This is probably going to sound like a bitchy, condescending post, but hear me out. I'm just trying to help.
I've been trying reading a lot of blogs on here, and the vast majority of them, I ending up having to skip over because they are un-readable for one or more of the following reasons:
*Zero capitalization
*Poor or nonexistent punctuation
*No paragraph structure
*Poor sentence structure
*Poor vocabulary (confusing homophones, using words that don't exist, et cetera)
*Blog typed entirely in bold, capital letters, or other such nonsense
What follows are some tips to help you with your writing, so that people can get to the idea of your post. Because no matter how good your ideas are, if people can't understand what it is you are attempting to convey they're not going to read your blog, your essay, your letters; or listen to you speak. Most of you should already know these things, and when you are writing something for someone else to read, it is imperative you use the conventional rules of the English language (that is, unless you're a Modernist writer like Faulkner or e.e. cummings).
1. Capitalization
Most of us have learned this from the age of 5 to the age of 16 in school. The first letter of a sentence is capitalized. The first letter of a proper noun is capitalized (for example, the name of a person or place; "Rachel from Seattle"). Personal pronouns like "I" should also be capitalized, unless you are suffering from low self-esteem, in which case you should speak only of yourself in the third person to avoid stray lower-case "i"s.
2. Punctuation
There are several punctuation marks that are meant to convey pauses in speech, a quote, or to note a contraction. Your several punctuation marks are:
. (the period which goes at the end of a sentence)
, (the comma, which notes a pause in a thought, but not the end of it)
; (the semi-colon which is intended to note a more significant pause in a thought; to separate two different ideas in the same thought)
: (the colon: this mark tells your reader you are about to list a few ideas; items in lists do not need to conform to general sentence and punctuation rules -- hence the missing capitalization and periods in this punctuation list)
( ) (parentheses, which note an explanation of a thought, without disrupting the overall idea)
-- (the dash -- my personal favorite -- which notes a tangential thought in an idea)
- (the hyphen goes between two words of which you wish to make a single word)
/ (the slash may be used in conjunction with and/or instead of the hyphen)
"quotes" (quotation marks let your reader know that you are quoting another source, or that the thought you are presenting within the quotes is not necessarily part of the point you are trying to make)
' (the apostrophe is the most misused punctuation mark; it is used to denote possessives and contractions. It is NOT meant to denote plurals. That's what the letter "s" at the end of a word is for, generally)
! (exclamation points are over-used; it is really only necessary to use one exclamation point at a time, though as far as I'm concerned up to three are acceptable)
? (the question mark goes at the end of a question. Right? When used in conjunction with the exclamation point, the question mark goes first. "The question mark goes first?!" You are asking a question that you are surprised you have to ask)
& (the ampersand is entirely unnecessary because you can just type the word "and")
[brackets] (brackets are used in quotes to enclose text that isn't literally accurate [they also can note tangential thoughts, especially those inside parentheses])
Possessive verses plural
When noting a plural possessive (except in the case when the plural and singular are the same "moose" for example), the apostrophe goes after the "s". "Those are the Girl Scouts' cookies." When you are noting a singular possessive, the apostrophe goes before the "s". "Those are a Girl Scout's cookies." In order to tell the difference, use your verbs. Verbs come in singular and plural too -- you want your nouns and your verbs to be in agreement.
3. Paragraph Structure
Your entire blog post should not be one very, very long paragraph. No one will read it. Your paragraphs should have one over-arching thought per paragraph, and separate paragraphs will tell the reader "this idea is related, but deserves separate consideration".
See what I mean?
4. Sentence Structure
You need a noun and a verb in each of your sentences. That's just rudimentary writing, and I'm sure you all know it. Try to write the way you would speak to a congressman.
5. Improving Your Vocabulary
You don't have to use big words, but you do have to use words you understand. Further more, there are a few words that sound the same, but are completely different. "There" "their" and "they're" for example. "There" is a place "over there"; "their" is plural possessive "that is their box of cookies"; "they're" is a contraction of "they" and "are". If you're not sure which is which, don't be afraid to look it up.
The most important thing about words is, if you're not sure about a word: look it up. Onelook.com is a good resource for words.
6. Formatting
Formats like "bold" or "italic" are there to be used for emphasis (as is typing in all capitals). When you use emphasis on a particular word, people pay more attention to that word. It brings that idea to the top of your readers' thinking. Therefore, it is NOT appropriate to bold, italicize, or capitalize your entire post. If you want your post, your ideas, to be seen as important, you should think carefully how you wish to word what you are trying to convey. Your thoughts, when conveyed properly, will not need any help from bold, italics, or all capital letters.
Now, I'm sure you all think that I am thoroughly pretentious, and that's just fine. But for those of you who actually follow the rules of writing in the English language, more people will be able and willing to read your posts.
Affectionately,
Rachel
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
You should become an english teacher.
---------------------------------------------------
I never let my schooling interfere with my education. - Mark Twain
Where there's a will, there's a way.
Rachel, your comments and suggestions were fair and square. I am going to go out on a limb by saying that I believe that you are open minded and accepting of typos, a few mis-spelled words, mix-ups, and even take into account level of emotions, time constraints, and possible fatigue. You would like to see a modicum of legible, sensible progressive blogging. Did I get it right?
I too have been dismayed by the way some of the posters have chosen to express themsevles. I am glad they have made an attempt. But I must confess, that have a tought time reading some of them, and have glanced at some, without making an attempt. I'm also afraid that by not pushing myself to read the really hard-to-read posts, I'll regret it. But, it's true, I get tired and very busy, so when I write, I do the best I can. I feel strongly responsible for anything I post.
Like, now. I'm tired. I got a ton of homework. Lots of research, writing, typing. Kudos, to you. You would make a good teacher, no matter who or what or where or when or why you teach.
Spelling doesn't get me as much as useage does. I fly off the handle (even in person) when someone misuses a word. That is probably my most vulnerable pet peeve. I am open-minded enough to know that I'm not great at spelling, so I try not to get on people for their spelling -- I even had to look up "etiquette" so I wouldn't get a thousand comments telling me that I spelled "etiquette" wrong and was a hypocrit for it.
The thing people have to remember is that you're writing something for other people to read, so it needs to obey general English rules.
I think I might become a serial killer if I became an English teacher.
I love that. If you catch any errors in any of my posts please inform me. I love English, but I'm not a grammar expert :-) I think that saying what you mean is as important as what you mean to say, so thanks for bringing up some good ol' grammar rules. ~Knowledge+ Action=Change~
In high school my AP US History teacher dubbed me the "Grammar Nazi". I think I get it from my mom, who is also anal about grammar and spelling -- but she's slipping in her old age.
However, I must disagree with "saying what you mean is as important as what you mean to say"; in fact, what you say is more important than what you mean to say, because if you say something that isn't the same as what you mean, people get really confused really easily. That's why we have all of these rules.
I get that one, too. I'm also not so sure about your usage of the semicolon in your example.
--Mike
No, neither am I. The example of semi-colon useage in the exclaimation explaination is better. Good catch though. ;)
One of the purposes of me blogging in this website is to better my writing, and in order to do that I need people who criticize my grammatical mistakes. God knows there are thousands of them. English is my second language, and it seems that I have never really gotten a very good grip of it. So please when you read my writing point out my mistakes, that is the only way I will be able to learn. ---------------------------------------------------
I never let my schooling interfere with my education. - Mark Twain
You should be proud of your English. It's a second language for you and the majority of your posts adhere to the rules. It's a shame that those who have learned English their entire lives still don't get it!
So, bravo!!
Nasink, honey, you have a better grasp of the English language than a lot of native speakers. You should be proud of how well you write, but I'll help when I can.
I'm with the rest of those who have commented. Brav-freakin-o!
We all make mistakes. However, there is a huge difference between a few mistakes and a poorly written post. Write your post in a word processing program (such as Word), fix the mistakes and THEN post it to PU! It's not that difficult, and for the most part, we will forgive you if you overlook a few errors. We do, however, reserve the right to point and laugh if you do not adhere to the grammatical rules, use slang, don't make sense, or babble.
Slang is okay. I will generally use slang in my comments -- for example I have posted "Word" as a comment to a post I fully agree with -- and one has to allow for the English language to appropirate new words: provided they actually mean something. Slang that doesn't mean anything is about as good as saying nothing at all.
I was referring to the use of acronyms and such which is so overly popular today. It drives me crazy to see someone writing a blog post in acronyms.
I use slang terms that mean something periodically as well.
Thank you for putting this up. I think the people that need to read this the most are the new users that just signed up. I've seen a lot of posts from new members that contain an assortment of violations of all the rules you discussed, probably because they just want to put up as many posts as they can with the 50 points in mind; they're only harming themselves because most readers don't even click on titles that aren't spelled correctly.
Not only that, but if you don't establish your thoughts as coherant in the first couple of posts you make, a lot of people will skip over all your posts. That's highly detrimental. Proves that the "easy way" isn't always all that easy.
Hi Rachel, good stuff, although I found some typos:
nonexistent, separate, explanation, exclamation, apostrophe. And yes, that makes me feel about as smug as a slug circumventing a rug. I just noticed that progressive U does not allow selecting and saving text, which I find bizarre, at least I cannot select anything on this page (except for the entire page), so I had to use the "view source" trick. I didn't know about homophones, sounds like a technical term in grammar. Possessive versus plural: yes, that comes up all the time, for example, on Valentine's day, you see the flower merchants on the roadside: "Tulip's" "Rose's" etc. I've been wondering about "the girl scouts' cookies" vs "a girl scout's cookies" for a long time without ever understanding the difference, now I know. What I still don't know is: if you end a sentence with quotation marks, does the period come before or after the last quotation mark?
First of all, you'll note that I didn't make a big stink about spelling. I didn't want to come across as a total hypocrit.
Now, with quotation marks, generally, if you are quoting an entire sentence, the period goes inside. If you are quoting a part of a sentence, the period goes on the outside of a quote (and on here, that has been debatable, but I stand by my assessment).
For example, quote Nelon Muntz, "Ha ha." The period goes on the inside because that is the end of the quote. However, if I was to say quote part of a sentence, or a phrase, the period would go on the outside of the "quotation marks". This is similar to the way the parentheses work as well, if the entire sentence is inside the paretheses, the period goes inside, but if, like above, there is only part of the sentence inside the patentheses, the period goes on the outside. It's tricky, and wordprocessing programs have conformed to the laziness in writing that has occurred over the last 20 years or so, but some of us still remember the rules.
It's annoying that there are so many different style guides. According to MLA, the punctuation always goes on the inside unless you need citation or if the quote is enclosed within a question (e.g., Why did Nelson say, "Ha ha"?). Then again, this could (to some extent) be considered 'technical writing,' in which case the punctuation always goes on the outside.
Bollocks to style guides!
--Mike
Yeah, as far as I'm concerned, as long as quotation marks are being used (at least mostly properly), the other punctuation doesn't really matter all that much -- so long as, again, it's mostly being used properly. MLA is useful for technical writing. I also think it makes things easier to read, especially if you're any good at writing in that style.
Max K,
What web browser are you using? I've heard that the problem selecting text that you mentioned is an Internet Explorer thing, so if you have a different web browser you might want to try using it.
Internet Explorer 6. I have Firefox also but I never use it, because I am used to IE. I can still select text by right-clicking and then "view source" and THEN selecting, but why can't I do that the normal way?
I'm so glad someone else has the decency to make a post like this; I thought I might have been the only one getting tired of seeing "OMG U R SO KOOL!" in a blog post.
Alexa
While I appreciate it when people use the English language properly, I think you may want to re-read your post.
Your use of the "ing" form of several words was incorrect, as well as your spelling on many words. I'm aware that you have said you didn't make a big stink about spelling...but how can you be such a grammar Nazi if you won't take the time to be sure that you are using proper grammar and spelling yourself? You were making very simple mistakes that I would expect from first and second-graders, perhaps, but not even fifth-graders....let alone anyone older.
I ran my entry through Word and it revealed that I had not used the suffix "-ing" improperly. It did reveal my spelling errors (and do you honestly think that a fifth-grader would be using the word "exclamation"?), but my attempt to fix them was thwarted by a message telling me that another user had modified my post and so it was unable to save changes. Whatever that means.
In the mean time, an elipsis had three (3) dots, followed by a space.
The only "ing" ending I saw that didn't fit was "I've been trying reading a lot of blogs on here"
Doesn't exactly constitute "a lot" of "ing" errors.
"We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us." -Marcel Proust
I agree completely! Improper grammar and word usage is an enormous pet-peeve of mine. I agree - spelling isn't always a big deal, but with the advent of spell-check, there really isn't an excuse. Typos are one thing, but misspelling very simple words just is not right. My mother was an English teacher and she proof-read every paper I turned in, and I thank her for that every day.
Rachel, I say again - BRAVO!
I totally agree! Like you, I skip over many-a-blog due to poor usage of the English language.
Kudos to you for putting this out there.
I agree wholeheartedly with what you're saying. If people on here really care about having their points heard, it would make sense that they would bother with basic grammar rules;-)
I agree with everything you say. (Of course, that could be mabye because I didn't read it all... Oh gosh, does the period go in or outside the parenthesis. Oh gosh.... Hmmmm... ............ Ah hah! I'll do both.).
I would add length as a bullet point. Now, maybe you mentioned it in the 1000+ words you wrote. Like I said, I didn't read it all. I just read the outline.
I think there was clear value in your post. And from reading a few of your posts here and there, you definitely are opinionated, intelligent and funny. (You remind me of me when I was a young lad! ohh gosh... not again.). So I think of all bloggers here, you are probably the most qualified to post something like this.
I like reading these blogs but unless there is something really compelling about a long post, I'll simply pass. And I think many others do too. So I propose we add conciseness in there somewhere.
I agree that length is an important factor. While Rachel's post was long, I didn't find it overwhelmingly so (I think having separate paragraphs really helps keep longer post like this managable), but I've read parts of some posts that are too long and/or in too long of paragraphs for me to finish.
I think it's best to keep post medium-short in length, because too long of posts get overwhelming, but too short of posts don't really tell you anything, and it gets irritating having the trimmed version cut out one sentence because the blog's barily longer then a paragraph.
"If I had had more time, I would have written something much shorter." -- Thomas Jefferson
That's what I'm talking about!
I must admit, I didn't much of that because I tend to feel my writing (or, rather, typing) is usually quite good, but I appreciate the effort. Some people honestly do need to read this and take notes. I've seen too many posts typed in capslock and other such nonsense.
"Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt."
"Freedom of press is limited to those who own one."
H. L. Mencken
Proof-reading is also a good idea. That way you don't accidently miss a verb while praising your own writing. ;)
Haha, yes. I get lazy as soon as it gets past midnight.
"Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt."
"Freedom of press is limited to those who own one."
H. L. Mencken
There is nothing more annoying to me than reading a paragraph with a missing word! It drives me insane! Proof read and it will make EVERYONE happier!
i agree but it is very hard to do when typing quickly
JZ
For you, perhaps. I believe the point is specifically to be more aware of what you're typing, rather than just typing nonsense without punctuation, et al. Typing 100 words per minute is useless if no one can understand what it is you are trying to convey. So, add the punctuation and capitalization and allow yourself to be slowed to 85 words per minute.
Well, I'm basically a grammar whore.
Ok, well maybe I'm a little excessive on the ellipses and brackets.
But generally, I like proper English.
And so many blogs don't seem to have any.
So...thanks.
You made my evening.
Love it.
♥, Dana
I absolutely love this post. Bad grammar and spelling is one of my biggest pet peeves, although I must admit that my spelling isn't always that great. Whenever people misspell simple words repeatedly, I get so very irritated.
Haha, like my continued misspelling of "separate"? ;)
I do that too! It wasn't until I read "A Separate Peace" in school that I realized I'd been spelling seperate wrong my entire life. Ugh...that bothered me a lot. :)
I have great respect for those who are "grammatically aware." Kudos!
i usually dont use english good in these replies i write but most of the time when i write its good english i think i dont know though oh no is this a run on well anyway thanks for the input maybe people will finally understand how i feel i mean maybe they can read words and see the meaning in them or maybe they see letters and see the errors in them who knows what the problem is
That popping noise you all just heard was a major artery in my brain.
Gosh, I hope that comment was sarcasm!! If not, I don't know what I'll do. ::Laugh:: Maybe my arteries will burst as well.
Great guide Rachel! It is seriously upsetting when people with great ideas fail to get them across effectively. Without communication, ideas are just ideas and can't get any where.
Sometimes bad writing still get a lot of "reads" because the title is enticing or confusing. ::Laugh:: I mean, how can I resist opening an entry titled "What!!" to find out what the upset is? Well, I guess they get points for writing an effective title.