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!