Zhen Lin
06-07-2005, 05:49 AM
I have never seen such short sentences passed off as blurbs. Some are shorter than the combined title + tagline. There is a reason why the front page box is so tall, and that is to write at least a paragraph of 50 words to introduce the story.
A well written first paragraph will function perfectly well as a blurb as well. Do not be afraid to use the first few sentences as the blurb.
There are other reasons for writing good-length blurbs: One of them is that the RSS and Atom feeds are made using the blurbs. (As opposed to blindly extracting the first paragraph(s) of the article, or even the first n words of the article, as certain sites like to do.) Personally, I wouldn't be impressed with such short blurbs from a site that bills itself as a "comprehensive Pokémon news service". (See screenshot.)
I'm sorry if I come off as being harsh, but this has been bugging me for a long time.
A well written first paragraph will function perfectly well as a blurb as well. Do not be afraid to use the first few sentences as the blurb.
There are other reasons for writing good-length blurbs: One of them is that the RSS and Atom feeds are made using the blurbs. (As opposed to blindly extracting the first paragraph(s) of the article, or even the first n words of the article, as certain sites like to do.) Personally, I wouldn't be impressed with such short blurbs from a site that bills itself as a "comprehensive Pokémon news service". (See screenshot.)
I'm sorry if I come off as being harsh, but this has been bugging me for a long time.