If you use MS Word etc.

First, I use Microsoft's excellent Office suite, especially Word, which is a powerful word processing program. It is far more sophisticated than Google Docs and leaves Blogger for dead when it comes to the tools on offer. In other classes I regularly teach, I use Word to prepare and publish materials for students to use, for example, a few days ago (March 20, 2018) I prepared a reading and a couple of sets of discussion questions (set 1; set 2) in Word. And when I teach research writing, the students in that class use Word because research writing does require tools that are either not available or not so powerful as those in Google Docs. However, we don't need to add line numbers in our work, and we can get by without cross-references and the like, so for our academic writing, Google Docs is perfectly adequate, and being free is considerably cheaper than the Microsoft products.

In the case of blogging, there is even less need for sophisticated word processing tools. The purpose of the blog is to practice writing fluently, to hold a discussion where the focus is on using English to discuss ideas in a style appropriate to a academic context, but it is not academic writing. This is why we:

• do not indent the first lines of paragraphs
• do not have hanging first lines in reference citations 

In our blog writing, we use a level of formality similar to that of Ali K. and Paul S. in the discussion board on page 9 of Skillful (Bixby & Scanlon, 2013), with a more strictly academic style in the summary paragraph and the reference citation, which nonetheless is modified to fit the formatting tools that blogs and similar online discussion boards offer. 

The problem with MS Word and similar programs 

Whilst Microsoft Word, Libre Office and similar programs, even Google Docs, are powerful writing tools, they work by adding a lot of formatting to the written text. This becomes a problem when that text is copied and pasted elsewhere, for example into a post in this blog: the formatting can be copied and pasted along with the words. In some cases, this not only leads to weird fonts and other distracting formatting in the post it was pasted into, but can infect the entire blog, which means I have to sift through one by one to discover and cure the infection using Bloggers "Remove formatting" tool. 

 

Therefore 

Thus, in order to keep the same simple format for readers across all of our blog posts, I suggest that 

• you write directly here in the blog. 

You can save your work as a draft until you are ready to publish, and Blogger helpfully underlines in red where it thhinks you have made a simple spelling or other typing mistake. But again, writing on a discussion board is not formal academic writing, so a few small typing mistakes, especially in comments, are expected. I'm sure you've already seen some that I've made, and noticed after I'd hit the "Publish" button. 

Alternatives

• If you do prefer to work in MS Word or another program and then copy and paste into the blog, the best practice is to first paste your work into Windows Notepad, which will delete all of the formatting, and then copy and paste from there into the blog.
   
• Alternatively, Google Chrome lets you right click and choose "Paste as plain text", which also deletes any unwanted formatting.
   
• At the very least, use Bloggers "Remove formatting" tool when you copy and paste into a post. 

 

Reference 

• Bixby, J. & Scanlon, J. (2013). Skillful Reading & Writing, Student's Book 3. Oxford: Macmillan Education