… or are frustrated journalists.

The reason I like LJ over other blogging platforms, even given it’s distinct disadvantages in searchability and such, is the conversational nature of the comment system.

Well, that and that I don’t need to maintain an RSS reader, because I can syndicate everything to my LJ friends page.

Silly me!

Wish I had a ‘subscribe to comment thread’ button that people could click!

Your point about journalism is an interesting one. Sometimes I think that if a newspaper article and a paragraph from a blogger were laid side by side people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

But then quite a lot of the best bloggers do have an (albeit hazy!) background or experience in/of journalism?!

(not being a regular on your blog, I don’t know if you do this or not, so apologies if I’m preaching to the perverted, er, converted)

“all the normal rules of what makes writing good or brilliant or just plain rubbish don’t really apply on here as blogging is a completely different sphere”

I would completely and categorically disagree with that, though. Most people /are/ more lenient as to what they will accept in a blog as opposed to, say, a newspaper column, at least to begin with. Most people start by just reading the blogs of just their friends, and some people never get past that stage.

However, once you get to the point where you have two or three hundred blogs on your to-read list, you start getting annoyed with people whose sentence structure, spelling and grammar are poor; principally because it takes longer to decipher meaning in sentences with poor syntax. Also, if you are not /very/ precise in your meaning, in a written medium, it is easy for people to misunderstand what you are saying, and maybe even take offence. I’ve lost count of the number of times when I have seen people in a forum or comments thread agreeing with each other aggressively and vehemently in capital letters with daggers drawn… And this is only one of the ways that a blogger can get on another blogger’s wick.

Once one starts to get annoyed with a blogger, one starts to read their blog less, and accord less weight to their points. Therefore, although “the normal rules” may not matter /to some readers/, it’s better to cater for those readers who /are/ bothered about that sort of thing, because you don’t want to artificially reduce your audience in an easily avoidable way. The whole point of blogging, after all, is to get your point across to as many people as possible, right?

(I would like to point out that Charlotte’s syntax is impeccable, btw)

Also – I wanted to make a point about being popular on here – I don’t think it necessarily means people like your writing or what you have to say – it depends on a huge amount of different factors – such as whether you’ve managed to click into the ‘blogging loop’ and have something orginal to say on a current topic or what time of day/night you can blog through other commitments..it’s not always because you’re the best writer…

I think what I’m trying to say here, Charlotte, is that all the normal rules of what makes writing good or brilliant or just plain rubbish don’t really apply on here as blogging is a completely different sphere?

It’s such a subjective thing. Do you nominate on the quality or the impact? What make a blog post ‘good’ or weirder still ‘the best’?

Think someone’s having a laugh as they want to make sure I don’t win!!!!

:@O LOL!