Great video on blogging and twitter tips

Blogging and twitter tips

It pays to listen to the professor when it comes to learning some of the great secrets and tips of becoming a great blogger. These tips on blogging presented in this video are great.

Great blogging and great writing go hand and hand

I think it is easy to say that to be a great blogger you also have to be a great writer. Learning from the advice of others is sometimes much easier than learning it in the college of hard knocks. This article gives you a lot of advice that needs to be applied on a daily bases.

Johnny Ray
www.sirjohn.org/bloglist

Mark Twain, Stephen King, adjectives, and hell

Author: Tom Aaron

If you look for advice on your writing, surf the Internet and you will find advice galore. One writing site tells you that one reason we plunk down money for writers like Stephen King is because they use adverbs to make their writing interesting. While adverbs, like adjectives, can help your writing in moderation, many writers overuse and abuse them. This overuse and abuse has resulted in today's overly strong reaction against adverbs and adjectives. As King says, "The road to hell is paved with adverbs."

Mark Twain shared King's lack of excitement about adverbs. He wrote about them in his "Reply to a Boston Girl," in the June 1880 issue of Atlantic Monthly:

I am dead to adverbs; they cannot excite me. To misplace an adverb is a thing which I am able to do with frozen indifference; it can never give me a pang. ... There are subtleties which I cannot master at all,--they confuse me, they mean absolutely nothing to me,--and this adverb plague is one of them. ... Yes, there are things which we cannot learn, and there is no use in fretting about it. I cannot learn adverbs; and what is more I won't.

King and Twain are looking at writing textually rather than from a grammar perspective. Thinking of grammar, most adverbs end with "ly". A number of writing sites suggest using your search function to find "ly" and editing it out unless the adverb is absolutely necessary. Following this advice, I checked this draft. I found three examples with "ly", two were mine and one was Twain's.

1. From me: This overuse and abuse has resulted in today's overly strong reaction against adverbs and adjectives.

2. From Mark Twain: they mean absolutely nothing to me,

3. From me: A number of writing sites suggest using your search function to find "ly" and editing it out unless it is absolutely necessary.

Let's see if we can edit these adverbs out and improve the texts:

Example 1

Original text: This overuse and abuse has resulted in today's overly strong reaction against adverbs and adjectives.

Revised text: This overuse has resulted in today's strong reaction against adverbs and adjectives, ignoring their value and place in English.

The new text deleted "overly" and added a phrase starting with a gerund, a phrase using a gerund and nouns. From reading this phrase, we can tell that the reaction is too strong and we explain why: because the reaction ignores the value and place of adverbs and adjectives in English. The question is which is your preference: an adjective or the additional informative text?

Example 2

Original text: they mean absolutely nothing to me,

Revised text: they mean nothing to me,

I hesitate to edit the words of Mark Twain. Were he here today, he might agree about deleting "absolutely." Or he might say that "absolutely nothing" sounds better. After all, they both mean the same thing.

Example 3

Original text: A number of writing sites suggest using your search function to find "ly" and editing it out unless it is absolutely necessary.

Revised text: Some writing sites suggest using your search function to find "ly" and editing "ly" out unless the adjective is necessary or improves the writing.

In example 3, more text was edited than simply the adjective. In order to have authentic examples of adjective use in this article, the draft was not edited before selecting the examples. Thus the original text contains unnecessary words, an empty it, and an adjective, all of which were edited out. The new text, without absolutely, is better.

When you write and edit your writing, edit out adjectives whenever possible. If you have difficulty editing your writing, some suggestions may help. You could have two places for your writing work. One place is where you work to write and the other is where you work to edit. The two places are much like the two hat approach. You wear your writer's hat, the blue hat with the red feather, when you write, and you wear your editor's hat, the green hat with the blue feather, when you edit. You sit near the window when you write; you go to the coffee shop when you edit. In writing you may cherish adjectives, but in editing you search and destroy without hesitation.

If you put your writing away for a week, you may be able to read the text as if it had been written by someone else. You may feel no connection to the writing and given the lack of connection, you may begin to edit without feeling ownership of the text.

Still, in spite of everything we've said, moderate adjective use can improve writing.

About the Author:

You can find Aaron Language Services on the Web at
http://www.aaronlanguage.com/
If you can't read Japanese, you can always reach us via our personnel page.

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com - Mark Twain, Stephen King, adjectives, and hell

Staying focused to make a better blog

How to improving your blogging

One of the top problems with many blogs is the lack of focus. Sometimes there is no clear cut purpose in having one other than the fact the author just wanted one. It is important to remember you have to give the reader a reason to want to go to your site. I know we all think we are extremely interesting or funny, but in reality unless you showcase it and let your reader know that, he will usually never come back. Readers don’t like being sidetracked or tricked into reading something. They usually are hunting for something and have many places to look.
So, what do you want your reader to do? Perhaps you want your reader to become a new friend, to buy something from you, or to simply to agree with your way of thinking. In any case, the tone and the message must be clear. A blog is in many ways a two way street. It requires a little give and take. And many people only give back after you give to them.
It is good to write a post on exactly what you are trying to accomplish. It will help not only you, but your visitors. It will definitely help you stay focused.

Johnny Ray
I’ve created several new blogs I’m focusing on now. One is concerning the mortgage business and the other is on Grilling steaks. If you have time check them out.

Blogging tips, the need to be consistent

Blogging consistently is one of the best blogging tips
As any business man can tell you, it is all about the repeat customer. In a bloggers case, it is repeat readers. To keep readers coming back to your site, you have to have new material for them to see. If your site is mainly for references and a source of information that is static, perhaps a permanent web site would do better. The main attraction in a blog is the currently updated information. There is always many other blogs you compete with and once one of your readers finds another site to entertain them, they may not come back.
So, how often should you blog? While it varies with the individual and the site, many sources will say that you should add to your blog at least once a day. Yes, it takes some commitment in your time. This commitment comes from developing the blog site, maintaining it, researching the material for the blog, actually writing it and finally letting cyberspace know you have it out there. And, of course, staying in contact with your constituents that leave comments is important and can be time consuming as well.
It is important to stay in a rhythm; a history of daily post followed by several days of no post will leave your readers confused. In the same reasoning too many posts in a short period time to make up for not posting earlier will leave many of the articles unread. It doesn’t hurt to experiment some when you first start blogging, but soon the proper rhythm can be obtained with a little analysis of your account. This is a good reason to study your analytics on your site. While many people offer blogging tips, the most important ones are the ones you research on your own through a complete analysis of your blog.

Johnny Ray
www.sirjohn.org/bloglist

Content is King

How good are you at writing content?

The bases of any blog have to be the content. Yes, it is great to have fantastic graphics, but if you don’t have something to say that is of interest to your readers they soon get bored. They also get bored if they see articles they are not specifically interested in. With this in mind, the content has to follow the original plan for the site. You have to know who your target market is. It also helps to know who the people that come to your site are. Using products like Google analytics can help a lot.
Not only must the content be in tune with your readers, it has to short and concise. Take a look at how long readers stay on your site. Is it ten or fifteen minutes? You wish. Most of the time and for most sites it can be measured in seconds. The attention span of most people surfing the web tends to be very short. They want information and know there are many places to find it. If you can provide them with what they want, they may bookmark your site for additional visits later. This is your best hope in getting traffic to your site. They want to know they can find answers on your site.
Another main consideration is how current your information is. Yes, it can take a lot of time to update every day, but it can be worth it. It only takes once or twice for the reader to lose interest and never return. Some articles can be short and others long, but the most important thing is to be regular in your post.
Feel free to post your comments and observations.
Johnny Ray
www.sirjohn.org/bloglist

Driving traffic to your web site

Constantly looking around the net to find new ideas I saw this article that I think everyone will enjoy. Much of the news is common sense, but I hope there are some gems in there you can use. If anyone wants to add sites or comments, please feel free to do so.