How To Write a Great Utopian Blog Post

I've been moderating posts in Utopian's Blog category for a few weeks now, and I have some thoughts, some tips and suggestions for writing great posts. Or, at least, for avoiding common pitfalls. This post is also going in the Blog category, so I'm kinda nervous about this.

Grammar

For me, it all starts with style and grammar. And there's a reason for that: a post that's grammatically correct and stylistically clear is easier to read. Your number 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 goals should be to make your posts as clear as possible. There are tools to help you with this. My recommended free tool is Hemingway, as seen in most of my moderation comments. For those who want to invest money in the improvement of their posts, I'd recommend Grammarly's paid version.

Image credit: PDPics at Pixabay.
As great as these tools are, they are mostly useful in pointing out problem areas. They won't catch everything, they will label some technical terms as wrong, and their suggestions won't always make sense for your specific post. Use them, but don't rely on them.

My Pet Peeve

One place where people often err is capitalization. People capitalize when they shouldn't, and don't where they should. Here are the three things you should capitalize:

1. A proper noun. Which means, the name of a place, a person, a company, a thing. It needs to be a name.
2. The First letter of a sentence.
3. The pronoun "I."

If you only capitalize in these three cases, you are unlikely to go wrong.

Extra tools and links

Image credit: Free-Photos at Pixabay

One way to get better at grammar is to take a course at Coursera. There's one starting next week (note that by signing up for free, you will be eligible to watch all of the course videos)! You can also check out Grammar Book. Here, too, you'll find a wealth of free information. But do be aware that they'll try to get you to sign up for the paid services. You probably don't need them. If you want quizzes and exercises, you'll find a bunch for free at a4esl.org.

Editorial Content

We are not interested in duplicated content. If all of the information you're presenting in a post about an open source project is available at their website or Steemit account, you aren't bringing the kind of value we want to see, unless it's your project. What do we want to see? Your views, and how your experience has informed them. We want opinions. We want personal stories of your use of the project. We want to know how it affected your life. You think it's awesome? Great! Now... why do you think it's awesome? That's what we want to know!

Image credit: Fas at Pixabay
You might think "but people want to know about the project! They don't care about me!" And you'd be wrong. We can find out about the project from its creators, we can google. We're on a blogging system built on a blockchain. The human, personal, element is what will make your post truly shine.

Format

We have templates. You can find them at our website. You can find them built in if you're posting through Steeditor or @steem-plus. We're all over the place. Use them. They will help!

In conclusion

We, the Utopian Blog category moderators and CM, want the category to have the best posts possible. We believe in you, and your potential to be even more awesome than you currently are. Let's do this, together.