Why comment on blog posts?
Leaving comments are vital to learning and interacting with others who are interested in whatever topic you were blogging about. I got great advice from a website that I have used in the past. Grammar Girl’s podcast gives a list of rules that give great advice on how to write a great blog comment. It is true that all bloggers desire comments from people because they want to have feedback from people who strongly agree and disagree with their stance. But it is important to leave a well developed thought before undermining your argument with the creator of the blog post. Find a point and stick to it. Be respectful and remember that the whole internet is audience to what is being said.
It is important to leave a comment that will spike the writer’s interest and really begin to dig into the subject further. Bad advice would be to just leave a simple comment without having any knowledge of what you are talking about such as this web site that I found while looking for good advice. I would also remind fellow bloggers to comment back, and keep the ideas flowing. If you find a blog where you learned a great deal of information, then by all means comment and thank them! This is rewarding for anyone to receive praise for the research and time that went into blogging.
Profanity and annoying personal attacks on your opinion are unwelcome everywhere. So don’t do it. I liked the video of the two women who created a song to point out the issue of bad comments left on blogs and youtube videos. There is a point to be made about tasteful comments and a good deal of our generation must have missed the memo.
What I learned from grammar girl.
I listened to the podcast concerning what was going on with spacing before a period. This is a grammar mistake that has been found in many blogs recently. I learned that the french don’t use quotation marks. That is quite interesting considering the U.S. uses them like they are going out of style. The french also put a space between the end of a word before they use a question mark or an exclamation mark. This is the reason why we might be following this trend.
I happen to be guilty of overusing the comma. Grammar girl would label me as a serial comma user. Serial commas can also be known as Oxford commas or Harvard commas. This is because these commas are not always necessary and the reader may understand the message without the need of a comma. I try to limit my comma usage however, I often write as I would speak and as I speak, commas are necessary. This is not always a bad thing. Commas create clarity. Whenever I feel that a comma would be needed to understand my point, I use a comma and I don’t need to fret.
Another podcast that I listened to was on plagiarism. Everyone knows that plagiarism is basically stealing someone else’s words and passing them off as their own, but what I didn’t know was that plagiarism can also be rewording someone else’s idea to make your own. Also, if you write a paper or essay for a class prior to the assignment you are currently working on, it is self plagiarism if you choose to reuse parts or the whole document as if the ideas are brand new for your current class. I feel that this is unfair because this is how everyone gets through higher education classes. We are so busy and overloaded with work that we need to reuse and recycle our past papers. A punishment for this offense can be expulsion? This is just crazy to me. I cannot imagine getting expended from school for reusing my own ideas that were properly cited and documented. Either way, plagiarism is very wrong and should be frowned upon.
For more information on any of these grammar tips, visit Grammar Girl’s website.
How I use social media
The types of social media that I am currently using is quite limited due to the lack of spare time. I do enjoy communicating with my friends and family through Skype and Facebook. I started doing this several years ago. I love having this in my life because I live so far away from many friends. Facebook can become addicting so I try to limit the amount of time I spend on this type of social media. I have also used WordPress in the past year for a class that I took last semester.
I find that adding more types of social media clutter my life, and I cannot keep up with how quickly information is thrown at me. I am interested in twitter because I am constantly hearing about it on the radio and the news on television, however I have a hard time taking “tweeting” seriously. Whoever created this concept was genius but whoever created the name and the lingo must have had fun making a silly word to describe sharing information. I do plan on adding twitter slowly into my daily routine because I do want to stay connected to information on PR.
I am surprised at how many hours a day that people spend on media outlets from the news in the morning, to the radio on the way to work. Then the internet all day at work. Then the same thing on the way home from work and then at home. We are constantly connected to the world by using our smart phones, and experiencing information overload all day long. Younger generations have claimed to have mastered the art of multitasking, but conflicting research is proving this to be impossible because our brains can only handle one task at a time. Although all of these resources were meant to make our lives more interesting and simple, many have found that always being connected to the world makes them more anxious and stressed out.
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