I've been moderating posts in Utopian's Blog category for a few weeks now, and I have some thoughts, some tips and suggestions for writing great posts. Or, at least, for avoiding common pitfalls. This post is also going in the Blog category, so I'm kinda nervous about this.
Grammar
For me, it all starts with style and grammar. And there's a reason for that: a post that's grammatically correct and stylistically clear is easier to read. Your number 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 goals should be to make your posts as clear as possible. There are tools to help you with this. My recommended free tool is Hemingway, as seen in most of my moderation comments. For those who want to invest money in the improvement of their posts, I'd recommend Grammarly's paid version.
Image credit: PDPics at Pixabay.
As great as these tools are, they are mostly useful in pointing out problem areas. They won't catch everything, they will label some technical terms as wrong, and their suggestions won't always make sense for your specific post. Use them, but don't rely on them.
My Pet Peeve
One place where people often err is capitalization. People capitalize when they shouldn't, and don't where they should. Here are the three things you should capitalize:
- A proper noun. Which means, the name of a place, a person, a company, a thing. It needs to be a name.
- The First letter of a sentence.
- The pronoun "I."
If you only capitalize in these three cases, you are unlikely to go wrong.
Extra tools and links
Image credit: Free-Photos at Pixabay
One way to get better at grammar is to take a course at Coursera. There's one starting next week (note that by signing up for free, you will be eligible to watch all of the course videos)! You can also check out Grammar Book. Here, too, you'll find a wealth of free information. But do be aware that they'll try to get you to sign up for the paid services. You probably don't need them. If you want quizzes and exercises, you'll find a bunch for free at a4esl.org.
Editorial Content
We are not interested in duplicated content. If all of the information you're presenting in a post about an open source project is available at their website or Steemit account, you aren't bringing the kind of value we want to see, unless it's your project. What do we want to see? Your views, and how your experience has informed them. We want opinions. We want personal stories of your use of the project. We want to know how it affected your life. You think it's awesome? Great! Now... why do you think it's awesome? That's what we want to know!
Image credit: Fas at Pixabay
You might think "but people want to know about the project! They don't care about me!" And you'd be wrong. We can find out about the project from its creators, we can google. We're on a blogging system built on a blockchain. The human, personal, element is what will make your post truly shine.
Format
We have templates. You can find them at our website. You can find them built in if you're posting through Steeditor or @steem-plus. We're all over the place. Use them. They will help!
In conclusion
We, the Utopian Blog category moderators and CM, want the category to have the best posts possible. We believe in you, and your potential to be even more awesome than you currently are. Let's do this, together.
I have been planning to create a similar guide post and I am glad to see that you did it. And I should say that I especially loved the pictures used in the post.
In the key points you explained without a doubt it's the most significant one to emphasize the importance of editorial content. The more we talk about it, the better.
About the review, since everything is pretty clear and direct to the point, there is not much to criticize. The post itself is a good and instructive example of a blog post even without suggestions in the content.
Your contribution has been evaluated according to Utopian policies and guidelines, as well as a predefined set of questions pertaining to the category.
To view those questions and the relevant answers related to your post, click here.
Need help? Write a ticket on https://support.utopian.io/.
Chat with us on Discord.
[utopian-moderator]
Thank you for your review, @roj!
So far this week you've reviewed 1 contributions. Keep up the good work!
This also does my head in for some reason (also, people not using the superior British way of spelling words!), haha. Mostly it's Germans who do that though, since they are used to capitalising all nouns - I don't know if any other languages do this, but that could explain it. Can also always recognise French people by if they put a space before a question or exclamation mark.
I'm Canadian so I find myself doing the worst thing ever, mixing British and American spellings.
As an Aussie I go through the exact same dramas. It's tough trying to be an organized but colourful writer.
Was recently contributing to a project where one of the variables was
colorand the urge to change it tocolourwas huge.In code I try to stick with american spelling just to be consistent with libraries.
Some Italians do it to. Especially with phrases like Open Source. :P
It's going to vary helpful article
Posted using Partiko Android
I'm not even sure what Utopian is, but I'm curious enough to go find out. Thanks for the helpful tips.
Blog category here i come
Do you have any examples of really good Utopian blog posts?
Aside from this one? Check out the weekly "Top of Utopian" posts on @utopian-io . There's usually at least one.
Ahhhhhh, thank you @techslut. I've been following @utopian-io but never actually clicked on those weekly posts... I had no idea how much gold was inside. I used to love reading content through the utopian app itself, and have felt a little lost since it was closed off, but this definitely fills that void. Thank you so much!
Another useful tool for you will be to check the blog post comments for the moderator's feedback. There's a questionnaire that gets filled in and is publicly viewable - it's a great way to learn what, exactly, made a post good and what the expectations for a post are.
This is not only limited to utopian...but very helpful to entire steem users for writing good and correct content on steemit
Posted using Partiko Android
Congrats, this post is feature on my news show(in Chinese :D) for today.
Thanks @didic for clarifying about the 'editorial content'. I have always wondered how to write editorial content.
Really great post. Capitalization is where some people make mistakes. Funny enough a lot of people don't know they should capitalize the pronoun "I, I catch that mistake when am proof reading.
very great guidelines sir i will follow these in few days.