Technically Speaking: How to Do Better in your Blogs

Once upon a time, there was this very eager good student who had a brilliant idea which she would like to share with her dear classmates and her wonderful English teacher. She typed away on her keyboard very happily and went through the completed piece several times before she finally decided that it was good enough. Then, she blissfully clicked on the "Publish Post" key at the bottom of the screen and was waiting enthusiastically to see her blog appears online. Just when she thought that everything was settled, the screen suddenly blinked and instead of seeing the words "Publish Completed", she saw AN ERROR MESSAGE!!!!! Oh no! That was 30 minutes of work went down the drain! The poor girl could only stare at the screen and there was absolutely nothing she could do to recover the entry! Luckily, the urge of sharing her brilliant idea with her beloved classmates and teachers was so strong that this girl wrote her entry again. And finally, after perfecting it, she successfully uploaded it to her blog and her teacher loved her entry very much, especially her story about the rainbow.

Well, this is a story with a happy ending. Does what happened to our heroine sound familiar to you? Actually, the whole unfortunate event could have been avoided very easily! All you need to do is to DRAFT THE BLOG IN A WORD DOCUMENT FIRST! There are two advantages in doing this.

First, you can have a backup copy of your entry. A backup file is important because if you don't have one, everything will be lost if your computer crashes suddenly. There will be nothing left and all you can do is to rewrite the whole thing. However, if you have a backup document, you will still be able to recover your entry after you reboot the computer. The software will automatically save your work as a temporary file in case the computer shuts down suddenly and it will reappear on the screen when it is switched on again.

Secondly, you can avoid making silly careless mistakes, and even improve your spelling and grammar if you draft your work with Microsoft Word. Of course, Word cannot correct all your mistakes, but it can help you spot the simple ones. Very often, we keep making some mistakes without knowing it. Take for example, many of you spell the word "holiday" as "hoilday", or "birthday" as "brithday". If you work with Word, it will draw your attention to these mistakes. Even better, its Spelling and Grammar Check can give suggestions for correction. This way, you can learn to write and spell better! Therefore, please always draft your entries with a Word document instead of typing directly in Blogger.

Including a Title
Also, to make your entries more attractive, make sure that you give your entries a title which gives us a clear idea of what we can expect to read about. What do you think about the titles of my entries? They are good, aren't they? *winks* In this busy world, we can't afford the time to read everything we can lay our hands on. Therefore, what we do is to scan the titles or headlines first. If they look interesting, we'll continue to read the whole thing. If not, we will just skip it. An article or a piece of writing without a title is usually dismissed by the readers. If you want your blogs to be read, ALWAYS GIVE IT A TITLE!

In order to encourage you all to give a good title to your blogs, from now on any blogs with no heading WILL NOT GET ANY COMMENTS FROM ME. *nods*

By the way, you may be curious about the main character in my story because I tell you that it is true. Well, it is true and I highly recommend that you read Jenny's blog. It's really interesting. Don't miss it!

It's MY turn: the "Good Student" List

I'm very happy to see that many of you would like to write about the topic we discussed in the listening class. It's interesting to learn that being able to meet assignment deadlines, having good-manners and being attentiveness in class are among the top of the "Good Student List". As I've mentioned in class, the one that I found most interesting is Helen's entry. Instead of making a list, she explains what she thinks a good student should be like with a story. That's creative!

Many of you have really a loooooooong list in your blogs. No wonder many of you think that it’s hard to be a good student. Since this is such a popular subject in your blogs, I would like to say a few words about MY idea of the qualities of a good student.

Unlike many of you, I have only two "criteria" to define a good student. The first one is that the person needs to have the incentive of learning. She needs to be a person who always tries her best to improve herself not only in her academic studies but also in her inter-personal relationships and even her personality. A good student makes mistakes, too. She may be late in submitting her assignments but she'll learn from her mistakes and will not be late in handing in her assignments because of the same reason. She may not be able to pass her test but she will do better in her coming test and even better in the one after it. She may make a teacher angry because of saying something the teacher considers rude but she will not do the same again. I consider learning how to become a better person IS the first and foremost reason why we send children and teenagers to schools. The other "criterion" that I have for a good student is that she must be a curious person. She should be curious about the world and people around her enough to want to get to know them better and to ask questions. This is why you can see how exciting I become whenever someone asks me a question in class. This is also why I think that the biggest compliment as a teacher I can get is to be asked a question on whatever I said in the lesson. To me, this means that what I say is interesting enough to you that you are curious to know more about it.

Do you think this much shorter list easier for you to achieve or more difficult? Why don't you tell me what you think by commenting on it here or talking about it in your own blog? I'm looking forward to hearing from you.

Keep Writing! Don't Let It Stop!

Are you tired of writing about things the teachers ask you to write about? Isn't it just nice to be able to write about whatever is on your mind and have real readers appreciating your thoughts and ideas? Why don't you make use of your blogs to do so? It is just like a diary with YOU as the MISTRESS of your own blogs. Therefore, YOU are the one who decides what you would like to talk about and how you would like to talk about it. You can even include pictures and your voice in your blog! The more often you write in English, the better and faster you'll be in doing it. I suggest that you make at least one entry each week. And in order to make it a more effective practice to improve your writing, you should aim at writing 200 words in each entry on the same topic -- however, of course, this is an ideal. The most important of it all for this practice is that you enjoy writing. Also, most poems and rhymes aren't this long.

Don't know where to start? Well, here are some ideas for you. You can write about something unusual that happened to you that day and things and people you like/dislike/feel strongly about. You can also talk about what you think about a book, a movie or the news, places you enjoy going to, etc. You can even write poems, rhymes or stories in your blogs. I hope you'll enjoy working on your blogs.

Have fun writing!

Ada Lam

Your English Teacher