Found on the web: 02/17/2011 (a.m.)

• 10 things I’ve learned in a year of blogging | JAMES MICHIE

  Very useful post, which succinctly suggests 10 things to consider when blogging. I think the author, James Mitchie, should have added a #11: create list posts. These always go down well, as exemplified here!

  Thanks to twitterers @zoeross19 and @largerama for mentioning it.

  tags: blogging James Mitchie

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Why Do You Blog?

In Why I Write, George Orwell suggests the following reasons that someone may wish to write:

• To make money.
• Egoism, eg a desire to appear clever, or to be remembered after your death.
• Aesthetic enthusiasm, eg a love of words for their own sake.
• Historical impulse, ie a desire to see things as they really are, so that posterity my benefit.
• Political (with a small ‘p’), ie to influence other people’s ideas about society.

I’d also add another two:

Educational, ie the desire to give others the benefit of the knowledge you’ve acquired – which I suppose could also come under the heading of egoism, or even political.

Record-keeping, be that as a diary, a research record, or another kind of journal.

So I am wondering if these categories might be applied to blogging? Why do people blog? I’ve set up a very simple, and no doubt simplistic, poll to find out. I know the categories are subtle and overlap and interface with each other. Nevertheless, my poll comprises just one question:

What is your number one reason for blogging?

Do take part, and feel free to add reasons of your own on the ‘Other’ category. Let’s see what transpires.

How To Start Blogging

Get writing!You know when a theme is developing in your life when the same sort of thing keeps cropping up. Well, I don’t know if twice in succession qualifies, but I’m going to go with it anyway. Yesterday I was catching up on my podcasts, and listened to a Grammar Girl episode entitled “How to get started blogging”. Then today I ran my blogarizer spreadsheet and was directed to an article entitled “10 must-use tips for beginning bloggers”. OK, enough already: I can take a hint.

Both articles are pretty good, in a general sense. Mignon Fogarty, the “Grammar Girl”, deals with knowing your audience, finding good, and reliable, information, and how to build your audience. Melissa Tamura, author of the 10 tips post, also talks about knowing your audience and, in essence, how to grow it.

I’d like to come at this from a different angle or, to be more precise, to emphasise different aspects of blogging. Here goes:

1. Start blogging. That’s right, just start. Stop navel-gazing, second-guessing the universe and playing “what-if?” games. Just start. Creating a new blog in something like Blogger takes all of five minutes. In fact, the most difficult part is thinking of a witty and memorable name.
2. Definitely define your audience, but start with yourself. What I mean by that is, write the kind of articles that you would find most interesting/enjoyable/useful to read. Then your blog will probably go one of two ways: either extremely eclectic, which stands a good chance of attracting a wide variety of people, or extremely focussed. Those two are not mutually exclusive, by the way. I think that latter possibility warrants a bullet point of its own…
3. Be extremely focussed. I mean extremely focussed. From time to time I receive comments from people along the lines of they have nothing unique to blog about. That’s plain wrong, because everyone is unique in some way. For example, you might be the only art teacher in your town who takes their class on a virtual art gallery tour every week. How does that work? How does a virtual gallery visit stack up against a real life one? I don’t know from first-hand experience what the answers to these questions are. But you do.
4. Put your audience first. I think if you’re going to write for an audience, you should at least try to make reading your work a pleasant experience. This is all highly personal and subjective, of course, but for me the two things I really can’t abide is swearing or implied swearing, and writing which is about as interesting as the list of ingredients on a packet of cornflakes. There’s no need for the former, and you can improve on the latter by analysing what it is you like about the writing of the blogs, magazines, newspapers, authors you read on a regular basis.

But the most important one of these, if you’ve decided or almost decided to start your own blog is the first one: just do it!

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10 Obligations of Bloggers

If you blog for an audience, as opposed to simply for yourself, what are your obligations? I’d say the following:

Use manuals to help with tricky or confusing words.

Write with integrity

For example, if you write about a product you have some connection with, especially if your report is positively glowing, then state that connection loud and clear. Unfortunately, the opposite is also true, ie if you don’t have any connection you should probably say so. I use the word ‘unfortunately’ simply because I think it’s a pity that some people think that if you like something, you must be getting a pay-off in some form.

Write accurately

Accuracy is another facet of integrity. Check facts, quotes and references. If you don’t have time to do that, make it clear that you’ve written what you believe to be the case, rather than present it as fact. Some people think that bloggers somehow naturally have more integrity than professional journalists, but I think integrity has to be worked at.

Write incisively

I know that one of the great thing about blogging is that it’s OK to air some half-thought-out idea, which on later reflection or in the light of further information may become regarded as less useful than it first appeared. I think that’s fine, as long you don’t try to sound as if not only do you know what you’re talking about, but that any other viewpoint is plain wrong. Why not just say: “I’ve only just seen this, so my initial thoughts are…”, or “I just had an idea that I haven’t had time to think through, but…” or “Here’s the kernel of an idea; tell me what you think.”?

Writing incisively shows through in the questions you ask as well as what you state. It’s not obligatory to always have an answer.

Write regularly

I think if you have built up a following, even if it’s only a dozen people, you owe it to them to write as regularly as you can. I don’t think you have to write every day necessarily, but reasonably often, like once a week.

(This is something of a counsel of  perfection: I have only just managed to update my My Writes blog for the first time in months, because I have been concentrating on the ICT in Education one, which I update pretty much every day).

Write well

I realise that to a large extent good writing is, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder. What you find beautiful I may regard as too florid. Writing which keeps me engaged may leave you in despair at its starkness. That sort of thing is a matter of taste, and there is little if anything to do about that. But surely it is not unreasonable to expect – to take just one example --  that those who blog at least trouble themselves to check the vocabulary they use and not, for example, confuse ‘continual’ with ‘continuous’ or ‘uninterested’ with ‘disinterested’?  Books which deal with commonly confused words are easy enough to obtain, after all.

Write for a purpose, with the reader in mind

I think if you write for yourself, you can be completely self-centred about what you write. However, in my opinion, as soon as you have an invited audience (which, by definition, you do have by making your blog URL known), you have an obligation to give them a reason to read your blog, whether that’s entertainment, enlightenment or simply stuff to think about.

Write for all your audiences as well as each of your audiences

We urge pupils to write for an audience, and to write differently for different specific audiences.  Should we not also encourage them to develop a set of over-arching principles that would apply to all writing, for all audiences?

Write with consideration

I suppose this is a personal thing, but I don’t like the idea of having swearing, or even implied swearing, on my blog, in case it offends some readers. That’s why I sometimes don’t publish comments expressing an opinion ‘robustly’. People are entitled to their opinion, and they’re entitled to express it forcefully, but if they do so by using expletives I’m afraid it won’t see the light of day here.

Be yourself

As Polonius said in Hamlet, “To thine own self be true.” I think an obligation that each blogger has is to define his or her own set of obligations. That is, I think that if you’re going to write publicly you have to develop a set of rules by which to write by. They may be very different from the ones I’ve listed here, which clearly reflect my own value system, but I think the process of thinking about them is important.

Be silent

Finally, I don’t think it’s necessary, or even wise, or useful, to pass comment on something as soon as it’s been announced. It’s good to be first with the news, but it’s also good to be among the first with well-considered reflections.

As Salvator Rosa said,

Be silent, unless what you have to say is better than silence.

What have I overlooked?

The Right Writing Style

My deskWhat is the 'correct' style for a blog post? When I first started blogging, I decided that my blog should be pretty serious. After all, one wants to be taken seriously, so it's logical that an article with a serious intent should be written in a serious manner.

But there are degrees of seriousness. If a blog post comes across as too didactic, it may prove useful, and may even be bookmarked for future reference. But it won't be enjoyed necessarily.On the other hand, some blogs go too far the other way in my opinion. Blog posts which use the occasional swear word may be funny, but you can't really share them professionally. I experienced something like this before blogs came on the scene. Back in 1998 I saw an hilarious diatribe against the internet by a British comedian called Ben Elton. I should have loved to have shown it at my next Ed Tech Co-ordinators' Day; unfortunately, the use of a swear word at a crucial point made it an untenable prospect.

One of the things I am growing weary of, when I read some blogs, is their underlying arrogance. In my opinion, blogs are meant to encourage conversation, but it's difficult to feel confident to start a conversation with someone whose tone already suggests that theirs is the only valid viewpoint. I have to say, it is almost exclusively men who have this trait in my experience.

In my own writings, I have become increasingly conversational in tone. I'm writing more and more often in a way that is closer to speaking than writing. I'm not sure if that is objectively good or bad, but it feels right for me.

And I think that is the crucial point. When it comes to blogs, which, after all, started their existence as personal web logs or journals, we need to find our own voice and our own style. Only if we enjoy the act of writing will others enjoy the act of reading it.

Surely that is the standpoint we must adopt in schools too? For example, should youngsters be asked to 'correct' their grammar or not to use text-speak in their blogs? Should they even be asked to correct their spelling?

If I were back in the classroom now, I think what I'd like to do is encourage my pupils to experiment in lots of different ways when writing their blogs. I try out different things myself, sometimes writing list-style articles, other times writing longer, more discursive pieces. Occasionally I even experiment with fiction writing. As far as I'm concerned, experimentation is fundamentally necessary, in the same way that exercise is necessary.

Let's make 2010 the year of trying out new ways to express ourselves in blogs!

This is a slightly amended version of an article I posted at the Technology & Learning blog yesterday.