31DBBB Day 14: Write an Opinion Post on your Blog
This is Day 14 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, a group project we are doing together in an attempt to improve our blogs and help each other become better bloggers. You can read more about it and still sign-up to participate here. Please subscribe to our RSS Feed to stay updated on the project.
Today we are going to spend some time writing an opinion post on our blogs. Thank you to all of you who participated on the first two weeks of assignments, we are gone through about half of the curriculum and are getting some good discussion back and forth as I initially hoped. Let’s keep up the effort and I hope everyone is having a good time while taking steps to improve their blogging.
- Week 1: Read about the first week of 31DBBB
- Week 2: The second week of 31DBBB
- Day 11 (Monday): Solve a Problem for your Reader
- Day 12 (Tuesday): Watch a First Time Reader Use your Blog
- Day 13 (Wednesday): Creating a Sneeze Page for your Blog
- Day 14 (Thursday): Write an Opinion Post on your Blog
- Day 15 (Friday): Leave Comments on Other Blogs
Some of the most popular blogs are those that belong to people that express their opinion loudly and often. Those blogs tend to generate more discussion, reader participation and excitement. Your task today will be to write a post that expresses an opinion.
As movie bloggers, this is a relatively easy task since we tend to express our opinions about movies nearly every time we post. Why does sharing your opinion is a positive thing to do while blogging?
- Expressing your opinion naturally leads your readers to want to express theirs as well
- When you express your opinion, you provide your readers with an analysis of a topic.
- You help your reader get a better understanding of different perspectives, making your blog useful
- Controversy breeds discussion
- Adding your opinion makes your blog unique
Assignment
- Write a blog post that expresses an opinion about something related to your blog topic.
- As always, come back and post your link here
Discussion
- Do you find it easy or difficult to express to form and express opinions?
- Do you have any other tips for writing opinion posts?
- Do you have an examples of opinion posts you’ve written that stirred good conversation on your blog? Post a link.
19 Comments
wow…i just read something (that may interest you Castor) and will definitely be working on a post for the bball site tonight/tomorrow
Cool cool, looking forward to read that
the most difficult part for me is when I start rambling about an issue, and the text just gets long and confusing. I try to keep it short… or as short as possible now. However, from time to time, I get to rant.
When I try to review a film, I get conflicts about whether or not I should write spoilers. As a place for ramblings, sometimes I discuss spoilery parts… but as I write more for other people, I either warn people a lot when there’s one coming… or just try to avoid it altogether.
How much is much text?
Totally agree with all you say. This is a huge problem for me aswell especially if I write about something I really love or hate!
My Inception analysis/review is up now and could easily be seen as an opinion piece. I had some difficulties design wise with this one making it very blocky.
http://jodokast.wordpress.com/2010/08/20/inception-a-rough-sketch-of-a-masterpiece/
I think the way you setup the post is the best you could do with screencaps, unless you wanted to use a poster-sized image instead of the long Inception title… or use smaller screencaps.
I have this problem too. Recently, i watched a DVD where it was the ending that made me throw up my hands and say, “OMG, that’s it! This is awful!” I’ve held off writing about it because I don’t want to give it away to readers. I’ve thought of using the “read more” by clicking feature and state that you should not click if you don’t want the spoilers, but that’s probably too tempting for people, eh?
Hi its time to another great post. Expressing our opinions to blog readers is something useful to both the author and the readers. Also opinions express the thoughts in our mind to others. It leads to good communication. I believe this is one of the best tutorial in our training session.
BTW this is my post regarding opinion – ‘What is your Opinion about Remake films’ and here is my post link http://www.moviescrunch.com/2010/08/what-is-your-opinion-about-remake-films.html what do you think about my post..share your comments.
Generating opinions is easy. Just think on some of the problems of our movie blog readers. Then from the readers side, you can write a post as opinions. This is my trick on writing opinions. cheers
Sorry bit I dont find how to comment on your posts?
Why Joel..is it really hard to comment on my opinion post?
I’ve done this quite a few times and most of them got lots of hits. The one featured on IMDb today is the one I just did this week. Everyone is entitled to their opinion but you still have to be courteous in expressing it.
I try to take the same perspective for those who post their own comments on my own opinion posts. Even if I totally disagree with what they’re saying, as long as there’s no profanity, and it’s not some lame attempt to link back to their own site, they can say what they feel.
It’s hard to take anyone’s opinion seriously when they resort to foul language. Like Niles Crane says, if you have to swear then you’re simply unable to express your opinion/feelings eloquently, or something of the sort. Double thumbs down if you take the Lord’s name in vain.
All my posts are opinion posts. So I’m ahead of all ya’ll. Ha.
(…)
I’m with you – all my posts are opinions but I’m guessing this is supposed to be more of a broad post, than just a movie review. Requires a bit more thought so I’ll keep working on it.
I can think of a few guys in the community who’ve come up with some great opinion pieces that I can tell are meant to stir things up – to fly in the face of commonly held beliefs, and they do a great job of bringing in the comments.
Personally, I believe that just about every single post I’ve ever written is an opinion piece. I mean, I’m not working from any kind of empirical facts here. And when I whip up a top 5 list, I am usually working from the perspective of a consensus builder, not wanting to rock the boat too much, because I don’t want to turn people off from dropping by. I think the opposite strategy could work better in that people would be dropping by to see what outrageous claim has been made, or to blow off some steam by posting a big flaming comment.
I think the closest I got to stirring the pot was with a top 5 list about Harrison Ford saying that he doesn’t watch his own movies. (Bollocks, BTW.) It got people rushing to his defence, and might have also had people thinking about when actors say things like that. Wasn’t a huge rush of comments (even for my little blog) but it flew in the face of public opinion, and that’s the spark that can fuel some real attention.
Oh yeah. This was the post: http://www.thefilmcynics.com/blog/?p=4142
# Do you find it easy or difficult to express to form and express opinions?
I definitely find it hard to post opinions, I feel like I do not want to offend anyone and while I like debating topics with people, I am sometimes uncomfortable having a similar conversation online. I feel like sometimes the commentary because of writing style, etc. can be taken out of context.
Here is my recent reaction/opinion piece to Gun Crazy: http://iluvcinema.com/2010/07/quick-reaction-to-gun-crazy-1950/
# Do you have an examples of opinion posts you’ve written that stirred good conversation on your blog?
Unfortunately the only other opinion blog that received a comment was my reaction piece to Obsession and that was because I forgot a detail of the movie.
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