As you surely know by now, I’m participating in the vDM30in30 blogging challenge. Create 30 blog posts in the 30 days of November, of whatever length and topic you desire, in an effort to facilitate the practice and improvement of writing skills. I have seen some complaints that the quality is not up to par and I’d like to address that briefly.

Participants: The 30 in 30 challenge has two goals. The first is to get you in the practice or habit of writing blog posts. If you write one a day for a whole month, you’re more likely to write some more next month instead of waiting a year in between posts. Second, it’s to help you improve your writing skills. If the blog post on November 30th is of the same quality as the one on November 1st, you may not have benefited as much as you could have. Write with improvement in mind. If you find yourself struggling in an area that you can’t fix on your own, reach out for help. If you need to take your post and copy and paste it into Word or Google Docs for a spelling or grammar check, do it. You owe it to yourself to make sure you use this time wisely to better yourself.

Readers: The participants are taking part in this challenge because they want to improve. Understand that some of the posts aren’t going to be of great quality – perhaps the author is early in their journey of improvement, or perhaps it became difficult to find the time in the heavy pace of 1 post a day. Also understand that the participants DO want to improve and constructive criticism is vital. Let the author know, in a constructive manner, about what areas they are struggling with. Drop a comment in their blog or hit them up on twitter. If you think your public criticism would be harsh or take away from the post itself, send a DM or ask the author for another way to contact them. Providing constructive criticism will help the participants, which will improve their posts, hopefully improving your enjoyment of the challenge.

Together, we can make all those November 30th articles really great! 🙂