It is that time of the year, and I am not talking about Christmas. It is the end of the semester and all your papers are due. Finals are coming up and you will be asked to write long, elaborate essay questions so the following tips have been designed to help you edit and proof read more efficiently.

photo by bmomeni

Even if you’re not in school, maybe you are looking for tips on how to write a better report for your boss, or a better research summary. Basically, no one likes to read a paper that looks like it was put together by a band of wild hyenas. Editing and proofing is simple if you follow these tips.

1. Print out. Do not correct your paper on the computer. Printing it out will let you work your way through the paper and make it less likely that you will read over silly mistakes. Pretend like the copy you print out is the ‘good’ copy, even if it is the draft. This will put you in a different mind set, one where you will be more attentive to mistakes.

2. Double space. Most teachers ask for your papers to be double spaced so that it will be easier for them to read or write comments. Use this format to your advantage. Print out your paper doubled spaced so that you will be able to write your own comments in. Use the columns to write in what you missed, or what you think should be changed. Circle words you don’t think fit. A double spaced paper allows you to manipulate your paper more efficiently.

3. Leave aside for a few days. This is an important one. Leave it aside for about a week, if possible and if not, a couple days will do. When you pick up your paper a week later, it will be fresh and not primed in your working memory. Having your paper primed in your working memory makes it really easy to look over mistakes.

4. Have someone read it over. Someone else’s opinion is an invaluable tool when doing a paper. They will tell you what makes sense, what doesn’t and what needs more work. They will also find the simple mistakes that are often looked over.

5. Turn spell check on. As silly as this is, I hear a lot of complaints from teachers and teacher’s assistants that common words are not spelled correctly. For example, the word essential is easy to misspell, essential, and even easier to overlook. But the last paper I corrected, someone had obviously forgotten to turn on spell check. Don’t have spell check? YahooMail, Hotmail or Gmail offers a spell check option. Copy and paste into an email to correct it!

6. Keep an eye on sentence meaning and grammar errors. Spell check is not without errors. The cat rode the dog into the sky. Spell check will obviously not tell you the previous sentence make absolutely no sentence. Pay attention when correcting.

7. Read one sentence at a time In order to check spelling, read sentences backwards paying specific attention to each word. Reading the sentence backwards will get rid of the automatic reading of sentences that makes it easy to miss spelling errors.

8. Correct with a bright colored pen – highlight even. There is nothing worse than trying to find what you corrected after having used a black pen. Using a red pen or highlighting your mistakes will make it easy to go back and find where exactly you need to correct.

9. Make paragraphs. This is another mistake I see often when correcting papers. Either there are no paragraphs or there are too many. Quick way to know whether or not to make a new paragraph is to ask yourself whether what you are about to write is a new idea, or new point. If it is, paragraph it.

10. Make sentences as simple as possible. You may understand what you are writing but that does not mean the person reading will,

These quick and easy tips on editing and proofing will help you write a better term paper or a better work report. After practicing them they will become automatic and effortless. Some points may not work for you…trial and error will help you decide which are good for you. Writing a paper without mistakes is easier than you think.

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“Should a blogger be more or less credible than a reporter for the New York Times?” is the question that is really bugging me for the last few weeks. I saw how Engadget managed to move Apple Inc quotation on the stock exchange, when they released internal news about the company. This is the power of the blog, but should we trust Engadget or any other blogs more or less than an offline magazine because the news turned out to be nothing but fake (how’s that Jason Calacanis? Engadget publishes everything they get in their email, TOO?).

However, my other question is, is the blogger a real journalist? Yes!

Bloggers are the new storytellers

I agree that false alarm stories were published on big blogs, but You have to agree with me that it happens with mainstream magazine, too. For those that think a blogger is someone that won’t fact-check a story I am here to tell you different because I’ve read a survey made by PewInternet which really makes it very clear: bloggers do check their sources! Even if you think at Engadget, the email they’ve got their eyes on, was really from the Apple system. But let’s see what the survey says.

Only one-third of bloggers see blogging as a form of journalism. Yet many check facts and cite original sources.

34% of bloggers consider their blog a form of journalism

57% of bloggers include links to original sources either “sometimes” or “often”.

56% of bloggers spend extra time trying to verify facts they want to include in a post either “sometimes” or “often”.

However, I am aware that many bloggers publish anything hot they get for a little more traffic (yeah I remember Jason Calacanis saying ValleyWag will eat everything you mail them) but it’s not the general trend. Also, if I think, there are mainstream blurry magazines that publish anything just to fill all their pages, I don’t think a journalist from CNN is more credible than Michael Arlington from TechCrunch.

One last thing worth to mention. If the blog wouldn’t have power, believe me not as many journalists would come up with a personal or company blog, so yes, I think blogging is the new face of journalism.

If anyone that’s not a blogger or a mainstream journalist, I would really love to see what you think.

Here is a very cool idea on how to really blog for your audience. Considering that you have launched your blog/website and have optimized it, then you should be getting some search engine traffic. You are happy I can bet, but what if you could write articles targeted better and better to what they are looking for?

I advise you to use some sort of tracking methods like Google Analytics, Awstats or any other plugins that you like and see what are the keywords your visitors search for when they land on your site. I had a very good example on one of my blogs about fashion and house gadgets, where we’ve seen there might be interest in do-it-yourself products, so we started adding them. Without doing anything the next day someone Stumbled us, and the site went up.

So what we did? Identified what people wanted and wrote good articles about it. Works!

We all know that men like what women usually say “size doesn’t matter” but we also know that we never believe it and feel frustrated (well, some of us). Having this funny quote in mind, it makes me think : does size matter when you are blogging? Yes.

If you ever need to write a researched article where you need to get references and explain people what you are talking over there, of course you are forced for a big essay. However if it’s too big, your audience may not be that patient to read it all. Therefore bigger articles should be really well structured and concise.

What about those small articles with only 1-2-3 lines? I wouldn’t advise, unless you need to ring the bell with something new and you are waiting content through comments. For example a small article with a link to an article on which you expect your audience to bring in their thoughts might be good from time to time.

I need to apologize for not being able to update the blog for the last three days but I had two days away: one at the seaside and the other one for a barbecue. When I got home I was struck. How should my next blog post be: funny, neutral or controversial?

Being funny

Girls always like funny guys (and I guess boys like funny girls, too) so if you plan to write an article where people just enjoy a good joke and relax on it, go ahead. There’s nothing wrong to be funny from time to time.

Getting controversial

It’s the easiest way to get you traffic but think if you just want a few spikes or people that are really interested to read your content on a regular basis. However if you have arguments for your idea don’t hesitate to be you. It’s what makes it really personal.

Being neutral means being sleepy?

I don’t think you should always takes sides just so that you choose something. It’s like voting. If you don’t like Britney Spears or Janet Jackson, say it. Don’t take sides just because it’s trendy and everyone does.

I know I have talked about being on Digg or not, therefore I’ve visited Digg more than I usually do for the last week. I found some interesting things the most important being that I don’t think it’s just me that thinks Digg is getting more and more baiting content.What does it mean to bait the Digg users? Writing content that will trigger the little monsters inside. You incite them with something. Articles starting with “5 reasons to …” or “Eleven ways to …” are going to attract the Digg user and will get your story dugg. That is because the human being is always much more interested in getting the information from someone else rather than making their own judgement that will create the same or probably a better analysis. Why should I make a list of my top preferred gadgets launched in the first quarter of 2007, when someone can do that for me? For me this is what Made For Digg (MFD) websites mean.

Write for your audience. If it’s Digg they want, give it to them.

However though it may seem like I presented you the whole situation in a negative way this is not fully correct. Creating Digg content is not bad because this is what web2.0 means. To make the user act with it’s feelings, passions and opinions. The comments on the story are, for me, much more important than the story itself. You get to see what people think. Muhammad Saleem wrote a post at CopyBlogger a few days ago and it looks like he is going to give tips on writing for the social bookmarking websites from now on over there.

So for those that wait for the “MFD sites : good or bad” answer I am saying it can be good but it can also be bad. Whenever you launch a website you need to decide who will you be writing for? What kind of people? Also need to see what kind of articles you are going to create. Because if you plan to target RSS readers but once in a while you write MFD content they may not like it. Problogger says that many bloggers are tricked by thousands and thousands of visitors and they start to blog about stuff which is not really a good part of their community. Use Digg to “expand your horizons and grow your audience – but keep your core readers right in your focus” he said.

My audience is not Digg therefore I don’t have a Digg button right now. You think it’s worth it? I bet you can do it manually.

For those of you that didn’t knew there is one blog released every second, according to Technorati. Not even 1% of these blogs will get lots of exposure and that is because not everyone is interested in marketing their blog or making money out of it or because the owner cannot market it the right way. Below you will find a few hints that you should try to follow.

Become an expert in your niche and write passionately

If you have nothing to do with medical activities you shouldn’t start blogging about brain surgery because you’re not good at it. Blogging should be something made with passion, something that you are good at so this is why you should choose your niche wisely and when you do, focus on it. If your articles are well structured other bloggers or sites will link to you, so that you may become authority.

Lots of people say that content is king and you should keep that in mind, in the quest for more traffic, because neglecting your writing could affect your blog. Here is a small tip : make your own researches and post answers to questions that people may be interested in. How to do that? Keep a close relation to what comments you get and inspire your next articles from what they need to know.

Make sure you are SEO friendly

SEO is very wide and changes day by day, but if you are going to follow a few simple rules the search engine bots should love your content. Change link structure to permalinks, use unique titles and highlight keywords that you emphasize on, host your own blog software, use SEO friendly blog themes and plugins. Make sure your ping and trackback really work and use them, and comment on other blogs both for exposure and for a linkback.

Blog themes should be relevant to your articles

Blog looks are very important when it’s about people coming back to read more of your content, because if everything is messy you are going to look un-professional, but if you have a clean theme (try unique) it counts very much for a first impression to become worthy reading. If you don’t have the money to spend for a custom theme, there’s no problem, go ahead and download one from the internet, but make sure you customize and tweak it wisely. Make sure you use related images for your theme or for your articles because that way you get attention.

Guest blogging will make you draw attention

Michael Kwan of Beyond the Rethoric is a very good example of guest blogging. He started commenting on JohnChow.com like hell and got the attention he wanted. Then he became a guest blogger on JohnChow.com and from this to getting a job as a blogger on one of John’s websites related to gadgets was just a matter of time. His experience on different technology blogs like mobilemag.com also helped.

Of course this may not work for you (commenting like hell), because it could get you in the spam filters or banned from a website, but keep in mind that guest blogging brings power, brings exposure and makes you a trusted person in that domain.

Make sure you subscribe to feeds and publish them full

Your articles is what make people subscribe to your blog’s feed and if you already been through the installation process adding a feed via FeedBurner is not going to be hard at all. Keep in mind that subscribers don’t usually unsubscribe so if you got one, you can count on another visitor (daily or not).

For those that will tell me using full feeds is not good because you get those black hatters to scrape and steal your content I have a reason telling you to do so. Usually when people see more text (not just the 4 lines) they get much more interest and want to read it from the source, directly on the site. If you add they everyone in the world is usually annoyed by a “read more” link, you have my case on why blogs should have full feeds.

Your content is great but you need linking

Remember I told you that the ping and trackback service should be working? Well you should understand that trackbacking other blogs is great, because they may write about you and give a link back, or they may accept a trackback in their comments which is also a potential source of traffic.

These are just a few things that you should consider when launching a new blog. Hope it helps and I am going to give a new answer regarding promoting on social bookmarking websites in a short time.