On Blogging and Grammar

People have different reasons for putting up blogs. There are some who only do it for leisure and use their blogs as an online journal to update their friends about what’s going on with their lives. Others use it to publish their creative outputs like poems, short stories, pictures (in the case of photo blogs), videos (video blogs or vlogs) and the like. Then there are those blogs that focus on a particular market like travel, technology and others. They can be a combination of two or of all, but most blogs fall under the categories above.

However, aside from leisure, publishing one’s creative works and writing about particular subjects, blogs can also be used to generate profit. There are a lot of ways to do so. But the most common of them is putting up ads on the pages.

Putting up ads on one’s blog page can be done by signing up to adsevers like Google’s Adsense program, Adbrite, etc. While I do not have anything against those who blog for money, I am against those who do it blatantly (eg. having pages filled with too much ads) and at the same time, do not have the good content to back their blogs up.

By good content, what I mean is the ability to at least construct a decent sentence regardless of the language used in the post. I don’t really mind if personal blogs overlook this, but it’s different for those who blog for a niche market. I think that more care should be taken when writing a post in the case of the latter. If you’re writing it for the money, make it worth it. Of course, English is the preferred language in writing a blog post to gather relevant keywords for adservers, but please, make an effort to learn how to write it well in that language.

While I won’t give particular examples of blogs, here are some examples of what I’m talking about (based on real blog posts, but modified to protect the blogger’s identity):

“I have AN cat that purrs every time it sees me.”
“I am with my sister right now. She WAS really beautiful.” (Unless of course the writer meant that she used to be pretty and now she’s not.)
“What have you been doing in the PASS two hours?”

I may sound like I’m nitpicking, but if there’s a consistent torrent of grammatical errors in every post (which is the case of the blogs I referred to in the samples above), then that’s another thing.

Surely, if a blogger can invest time in learning how to write HTML, CSS, php, asp, etc. codes, it’s also worth it to learn how to write at least in simple English.

This article was originally published in methinksreally.blogspot.com