Blogging and Commenting Guidelines

Blogging and Commenting Guidelines

Digital Privacy:

  • First names only – Use only your first name and the first names of any friends that you might want to mention on you blog or in your comments.
  • No contact information – Refrain from posting our school name, address, telephone numbers and refrain from posting your home town name, your home address and home phone number.
  • Leave no tracks – Don’t provide information about where you’re going and when you’ll be there! Avoid giving out information about your daily or weekly routines (e.g., when and where your dance class is, the date, time and/or address of your best friend’s next party).

 

Tone is Important:

  • Think friendly – your comments should be polite, encouraging, and friendly.
  • Avoid sarcasm – sarcastic remarks are so easy to misinterpret online. Try to use humour without a sarcastic edge.
  • Civil disagreements – handle disagreements with politeness, by presenting your opinions, constructive feedback, and ideas with a positive tone.
  • Use appropriate language – inappropriate language will not be tolerated.  I reserve the right to delete a blog if I see inappropriate language used on the blog.  The student blogger will have the same writing assignments to complete as the rest of the classmates do, however he/she will complete them on paper rather than online.

 

Content counts:

  • On Topic – make sure your comments make sense and are on the topic of the original post.  Avoid getting so silly that you’re off topic.
  • Be Specific – a good comment shows you’ve read the blogpost carefully and have something specific to say about it.  Although everyone wants to hear ‘Good job’ or ‘Loved this blogpost!’ a more specific comment can really help the author of the blog to determine what it was that was ‘good’ about his/her writing.  Your comment should respond to: 1) the tone of the writing; 2) the use of language; 3) the way the story was developed or organized; 4) the way the blogpost made you feel; 5) what the blogpost made you think about or question or wonder; 6) the sentence structures, words, phrases, etc. that stood out for you.
  • Avoid ‘text talk’ – Don’t use ‘facebook’ or ‘texting’ type abbreviations (e.g., u for you, or gr8t for great). This IS English class, after all!

 

Use conventions correctly:

  • Check your spelling – Use spell check before you post your blog or your comment.
  • Punctuation is the reader’s roadmap – Use correct punctuation to the best of your ability.  It is a courtesy to your reader and will make reading and understanding your ideas so much easier.  Common errors include: forgetting apostrophes, omitting capital letters for names of people, places, events, countries, days, months, languages, etc., overuse of exclamation marks (Wow!!!!!!!!), overuse of ellipses (and the next day . . . ).
  • Capital ‘I’ – When referring to yourself always use a capital letter ‘I.’  Never use ‘i’ for ‘I.’
  • Alignment – Always use left alignment for writing.  It is difficult to read a paragraph or more that is written in centre alignment.
In case you didn’t think punctuation was all that important – consider this:

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