Just take a few moments...
As I've mentioned before, and will probably not mention again in the future, this blog was conceived to fulfill a classroom requirement. Tomorrow our professor will go through each blog and grade it based on content and creativity, among other things. One of those other things is basic stuff like spelling and grammer.
So we were allowed to go through this week and clean up our article, which brings me to a little lesson bloggers, professional journalists and other writers could all learn. But especially to bloggers, when you crank out a thousand words really quick and without thinking hit the "Publish Post" button.
As I went through to clean up my articles, I was astounded by the spelling errors, the sentence structures and the length of my articles. As I waxed poetic on the state of blogging and wikis, I wrote lengthy posts which could have been shortened without any loss of content.
Imagine for just one moment how your article would look if you took five minutes to step back and look over it? What if you saved it and came back to it later to revise before posting?
Here's the money question though. What if you took one hour to research what you were writing? What if, rather than merely comment on the news, which is something bloggers and professionals both do, you took one hour of your time to look online, flip through a book or, even better, make a phone call?
That's my challenge to bloggers everywhere, including myself. When that issue hits you and you just can't wait to get online and post your thoughts, just take one brief moment and think of one thing you can do to make your article that much more interesting, credible and informed. How much better can it be in 15 minutes? And if it can be better then, what about an hour? C'mon people. You can miss Oprah for just one day to write a kick ass blog can't you?
So we were allowed to go through this week and clean up our article, which brings me to a little lesson bloggers, professional journalists and other writers could all learn. But especially to bloggers, when you crank out a thousand words really quick and without thinking hit the "Publish Post" button.
As I went through to clean up my articles, I was astounded by the spelling errors, the sentence structures and the length of my articles. As I waxed poetic on the state of blogging and wikis, I wrote lengthy posts which could have been shortened without any loss of content.
Imagine for just one moment how your article would look if you took five minutes to step back and look over it? What if you saved it and came back to it later to revise before posting?
Here's the money question though. What if you took one hour to research what you were writing? What if, rather than merely comment on the news, which is something bloggers and professionals both do, you took one hour of your time to look online, flip through a book or, even better, make a phone call?
That's my challenge to bloggers everywhere, including myself. When that issue hits you and you just can't wait to get online and post your thoughts, just take one brief moment and think of one thing you can do to make your article that much more interesting, credible and informed. How much better can it be in 15 minutes? And if it can be better then, what about an hour? C'mon people. You can miss Oprah for just one day to write a kick ass blog can't you?
posted by Aaron Burkhalter at
12:21 AM
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