Breaking from the normal thought processes, I’m going to offer some blogging advice: Don’t Mention It. That’s the gist of it. Keep your mouth shut. My blogging advice is to keep your mouth shut. No not really. Not entirely. I’ll explain.
For explanation, I’ll offer up the examples I’ve seen, the first of which is when the blogger tells you, “Sorry my post is so crappy today,” and then they begin to tell you all the excuses why, as if you wanted to know, “I had lots of laundry today.”
Not good practice. It would have been better if Captain Blog didn’t mention it. Laundry isn’t the most interesting thing in the universe. Reading about laundry is even less interesting.
Here’s another one, usually following a holiday or a weekend, a blogger will tell everyone, “I wasn’t able to get much done in my blog because I was so busy with other things. I had to schedule a colonoscopy, my dog died, my apartment was a wreck and my mother was coming to visit.”
Obviously, the most interesting part of all that is how and why this person groups a colonoscopy in the same category as their mother coming to visit. Sigmund Freud just dug himself up out of his grave.
Remember my advice: Don’t Mention It.
Personal problems don’t necessarily make interesting articles. Sure, a reader can choose to read about your personal problems, or not. Like changing the channel on the television, the audience can move on to something else. I suppose you could even detail the colonoscopy you scheduled, if you felt the urge, but I can’t imagine there being a huge audience for such stuff.
Another one that maybe only bothers me and no one else in the whole world, is when someone makes an entirely new blog post about how the previous post was full of errors. “I didn’t mean to have so many mispelled words, please forgive me, cause i’m not used to so much resposibitley of making blog every day.”
Okay, we get it, you’re new. But if your every entry is about how bad you are at the blogging, it might be better for the entire infonet if you just quit. Wouldn’t it be great if we all recognized our limits? Even Eddie Van Halen realized his band was nothing without a singer. That’s why he had two, count ’em, two, different singers. But now, that’s almost off topic…
Don’t mention it.
Instead of telling people how bad you are at grammar, punctuation, and spelling, maybe take a new track and start detailing how you learned there are two esses in the word misspelled, how you learned where the colon goes, how you learned to make it work, how you managed to make time for the latest article, or how you managed to have your mother visit AND get the blog done. Wouldn’t that be something? A post like that would help others learn how to juggle a busy schedule, or even how to spell.
Wouldn’t it be better if the apologetic blogger just fixed the errors rather than spending so much time apologizing? Grammar, punctuation, spelling—these are the three major ingredients to readable sentences. It only takes the reader half a minute to read the article, so it shouldn’t take the writer much longer to re-read, proofread, and edit.
Finally, I’ll take my own advice and tell you I’ve learned recently the word harassment only has one are and two esses. Embarrassment, on the other hand, has two ares and two esses. Cool, eh?
(Next time, I’ll write about whether it’s better to spell out a letter name phonetically, like ares and esses, or to capitalize them, like Ss and Rs.)
Xenosthesia.com 