Studio Guide 03 · Blog #1

The draft everybody writes, and how to fix it.

Assignment one asks you to introduce yourself to a global audience. Below is exactly that post being written on my own blog: the weak first draft, every fix, all three images, and the settings that carry the marks.

≈ 45 minutes30 points3 imagesPublished live

Blog #1 · Week 2 · 30 points

Introducing Yourself to a Global Audience. An introductory post or an About page. Fifteen meaningful sentences, three hundred to five hundred words, at least three images, published live. It has to introduce who you are, say what the blog is about, name your audience, and give a stranger a reason to come back.

This is my blog, not a demo. Everything below happens on Career Communications, which is a real WordPress.com blog with real readers. I wrote the bad draft first on purpose, then fixed it in front of you. Do the same thing to yours.

Before you open WordPress

Read the assignment once, then read the nine standards

The prompt gives you the subject. The handout gives you the standard.Blog #1 asks for an introductory post or an About page: at least fifteen meaningful sentences, three hundred to five hundred words, at least three images, and a layout that matches your topic and tone. On top of that, every post this semester is held against the same nine standards. Six of them are simply checkable, which means there is no excuse for losing those marks.

Decide your niche and your three pillars before you write a word

You cannot introduce a blog that does not know what it is about. Write down one niche and three recurring themes. Every post you publish for the next fourteen weeks has to sit under one of the three. If it sits under none of them, it belongs to somebody else's blog.

Mine, as an example: the niche is career communication in Korea. The pillars are interview performance, written self presentation, and working across cultures.

Find your one sentence

The first E in E-E-A-T is Experience, and it is the one thing nobody can borrow from you.Before you start, write the single sentence only you could have written. Something you did, saw, ate, built, or got wrong. Everything else in the post is arrangement. That sentence is the post.

Start the post

Open your blog dashboard

This is my live blog, Career Communications. Yours will look the same. Write blog post is in the Quick links panel on the right, or use Posts, then Add New Post.

Click Add New Post and look at the empty screen

Two fields. A title, and everything else. The Publish button is greyed out until there is something to publish.

Write the draft everybody writes first

Write it badly on purpose, then fix it

This is the draft I get about thirty times a semester.It is not lazy. It is what a first draft looks like when you write for a professor instead of for a reader. Everything wrong with it is fixable in ten minutes, which is the whole point of this guide.

CarefulTwo problems, and they are the two that cost the most marks. 1. The title is a filing label. It promises nothing and no stranger will ever click it. 2. One paragraph of one hundred words, no headings, no images, no structure. Seventy nine per cent of readers scan before they read, and there is nothing here to scan.

Step 6: Write it badly on purpose, then fix it

Fix one: the headline

Write ten headlines. Keep one.

Eight out of ten people read the headline. Two read the rest.It is the most leveraged sentence you will write all semester and the one students spend the least time on. A headline needs a place, a number, or a claim somebody could argue with. Two of the three is better.

Weak: About Me. Weak: My First Blog Post. Weak: Introducing Myself.

My first attempt was I Have Sat Through 700 Mock Interviews in Seoul. The Same Thing Goes Wrong Every Time. Specific, yes. But it opens on what is broken, and that is not how I talk or how I teach. So I rewrote it to open on what is possible instead, which is the same claim pointed the right way.

Point the promise at hope, not at damage

Assertive and optimistic beats grim and clever, every time.A reader decides in one line whether this is a place that will make them feel capable or a place that will make them feel behind. Both headlines below are true. Only one of them earns a second visit.

Before: The Same Thing Goes Wrong Every Time.
After: Here Is the Good News.

Fix two: structure

Break the wall into paragraphs and add real subheadings

Type ## and a space at the start of a line and it becomes a Heading 2. Three or four of them across the post. They are what a scanning reader lands on, and they are how a search engine works out what the post is about.

Paragraphs of two or three sentences. Then a heading. Then two or three more. Nobody reads a hundred word block on a phone.

Bold the one sentence that carries the post

One per section, no more. Bold everywhere is bold nowhere. Type ** either side of the words and WordPress does the rest.

Fix three: the three images

Add an Image block where the reader needs a breath

Press Enter for a new line and type /image, then Enter. Put images where the text changes subject, not decoratively at the top.

CarefulUpload puts your own photograph on your blog and that is what the assignment wants. Select Image reuses something already in your library. Insert from URL points at somebody else's server, and WordPress itself will warn you about it later. Use Upload.

Step 11: Add an Image block where the reader needs a breath

Get your files ready before you upload them

You have 1 GB, and a phone photograph is about 4 MB.Resize to about 1600 pixels wide, save as JPEG, and rename the file before it leaves your computer. hanyang-campus.jpg is read by Google. IMG_4821.jpg is not.

Upload, and notice what the filenames look like afterwards

These three went up through Media, then Add Media File. The names they arrived with are the names they keep, and they are the names search engines read.

CarefulRename before you upload. Renaming afterwards does not change the file's address, so the damage is already done.

Step 13: Upload, and notice what the filenames look like afterwards

Choose where the picture comes from

WordPress.com gives you six sources. Two of them solve the legal problem for you: Pexels free photos and Openverse are both free to use and built straight into the editor. A photograph you found on Google Images is somebody's copyrighted work and it will cost you marks here and money later.

Pick the file from your Media Library

The Upload files tab takes a new file from your computer. The Media Library tab reuses anything you have already uploaded.

Write the alt text. Every image. No exceptions.

This box is worth marks and takes eleven seconds.Alt text is what a blind reader hears and what Google reads. Describe what is in the picture and why it is there.

Empty is a lost mark. image1 is a lost mark. The main building at Hanyang University in Seoul, where I have taught career communication for eighteen years is a mark.

Fill in the alt text, and use the caption to credit the photographer

If the photograph is not yours, the caption is where you say so. Photo by Piotrus, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. That one line is the difference between using an image and taking one.

Click Select and the picture lands in the post

Repeat twice more. Three images minimum, spread through the post, each one with alt text.

The finished post

This is what you are aiming at

Same writer. Same subject. Roughly forty five minutes of work.Six hundred and forty words, three images, five subheadings, one pull quote, a named niche and three named pillars. Every claim either comes from something I did or carries a citation. Read it once through before you look at the parts.

The opening does three jobs in four lines

Three short facts establish that I have actually done this. One sentence turns it into a promise about the reader rather than a boast about me. One more names the problem and calls it solvable.

Seven hundred mock interviews. Eighteen years at Hanyang. Twenty four years in Seoul. Then: In all of it, I have never met a student who had nothing worth saying.

That is the whole opening move. Proof, then hope, then a promise.

Bring in real evidence, then turn it into encouragement

This is where E-E-A-T stops being a checklist and starts being a voice. Three cited statistics, then the reading of them that makes the reader want to keep going.

Ninety percent of web pages get no organic traffic from Google (Ahrefs, 2020). Eight readers in ten never get past the headline (Copyblogger). Seventy nine percent scan before they read.

Then the turn: read those as bad news and you never publish. Read them correctly and they mean the field is won by whoever learned the rules and kept applying them. Cite the research, then tell the reader why it is on their side.

Name the pillars, name the reader, and make one promise you can keep

The three pillars appear in bold so a scanner cannot miss them. The audience is named in plain words. The closing asks a real question rather than saying thank you for visiting.

And the pull quote is the sentence only I could have written: if you have ever walked out of an interview and thought of the perfect answer on the subway home, you are exactly who I am writing for.

Check it on a phone before you call it finished

More than half of your readers arrive on one. Short paragraphs and real subheadings are not a style preference. They are what makes a post survive a six inch screen on a moving subway.

The five on-page elements

Open the Post tab in the settings panel

This panel is where six of the nine standards are checked, and it is where marks quietly disappear. Click the panel icon at the top right, then Post.

Set the five elements, one at a time

These are simply checkable, so there is no excuse.Title tag. Your headline, already done.
Meta description. Open Add an excerpt and write one sentence that makes a stranger click. Not the first line of the post.
One H1. WordPress makes your title the H1. Never add another. Your subheadings are H2.
Descriptive slug. Shorten it to four or five real words: 700-mock-interviews-seoul, not the whole sentence.
Alt text on every image. Done above.

Set the featured image, the category and the tags

The featured image is the picture that appears on your front page and whenever anyone shares the link. The category is the pillar this post belongs to. Tags are the index at the back, five is plenty.

Publish

Click Publish and read the check panel before you confirm

WordPress runs its own review before it lets you go live, and it is worth reading. Mine flagged four things.

Careful1. External media. An image pointing at another site may load slowly, display wrongly, or vanish. Upload it properly. 2. Visibility. Must read Public. 3. Add a tag and assign a category. WordPress is telling you the same thing the rubric does. 4. Then, and only then, Publish.

Step 27: Click Publish and read the check panel before you confirm

Open the live address in a private window

That is the version a stranger gets, and it is the version I mark. If it asks for a password, your blog was never launched. Check it on your phone as well. More than half your readers will be on one.

Submit the live URL, then go and comment on two classmates

An unpublished draft scores zero, and so does a screenshot.The deliverable is the address. The two peer comments are part of the mark for this post, and they are due the same week, not at the end of term.

The finished post, in full640 words · 3 images · Blog #1

Seven Hundred Mock Interviews in Seoul. Here Is the Good News.

Seven hundred mock interviews. Eighteen years at Hanyang. Twenty four years in Seoul.

In all of it, I have never met a student who had nothing worth saying.

I have met hundreds who were never shown how to say it. That is a completely different problem, and unlike talent, it is teachable. This blog is where I teach it in public.

Why a blog, and why now

The numbers are blunt. Ninety percent of web pages get no organic traffic from Google at all (Ahrefs, 2020). Eight readers in ten never get past the headline (Copyblogger). Seventy nine percent of people scan a page before they read a word of it properly.

Read those as bad news and you will never publish anything. Read them correctly and they are the most encouraging statistics in professional communication. They mean the field is not won by the most gifted writer. It is won by the person who learned the rules and then applied them, week after week, while everyone else was still waiting to feel ready.

That is a competition you can win. It is, in fact, the only kind worth entering.

Who is writing this

I am Matthew Clement. I teach career communication at Hanyang University's Center for Creative Convergence Education, where I have been for eighteen years.

Before the university I trained communication teams inside Daewoo, Daelim, Doosan, SK Energy and Samsung affiliates. That is where I learned what Korean organisations actually reward when they say they want good English. Before that I presented on Arirang TV, SBS Radio and TBS, which is where I learned that clarity is a performance, not a personality trait.

My academic training is in political science and policy, so I read every communication problem as an incentives problem first. Who is in the room. What they are measured on. What they are actually listening for, as opposed to what the job posting says.

Image 1 · Hanyang campus · alt text and CC credit in the caption

Every year I run more than fifteen hours of individual mock interviews with over forty students, recorded, twenty minutes each. Almost everything I publish here starts in that room, with a real person, a real question, and a twenty second silence I have learned to sit through.

What this blog is about

One niche: career communication in Korea, in English. Three pillars, and every post I publish sits under one of them.

Interview performance. What to say in the first ninety seconds, what to stop saying, and how to answer the question behind the question.

Written self presentation. Resumes, cover letters, LinkedIn profiles and the self introduction letter, judged the way a hiring manager actually reads them, which is quickly and unsentimentally.

Working across cultures. How Korean workplace norms land on a foreign employer, how foreign expectations land here, and what to do when the two disagree in a meeting you are sitting in.

Image 2 · the computer lab where the work happens

Who this is for

Korean university students preparing for a first professional interview in English. Graduates a year or two out who have realised that the thing holding them back is not their ability but their account of it. Anyone building a career across two languages and two sets of expectations.

If you have ever walked out of an interview and thought of the perfect answer on the subway home, you are exactly who I am writing for. That answer was always in you. The work is getting it to arrive on time.

What you can expect from me

One post a week, every week, with something in it you can use before Friday.

Real examples from real sessions, with names and companies removed. Evidence where I have it and a citation where I borrowed it. And where I am guessing, I will say that I am guessing, because the alternative is the confident nonsense that fills most career advice online.

Image 3 · the Pixels, Podcasts and Prose course page

Everything I ask my students to do, I am doing here in public. They build blogs, record podcasts and put their work in front of strangers for fifteen weeks. It seemed dishonest to ask that of them and not stand in the same place myself.

So: what are you preparing for? Tell me in the comments and I will write about it. That is not a closing line. It is genuinely how I choose what comes next.

The mark sheet, in the order I read it

The headline. Would a stranger click it? A place, a number, or a claim.
The first two sentences. Do they promise something, or do they say hello?
The niche and the three pillars. Named out loud, somewhere in the post.
Structure. Subheadings, short paragraphs, one bold sentence per section.
Voice. If a sentence would survive unchanged in a term paper, rewrite it.
Experience. The one sentence only you could have written.
Three images, spread through the post, every one with alt text, anything borrowed credited.
The five on-page elements. Title tag, meta description, one H1, descriptive slug, alt text.
Published, public, on time, and the live URL submitted.
Two peer comments, the same week, with something in them.

The three things that cost the most marks

A title that is a filing label. About Me, My First Post, Introduction. Eight out of ten readers get no further.

Empty alt text. Eleven seconds each, and it is on the list above. There is no reason to lose this one.

A draft left unpublished. It scores zero. Not a low mark. Zero. Publish on Thursday, not on the night I mark.