This list of Ingredients for a Good Online Comment works well for any kind of online communication.
- A dash of brevity. Nobody wants to read through pages of verbiage. Blog posts are meant to be short, and comments are meant to be shorter. When I see a really long comment, I wonder if the writer isn’t a little overly devoted to his or her idea and how their time is being allocated.
- A heaping tablespoon of clear and grammatical expression. Okay, I'm a professor, but when I see spelling and grammatical mistakes — even online — I discount the rest of the message. This is not entirely fair to non-native speakers of English, so I sometimes discount this factor a bit for exotic-sounding names.
