Open Letter to Fellow Bloggers

Assignment #9 for Writing 101 of Blogging University is to “reinvent the letter format.”

Some might say a post in the form of a letter is trite and overdone. But when done well, a letter can tell a great story or get your message across.

After a little research on the topic of open letter writing, I did find some ‘backlash’ about the open letter writers and have duly noted their valid points and just wanted to put a disclaimer out there that…Writing 101 made me do it!

I also found a similar letter  as to what I plan on writing out there in the interwebs that also makes valid points, that makes me second guess my choice of letter…but as it is something I notice often, it is the first thing that popped into my head when I read the assignment.

Dear Fellow Bloggers,

How are you? I hope you are all enjoying beautiful weather.  Here in the northeast, we are enjoying glimpses of fall in the crisp mornings and cool evenings, but whatever your seasonal shift might be, may it provide plenty of inspiration for many interesting and inspiring blog posts!

As I have delved deeper into the blogosphere and am getting to know some of my fellow bloggers and spend time reading their posts, I can’t help but notice a few small, little details that honestly, drive me a little batty. I admit, being relatively new to the craft, I am mostly associated with other fellow, relatively-new-to-the-craft bloggers, so maybe it is just a newbie thing and will eventually work itself out. But…

The small, little details that drive me especially crazy are…the lack of capitalization and punctuation in the tiny little words like “I” or “I’m” or “I’ve” or other similar types of words. Along with this little pet peeve, is the overall lack of general capitalization of the first word in a sentence or proper nouns and punctuation.

I realize that these types of ‘errors’ come from a generation (or two) of people spending so much time using text messaging, social media and e-mail type forms of communication, that we, (myself included) naturally use these common abbreviations and ‘text speak’ while typing on the small keyboard of a cellphone or tablet to send quick messages or comments on social media.

And I will be the first to admit that I am not perfect (see, I just started a sentence with the word ‘and’)…but we, as bloggers, are writing to send our thoughts and ideas and opinions out there into the big, worldwide web…at the very least we should attempt to write something that resembles a sentence, with the use of the most basic and minimal rules of grammar…a sentence starts with a capital letter and ends with some form of punctuation. How else will we be taken seriously??

I am trying really hard to not be such a grammar nazi…so I ask forgiveness for my grammar nazi ways! I do try very hard to overlook such trivial things, such as capitalization and punctuation and look at the entire written piece and try to comprehend what the reader is saying…but I have to admit…these little things are distracting and bug me!

For me, at least, I do most of my blogging at a computer, with an actual keyboard, that you don’t have to jump through hoops to find the symbols in order to use a question mark or a period…and that does make life much easier. I, even just recently, went on vacation and did finalize some posts and publish them through my phone and tablet and I have to admit it was kind of a pain-in-the-butt…so I do understand and appreciate the limitations of technology (and I love my techno toys!!) but with a little planning ahead of time, you can prepare your post in advance and spend less time fiddling with your cellphone or tablet.

I also have taken into consideration that maybe some of you are using ‘text speak’ as your blog style kinda thing…which is totally cool!! But if that is the case, then consistency is key! If in one sentence you have something that resembles correct sentence structure and then the next sentence is “idunno where u b at”…it gets a little confusing!

In closing, I just wanted to share these small, but annoying little details with my fellow bloggers and suggest that we, as the newbies-to-the-blogging-craft, make a conscious effort to do a little more editing and proofreading (my personal favorite, being ‘save draft’ and ‘preview’ and edit…ad nauseum) so that the blogoshpere will be filled with intelligent musings from our Up-and-Coming-Blogging-Superstars  and we can be proud of our grammatical sentence structure.

In blogging kindness,

Your Fellow Grammatical Challenged Blogger.

P.S. Please excuse any glaring, grammatical errors I might have missed in my first (of many) go around of ‘save draft’ and ‘preview.’