How to write more effective comments
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I want to express my sincere and deep appreciation for the thousands of comments you all leave in response to the published articles at IdahoFallz.com. Those comments generate many great discussions here. People sometimes ask me why I put so much time into fostering this online community, and one of them is the excitement I get from seeing new comments appear daily. Thank you.
Many people get excited when they see a particular person has left a comment. This happens when that person usually says smart or funny things that really makes your day or makes you think. Reading a great comment can be like listening to a person who is the life of the party. Everyone wants to be part of that.
I want to pass along a few tips to writing more effective comments. You may find using some of these tips will help spur others to respond more often to your comments. I do not want to put pressure on anyone to suddenly produce great comments, and I do not want anyone to think their comments are not great. I often write duds myself, so I researched some tips for writing more effective comments.
Many discussion threads go wildly off-topic from the original article, and that is not necessarily a bad thing. It is fine to respond to an off-topic subject if the conversation has led to it. It is nice to finish your comment with a remark or question that feeds off the original article. Doing this makes conversation threads deeper and richer.
Readers visually digest short paragraphs much easier than huge paragraphs. Look at the newspaper and any online news. They publish one, two, or three sentences per paragraph. Doing this will also help you focus your ideas and makes it easier to cut back on excessive wordiness.
Quickly review your comment before hitting submit. Spelling and grammatical mistakes are easily forgiven here, but a quick look-over will help you feel better about your comment. It helps to first quickly write out your thoughts, then go back over them to rewrite them into shorter, snappier sentences that get to the point faster.
Sometimes you may have gotten excited about a conversation and written a comment longer than the original article! There is nothing wrong with it, though you might review your comment to see if your main point is still getting through all the clutter. A point can often be made stronger by isolating it, then going back and adding additional thoughts in a separate comment.
Quickly skim your comment immediately after it is posted. Sometimes you want a change then, and IFz offers edits for up to 5 minutes after you post a comment. You can see the red bar and the timer counting down how much time you have left. Honestly, you actually have ten minutes to edit it. The timer shows five minutes to click on, then another five minutes in the edit screen to submit your changes.
Finally, you can improve your comments the most by simply commenting more often. The more practice you get, the better you will write. Nobody can improve without making some mistakes. Don’t go blabbering around just for the sake of it, but don’t be afraid to look stupid once in awhile. My missteps are certainly littered everywhere on this site, and I have learned a lot from them.
People who comment a lot eventually work up the courage to write their own articles. It is an indescribable feeling when an article you publish generates many comments and deep discussion.
What are your comments about comments?
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Comments
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0 Great points Joe - and right on the money. I tend to read the right-to-the-point, pithy comments and skip over the long, bloated “see how many words I know” epistles.
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0 0 (cont)Unless it’s a story or explanation that cannot be told in fewer words. There have been some lengthly comments that were totally riveting.
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0 0 I do not want to copy any materials from this website, but I encourage you to read:
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0 0 Some folks write a good number of comments, and wondered why they do not see their name in the sidebar under ‘Top 50 Commenters’.
Because anyone can leave a comment under any name, it only calculates names that were left with an email address. If you leave an email address with your comments, it’ll tabulate up for you. It does not have to be a real email address, just a consistent one that you enter.
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0 0 I don’t know if my system is doing this automatically, or if some folks are doing it, but if you are entering “deleted” in the email or website fields when you leave a comment, I would greatly appreciate it if you stopped 8^)
It actually creates an outbound link and makes IFz look like a spam link farm, so I have to go through every few weeks and delete them out. You can leave those two fields blank if you want. If you want your name to be counted and climb up the “top commenters list” create an anonymous yahoo account and enter that address. Appreciate the help thanks 8^)
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1 2 “Many people get excited when they see a particular person has left a comment. This happens when that person usually says smart or funny things that really makes your day or makes you think. Reading a great comment can be like listening to a person who is the life of the party. Everyone wants to be part of that.”
Oh, this is SOOO true, I’ve seen it on the most recent articles!
“Finally, you can improve your comments the most by simply commenting more often. The more practice you get, the better you will write. Nobody can improve without making some mistakes. Don’t go blabbering around just for the sake of it, but don’t be afraid to look stupid once in awhile. My missteps are certainly littered everywhere on this site, and I have learned a lot from them.”
Again, tips that are well-worth repeating! 
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1 2 ha ha ha ha ha ha . . . “find humor”, you are very aptly named.
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3 0 Hi, Joe…
Thanks for the education on how to edit here! I often do other place, but I didn’t know how to do it here.
The thing about discussion humor that I picked up from a good pal, the wittiest guy I know, is to include yourself first. He learned this from Mark Twain, who could be very biting in his humor, but he was always out in front of the parade and never excluded himself when making fun of others. It worked for Mark Twain pretty well, and it works for my buddy, too.
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0 0 Hi, Joe…
I couldn’t see the timer bar on my browser. I use Safari. Any tips?
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Here’s an example of holding off a couple points until the next comment, helps them stand on their own.
One point of this is to not just improve your comments here, but on other blog sites you may visit and participate on.
The second point I make is that comments can be half the reason many people even read anything on a blog. John Dvorak said on last week’s Cranky Geeks podcast that reading the comments is most of the entertainment he gets from reading blog articles.
So improving the way you write comments does not take much effort but returns great dividends for everyone.