Writing for the web is a little different than for any other medium; other entertainment is a click or twitch away, staring at a screen is just harder than paper and scrolling is an active rather than passive task.
Tip 1 - use white space
It's much easier to read text online when the paragraphs are short and there is plenty of white space - so use those carriage returns. Examples: the BBC news website has a blank line after every sentence in it's articles.
Edmund Hillary Article
A double blank line can be used to indicate where a conventional paragraph would have ended.
Tip 2 - use headings, italics, bolds and other formatting
It was easy to find this second tip right? I used bold to format the heading. The eye moves through the text and uses white space and text variations as anchor points. This becomes crucial when scrolling where unless it's done carefully positions in the text can be lost.
Bold and
italics can be used to add
emphasis on a particular word or phrase.
Tip 3 - use Capital Letters and punctuation - and try to get your grammar right
You're writing for a varied and vast audience, your blog entries maybe read by professionals - some bloggers have obtained work on the strength of their journals. In my case during the course of writing my blogs over the last five years - I've improved my grammar and punctuation in order to stop my Dad from sending a list of corrections - do your best and try to improve where you can. (Please don't send all the mistakes in my blogs to me after this pompous forum post though! I know there are mistakes)
Tip 4 - use complete words m8!
Unlike SMS messaging there is no character limit on the number of words or letters in a blog entry.
Tip 5 - spelling - and spell checks
I'll apologise in advance for the idiosyncrasies of the English language - it's not consistent, it's not phonetic, it's full of confusing sub-rules - "i before e except after c where the sound you want is eee" - what idiot would design a language with this kind of thing? - that's the problem the language was not designed - it evolved along with it's people and culture.
I'll apologise a second time - travelblog.org doesn't yet include a spell-checker. It's been on the To Do List for so long. I hope to rectify this soon.
Your options are (currently)
• write a blog entry in a word processor - spell-check, copy and paste;
• use Firefox and install the dictionary plugin - (Internet Explorer is sooo bad - this is something that should have been added 8 years ago)
• just make a best effort and put in a disclaimer.
Tip 6 - and this is controversial - write shorter blog entries - but more of them
There will be some debate on this - I've read some 8,000 word blog entries and they have been amazing - I've also got a little way in to some and found that I'm lost. There is no entry limit and no photo limit - you can write as much or as little as you want and include as much or as little as you want.
Blog entries of 1,000 to 3,000 words with about 40 photos seem to hit that sweet spot. If your blog is going to get significantly longer than this - two blog entries?
Feed back, discussions and additional tips as ever are welcome - hope this helps!
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