Check Your Spelling!

No one expects graffiti artists to spell right, but you do expect people who are attempting to be taken seriously online to make their best effort.

Maybe it's the English professor in me coming out, but as I've been reading a number of missionary blogs, I've discovered that some posts are not conveying the right impression because the spelling isn't so good.

Here are a few misspellings found on missionary blogs:

Three Things a Missionary Blog is Not

This follows up on my previous post about the power of the personal and also my post about considering the audiences for one's blog. I've noticed in studying some early efforts at missionary blogging that blog posts can sometimes be either too impersonal or too personal. I think this is happening because people are assuming that a blog is more like other forms of communication than it truly is. So, at the risk of sounding like I'm contradicting what missionaries might expect to be legitimate for their blogs, here are three things a missionary blog is NOT:

• A Blog is Not a Pulpit
• A Blog is Not Letters Home
• A Blog is Not a Journal

Details follow the break.

Social Networking for Missionaries?

Should LDS missionaries be on the online social networks?

A few missionaries from the New York, Rochester mission have been approved to set up Facebook accounts for a pilot program. The photo shows some of their Facebook profiles.

In the spirit of my last post, calling into question why missionaries might blog, I'd like to think through why they might participate on Facebook or any other of the social networks now available.

I have some of the same concerns I expressed with blogging. Is this really the best use of a missionary's time? Doesn't this risk reconnecting missionaries with the world they left behind at the expense of keeping their focus on where they are called and their proselyting purposes?

I want to be an advocate for missionaries doing social networking. But first, how could it go wrong?