Win my attention!

With the recent upswing in traffic here at SSTOL — much appreciated, incidentally, and welcome to all the new readers, cruisers, and random drop-ins — you may well be asking yourself:

"How could I entice the SwanShadow guy into perusing my blog for more than the 30 seconds required by BlogExplosion, and possibly even into becoming a regular visitor?"

I, being an accommodating sort, will be delighted to share the keys to the Magic Kingdom (or at least, the keys to my criminally brief attention span) with you.

First and foremost, you should not care whether I frequent your blog. Or whether anyone else does, for that matter, unless your specific purpose in blogging is to keep in touch with family members, loved ones, and/or friends — in which case, you should only care whether those specific people frequent your blog. If, however, you are not targeting your blog for a select audience, whose members presumably are already interested in you and therefore will visit your blog regardless of its content, you should blog for your own amusement / entertainment / catharsis / whatever, and to blue blazes with what anyone else thinks about it.

Given that you've read this far, I'm supposing that you still crave my input. And you shall have it.

Here's a five-point strategy to get SwanShadow to read, and perhaps even enjoy, your blog for more than half a minute:

1. Learn how to write, and use the skills you learn. Maybe it's because I use words for a living, maybe it's because language and the verbal arts are one of my highest passions, or maybe it's just because I'm an anal-retentive, persnickety nitpicker. Whatever the reason, if your blog reads like an illiterate third-grader composed it, I'm out of there. Run your posts through spell-check, at the bare minimum. Write in complete sentences unless there's a clear stylistic reason to the contrary. Don't pretend you're e.e. cummings — capitalize the letters that require capitalization, and don't capitalize the ones that don't. Learn where the punctuation goes, and put it there. Learn when to use, and not use, apostrophes, especially in the words "its" and "it's" (which, contrary to increasingly popular usage, are not interchangeable). Divide complete thoughts into paragraphs. Pretend I'm your high school English teacher, and my grade will either get your blog into Stanford, or condemn it to community college.

2. In the words of sports talk host Jim Rome, "Have a take, and do not suck." Far be it from me to tell you what to blog about. Blog about what pleases you — I'm interested in many things, and even if I'm not especially interested in your topic of choice when I arrive at your blog, I may very well hang around if you have something original and intriguing to say about whatever it is. Tell me something I don't know. Tell me more about things I do know. Just have an opinion, and express it cogently and with flair. I'll be all ears. And you don't get points just by posting links to other people's content. Link away, but add something fresh. Share a thought. Have a take. Grow some funk of your own.

3. Don't hate. If you really don't like something, say so, but say so in a respectful way. You can make all the snide japes you want about "the other side" and whoever happens to occupy it — I'll laugh if you're funny, even if I'm on the other side. But I'll weary of a constant barrage of bashing, even if I staunchly oppose whatever the bashees represent. They may be evil incarnate, but I'm more interested in your alternative perspective than in unadulterated vitriol.

4. Go easy on the profanity, willya? I'm not a prude — okay, maybe I'm a bit of a prude — but I've heard all the words and you don't know any I've never encountered. Seriously. I've heard people insult each other on three continents. Your constant use of vulgarisms, however, will soon convince me that you can't communicate any other way. Invest in a thesaurus. Clip and save the vocabulary quizzes in Reader's Digest. Find new ways to express yourself that don't make you look like you're wading in the shallow end of the genetic pool.

5. Use a decent template. That doesn't mean mind-blowingly artistic — it means legible. I really don't care how fancy your blog is. I just want to be able to read what you've written. If it hurts my eyes to look at your neon green, calligraphy script body text against your fluorescent pink Barbie-and-Skipper background, you could be the second coming of F. Scott Fitzgerald and I'll never know. I'm off to find my Visine. And for pity's sake, lay off the cutesy flashing animated graphics. We're all adults here.

That's it. Do the above, and I'll be glad to check you out. If I find something worthy of comment, I'll even drop you a note. Convince me you'll be interesting more than once, and I'll even link to your blog.

Oh, one more thing. Moms (and some of you dads too), if I have to scroll through fifty photos of your adorable little moppet(s), please tell me something unique about little Mitzi or Perseus that I can't discern from the pictures. I have a daughter myself, so I know a cute kid when I see one. But tell me why yours is/are special.