An Example of What a Blog Post Should NOT Look Like
January 10, 2009 
10 Comments
This post is going to be hard to read, but I suggest that you read it all the way till the end. I’ll put some of the key points in bold so that you can pick some of the more important information up, but for now force yourself to get through this post. I’m not picking another Muslim’s blog to point out as the blog with the worst blog post ever. I won’t be talking about the grammar or the flow or how original the content is. Rather I wanted just to talk about the overall structure of the post. I wanted to give you just one example of a mistake a lot of bloggers make (Muslim or not). Instead of telling you what you should avoid doing, I thought I would just show you instead. It can be quite irritating when your blog post goes on and on and on and on and on. No one wants to read it. As a matter of fact, you probably wouldn’t want to read it yourself after you’ve finished writing it. So what is the problem? It’s not necessarily that your idea is bad or that your writing itself isn’t awesome. Both your idea and writing can be the best thing ever, but if it isn’t easy to read then there is no point. If you were writing in your personal diary then you can write however you like. However, when you decide that you want to write material for other people to read then you need to think about how you can make that information most easily accessible to your readers. There are a lot of things you can do to take your blog post from a “C” to an “A+”. If you’re still reading this then I congratulate you on your patience. Writing one continuous stream of thought simply won’t work in the vast majority of cases. Paragraphs should be no longer than 4-5 lines. When writing online, don’t focus on how many sentences in your paragraph – worry about how many lines it is. Readers want to be able to quickly skim a post. If they come across a post that they can’t skim then they avoid it all together. So do your absolute best to avoid writing one long, continuous paragraph. Having said that, I think the best thing for me to do now is stop.
