How we blog (+ presentation)

Three Parts 

Since our purpose is to combine practising more than one language skill in a way that will help improve vocabulary, grammar and fluency across all skills, our usual blogging follows the format that is suggested in the new post template. This consists of three parts:

1. A very short introduction that explains why you chose a particular listening or reading to respond to. Two or three sentences should be enough.
   • Make the title of your chosen reading or listening a link so that we can easily go to it if we are interested. It's also a good habit to put the title in "quotation marks", and adding bold formatting makes it easier to see.
   • The maximum number of words is 100. Write 100 or less words to introduce your chosen reading or listening.
    
2. A summary, which should also be very short, that tells your readers, your classmates, the main ideas that are important in your chosen listening or reading. Again, two or three sentences should be enough. Your readers do not need, or want, all the details. Interested readers can follow your link to the original source if they want all of the details in your very short summary.
   • The maximum number of words is 100. Write 100 or less words to introduce your chosen reading or listening.
    
3. Your response to what you listened to or read. This should be more than half of your total blog post. You might want to write two or three paragraphs here. 

These three parts ensure that you practice a range of important skills for an IELTS test, from listening and reading for main ideas and details to presenting and supporting your own opinion in writing.

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Notes on format

New blog posts are created with a preset format. This saves you having to worry about it and gives all of our posts a consistent appearance. I suggest you not change it. Use the same paragraph formatting that you see here. 

Some specific points

• Don't indent the first lines of new paragraphs.
  Although it is standard practice to indent the first lines of paragraphs in academic writing, this is not usual in blogs, nor is it easily done. Using space space space to indent is a dangerous habit that is always best avoided. Using Tab is not much better. It is enough to put one line between them to separate paragraphs.
• When writing in more sophisticated word processing programs such as MS Word or Google Docs, we use the paragraph formatting tools (usually the ruler) to set indents for first lines. These sophisticated writing tools also have options to control paragraph spacing that are not readily available on blogs.
   
• In academic and similar writing, paragraphs are left aligned. That is, the lines are even on the left side of the paragraph only, not on both sides. Please leave the formatting left aligned. 
   
• Since we are writing primarily to practice fluency across skills, I suggest you write in the blog, rather than in MS Word or some other program. If you do write in another program and Copy Paste into the blog, keep the blog formatting. Keeping the same formatting for all posts makes it easier for readers. 

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Presentation + Notes 

I've also created this presentation that shows a series of screen shots with notes of me writing a new blog post from start to finish.