Monday, January 17, 2011

Proofreading is the Key

After reading Julie's (@WritingSpirit) blog post about keeping the way Facebook posts links in mind when writing opening paragraphs for your blog, I took a look at mine to see what it looked like.

There are two things wrong with this link. First of all, the comment, "Please forgive the formatting" was written a little after 1:00 am, when I was very sleepy. I wanted to make sure my post could be read at the top of the morning for Short Story Saturday before I went to bed. After tinkering with the HTML coding, I have corrected the formatting issue. Also, there's a misspelled word in the link. "The reports were off and some of the clients had been calling saying significant somes..." This should be sums not somes. This has been since corrected but just because I have changed the blog itself, the link on Facebook is still the way it was when I first uploaded the post. The lesson I learned from this is that I will definitely have to do a better job of proofreading before I hit the publish button.

Now, I'm guessing this could be the reason why I used to get so many rejection letters when I was actively submitting short stories and poems for publication. Who wants to publish someone who can't even write a single paragraph without a misspelling? I wouldn't if I were the publisher.

Please be careful how you send things out in the world, as they say, you only get one try to make a first impression.

In response to--Shine Online Blogging Tip 2

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is very true. I never thought about this as well when I post things on FB until after reading
Julie's post.

Susie McCray said...

@creativek2

I plan to be a lot more mindful of this in the future.

Cat Russell said...

I've also heard that you can title posts so that they're more likely to come up in a Google search. I've never tried it though.

Good point about the FB thing. I've also noticed that sometimes when a shortened url is used, the partial beginning of the post will not show up. Not all the time, just sometimes. But your point is well taken. Photos at the top of a blog post show up first also, so I think they're nice attention-getters. :)

Susie McCray said...

@ganymeder

I'm a very visual person which is why I usually try to pick just the right picture to convey my message.

Thanks for stopping by.

Unknown said...

Very informative post! I hadn't even heard or realized those tips and tricks about higher postings using the beginning of a post! Where can I learn more? And what you said about the proofreading, OMG, I definitely need to work on that. And I need to remember to never post while sleepy! That makes for the worst and hardest to correct posts! SMH!

Susie McCray said...

@Willie

Hey buddy, you can click on the link at the end of the post to go to @WritingSpirit blog and read more about it.

I was dumb enough to think if I fixed my blog that I would fix the summary in the link too. Silly me. Lesson learned.