Writing Advice that Will Benefit Us All

It is great to see Minti growing! When I signed up, things were fairly quiet. Now that Minti is taking off, I just have a few thoughts to share when it comes to writing advice. This is in no way a "put down" to the people writing advice. In fact, I want to encourage it. It will do me, and all of us here at Minti a whole lot of good if we can expand on our advice so that instead of having countless short mediocre advice, we can have a lot of well thought out excellent ones.

• EXPAND ON THE IDEA: We all have a lot of knowledge and experience to share each other but before rushing to click on "write advice", I suggest expanding your thoughts first. If you have a short advice, it will appear that you are just writing random thoughts, or that you are just simply voicing your opinion on a subject. If you just want your opinions known, it would be better if you write them on your blog. We can all still view them!
• DO A LITTLE RESEARCH: Some topics are not research-able, which is just fine. But most can be.  A little internet research to back-up what we want to share, or just simply to offer other sites that point us to the same direction so as to drive your point deeper.
• SHARE YOUR EXPERIENCE: I am sure that you are sharing an advice because you have experience on the subject. Sharing one or two relevant ones will personalize your story and make it easier for us, parents, to relate to you.
• RELATED ADVICE: Since there are already a lot of advice written, it is a great idea to check out others that have already been written on similar subjects. If you agree with most of the already published advice and you just simply want to add a few things, consider simply writing a comment under that advice. If you are not satisfied with existing advice, by all means share your wisdown, but remember to add relevant advice under yours. There is a spot on the bottom of your advice where you can add links to other great advice.
• FORMAT: If after expanding your thoughts and your advice is still short, a one paragraph advice will suffice. However, if your advice is long and still only contain one or two paragraphs, it gets a little distracting. It is hard to get the message when the article looks like it rambles on and on without format.
• PROOF READ: It is a good idea to do some proof reading before you publish your article. We all understand that some typos happen, but if the whole article is full of typos it is distracting. Some of you writers out there may even just stop reading if the article is littered with typos, which we don't want to happen.
• THERE IS NO NEED TO BE WRITERS: OK, I know I mentioned format and proof reading, but really, you don't need to be a writer. You don't need to be fancy and use big words. You don't need to know when to use or not use a comma (though having tons of run-on sentences make it hard to get what you're saying). You just need to be clear enough for us to understand your point.
• PICTURES: Pictures are always interesting. Find a picture online somewhere, or provide a picture of your own to drive your point.
• YOU CAN DELETE AN ADVICE: If you wrote an advice that you actually meant to put under "requested advice", no worries! You can delete it.
• EDITING: If when you revisit your published advice and you notice a few more than the forgivable amount of typos, please, go ahead and edit it! I believe you can edit and re-edit as many times as you would like (though I'm not 100% sure on this).
• SAVING THE DRAFT: If you get interrupted in the middle of writing your advice (as I'm sure we all experience on a daily basis), save your article as a draft. You can revisit it later when it is more convenient to you. So don't feel rushed! It is better to put off publishing your article when it is not yet the best it could be, rather than publish a mediocre half finished one.

Like I said, I am not trying to demean anyone by this article. As far as typos, formatting and grammatical problems, I am also guilty. These are suggestions for improvement that we can all benefit from. If you have others, please feel free to add a comment.  We are all parents here, or planning to become parents, and we can help each other! We can impart wisdom so that others can learn! Parenting is hard work and I am just thankful for such a site as Minti! Let's all put it at a higher standard than other sites (though I think this may be the first of it's kind).