When you decide that you want to start blogging, and you decide what you want to blog about, you will need to find your place in the baseball discourse community. So what exactly is a discourse community? Well according to Henry Jenkins’s in his writing Spoiling Survivor – The Anatomy of a Knowledge Community, online communities are “defined through voluntary, temporary, and tactical affiliations, reaffirmed through common intellectual enterprises and emotional investments” (Spoiling Survivor 27). The paper is designed to help you develop a good, effective blog, so you can become part of the baseball discourse community.
Developing and sustaining a purpose and mission for you blog
The first step in starting a blog is to determine what you want the purpose of your blog to be and what you want your readers to get out of it. You might want to solely report game highlights, or you might want to only give predictions, or you may choose to do a mixture of both. Really, it’s all up to you. Everyone’s blogs are different and everyone brings something unique to the discourse community.
Your main goal is to decide what kind of audience you want to attract. Once you have done that, then you can write a mission statement based on how you want to grab their attention and also how you want to keep them there. You always want to remember to stick by your mission and try not to go off the beaten path, because this may result in a decrease in readership to your blog. To prevent this, it is a good idea to go back to the mission statement periodically to make sure you are still producing what you intended. It is important to write accurate posts so your audience can get the most out of your blog.
Stumped?
I have found out that one of the hardest things about blogging is finding ideas to write about, especially in the off-season. When the season is going on you can also write about game highlights, players’ personal performances, and any controversies that may have occurred. However, when the off-season comes around you might get stuck and develop a case of writer’s block. I have found some ways to help you get over this dilemma from my personal experiences. Some issues that you can talk about are any current trades or position moves that a team has made. Another idea would be to talk about any historical events or past accomplishments that a team has experienced. One of the easiest issues that I have found to write about is evaluations. You can form long, detailed posts by evaluating different positions, a team’s offense and defense, a team’s coaching staff, or a team’s administration.
Effective writing processes and approaches
I think that it is important to know exactly what you want your audience to get out of a post before you actually write it. You may need to write out an outline or rough draft, or you might be able to do this in your head, but it is to lay everything out. I found my posts to be most effective when I do this because then I don’t go off on a random tangent. Once I have laid everything out, I start to write, and I don’t revise my paper until I am done writing the complete post. Then I proofread my post twice. I first proofread it to check for ideas and to make sure everything makes sense. Then I go back and check for any grammatical errors or sentence structures. Once I have done all of this, I finally feel confident enough to post it online.
The main trouble that I found myself running into was the fact that I would have a great idea but I wouldn’t know how to put it into words. When this happened, I would just insert a rough draft of my idea into the paper and make it bold. This way I knew that that part wasn’t finished and that I needed to go back to fix it. I found these ways to be the most successful ones in order to produce a noteworthy post.
Incorporating outside information and sources
Obtaining knowledge regarding new occurrences is very important to the discourse community because it helps to keep the community close and involved with each other. Jenkins describes this when he wrote, “What holds a collective intelligence together is not the possession of knowledge – which is dynamic and participatory, continually testing and reaffirming the group’s social ties” (Spoiling Survivor 54). To do this, you need to find a few credible sources for you to tie in information from. For example, you may want to have one of your sources be a team’s official website or MLB.com. You can also use other blogs, but just make sure that they are credible.
Catching people’s attention
When writing, you will want to remember to make your blog interesting from the very beginning. Your main goal is to get readers’ attention, and then you want to keep them there. If you don’t have what they are looking for from the very beginning, they will go elsewhere to get their information. This is why it is important to also have an effective voice, which you will learn about a little bit later. One way that you can gain a reader’s attention is by including pictures. This is especially effective in a baseball blog because your readers will be able to view action pictures from the games and they will also be able to see pictures of certain players and fields, which is beneficial if they were unaware of what they looked like. You may also choose to use quotes, which is another good attention getter.
Connecting with your audience
A very important issue that you will want to make sure happens is that fact that your audience stays connected and interested in your writing. In order to do this, it is a good idea to look at your stat counters. By doing this, you can obtain very useful and valuable information. As a blogger you will be able to see which posts and ideas got the most attention from your readers. Once you know this, you can decide which subjects earned the most traffic and you will want to write more about those posts or write more posts like that.
Developing an effective voice
Finding a voice in a desired discourse community is very important, because it defines you as a writer and it also characterizes what you believe in. Having a significant, noteworthy voice will decide whether or not a reader will take the time to read your thoughts and opinions, and will hopefully keep them coming back for more. George Lakoff’s thoughts on the importance of a voice is explained in Don’t Think of an Elephant! when he states that its important to have “language that fits your worldview….The ideas are primary- and the language carries those ideas, evokes those ideas” (Elephant 4). Another important aspect is that you will need to consider is how your audience will interpret the information that you are giving them. Frank Luntz stated in the Introduction to his writing, Words that Work, “It’s not what you say, it’s what people hear” (Introduction xiii). So basically for your baseball blog, you want to develop an enthusiastic, knowledgeable voice that uses very descriptive and passionate words. You want your audience to find your posts exciting and interesting and if you keep writing good, credible posts, I guarantee that they will keep coming back to your blog to get the latest baseball news.
Some FYIs
Something that is very important to writing blogs in consistency. You will want to make sure you keep your posting consistent and in a timely matter. You also want to make sure that your voice stays consistent. You want your audience to know that they can come to you for the latest news and highlights. You also want to make sure that you use trustworthy sources so your audience is confident that your writing is credible. However, the most important thing to do is have fun with it. If you are bored or just plain not interested in what you are writing about then it will show right through. Find things to write about that you would talk to your friends about. Your posts will flow much better and if your audience sees that you had fun writing it then they will have fun reading it.
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