The planned School Library Blog Machine (or possibly a Dr Who episode)
If you’re interested in writing for the school library blog, then this is the post for you! You can write about anything you want – book reviews are always welcome, so you could talk about what you’re reading during lockdown. Similarly, reviews of tv shows, films, video games, comics, and boardgames are very welcome. What have I missed that you would like to review? You can help each other find ways to pass the time by sharing your recommendations through the blog. Have a look at the blog posts already published, including those from other Glasgow School Libraries, to get some ideas, but don’t be put off if you think your idea has been done before, or if you can’t see your idea. Get in touch with me before you start writing your post, so that we can talk about your idea and plan the publication date (you’ll find my email address in your year group/class Team on Glow if you don’t already have it).
If you’ve been inspired to write some great stories, poems, plays, anything, and you’re not shy about sharing them, I would definitely be interested in reading them and sharing them here. You might even want to show a piece of schoolwork of which you’re particularly proud. It’s slightly more complicated when it comes to sharing your artwork and comics, as there’s not a lot of memory to store pictures, but don’t be discouraged – we’ll figure something out if you’d like to produce a comic or piece of art. If you want to share any videos or perhaps a podcast that you’ve created, we can share them as a link, and you could write a post to introduce your work. Are you in a club or group of any kind? Maybe you can share tips on how to keep your clubs meeting up during social distancing. Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you would like to share other material that I haven’t mentioned here.
You can also share your hobbies with other blog readers – maybe you’ll inspire someone to take up something new, thus helping them get through this tough time of social distancing, and perhaps leading to you becoming friends if you weren’t already. Perhaps you’d like to write about a day in your life under lockdown – we could end up creating an interesting archive of life in such unusual times.
How do I write a blog post?
This isn’t like writing a post on your own blog. I will publish the post for you, so would recommend that you write it using Word. You can email it to me once you have it ready to publish. Word lets you do all the formatting more or less as you would on a blog, including adding links to your post.
In terms of word limits, there are none, but if you’re planning on sharing your novel or dissertation, I’d suggest that we publish a chapter at a time, across a few blog posts. I’d recommend a post of no more than 1000-2000 words, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be that long. If you have any questions, you can email me any time.
Plan your post. How much planning depends on what you’re writing about, but it’s helpful to know the basic structure – introduction, body, conclusion – no matter what the subject. If you are writing a more in-depth piece, use what you’ve learned in school about writing essays to plan it out.
Choose an interesting, eye-catching title. This will appear in the blog preview when I share the link on the library’s Twitter, and will be one of the reasons why people choose to click on the link to read your post. For the same reason, attach a picture to your email when you send me your blogpost; put a note in the post about where you would like the picture to go, as it doesn’t always have to be at the beginning. You can use your own photos. If you take an image from somewhere online, you should check the copyright, to see if you have permission to use it. Wikimedia Commons is an excellent resource full of images which are free to use. I will write a separate post about finding and using images in a separate blog post next week.
Proofread your post before you send it. Word has a spell check and grammar check – these are your friends! If you notice that you’re using the same word repeatedly throughout your post, especially in sentences next to one another, have a look in a thesaurus for a synonym (a word that means the same, or almost the same). If you are using specific terms to do with the subject of your post, you don’t need to worry about it. Using your school library card number, you can access the Oxford English Dictionary, which includes synonyms, here; it’s the first link in the list of e-resources. If you don’t have your school library card number, send me an email, or use your community library card if you have one.
When you send me your post, you should include some tags. These help people find blogposts when they’re searching for information online. If you scroll to the end of this post, you’ll see the tags – Blogging guidelines and Writing blogposts. You can click on these to find other posts with the same tags on the Glasgow School Libraries blog (note: you won’t always find posts, but it’s a good idea to check if you’ve been reading a post about something that interests you). I might add more tags if I think that they will help people to find your post, so if you’re not sure what tags to use, that’s ok.
I look forward to hearing from lots of eager volunteers. Don’t hesitate to get in touch with any questions. Hopefully we can start sharing your posts from next week or the week after.
