Blog, and Don't Suck
Anyway, without further ado, here’s how to Blog and Not Suck.
Before we stop sucking, I need to impart a little
news to you. I have recently been named the Blog
Manager of IMP. This means, for all you team
members, I get to pester you to blog and I get to
mess with your post before it goes live. Don’t
worry, I won’t be evil with it, I’ll just make it
not suck, which I’ll get to in a bit.
For you, loyal reader, it hopefully means more and
better posts. I haven’t been doing a stupefyingly
stellar job as of yet, but I hope I can get off my
hiney and actually get to work now. This post
should help with that, because part of the reason
I’m writing it is to give myself some guidelines on
editing posts. The other half, of course, is so
those posts suck even less than they do now when
they come under my nose for review. Now, on to the
suckitude, and how to prevent it.
These are actually inspired by a journalism class I
took last semester. Many of the concepts transfer
easily to blogging, so it wasn’t too much work to
come up with this simple set of guidelines.
There are three main elements of a post: Mechanics,
Structure, and Content. They’re in the order of
ease of correction, so you should at least read the
beginning. Speaking of beginnings, let’s begin.
Mechanics
Mechanics,
to put it simply, is spelling and grammar. These
are things you should have learned in school, so
you really have no excuse. Nevertheless, I’ll go
through some of the elements of this.
Consistency
One
of the most confusing things any piece of writing
can do is switch person. You know what these are
(first person, second person, third person, etc.),
and you know how to avoid switching them (don’t).
Switching tenses is equally as bad, especially if
you’re going backwards. These are trivial things,
and you should have no difficulty with them—in
fact, it’s more difficult to switch than not.
A harder thing to keep constant is your writing
style. It naturally changes all the time, and if it
does in the middle of a blot post the break can be
jarring for the reader. Luckily, avoiding this is
simple as well. The simplest way is to just write
in one sitting. Even if your style changes then
(which is unlikely), it will do so gradually and
not abruptly. If you can’t do that, read over what
you previously wrote before continuing. This is one
of those psychological things where if you keep it
in mind, it’ll probably go the way you want it to.
Spelling
Use
spell check, and double-check it. That’s all that
need be said. You don’t really have an excuse.
Capitalization
This
is pretty simple too. Capitalize when necessary,
not when it isn’t. Always capitalize the word I,
even in contractions. Check the capitalization of
products and websites you mention, while you’re
checking the spelling. Capitalize beginnings of
sentences and proper nouns, and just follow the
rules you learned years ago.
Grammar
This
is by far the worst offender yet. In short: Follow
the rules. To elaborate, here are some of the
common mistakes you should watch out for.
-
Ellipses: I wrote a post on this on my personal blog, but the gist of it is to always use opt-; (option-semicolon) instead of three periods.
-
Punctuation: Watch your placement of periods and exclamation points around quotes and parentheses, and remember there isn’t a space between a sentence and its ending punctuation. There is only one ending punctuation mark per sentence, and this includes an ellipsis.
-
Exclamation points: Fewer than one of these for every two paragraphs, as a rough rule. Any more generally gets annoying. Remember, only one ending punctuation mark per sentence.
-
Compound words: There are a few tricky compound words. For instance, nobody is one word, but no one is two. Although they are both usually pronounced as one word, noone looks ridiculous, so it is left as two words. The other one that drives me crazy is everyday. Everyday is an adjective, describing an event that takes place each day, as in an everyday occurrence. Every day, the explicit expression of frequency, is two words, as in an event that happens every day.
-
i.e. vs. e.g.: These are two abbreviations that are commonly mixed up. Their literal translations, and meanings, are subtly different. The Latin id est translates to that is, so it should be used as you would use that is. The also Latin exemplia gratia, on the other hand translates to for the sake of example, and is used as a synonym of for example. Therefore, use i.e. when you wish to restate something, and use e.g. when you give an example. Or, avoid the confusion entirely by using for example and that is.
-
Accents, Umulats, and the cé cédille: English is a very convoluted language, and borrows many words from other languages. These affect pronunciations, and are in fact a variation of spelling. Expose is not the same as exposé, à la as a la, uber as über, and facade as façade. To type an acute accent, the type used in Spanish and some French words, press opt-E and an accent with a yellow highlight will appear. Any letter you type after that will have the accent applied to it. For a grave accent, used in other French words, do the same with the backquote key, above tab. To type an umlaut, use U, and for others consult your local Google. If this doesn’t work, chances are that combination isn’t possible—for example, you don’t put an umlaut over a t. If you’re unsure of the spelling, the best practice is to Google the word with no modifications and copy the correct one into your post.
-
Try and: This is a personal pet peeve of mine. “Try and” implies you will try, and you will also do something else. “Try to” is the correct way, but this isn’t too big of a deal.
-
Literally: This word is literally used to death. Anything wrong with that sentence? YES. It states that the word “literally” is dead, which it isn’t, it’s very much alive—perhaps too much so. If you say literally, make sure you mean literally. This is a pet peeve of many, many people.
-
TLAs: Three Letter Acronyms, or any other acronyms, should either be widely known, like DRM, IRS, DMCA (oddly enough, I can’t think of a happy one at the moment), or should be explained immediately after they’re used, preferably with the letters in the acronym capitalized. For instance, flops (FLoating-point Operations Per Second) or Ghz (GigaHertZ).
-
Apostrophes: These also tend to be overused. Remember, its is the plural, while it’s is the contraction. Also, TLAs tend to be written as TLA’s, which would indicate possession, and the same for numbers (e.g. 1990’s instead of 1990s and 40’s instead of 40s, or ’40s). Because both of these separate the shape of the noun from the shape of the s, by being capitalized or numbers, there’s really no excuse for this.
Speaking of those, it’s generally bad form to use contractions in newspapers, because it’s formal writing. However, blogging is less formal, and you’ll notice I have no problems using several contractions per sentence here. They aren’t a problem, as long as you remember your apostrophe. Another difference is person—all news pieces are third person, and features are either first or third person. This blog post happens to be in second person, as you can see, dear reader.
Numbers
A little-known, or little-realized, convention in journalism is to write out all numbers lower than ten, and sometimes up to twelve. This keeps the piece looking professional, and is generally a Good Thing. Numbers 1,000 and higher are written as one thousand, and the numerical part is rounded to the nearest tenth. Thus, 1,467,000 becomes 1.5 million. You can follow the pattern from there.
Emoticons
I dislike these. To me, they present an air of unprofessionalism. I won’t delete a few of them in IMP blog posts, but I think the frequency of exclamation points could apply nicely to these as well.
Alex is your Friend
If you’ve never met Alex, go seek him out in the Speech section of your System Preferences now. He is, by his own description, a new voice for Leopard, and he’s a very advanced text-to-speech engine. Every blog post can benefit from a read-through by Alex, with you following along to catch and correct typos and awkward sentences. To make him talk, select any text and go to the Application?Services?Speech?Start Speaking menu. You can’t pause Alex, but you can customize his speed in that Sound preference pane. A little hint of you need him to stop reading something to you: If you can’t select the “Stop Speaking” option, instead select a random word and tell him to speak that one. He’ll promptly drop what he’s doing and, on finishing your second assignment, forget to pick the first back up again.
Structure
Structure has to do with the organization of your post, and all its surrounding elements. This includes not only the words, but the content. There are only three main sections of this I can think of at the moment: the headline, the copy (a fancy name for the content of your post), and any graphics you choose to use, along with their captions. Because this is a blog, you don’t have to worry too much about layout, because that should be managed by your CSS, which may be managed by your site designer or your site’s theme.
Headline
The first part is the headline. Being one or two lines long, it doesn’t need much discussion about structure, besides that you don’t put a period at the end of it, and that instead of double quotes you use single. Move along now.
Copy
This is the body of your post. There are several guidelines to this. The big one that you must never, ever break is regarding paragraph length. SHORT, people, SHORT. I’ve seen several abuses of this rule, but never for very long. (Hint: because I didn’t bother to read that article.) You may notice I’m not the best observer of this rule myself, but I’m working on it, trust me. One idea per paragraph, and keep them short.
Length can also be a deterrent, but I dare not criticize for it, because I am the worst offender I have ever seen on this front. Don’t write a lot of useless crud just to make your post look substantial, but don’t get rid of good stuff for the sake of length.
The traditional journalistic practice is to use the “inverted pyramid” or “martini glass” styles. The former organization puts important facts at the top, and less important ones at the bottom. The latter uses inverted pyramid for about the first half, and chronological order for the second, which is useful for action stories that would be impossible to understand in any other order. For blogs, however, a less formal structure is again acceptable.
Captions
It’s considered good form to have a caption to a picture. Note that I said picture, and not graphic, as I said above. Graphics generally don’t need captions, and if they do, consider a more self-evident graphic. Pictures, on the other hand, should have captions. Captions should have information, more than is evident from the picture. For example, a photo of a girl with a trophy could be captioned, “Sarah Jane Smith won the spelling bee with the word ‘crepuscular,’ which refers to dusk.”
Captions should also be formatted directly under the photo, and if there’s enough text it should span the whole image, and should be aligned center. As a general rule, a good font is 8pt. It should be between 2 and 4 points smaller than the rest of the article.
Content
This is the actual material in your post, as you might be able to guess. This is the area that will be policed the least by me, because if I tell you what to write there’ll never be anything interesting to read about, and we wouldn’t want that. Rather, there are a few guidelines to follow.
About headlines, journalistic convention is pretty strict. The first and foremost rule is that a headline is not a label. You must never, ever, name your post “CoolApp Review,” or anything so boring. A headline is meant to capture attention while it’s buried in a newspaper full of them, and the concept stands for blog RSS feeds as well. You should make your headline pop, and pique readers’ interest.
The grammatical guidelines are pretty strict too. No prepositions, and replace the word “and” with a comma. Headlines are always in the present tense. There’s a lot more, but you don’t need to know it.
I already talked about the inverted pyramid and the grammar, so there’s not really much to talk about here on copy. Try not to include anything that doesn’t need to be in there, especially if you suffer from overeloquency, as I do.
As far as graphics go, you should have one. They’re pleasing to the eye, and can help draw readers’ attention when they’re checking out our homepage. Try to have one before the break (the more tag in WordPress, which splits up what goes on the front page and what only appears when you click through). If you are doing a review, screenshots can make a post a lot more enjoyable. Those screenshots also become more useful when equipped with a caption.
The Exception
Humor. Whether it be self-mocking or making fun of a public figure (such as our friends up in Redmond), or using ideas h4×0r or LOLspeke for comedic effect, this is grounds to break almost every rule. I know, aren’t I nice? However, this opens the door wide open to libel (the fancy way of saying “stuff that pisses people off, that you can get in trouble for”), and I aim to close it back up again. Don’t make fun of people who don’t deserve it, and those who might get mad at you for what you say. It’s a fine line between humor and offensive writing, and what’s funny to you may not be to others.
Now that I’ve threatened you with death the editor’s cut, go out and write a post, then revise it and see quite how many mistakes you’ve made. For extra points, find a mistake in this post, and leave a comment about it. This is the last lesson I will impart to you for the day: Be open to feedback, both positive and negative, but not idiotic—those people don’t deserve an acknowledgment.
2009