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PSA: Responding to a Blog

By embryowassup
Created Jul 23 2006 - 2:10am

Plenty of critique has been written about the art of writing a good blog.  It seems, for the most part, we want blogs with substance, that bring up issues that matter, tell us why they matter, and offer an opinion based on facts surrounding the issue.  However, the blog community (I will not say blogosphere.  I will not say blogosphere.) is useless without a base of people who can respond and argue effectively.

In case you haven't noticed, this isn't your shitty .php forum on newgrounds.com.  If you want to respond to a particular blogger's comment, you don't have to write "in response to [comment title]."  You don't even have address the blogger by name.  What this (and many other) site has done is instituted the reply button which allows your response to be tiered right under the comment to which you're responding.

An effective comment does three things: it addresses an argument (or arguments), challenges it with an opposing view (I've seen some comments which don't), and most importantly offers facts, quotes, logic, and/or expert opinion in order to support the aforementioned opposing view.

So, for example, a comment such as "you're wrong" or even worse "ur rong" does not add to the discussion at all.  A decent comment will be at least two sentences and probably no more than 3 paragraphs.  If the comment is shorter than that, chances are, you haven't said anything of worth (or you have amazing grammatical skills).  If the comment is longer than that, chances are, you should be writing your own blog entry instead.


Source URL:
http://www.progressiveu.org/190000-psa-responding-to-a-blog