The Small Things Matter

Hey there, lovelies!  Hope you’re enjoying your summer so far (if it’s summer for you)!

XOXOAliciaHeartsYou here, back with another post on BecomingAnAlpha!

This one is just to help anyone with post editing.  We’ve been on WordPress so long that the small things start not to matter as much, even though they should.  Post editing is one of those small things.  Here’s a few tips to help:

 Check Your Spelling:

Checking your spelling, punctation, and capitalization can be so very important.  No one wants to sit through a post that has those kinds of mistakes every few sentences.  Not only that, but it makes your post or page seem sloppy as well.  Both of those will turn a person away from reading your blog.  Your computer’s spell-check can be your best friend.

Read Your Post Out Loud:

This may seem a bit amateur, but even professional editors do this.  If you’d only read your post or page silently, your mind will skip over the grammar or wording mistakes and automatically correct them as you read it.  Reading it out loud, however, will force you to read it as it is actually written and then you’ll hear where any mistakes are so that you can fix them.

Have a Friend Read Your Post:

This is pretty self-explanatory.  Lots of times in the past, my friends have caught mistakes that I’ve missed and it helped me out a lot.  Just make sure that when you ask them to read it, they know to let you know of any mistakes instead of only reading it to tell you whether they like it or not.

Check Your Links:

If you intend to insert a link into your post, make sure you do so.  Also, please make sure you spell the link url correctly; You don’t want to insert a link for one url and having it take your readers to a completely different one.

Review Your Tense Usage:

Unless you have a reason to switch tenses during the middle of a post (i.e. a flashback), make sure you don’t switch them.  If you start the post in 1st person, finish it in 1st person…if you start it in 3rd person, finish it in 3rd person.  This is a huge cardinal rule of writing!

I have a few notes to let you know about as well:

»Firstly, we have accepted three new members to BAA! Check out their Alpha-licious profiles on “The Girls Here to Help” page!  This means there will be plenty of posts this summer!

»Secondly, we’ve noticed that Polyvore has changed a bit since we first made the tutorial on how to insert outfits into WordPress pages and posts.  So we’ll be updating that later this week (and will just be in the place of where it is currently located, on the “WordPress” page.)

»Oh and don’t forget to check out this month’s Alpha In Training, AliciaRivera377Blog!

xoxo, Leesh