On Websites and Blogs

You and your partner have five minutes to make a list of all the different kinds of places you can write online. The team with the longest list gets some cool prizes!You can make your list wherever you like.

What is the difference between a blog and a website?


blog


personal
a casual tone
easy to set up
more interative
updated daily




website


impersonal
a formal tone
more difficult to set up
more official
more static (it doesn't change)



In partners find a blog and a website related to 1) Vancouver, 2) learning English, 3) food and 4) the topics of your blogs. How are they different? How are they the same? Post links to each and make your comparisons in twitter posts.


tips for professional online writing

How Time Flies!

Good Afternoon!

 Today we're going to start with a short free writing assignment. After that we have short presentations about ways to increase traffic to your blog. Finally, we're going to start the last writing assignment for your blog. I want this class to be as useful to you as possible so for the third blog post, I'd like you to choose one of the following:

1) Interview a classmate on the topic of your blog. You must include at least ten questions and you are responsible for writing down his or her answers. For this assignment you will want to find out about their opinion regarding your topic. If your topic is movies, it will be easy to make questions about movies.

2) Find an expert and interview him or her. This will be more difficult and might require you to email or approach different people. You should ask at least five questions.

3) Give us the story of your life as it relates to your topic. You can make up parts of the story but basically you want to relate different parts of your life to your topic.

4) Any other suggestion.



Whatever topic you choose you need to include at least one link, one picture and one video that's related to your topic. Finally, your post should have three paragraphs for an interview and five if you're relating your life story. Most importantly, have fun!

Increasing traffic to your blog...

Today you'll research different ways to increase traffic to your blog. You'll have fifty minutes to do your write up (on a wiki, blog post, or some other online place)  and then you'll do a short presentation on three ways to increase blog traffic. Two things you need to do (and show us in your presentation) and the other way you only need to tell us about. You will have access to anything online so try to make your presentation as dynamic as possible. You can do your research at 19 tips to increasing blog traffic or 21 tactics to increasing blog traffic. The second reading is more difficult, but both readings will have new words and ideas in them. In your presentation, include three new words that you learned.

Tuesday week three

A- five minute warm up - write about an experience that's related to your blog: You might write about the first time that you did something, the most difficult time you encountered your subject of interest or perhaps a time you helped someone else appreciate your topic.


B- swap your story with a classmate and write down three questions that the piece of writing leaves you with (5Ws)


C- After you get the three questions from your classmate, rewrite your story with the answers.


D - General Questions that Can Be Answered at the End of a Narrative:

Why was your experience significant? What aspects of your interest were highlighted by your experience? (i.e. Going to a Canuck's game helped me understand hockey better in three main ways. First of all... Secondly... Finally.... ) How did it change your understudying of your interest? (to broaden your appreciation of sth, to deepen your understanding of sth or to help you understand sth better)

Using Narrative to Strengthen your Writing

Monday:


today's class:
1) present blogs to your classmates
2) new students today or tomorrow:
Does anyone want to help a classmate set up a blog? They can also write a post about their new classmate based on the "getting to know you" questions. How do their classmates interests connect to their own?
3) short fiction

What's another word for narrative?


A In partners write a short-short story - it must have a beginning, middle and end, and shouldn't be any longer than 140 characters. After I have checked your story, tweet about it online.



4) What is a story? It's something that hooks people's interest. It's a good frame for your topic.

5) The specifics of a story:

Connections

1. writing warm up: What comes to mind when you see this picture? Please "free write" for five minutes based on this image or anything else that you have on your mind. The goal is to not stop typing. This is a great writing warm up. Go!





2. What are five types of connections that you can make online? In partners please tweet me your answers:
i.e. You can connect your _____________ with your ______________.

You can connect your friends with your personal updates.

You can connect songs with their lyrics.

connect your blog with your twitter account Connect your blog with videos, pictures, press articles, audio file ...





3. Please write a three "paragraph" post about some website or blog that is connected to your main interest. In the first paragraph write about how the website/blog looks visually (i.e. How atttractive are the images? Are there any videos? etc), then in the next paragraph write about the content (How often is new information posted? How long are the posts? What's a new word you've learned from the site?), and finally write about the overall connectivity of the site (i.e. How many links are there on the site? What do they link to? How useful are the links?)

What is good writing?

I've been interested in writing ever since I was five years old. I remember very clearly holding a pencil in my hand as I played at being a great writer. I sat at a small table in my bedroom and covered an entire page in loops that resembled - to my five-year-old eyes - cursive. As I "wrote" blue loops on the pages, I felt as important as an adult with great thoughts to share with the world. I imagined thousands of people reading my insightful prose.

At the time I had one thought: writing is a way to communicate with a wide audience.

These days I write on a daily basis. I write poems and short stories. In a year I hope to have a book published. It's taken me almost forty years to work towards my goal of communicating with a wider audience, but it's been worth it.

What do you think good writing is? Let's brainstorm as a group.

correct grammar
formal writing (when you need to be formal)
KNOW WHO YOUR AUDIENCE IS!!
clear / clarity //
A variety of sentence lengths and structures.

Writing in clear and simple sentences results in excellent writing.

Good writing is a series of sentences that build towards a strong paragraph.

We need a specific topic and a wealth of detail for writing to be interesting.

You are a good writer when you can understand your audience.


In our opinion, coherence is the most important thing for writing and the topic has to be attractive for the readers.


How does writing for the web differ from writing in a diary? Please work in partners and tweet me your suggestions...

When you write in you diary, it's private, but when you write on the web, everybody can read it.

Please read through your partners' first post. Send him/her any corrections on twitter and then finish with three questions you have about his/her experience.


B. Find one other blog that's similar to your own and respond to a post. Do you agree or disagree with the content? How does it make you feel?

C. Writing involves change. When you read something you expect to be changed in some way and when you write you also want to learn something new about the process of writing. For blog post#2 find two pictures that show two very different attitudes people have about your topic. You will write a five paragraph article that explains the change from one attitude to another. It might be about how your attitude changed towards your topic or someone else.