(adapted and crossposted to our senior classes’ blog)

The reason we post about our learning and share our writing on blogs (or online in general) is to connect with an audience. In school, most writing doesn’t go beyond the classroom, and it’s not meant to be read by anyone besides the teacher. This isn’t real writing. Writers create their pieces to share with an audience, whether it’s through physical or online media. They submit writing to anthologies and magazines and newspapers; they try to find agents and publishers; they share their writing in various online archives.

As a writer, we are buoyed and excited by the positive comments that readers leave. They inspire us and fuel us as we write more. Not all comments that are left are positive, and we must learn to deal with the negative ones, but even then most people are constructively critical rather than hurtfully so. Regardless, receiving any comment at all means at least that someone is reading our work.

However, writing comments that move the conversation and learning forward is a skill we need to acquire and practice. Blogs are written in a different medium than Writers’ Workshop pieces, which are a more formal style of writing. We’ll talk about writing good blog posts later, but for now what you need to remember is that the point of a blog is to prompt conversation (see the bottom of this post to explore possibilities if you’re uncertain, or read I’m a Blogger).

This week’s tasks from the challenge are:

 

For our class, you may choose any one of the available tasks (see the Challenge blog post for more detailed instructions for each task) or create a blog post about why commenting is important for you personally, as well as read and comment on people’s blogs – both those by people within the class and those by people in other parts of the country or world. Ensure that your comments are thoughtful, considerate, and properly written, and make sure they contain content to which someone could reply in order to continue the conversation. (If you find someone who’s blog interests you enough that you want to return to it and see what else they write, click “Follow” and their posts will show up in your Reader on the Dashboard.) Always click “Notify me of follow-up comments” so that you can see if someone replies to your comment. Remember that you should be keeping an eye on the comments on your posts as well and responding to as many as you can.

When you’re finished your post – whether you’ve uploaded a poster or a video, or you’ve posted about why commenting is important – make sure to submit your post’s URL to the challenge (remember that a post URL includes a date – click on the heading for your post and then copy and paste the website address that shows up).

**If you’re trying to figure out what to write to engage your audience, there are a variety of topics you could choose. You might explore an idea as Alyson and Eli do, or you might give advice as Mercedes does here, or as Emilia does. You can share something that bothers you as Keira and Kamryn do or talk about a topic that is significant to you as Brie and Ethan do. Always remember, when writing more personal posts, that literally anyone could possibly read these, so keep personally-identifying information out of it.

If you’re looking for ideas, check out some of the blog posts from previous writing classes – a few exemplary bloggers from each grade are identified at the top of the previous years’ blogrolls page.