How to write a great blog comment

http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/how-to-write-a-blog-comment.aspx

by j_baker • 17 years ago

15 10 17 years ago

grammar.quickanddirtytips.com

RyanMcGreal• 17 years ago

> Rule #7 -- Keep it Short

There was a post on HN a few months ago suggesting that comment length correlates positively with comment quality.

j_baker2• 17 years ago

It may be this one: http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html

I do see pg's reasoning here, but I don't necessarily know that I agree 100%. Yes, it's true that longer comments are likely to have more thought put into them. And that shorter comments are likely to have less thought put into them. However, I oftentimes find that making my comments brief takes more thought than writing a long comment.

After all, as pg also says, succinctness is power: http://www.paulgraham.com/power.html

ryanelkins• 17 years ago

Everything has it bounds though. There is a point where a comment goes from well thought out and detailed commentary and into the realm of long winded rambling nonsense or expository blowhardedness. It should probably be just long enough to make your point.

There's something to be said for being able to communicate clearly and succinctly.

j_baker2• 17 years ago

And a nice example of how to communicate more clearly and briefly than my comment!

raffi• 17 years ago

This is a good post. I found it when I ported After the Deadline to Intense Debate and wrote a post about it. Here:

http://blog.afterthedeadline.com/2009/10/09/how-to-write-a-g...

xtho• 17 years ago

First of all, you don't write _great_ blog comments. If you have something really great to say, you publish it as a blog post, submit it to social news sites, and put a link to your post in a comment to the original post. People do that and they are successful. Comments are for losers.

On second thought ... Arrgh!

jackchristopher• 17 years ago

Yeah, that's a lot of trouble to get your stuff (possibly) noticed. I'm sick of this expectation. Technology should address this as a problem. Am I really expected to do a blog to be part of "the conversation"? Am I only listened to when I do the social media dance? I don't like this world.

Something needs to replace the blogger/commenter dynamic. Something that puts people on equal footing by default. The blog dynamic too easily devolves into a high status/low status game.

RevRal• 17 years ago

I know it's hard; those boxes in which you write comments can be tiny

I hate this. I tend to submit the comment with little proofreading, then I read the comment on the page and edit it a bunch of times.

steveklabnik• 17 years ago

WebKit has a great feature that lets you just drag the lower right corner on any textinput. I use it in Chrome all the time, I hear it's in Safari too.

MaysonL• 17 years ago

+1 for this tip: I've been using WebKit nightlies for months and never noticed this.

How to write a great blog comment

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