Editing a Blog Post - Why Re-Reading Text and Photo Captions Helps

CHECKING TEXT
I just retyped my headline. I typed fast and out came blag post instead of blog post. Typing this sentence in the text I typed blah post.

When you re-read your work you find these mistakes. I often neglect to go into VIEW to see what the reader will see. But if you are writing blog posts, it really improves your posts.

When I create my post I type in a wide box. But when the text appears in the blog the right hand side is filled with links and advertisements. One result is that two sentences are often enough for a paragraph. More makes a long block of text so I have to shorten paragraphs.

CHECKING PHOTOS
For example, only after writing for several years did I discover the facility to enlarge your photo to large or extra large. You can make a picture bigger so you can see the food or the expression on somebody's face.

However, sometimes the picture bleeds outside the column width. You might lose the person on the right or left of the picture. Or find the text and picture are overlapping.

Finally, when you add a photo it may slip into the place where you last left your cursor. The picture moves up, the text wraps around it and the picture captions apply to the wrong picture or sit in the middle of nowhere as if a picture has vanished. If it confuses the author, what must it do to a reader from Japan.

The other surprise is that if you have two or more blogs, you alter the frame of one and get narrow columns, but your other blog has wide columns. So what you imagine your text looks like, as you flit from updating one blog to another, is not what you expect.

Now I must save this - and check how it looks.

Remember to add your selling point or call to action at the end. You could create a signature and repeat it every time.

Angela Lansbury BA Hons. Author. Freelance writer of travel and features. Photographer. Please look at Lulu.com and Youtube and other blogs. Angela is also a speaker and speech trainer if you need one.

Too Many Adjectives, said writer Dahl

I read an article in the Daily Mail online. A man re-discovered a letter which he received from Raould Dahl, responding to a request from a then 17 year old for comments on a school project short story.

I would agree with Dahl that too many adjectives slow down an action story. However, different types of stories and audiences and subject matter require different styles.

I disagree with the example Dahl chose. 'She had a bosom' is a nonsense. Every woman has a bosom. to say that implies the writer has a one track mind. (He didn't care whether she was intelligent or had a job. She had a bosom. That was enough.)

The first four word sentence is terse. It did not create any picture in my mind's eye of the woman, but of the writer or speaker.

'A shapely, prominent bosom', however, focuses my mind on a vision of a rather well-endowed woman. A novelist has time for such long sentences. Descriptions are expected in novels as a pause between action.

But a short story writer might need to cut down on adjectives simply to cram more action into one thousand words. One thousand is the limit for the many modern short stories, because that number or words will fit into on one or two pages in a magazine with advertisements down the side.
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Readers' comments on the same article express surprise that a letter from such a famous person had been mislaid and only just discovered.

The loss of a letter does not surprise me at all. A single sheet of paper can easily sit in an untouched file for years, stored in an attic or at the back of a cupboard. Today's houses are filled with paperwork. Writers and creative people are notorious collectors.

It takes a scientific mind to catalogue every paper and be able to locate everything.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2983602/Dear-Jay-asking-Roald-Dahl-s-brutally-honest-letter-boy-17-asked-author-advice-Level-project.html


Angela Lansbury BA Hons is an author with books on lulu.com, videos on Youtube and more blog posts on travel and other subjects. She is also a freelance photo-journalist, author and caricaturist and gives speeches and trains speakers.