NBI – All The Pretty Blogs… With Some Contradictory Advice Thrown In

All good things must come to an end.  This holds for mediocre and bad things as well.  You can pick which you felt the New Blogger Initiative was.  Syp certainly seems happy about things.

As one of the so-called sponsors, I committed to putting up an announcement about the event, writing a bit of advice (I even did some advice embedded in a live post), and then posting a summing up of all the new blogs and advice shared.  And so here we are at that final step, the summing up.

Hrmm.

I really have nothing else to add, so I will let you sum it up.

(NBI advice: polls are a great way to avoid committing to an opinion!  And, as a bonus, you can always wring another post out of evaluating the results!)

That said, onto the long lists of blogs and articles, which are after the cut.

First we have the new blogs.  Go visit them.  Click on each link.

Links copied from Syp’s post because I am lazy.  But I am taking it on faith that you’re all linking here, to this blog.  Linkwhoring.  It is what’s for breakfast.

And then there is the advice.  I added a couple of last minute entries.  Not all of it is contradictory, but I am sure if you distilled it all to basic points and lined them all up, you could find cancel most statements out with an opposing statement from the same list.  So just blog however you want!

Anyway, extreme linkwhoring!

The only other thing I can add is that you should, if at all possible, get somebody to proof read your work before you post it.  Or read it aloud to yourself, word by word.  I don’t do either and I am appalled and embarrassed most days at what my fingers have typed while my mind was obviously elsewhere.  My brain knows exactly when to use there, their, or they’re.  My fingers seem ambivalent on the subject.

Not that I am taking the hard line on grammar and usage.  Glass houses and all that.  But sometimes I see hurriedly written blog posts where the number of errors makes me unable to appreciate the actual point of the post.

And one more last piece of advice.  When in doubt, go with the simple declarative sentence.  I often (far too often) find myself in some paragraph long sentence attempting to round up all possible points with a forest of subordinate phrases only to find that I have totally lost track of where I have started.  So I go back and break things up into five or six… or a dozen in one case… simple sentences.  It can be dull, but it often gets the point across more effectively.

Otherwise, carry on.

7 thoughts on “NBI – All The Pretty Blogs… With Some Contradictory Advice Thrown In”

  1. saucelah

    most of my education is related to writing, and it is kinda sorta my profession; however, the older I get, the more I screw up shit like their/there/they’re and not notice until days later.

    I also do this weird thing now where I will replace a word with a slant rhyme. Talking about a baseball game on facebook last night, I mentioned something that happened in the 6th inning, only I wrote “evening.” Drives me nuts.

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  2. Wilhelm Arcturus Post author

    @saucelah – There is something with mental muscle memory and years of typing that detaches your fingers from your brain when typing.

    Some of it is entrenched patterns. For example, after years of playing TorilMUD, I am completely unable to type the word “ratio.” My fingers always add an “n” turning it into “ration.” (And it did it just then too, even though my brain was screaming “Don’t do it!”) Too much time spent typing “get ration, eat ration, put ration bag, give ration Xyd” in my youth.

    But other times, my fingers just seem to want to chart their own damn course.

    A malady of the digital age. Somebody should do a study!

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  3. bhagpuss

    I want to know why I reverse the “n” and “g” of any word ending in “ing” so very, very often. I did it even typing the last sentence and had to correct it.

    I have watched my fingers as I type and I swear I’m hitting the keys in the right order. I even entertained the possibility that there was something wrong with my keyboard. The simple fact, however, is that I am a hamfisted typist and I try to type too fast.

    Edit, edit and edit again is my advice.

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  4. Antivyris

    Due to years of dragonrealms, I simply cannot spell ‘the’ without typing it as ‘teh’ twice. Personally, I thing it happens when your learning to type in specific programs, say specific things, and then your hands just get out of sync after that. Like in a WASD game, you sometimes type slower with the mouse hand. And I don’t think age has much to do with it, just habits.

    Though, is it odd I started a blog during NBI, but not because of NBI? Feels kind of odd…

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  5. mbp

    Guilty as charged on the failure to proofread. The rot set in a couple of years back when I tried to teach myself touch typing. Somehow I never quite got to the end of the lessons and yet I found I couldn’t go back to slow but reliable two finger typing. It never fails to amaze me though how a couple of letters out of place can transform the most brilliant piece of rhetoric into worthless drivel.

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  6. rowan

    I’m in the same boat, can’t type WoW without capitalizing both W’s, and a dozen other typos. I’ve always said it’s not the typing, but the proofreading, that really needs to improve. :)

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