COMM 207 -- editing blogs, steps 2 and 3

On Thursay, I asked you to write a good paragraph, at least four or five sentences long, on this question:

Compare and contrast the description of what a newspaper editor does in Ludwig and Gilmore, "Modern News Editing" and a literary (book) editor does in "Zen and the Art of Editing" by Terri Windling. Focus on what each does to bring out the best in the writing of the people they edit.

Next, I want you to double-space your paragraphs and print them out. Exchange papers with another student, and edit each other's papers using standard proofreading symbols, which you can find on page 73 in Ludwig and Gilmore or on the University of Colorado at Boulder website at

http://www.colorado.edu/Publications/styleguide/symbols.html

Hang onto them, and save your papers in an electronic format. You'll use them to start your blogs for COMM 207.

Do what? He say what?

If you don't have your own blog yet, it's time now to start one. We'll take a couple of minutes in class today for you to do that. Blogger, the website that hosts my class blogs, is relentlessly, determinedly, aggressively user-friendly. The hardest part, in a way, is finding a name that hasn't already been taken ... especially if you want to be imaginative. Click on the student blog link at the top of the page for a directory, and you'll see the names your colleagues have chosen ... and link to their blogs, too.

If you have another blog for another of my classes, feel free to use it. I want all of my 200- and 300-level masscomm students to have a blog for classwork.

If you don't, there's no better time to start one than now. We have several experienced bloggers in the class who can help you. If you've been posting comments to any of my blogs, or any other blogs on blogspot.com, you can use the username (which is really an address, right?) and password you already use for Google applications.

Next ... once you've got a blog, you want to post something to it. Right?

So, get into the dashboard, click on "New Post" and copy and paste your edited paragraph into the Edit Html or Compose field. Click on "Publish Post," and you're blogging.

Remember your username and password, and email me a link to your blog so I can post it to an updated directory of student blogs. We'll use your blogs a lot this semester, so you can get used to a few of the basic HTML tags and get a feel for blogging while you're at it.

Reading assignment for Thursday: Follow this permalink to my Jan. 20, 2008, blog "Should every newspaper journalist journalism student start a blog?" at http://mackerelwrapper.blogspot.com/2008/01/should-every-newspaper-journalist.html.