For this week’s edition of Blogging Insights, Dr. Tanya wants to know about our reading habits vis-a-vis prompt posts. She asks:
Do you like reading posts written for prompts? If so, what kind?
Yes, I do. I host a number of prompt posts and I read every post from those who respond to my prompts when they link back to my prompt post. I am fascinated by the variety and range of responses.
When you publish a piece in answer to a prompt, do you read entries by other bloggers? If so, do you read them before or after you have written your own?
Most of the time, I don’t read other bloggers’ posted answers to prompts before I post my own, as I don’t want how others responded to the prompts to influence how I will respond. But it also depends upon timing. For example, Rochelle Wisoff-Fields publishes her Friday Fictioneers prompt on Wednesdays. I never post my response to it until Friday because, well, it’s called Friday Fictioneers. But a number of bloggers I follow also respond to Rochelle’s prompt, often starting on Wednesday. Since their posts show up in my Reader on Wednesdays and Thursdays, I can’t help but read what they’ve posted in response to Rochelle’s prompt before I begin to compose my own response on Thursday night or Friday morning. The good news is that my memory is so bad that by the time I start to write my own Friday Fictioneers response post, I usually can’t remember what others have posted in their responses.
Also, I schedule my daily one-word prompt for midnight my time and most of my other prompts for 3 a.m. my time. By the time I wake up in the morning, some bloggers have already posted their responses to my prompts and they’re in my Reader. But other than including my own one-word prompt, along with those of other daily, one-word prompters, in my some of my posts, I don’t often respond to my own prompts, anyway.
Bottom line, for the most part, I try not to read responses to prompts I’m participating in before I’ve written my own response. And, time permitting, I do try to read the responses to those prompts from other bloggers.
Your’s (and John H’s) posts hit my reader at 8am. and I try to start work at 9. So that gives me an jour… Doesn’t always work out!
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Timing is everything, as they say.
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Blog reading here on WordPress is the only thing that actually works to grow your own blog I found. any FB and Twitter posts I make about my stories barely get a click and little else seems to work. However since I’ve been doing your prompts and a few others and then reading and commenting on the writers blogs my site has grown dramatically. In five and a bit months I’ve gone from 75 followers to 515 its incredible.
Blog reading is the ticket to success.
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Yes it is. We all appreciate it when other bloggers take the time to read, like, and especially to comment on our posts.
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For sure. Those likes and comments make it worth sharing and give us the boost to write the next post.
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Reading the responses to different prompts can give one an insight into how people think or what’s on their minds!
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I read prompts from other bloggers too. I try to read as many as I can, or as my time permits!
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I try not to read prompts until after I have written for them, But time willing I do read what others have written.
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