20 Days to Better Blogging

Image by Wayan Vota via Flickr

This site has some excellent blogging tips for teachers, especially for those who are new to blogging. Check it out!

There are many reasons why children should blog. First and foremost, it helps children to develop their own voice as a writer. It allows children a reasonably low tech way of conveying messages that involve text, sound, photos and videos. … Blogging allows children the opportunity to reflect on their learning and to enter into a discussion with their readers through comments. And on top of all this it will allow children to improve their writing because audience and purpose are all.

— Joy Simpson
20 Days to Better Blogging with Children

Quotes About Blogging

Image via Wikipedia

Your blog is your unedited version of yourself … Your blog is what you say when there is nobody standing over your shoulder telling you what to do.

— Lorelle VanFossen

A blog is in many ways a continuing conversation.

— Andrew Sullivan

The heart of blogging is linking … linking and commenting. Connecting and communicating — the purpose of the Internet.

— George Siemens

And it occurred to me that there is no such thing as blogging. There is no such thing as a blogger. Blogging is just writing — writing using a particularly efficient type of publishing technology.

— Simon Dumenco

Browsing the Quotations Page

photo by kodomut

Four girls, four computers, and a whole lotta writing goin’ on… Kitten and Niner both finished their novels today! Now for the job of revision. Or rather, now to procrastinate the job of revision…

Instead of editing, I’ve been having fun with The Quotations Page’s Random Quotes.

It’s Moonlight‘s fault. She found this one:

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book. I’ll waste no time reading it.

— Moses Hadas

To Write Is to Think

photo by A Journey Round My Skull

To write is to think,
and to write well is to think well.

— David McCullough
quoted by Peggy Noonan
in A Cold Man’s Warm Words

Quotable: “Blogs Are like a Journal, But. . .”

Blogs are like a journal, but if you don’t post on them, the pages get moldy and shrivel.

— Climbing Gecko
Gecko’s Tips For Survival

Give Thanks

photo by Hamed Saber

¹⁰ David praised the LORD in the presence of the whole assembly, saying,
“Praise be to you, O LORD,
God of our father Israel,
from everlasting to everlasting.

¹¹ Yours, O LORD, is the greatness and the power
and the glory and the majesty and the splendor,
for everything in heaven and earth is yours.
Yours, O LORD, is the kingdom;
you are exalted as head over all.

¹² Wealth and honor come from you;
you are the ruler of all things.
In your hands are strength and power
to exalt and give strength to all.

¹³ Now, our God, we give you thanks,
and praise your glorious name.

— 1 Chronicles 29

Scripture taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 Biblica.
Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

More Quotes About Writing

photo by WellspringCS

Once again, inspiration from The Quotations Page:

Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.
— John Ruskin (1819 – 1900)

Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time… The wait is simply too long.
— Leonard Bernstein (1918 – 1990)

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.
— Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900)

I love being a writer. What I can’t stand is the paperwork.
— Peter De Vries

Quotes About Writing

photo by milena mihaylova

These are from The Quotations Page:

The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write a book about it.
— Benjamin Disraeli (1804 – 1881)

This is the sixth book I’ve written, which isn’t bad for a guy who’s only read two.
— George Burns (1896 – 1996)

Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say ‘infinitely’ when you mean ‘very’; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
— C. S. Lewis (1898 – 1963)

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
— C. S. Lewis (1898 – 1963)

Why “Blogging 2 Learn”?

The name of this blog is a play on the title of William Zinsser’s book, Writing to Learn. As Zinsser wrote:

“I thought of how often as a writer I had made clear to myself some subject I had previously known nothing about by just putting one sentence after another — by reasoning my way in sequential steps to its meaning. I thought of how often the act of writing even the simplest document — a letter, for instance — had clarified my half-formed ideas. Writing and thinking and learning were the same process…

“Writing organizes and clarifies our thoughts. Writing is how we think our way into a subject and make it our own. Writing enables us to find out what we know — and what we don’t know — about whatever we’re trying to learn. Putting an idea into written words is like defrosting the windshield: The idea, so vague out there in the murk, slowly begins to gather itself into a sensible shape.”