Blogging is one of the most straightforward and easy-to-produce types of digital writing. When you blog, you’re free from some of the more difficult technical work of making videos, recording podcasts, or rehearsing a presentation. Most of what you’ll do is text-based…a lot like this guide!
For more about the rhetorical expectations of blogs, and how they may be assigned in Writing and Rhetoric classes, see the Blog for Writing and Rhetoric Courses page.
This guide will help you start your FIU WordPress blog in just six short steps: Topic, Platform, Compose, Augment, Edit, and Publish!
What’s So Great About Blogs?
There are a few things that make a blog a little different from other writing you’ve done (like essays you’ve written for classes). Blogs are usually a little less formal, a little more personal, and you have the option to add video, images, and more.
In a lot of ways, blogging takes the essay format you already know, and makes it more accessible, easier to write, and more expressive through the use of multimedia tools.
Starting Your Blog – Step-By-Step
To write a blog, you absolutely need two things: something to say, and somewhere to say it. Once you have that, you’ll compose, augment, edit, and publish – six steps in all.
Step 1: Something to Say (Topic)
If you’re starting a blog, it’s probably because you have a message to share with the world or someone, like a professor, has asked you to write a blog on an assigned topic (or perhaps a freewrite).
For this quick-start guide, we have to sort of assume you already have some idea for a topic – if you’re stuck, or if you just want to brainstorm, it might be a good idea to make an appointment at the FIU Writing Center.
There’s really no limit to what you can blog about – personal thoughts and feelings, movie reviews, memes, you name it. Some blogs are focused around specific topics, and of course if your instructor has given you a topic, then that’s probably what you should write about – but for your own blogging practice, just about anything goes!
Step 2: Somewhere to Say It (Platform)
Once you have an idea for a topic, it’s time to find a place to express yourself – this is called a platform. That’s just another way of saying something like “a blog hosting site,” but it also includes things you probably use every day, like Twitter, Snapchat, or TikTok – these are all just different kinds of platforms.
At FIU, you can start your own WordPress site at FIU MyWeb. Since this is a quick start guide, we’ll assume that’s what you’d like to do. For more info, the page Creating a WordPress Site with FIU MyWeb provides a more in-depth guide to MyWeb.
Just connect to FIU MyWeb, log on, and FIU MyWeb will create an FIU Word Press site for you – just click the “Write Your First Blog Post” link to get started.
Step 3: Compose
You have a topic and a platform – now it’s time to actually write out what you want to say!
Blogs are usually informal, personal, and direct. You may have been told that it’s not okay to use “I” or “you” in an essay – not so for a blog!
(Maybe you noticed that I, the writer of this tutorial, already addressed YOU several times – see how natural this feels? That’s blog writing!)
For blogs, less is more – a good post that actually gets read is probably around 1500 words. Less, and it’s hard to say something meaningful. More, and you risk losing your audience. That may be a bit longer than you were thinking, but the casual “spoken” style of most blogs makes that a lot easier to come up with than you might think – try it!
Step 4: Augment
This is one of the really fun aspects of blogging – add images, links, videos, and more!
Your web authoring tools make it easy to pop a video or image right in the middle of your blog post. Just look for the little “Plus” sign, click it, and choose “image.”
Similarly, you can insert a link in WordPress by highlighting and hovering over your words. A toolbar pops up, you select the chain icon, and create a hyperlink to any site on the internet!
Step 5: Edit
Nobody gets it all right the first time – once you have your blog post written, and once you’ve punched it up with images, video, and useful links, it’s time to go over and make sure that it does what you want it to do – that’s called editing.
Read the blog aloud – how does it sound? Does it sound like you? Is it natural to read? Go back to where you sort of hang up or feel cringe-y…that might sound fake or awkward to your reader, too.
Look at the blog – are you using headers to make your content easy to find? How long are your paragraphs? Usually in blog writing we keep things short and tight – if your paragraph is more than 5 lines long, it might be time to trim.
Test the blog – do all your links work? Do your videos and images load? Try it on a different computer, if you can.
Step 6: Publish
Your blog post is now ready to share with the world – in the WordPress environment, you only have to click the big “publish” button in the upper right hand corner of your page. WordPress automatically puts your blog online and generates a unique URL that you can share with your instructors (if you’re writing a class project) or with anyone who might want to read what you have to write.
What’s Next?
Blogging is a great way to get regular writing practice and to keep in touch with other people. You may find other people who blog about the same topics that interest you – or perhaps you’ll awaken an interest in someone else!
Once you’ve written your first post, keep going – you’ll find that blogging can be a lot of fun and it can improve your writing substantially. Keep experimenting with the different features of the FIU MyWeb WordPress platform until you’ve made your blog into something that’s truly and uniquely yours!
And if you ever want to get more out of your blog, or if you’re just looking for tutorials, published student work, or anything else related to digital writing, come back to the FIU Digital Writing Studio any time.
Happy blogging!