(or, the specifics of good writing vis a vis blogging)

We’ve been talking all year about what good writing is. Good writing …

     hooks the reader in

     has a purpose that is clear

     is written for a particular audience

     shows rather than tells

     includes lots of detail, description, examples

     is organized in paragraphs that flow

     follows the conventions of spelling and grammar

Blogging is absolutely a form of writing, and it needs to follow all of the criteria we’ve been talking about all year. But blogging is a very different sort of writing than writing on paper – or even the letter writing we’ve been doing each month. Blogging is – or should be – the start of a conversation. The point of writing is to have people read your creation, yes; but readers rarely have a chance to actually engage with you about whatever you’ve written. If it’s good, they think about it, and they engage with it, but they do so on their own – or sometimes with their friends.

With blogging, your readers have a chance to engage with you pretty much in real time. As they read, they have the ability to comment. More than any other type of writing, therefore, blogging is a place to not just share information or stories, but also to ask questions. It’s a great place to wonder, to grapple with the big ideas in what you’re learning (whether school-directed or otherwise), or to write about things that are bothering you. In blogging, you don’t always have to have the answer. Sometimes it’s enough to have a good question.

That same opportunity for reader engagement, however, makes it crucial that you provide your reader with something that engages them. No one wants to read a list of what you’ve done. No one in the blogsphere cares if you’ve added a slide to your presentation, or if you had the chance to go out and test out your prototype. What they want to know – what will engage them, is what you learned about making slides. Is there a trick you can share with them about how to do something cool with PowerPoint – or are you using a new presentation tool (like Prezi) that you can explain to your readers? They want to know what happened when you tested your prototype. What did you learn from doing that? Did it work? Did it fail spectacularly? Why? Tell them that funny story about how the go kart seemed to be chasing you when your partner let it go at the top of the hill. What are you going to have to do to fix it?

When you blog, your audience needs to be at the forefront of your mind. If you don’t care about it, if you’re not interested as you write it, chances are no one is going to be interested in reading it later – except maybe your teacher, and that’s more because she has to in order to help move you forward as a writer. Trust me, she probably wouldn’t otherwise.

So make her want to. Make her – make all your readers – wait eagerly for the next post so they can see what happens next.

And always remember the expectations of good writing. (Edublogs has a spell-check, you know.)