I am so glad to share my thoughts about Scott Thornbury's blog as my first post. 😀 The time I opened this website, I was amazed by its content arragement. Didn't I open a dictionary that everything is in an alphabetic order? All of a sudden, I was freezed and have no idea what to do next, which similar to the situation when I am sometimes overwhelmed by a word dictionary and couldn't regard it as light reading or literature. However, if you take a closer look at the posts, actually it is not as distant as dictionary.
Organisation and Layout
The overall organisation is clear and concise since there aren't many assessaries within the pages and they demonstrate quite logically. There are concepts, updated content and comments, filters and information about the blogger.
Specifically in the home page, different concepts in alphabetic order cover the main part of the layout to show all involved content related to ELT. The remain space in the right displays updates and other kinds of menu to classify the content.
Content and Features
After skimming the table of content, I find it more abundant than I imagine. It not only describes elements of ELF lesson such as coursebook, dictation, drills etc., theories such as motivation, multilingualism, but also relates ELT with other displines or ideologies such as Ecology and Neoliberalism.
Apart from the concepts discussed and introduced mainly from the blogger, there are also some handy websites provided for readers to go deeper by themselves.
Ease of use and Navigation
Since the blog is sorted according to the initials of each term, I can easily look it up to learn those concepts in this blog as long as I have a particular word in my brain. In addition, there are other options to filter the content I need. For example, I can either serch it by published time or general topic. One thing markable is the more posts related to a topic, the topic title is more lager and bolder.
The information in each page is also clear, with the main content in homepage and personal profile in 'about' page. Nevertheless, I am confused about the 'index' page because I don't find any differences between this page and homepage.
Target Audience
I discovered that readers come from differnt places all over the world and different posts have different commenters, most of who are L2 teachers. Usually those comments were not only responsed by Scott but also found an echo in other people who had similar personal experiences. Some others may also combine ideas with their cultural context.
Summary
To write a better post, there are some points do require attention:
1. Write a good headline by reading megazines for inspriation.
2. Contain an introduction to hook audiences as well as generate an overview of the post.
3. The body may include sub-headings to make post esay to skim.
4. Link my post to others' website to create more credibility.
5. End up the post with an conclusion to summarize the post and leave a question for audiences that predispose them to leave a comment.
For more details, you can take a look at the video below. 👇
I love your structure! You write the key words in bold and underline them, which makes them easy to catch readers' eyes.
ReplyDeleteHi Cuilin, You've made a great start here - I love your chatty and personal style, it's perfect for blogging! Your review of Scott Thorbury's blog gives us a flavour of all the information that's available and well done for adding useful screenshots so we can see what it's like too. The commenters on that blog write a lot - almost as much as Scott himself! It's great that you convey this by adding almost a whole comment. Your own blog is clear and attractive - you have a good contrast between the light font and the dark background so it works well. The subheadings are consistently colour- coded and that looks good too. The video you embedded has some great advice about how to blog - although I don't think you need to link to other bloggers as much as he suggests. Overall a great start - well done!
ReplyDeleteHi Culin, I like your conclusion part which provides detailed and actionable steps to write a blog. Occasionally, we used the same video for the summary. But I think you did a better job than me! Also, I really like Scott's blog here with some creative ways of searching (Alphabet order for concepts & different font sizes for keywords to show the frequency).
ReplyDeleteI love your bolt. It is very clear and each picture matches the content., so that I can quickly understand your content. It can see you highlight important content by using underline. And the title of each section is well organized.
ReplyDeleteHi Cuilin,
ReplyDeleteHow organised and neat your blog is!
I love highlighting the adjectives you used to describe the blog and the way you created your summary.
It is really amazing, keep the good job!