Blogger Style Guide


Digital writing is a different kind of prose than a traditional English essay writing. As such, the grammar and formatting of a blog post differs from the formal expectations of a paper. Here are just a few ideas to consider as you design your blog posts.
  • make full use of the WYSIWYG buttons
  • text can be formatted in the same way as in a Word document, but the highly visual nature of online reading and writing makes such font tools even more effective
  • at the very least, you should continue to italicize novels and use the appropriate  formatting for other titles 
  • don't overdo it with such textual effects (as above) as that will distract from the content of your post
  • certain rules that govern the conventional English essays written in Word do not apply in the blogosphere--for example, don't double space lines or indent paragraphs (in fact, you may need to remove certain formatting as you move text between Word and Blogger)
  • make all links hyperlinks (I never want to see a URL, "http://blahblah.blah" in an entry)
  • cite sources using hyperlinks to online content
  • provide hyperlinks for your readers for more information on a topic 
  • acknowledge images sources (using hyperlinks)
  • caption images 
  • instead of long paragraphs, think of using shorter groupings of text to break up the "page"
  • add images and video to break up the text
  • if you know HTML, feel free to use the added features through the programming language (you can, for example, make a certain song play while people read your entry!)
  • tag, or as Blogger calls it, "label," your posts with keywords that allude to its content--this helps generate an organic index or table of contents for the class blog as a whole


For more tips on the format of digital writing, see the online version of the Web Style Guide, especially the Editorial Style chapter.

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