When writing a blog post in WordPress, as I will demonstrate in the video screencast that accompanies this course in the Blogging curriculum at SMUG, you can format your text in many ways, similar to what you do in Microsoft Word. And the toolbar is much like what you are familiar with in Word.

You can make text bold, or italic (or you can even strikethrough, which is what you should do when correcting an error in your posts after they have been published, so it doesn’t look like you’re trying to rewrite history and avoid ‘fessing up to your mistakes.)

You can have

• Bulleted
• Otherwise known as
• Unordered lists

Or your lists can be numbered, with the

1. First point
2. Second point
3. And so on.

When you are publishing an extended quote from another site, such as this insightful paragraph from my post about HARO, you can use the block-quote function.

My first impression has been quite positive. HARO is a really neat service, with a site for sources to sign up to receive thrice-daily emails of media requests, and a separate page for journalists to enter their source requests. Peter goes through the journalist requests and categorizes them (actually, the journalists do the categorization themselves) and sends the email digests to the HARO, community which operates on five simple rules. And it’s free to both sources and journalists.

Of course, you can have your text be

left justified

centered, or

right justified.

Adding a link is easy too, which you do by highlighting text and then clicking the icon that looks like a chain link. And you unlink by selecting the link and clicking the icon that looks like a broken link.

If you show the “kitchen sink,” you can more easily have

Small

Medium, or

Large Headlines

And can have underscored text that is fully justified in different colors.

The options you have for special characters seem to lead almost to ∞

The “Add media” buttons let you add photos, video (including YouTube videos), music and even a PollDaddy poll. Unless you have purchased the 5 GB space upgrade, you won’t be able to upload video or audio files, although you can embed YouTube videos without paying.

Speaking of embedding YouTube videos, here’s the screencast I created as I was writing this post:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0u_ysmUy7oE]