How to make your blog look more amateurish
January 30, 2008
One of my pet peeves is a blogger going out and writing blog posts without proof-reading them.
Now, the great thing about blogging is that there is a huge diversity of people in the blogging community, and not all of them are from English speaking backgrounds, so allowances must be made.
But even if your blogging program has no spell-checker, that doesn’t mean you can’t proof-read the posts you write and make sure they are correct.
Here is my list of the top five most common errors:
- “To many” - the word is “too”
- “dont/cant/wont” - these are compound words, contractions of “do” and “not” - you have to write “don’t”
- Capitalisation - start a sentence with a capital, don’t use capitals after commas, and do capitalise names
- Lack of commas - if you use an interjection like “however”, “wow”, or “well” - then use a comma
- Wrong word completely - bad proof-reading leading to “was is” or some other text that can’t even be guessed by context
Now I am not going to link to anyone in this post, because I don’t want to highlight anyone in particular. I don’t think that would be appropriate. But I do believe that a lack of proof-reading leads to a lack of quality, and unless your blog is already very popular or well respected, you need to make every effort to shine in quality - of content, of style and of correctness.
Yes, I have proof-read this post - it would be highly embarrassing to write about it and then to have errors. So I really hope there aren’t any…
UPDATE:
I said just above that I wouldn’t link to anyone. Now I honestly just wrote this post and straight after went to Shoemoney.com on my usual trawl of the blogs I read. And there it is - a post about grammar by someone who was more willing than I was to name names. Nick Sullivan at Internet Babel posted, and Shoemoney responded bit. Now, I don’t think it matters for big names like Shoemoney, but for you and I starting out bloggers, I stand by my earlier comments on quality.
And I maintain that I wrote this post before I read about the other one on Shoemoney.com - honest! 
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February 1st, 2008 at 12:07 am
It’s funny reading through this trying to find some errors!
No typos but if I was being picky I’d point out the following.
All the items in your top 5 list are sentence fragments. I’m not 100% sure of the rules but I believe there should be some punctuation on the end of the last line.
You use hyphens everywhere. To be grammatically correct to should probably use en dashes(–) and em dashes(—).
In point 3 you capitalised the word “Name” but I don’t think you should have.
If I was being really, over-the-top pedantic, I might say “close the strong tag before the full stop!” or at least be consistent.
Sorry to be picky but I couldn’t help myself.
A
February 1st, 2008 at 12:08 am
Oh, also don’t put a full stop in a title. It is not a sentence!
February 1st, 2008 at 12:27 am
I knew it would be a challenge for you. You *are* very fussy aren’t you…
I put the capital on the word Names to make it seem like a name itself, as an example - that was intentional.
So are you happy now?!? I proof-read it about 5 times, because I knew someone would be onto me.
Hey if it generates a response… maybe I should have written the article in JeffK speak or similar…