Facibus On Blogging

Dan Saffer has some good advice for people who want to be taken seriously when commenting in blogs.

He says that comments will not be taken seriously unless authors follow a few simple rules:

• Use reasonable English grammar. Even if you don’t speak English as your first language, you can at least obey some basic English conventions, like capitalization and punctuation. Amazingly, it is usually English-speakers who are the worst at this.
• If you have a lot to say, break it up into paragraphs. One giant paragraph is annoying.
• Actually read what you’ve responded to. It’s amazing how much misreading or skimming of a post people do before responding. Closely read the post to see if your criticism or concern has already been addressed.
• Be reasonable when what you are responding to is reasonable. Respond to reasonable discussions reasonably. Ignore unreasonable discussions. (This is hard.)
• Participate in the discussion. If you only post with problems or to complain and never contribute solutions or interesting commentary, you don’t have much credibility.
• Don’t comment anonymously. If you believe what you are saying, be an adult and put your name on it. If you are too cowardly to leave your name, you probably shouldn’t be commenting.

Stephen King said “write to your audience, everything else is bullsh*t”. It makes sense - write to the medium, and write to the reader (in this case both the blog owner who will moderate your comment as well as those that will read it further down the track).

I like to think of Dan’s advice as common sense - but who says that common sense is common?