Blog Writing for College Students

Focus (Group Leader Shanna Dixon)

Choosing Your Topic by Amy Rehner

Choosing a worthy topic is essential to the success of the overall blog. A topic expresses one essential idea within writing and unifies each successive post. At first, a specific topic may seem to confine creativity, but focusing the topic actually provides endless creative possibilities. A focused topic encourages the audience to engage more actively and interact as a part of a blog community, ultimately enhancing the popularity of the blog.

Research Methods by Melissa Grantham

Research is the process of gathering information, evaluating it, and applying it to a question or problem.When writing for digital media, research allows writers to narrow their focus. Having a narrow focus makes a blog more interesting and the writer an expert on the topic.

Participation by Marian Brewer

When starting a college blog, it is important to know how to encourage participation with not only other bloggers, but the readers. Participation is more than just writing in a clean and concise manner. Blog authors must understand that a blog does not operate in a vacuum, but instead is a piece of a vast branching network. Blogrolls, share buttons, and enabling comments are a few ways to increase participation.

Organization (Group Leader Nadine Epperson)

To maintain readership of a blog, a writer must create an organized space. Quality content can easily be overlooked on a cluttered, inconsistent page. Organization includes the overall structure of the site as well as the individual posts. There are several things that contribute to this consistency. Categories and tags aid in narrowing the focus of each post within the blog. Headers and sub-headers should give the reader a clear indication of what is contained in each section. By using lists, digital media writers can highlight important content, break up posts, and guide readers through a sequence of information. Links connect the page to other sites on the internet and offer access to other portions of the blog. All of these elements support the structure of an organized, consistent environment for content.

Categorizing Posts by Candice Barca

Categorizing a post is vital to the structure and organization of a blog. Categories help readers quickly identify the content of a blog. Tags provide specific information while grouping together like posts. Together categories and tags make it easier for readers to navigate the information within a blog.

Headers and Sub-headers by Chrissonia McCall

Headers and sub-headers are an important part of blogging used to organize content. Keeping in mind the goals and vision of the blog, headers and sub-headers help readers find specific information in a short amount of time.

Links

No page on the internet stands alone. The connection of sites on the internet is what makes the web interactive. Links play a vital role in maintaining this interactivity. By connecting to other areas of the internet, readers are given access to an unlimited pool of information.

Writing Style (Group Leader Kristin Hanlin)

Scan-ability by Kristin Hanlin

If digital writing is not scannable, many times it will not be read. Writers of digital media must pay special attention to scan-ability because readers of digital writing are known to be easily distracted, impatient, and unwilling to read huge blocks of text. Digital writers must understand and utilize different properties of text, visuals, multimedia, and linking to maximize scan-ability.

Inverted Pyramid by Siobahn Fisher

College students should familiarize themselves with the inverted pyramid. This design for news and information delivery via the web will help new bloggers quickly achieve brevity while communicating in a concise way. The inverted pyramid is important to the retention of a blog's audience.