Picture by paolelfa taken from flickr.comWriting a blog post is for me writing thoughts or respect tasks following "the mind flow". Now I understand it should be much more. I have never thought about the structure of the blog posts I've written so far, but they have a structure anyway.
I've always tried to focus and make the topic clear right from the title, and where possible, I tried to catch the reader's attention by means of an enjoyable language and style.
At the beginning of the post there is always the main topic, in order to have an idea of what the topic is about. Then there is the text body and at the end I've always put questions or suggestions, giving the reader the curiosity of explore, know and learn more, as I would do!
But the structure is never thought or planned before. Now I know it is a mistake! If I don't organise the structure I wouldn't probably be clear and effective. The post will appear as confused and no reader will read my posts again.
Reading through some 'academic' blogs found in e-tivity 5, I see how they are well structured. Most of them have an evident 'academic' structure: Introduction, Body and Conclusion, with all the characteristics described in Handout 2 (Logic, cohesion, clarity and coherence).
Therefore, I think the main aim of the blog determines the style. If a blog is 'academic', it is probably made of well-structured posts. If the blog is 'personal', it would probably be made of posts with personal thoughts, opnions and not necessarily well-structured!!
What do you think? Let me know...
Martina
Hello Martina!
ReplyDeleteTalking about blog posts, I think that they should follow the ‘hourglass’ structure too to some extent. Indeed, I think they turn out to be clearer if they follow it. However, as you said, a blog post that is ‘personal’ can leave aside this kind of structure.
As far as language is concerned, I want to point something out to you.
• In the first sentence I think you forgot an –ing form. Didn’t you want to write: ‘Writing a blog post is for me writing thoughts or respecting tasks…’?
• At the beginning of the second paragraph you used the present perfect tense but I think in that case you are talking about something in the past and so you’d use a simple past.
• In the same sentence you wrote: “I’ve always tried to focus and make the topic clear…”. It is not clear what you focus on.
• At the beginning of the third paragraph you used a comma before a subordinator: “, in order to”. It is wrong.
• And finally, a spelling mistake. You wrote “opnions” instead of ‘opinions’.
I hope these corrections are right at least!
Bye,
Chiara :-]
Hello Martina!
ReplyDeleteI agree with you, the topic and the aim of a blog determine its style. I know the topic of our blogs is academic and that, as a consequence, we should write well-structured posts but I think a certain degree of spontaneity has to be maintained. We're writing blogs not academic papers!!! We can try new kind of structures, less fixed structures. The most important thing is to write a text that is as clear as possible! And I think your post is very clear, right from the beginning and you use language properly. I didn't notice mistakes... I had some doubts only about "the curiosity of explore, know and learn more": is "of" right? I didn't find any useful examples on my dictionary so I checked "the curiosity of/to explore" on Google and I found there is no result for "the curiosity of explore". Thus I guess "of" is wrong!
See you in class!
Ilaria.