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sippicancottage

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything

Sippican’s Handy Guide To Writing On The Internet

Hello, Interfriends. I’m from the Intertunnel, and I’m here to help. Perhaps you’re new to blogging, or you’re so busy running your actual empires that writing a short essay each day is cutting into your FarmVille time. Try my handy guide to writing blogposts, now in NEW, handy, step-by-step format. It’s so easy, any fool can do it, and probably will.

Sippican’s Handy Guide To Writing On The Internet:

(Parse innocuous comments by prominent dullards for deep and sinister meanings. Read only extemporaneous verbal remarks, transcribed by detractors who can’t spell and edited by invertebrates, and refer to them like they’re a legal brief.)

(Insert picture chosen from thousands to make person look bad here. Bonus points for unwittingly using photoshopped examples stolen from Google.)

(Clumsily disguise editorial comments masquerading as a search for information here. Refer to previously published balderdash as gospel to support. Steal what you can from Wikipedia, but don’t just cut and paste. Paste the text into your Apple thingie and type a new version right below it, then erase the original. Confuse “reign” and “rein” to prove you went to college.)

(Place apostrophes all over the place until your text looks vaguely Arabic. Make up all sorts of imaginary rules for where they go, like before the pluralizing “s” on a word that ends in a vowel. These rules are similar to the law your friend told you about that driving with your shoes off is illegal. Your friend can neither confirm nor contradict this idea for you; he was shot dead by a policeman during a routine traffic stop because he was fumbling around under his seat and the policeman capped him. The policeman sure looked silly when the guy only had an unlaced shoe in his hand.)

(Under no circumstances learn actual grammatical rules by heart. Make sure to use the term “teaching to the test” unironically and pejoratively when referring to any educational enterprise, including the education you didn’t get.)

(Never refer to any evidence. Write “the science” like a four-year-old would. If anyone ever corrects your grammar, including mentioning that it’s not spelled “grammer,” make sure to unhinge your jaw and scream at your monitor while you call them the sort of person that places other persons in an oven, and then tell them to perish in a conflagration. Remember, ALL CAPS is not just for acronyms anymore; it’s for BEING UNASSAILABLY CORRECT ON THE INTERNETS. Your ambivalence about (your)grammar notwithstanding, if any person refuses to hew to the imaginary dictum that LEGO blocks in the plural never be referred to as legos, or stubbornly refuses to care how to spell “Wookiee,” come at them like they owe you money.)

ATTENTION: No male human will pay attention to you on the Intertunnel if you don’t have pictures of broads on your page. Even the gay men demand this. So make with the hubba hubba or get used to tumbleweeds in your sitemeter:

If you want women to read, too, you’re going to have to play a deeper game than just hoary old pictures of Italian actresses. You need to find pictures of women eating ice cream while reading recipes and dieting advice during a shoe-shopping expedition. I’m not sure where to get those without reading The Frisky, so we’re going to have to improvise:

(Here’s a good spot to start making a dog’s breakfast of compound words. Split them apart when you’re using them as adjectives, even though that makes half of the resulting two words back into an extra verb in the sentence. Then smash two others together for no reason because some crummy website’s URL does, and it looks funny if you don’t. Most everything grammatically correct  looks funny at this point; you can’t go by that.)

(Here’s where we just throw in the towel and write a blogpost that announces that the semicolon is useless, because you have no idea how to use it, and from now on it’s banned on the Intertunnel because you said so. Get some jellyfish at a style guide desk to agree with you, after they’ve finished decreeing that we all go into the sewer through a personhole. Almost forgot: If you write for the Uppastump Vermont Yankee and Coupon Clipper Gazette and you’re too dull-witted to even cover the town meetings and they send you  to cover high school sports instead, make sure you go out of your way to farg up the acronym “RBI” and use it for a plural, too. In conversation, double down on the awesome and utter: Rs BI. )

(Too two to tu. I’m a little Intertunnel train. To Two! Too To! I go ’round and ’round in circles going: To Too! Where to I go around in circles? Over they’re. Your stupid if you don’t know that.)

(Now we’re going to beg the question. Everything begs the question. You are going to use this term more than a dullard with barbecue sauce all down his muu-muu shirt covering the Pats uses the term “step up.” You are going to ladle “begging the question” all over everything like some sort of idiomatic gravy. You will, however, never once use it to mean what it actually means, which is petitio principii. When challenged, you will refer to any number of your shortbus colleagues infesting the Intertunnel who have written blogposts announcing that since so many people are dullards and use terms they don’t understand, it now magically works as anything you want it to, like a Webster’s Swiss Army knife.)

(Moving on, be sure to point out that certain newsgathering outlets are sinister cabals run by shadowy malefactors and staffed by malignant hatchetmen. Then endlessly link to their output, and talk unremittingly about their puerile opinions, and ignore anyone talking sense.)

(Here’s where you place an update thanking another website owner with at least 10 percent more traffic than you for linking to your blogpost. You sent it to them four times, but try to act surprised and gratified. And don’t forget to tell everyone to hit your tip jar even though you make mid six-figures and have tenure)

17 Responses

  1. I told a girl an amusing anecdote once. She said, "That took too long."
    Then we had sex. She said, "You're funny."

    So you see, I am often misunderstood. Or I never am. I'm not sure which it is, but it's one or the other.

  2. If modern life doesn't make you cranky, you aren't paying attention (or are taking too much medication). However, we do have to keep it under control. Therefore, please continue to charm and amaze us with you insights into life (and stuff). Always enjoy visiting.

  3. Sipp, this was so awesome I would have liked it even without Sophia eating ice cream. Probably not without Sophia, though; everybody likes looking at a smokin' hot dame.

  4. Or if you're me use semi-colons, dashes and ellipses interchangeably and depending on what mood you're in that day. Use smiley faces so people know how to respond… 🙂

  5. I would have loved to have heard you shouting that at cars from the freeway overpass… ( Oh, and I love the word, conflagration.)

  6. [Here is where spam commenters tell you how awesome your writing is and how it has saved MUCH time! It's also a place to hijack links from your site by pointing out how uncanny it is that absolutely everyone must be thinking the same thing; it's an Intertubes Singularity. ]

    [Now we put in a "hat tip" to The Professor, hoping for a rebound that will dim the lights in the Blogsphere– and yes, DailyPundit (space or no space?) named it that– with a H/t to Instapundit.]

  7. Back link to myself. Use the personal pronoun too much.

    Overuse the word "awesome." Try to be pithy, but come out like an over-aged Alzheimer's patient.

    Cats. Misspelled. Period. after. every. word. ellipsis…

    fail to capitalize anything.

    I could get used to this.

  8. How often should one use (or imitate) Teh Hip Ironic attitude? Or is that restricted to youngish urban bloggers?

    What about a screen capture of a celebrity Twitter post? Or one of those free user-polls?

    This stuff is hard.

  9. Bwahahaha to all of it — including the comments.

    But putting "Curves" on Sophia — priceless. Too funny.

    I'm forwarding this to all my fat girl friends at Curves, btw.

    BTW 2: I thought the whole point of blogging was to misuse language.

    Mea culpa. 🙂

  10. Henceforth I shall only communicate using consonants.

    sy whn wrtng, bt stky whn spkng; ths wh cnnt kp p wll b lft bhnd.

  11. Nice Churchill reference in the comments. IHMO, I think this explains the lite readership of my blog thing. Hey, and thanks for the link!

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