Suggestions For Effective Posts

Thank you @Marie Mallery ! I cropped it down a little so there was more of you and Becky, and when @Ken Anderson is online, he can add this for you as your avatar.

 

@Marie Mallery, if you want me to add that as your avatar, I can do that. The whole picture would be difficult to define in an avatar, though. It might be best if I crop it to focus on one part of it.

 

@Marie Mallery, which part of the photo do you want me to focus on?

 

I cropped it quite a bit from what Marie posted, that was mostly sky and water; so I just focused in on Marie and the dogs, @Ken Anderson .

 

@Yvonne Smith, yes I know. I had to crop it a little more so as much of the photo content would show as possible.

 

If you find that other members aren't replying to your posts, that happens to all of us sometimes, but if it happens to you a lot, you might want to consider your posts.

Are your posts reasonably well written?

This isn't a writing class, and you shouldn't have to be overly concerned about your spelling and grammar, although these things always help. But, are your posts readable? There are some people here whose posts I generally ignore because it would just take too much of my time to figure out what it is that they're trying to say.

I don't know if it's because their posts are bits and pieces of things written by someone else, then copied and pasted here without concern for whether the pasted text makes a comprehensive sentence or paragraph. I consider this to be a possibility when I see sentences that are broken off in the middle of a sentence, then continued on another line, often without forming anything approaching a grammatically correct sentence.

I can't think of any other reason why someone wouldn't use the entire space, allowing sentences to wrap into another line naturally. Unless you're writing a poem or a list, I don't see any reason for that. It's distracting rather than attracting, so I generally ignore these posts and I suspect that others may do so, as well.

What is the percentage of original material in your post?

While it is okay to post excerpts of news or even blog articles from other sites, when this is done without supporting original material, be aware that some of us aren't interested in things that you haven't written yourself. This is a discussion forum, after all. If I wanted to read a bunch of different news or blog articles, I'd spend my time surfing the Internet for that kind of thing rather than hanging out here. One hundred percent original material is the most likely to be read, I think. The larger the percentage of copied and pasted stuff that is in your post, the less likely it is to be read or replied to.

There are exceptions, of course, such as the news section. If you want to discuss something that you found elsewhere, there are times when it makes sense to do so, but if you simply copy and paste something from a news or blog site, the chances are not high that it will result in a lively discussion. As a rule of thumb, you will need to include original content in order to get a discussion going.

Think of it this way. If you hand someone a newspaper or a magazine, he is likely to sit there and read the newspaper or magazine, if he's even interested. That doesn't generally prompt a productive conversation. But if you show someone a news or magazine article and open up a discussion with them, that would be more likely to be productive. Original thoughts are better yet.

Are your posts frantic?

Some people seem to be so excited about a topic that they post three or four times in a row, usually in response to something they might disagree with, and these posts generally have the appearance of being written frantically rather than giving some thought to what they are saying and how they are saying it.

Frantic posts have the effect of shouting someone down, and this is not productive for discussion. Just because you have managed to discourage someone from offering an opinion you disagree with, that doesn't mean that you've proven your point or that you've won an argument. In all likelihood, you've just given people the impression that you're a crazy person and they don't want to talk to you.

In real life, most of us probably know someone with whom we avoid certain topics because they have proven themselves to be incapable of carrying on a civil conversation on these topics. Because you avoid the topic, that doesn't mean that they've won you over. On the contrary, they have simply proven themselves to be incapable of carrying on a productive conversation.

Instead, take a deep breath and realize that the world isn't going to end because someone has an opinion other than your own. We're not changing the world here, for good or for bad. Instead, we're trying to carry on a discussion and, to the extent that you might be able to win someone over to your side, dozens of incomprehensible and frantic posts are not going to achieve that.

One post that is reasonably well thought out is far more productive than four or five frantic posts that people are going to simply skip over if they even stick around in the thread.