Entries Tagged 'Writing' ↓

There’s a common knowledge story kicked around about “The Triple Filters Test.” Sometimes it involves Socrates and other times it involves an Arab scholar, but the truth of the story is the same. Here it is:

In ancient Greece, Socrates was reputed to hold knowledge in high esteem.

One day an acquaintance met the great philosopher and said, “Do you know what I just heard about your friend?”

Hold on a minute,” Socrates replied. “Before telling me anything, I’d like you to pass a little test. It’s called the Triple Filter Test.”

Triple filter?”

That’s right,” Socrates continued. “Before you talk to me about my friend, it might be a good idea to take a moment and filter what you’re going to say. That’s why I call it the triple filter test.

The first filter is TRUTH. Have you made absolutely sure that what you are about to tell me is true?”

No,” the man said, “actually I just heard about it and…”

All right,” said Socrates. “So you don’t really know if it’s true or not. Now let’s try the second filter, the filter of GOODNESS. Is what you are about to tell me about my friend something good?”

No, on the contrary…”

So,” Socrates continued, “you want to tell me something bad about him, but you’re not certain it’s true. You may still pass the test though, because there’s one filter left: the filter of USEFULNESS. Is what you want to tell me about my friend going to be useful to me?”

No, not really.”

Well,” concluded Socrates, “if what you want to tell me is neither true nor good nor even useful, why tell it to me at all?”

Most people leave it at that and assume that the story is just about the information we spread. The real truth behind it, however, is about the information we seek and create.

Imagine how different the world would be if we only chose to seek or create information that was true, good, or useful. Those of you who have been reading this blog for a bit can probably figure out that it’s the test that I’ve been using the whole time.

If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to my feed, commenting, or sharing it on one of the sites below. Thanks for sharing your time with me, and I appreciate your support!

This article was featured in The Fourth Edition of the Carnival of Improving Life.

Photo credit: Lauren

I’m trying to save all of my metablogging posts ’til Friday, since if I wrote about all the stuff related to blogging that I’m thinking about, I’d probably write as much about blogging as I do anything else. That said, we’re off!

Michelle at Bloggrrl wrote today about something that has been on my mind more and more recently. Basically, it’s about the use of our blogs and who should be the primary focus.
Continue reading →

I had a forehead slap moment last Tuesday when I was proofreading a letter my wife had written to a military officer. She’s doing some research on families of Army National Guardsmen who have deployed, and she needed to write a letter to an officer to keep the research on track. She asked me to proofread it because I can put on the military hat and look at her writing through the eyes of the person she was writing for.

So I put on the hat and took a quick look at the message. She wrote it in Mail.app, and all I initially saw was about 10 paragraphs composed of four or five long sentences. No headings, no sub-bullets…just a lot of paragraphs and a lot of big words. The alarms went off, because I knew there was no way in hell that her letter was going to be read thoroughly. It was just too unapproachable for her audience, and furthermore, he likely would have been reading it on a Crackberry.

I begin to restructure the message a bit, and noticed something very interesting: the key point to be gleaned from a paragraph was at the bottom of the paragraph. I thought about it a bit more, and it dawned on me: that’s why people have trouble reading academic writing.

Look at some of the better posts you’ve read online recently and see how they flow. They generally start with a key idea at the head and have a few sentences that flesh that idea out. Lists are paradigmatic of this structure; an item is introduced and qualified, an item is introduced and qualified, rinse and repeat. Slap an introductory paragraph (which starts with the key idea of the post) and a concluding paragraph (which may still start with the key idea of the post) and you have the post structure that makes up 75% of most blogs, this one included.

Academic writing is usually just the opposite of that structure. We’ll start with a transition sentence that gets the reader from the previous paragraph into the one we’re currently on. We’ll spend a few sentences constructing and qualifying the idea and finish the paragraph with the topic sentence. Non-academic paragraph structure descends from key ideas to their supporting ideas, whereas academic paragraph ascends from supporting ideas to the key idea. So, when people feel like they have to wade through an entire paragraph to get a point in academic writing, it’s because, in fact, they do have to wade through the entire paragraph to get to the point.

For a case in point, look at the structure of the following paragraph:

Aquinas?s motivation for advancing the Doctrine of Double Effect comes from his absolutist ethical perspective. One of the counter-intuitive results of absolutist ethical systems, in general, is that they deem as impermissible acts that many reasonable people find intuitively permissible. If one is never allowed to harm another person, then an agent cannot defend herself in cases where she is threatened, despite the folk intuition that people are morally permitted to defend themselves when they are unjustly threatened. Aquinas is attempting to make room for folk intuition while still holding onto the idea that it?s wrong to harm people–so he moves the discussion from what one does to what one intends to do. So, it turns out for Aquinas that the general moral prohibition against harming other people is, at best, misstated; the general moral prohibition should be against intentionally harming other people, and his theory attempts to flesh out conditions for something counting as an intentional harm.

This paragraph is an excerpt from one of my more readable philosophical essays. You can probably figure out that the paragraph before this one talks about Aquinas’s absolutist ethical perspective. The sentences in between are run-ups to the final point that “the general moral prohibition [against harming people] should be against intentionally harming other people.”

I have looked through a few representative samples of academic writing and my writing is not idiosyncratic in structure. It’s a product of the academic culture, and we train people to write this way and reinforce that training through the academic rewards structure.

I worry, though, that we are doing them a disservice, for we are training and rewarding a writing style that doesn’t translate well outside of our ivory towers. Furthermore, we may be doing ourselves a disservice, since we then have to struggle with our own writing once we’re out of the academic bubble.

It took me awhile last week to translate my wife’s letter. (I dropped it into a word processor to save it as a PDF, and it wound up being 2.5 pages, single-spaced). In the end, we compromised and just bolded the key idea, since there was really no way to restructure her letter without a massive rewrite. The ironic thing about the letter was that it was a very, very well written letter…if it were going to an academic audience.

Dustin posted an article about Personal Productivity in the 21st Century over at Lifehack. I was going to comment on it on the blog, but my commentary got a bit long, so I decided a trackback would be better suited.

As I blog more and more and try to get more traffic, the “cash value” of the ideas I’m thinking or writing about becomes more and more of a nagging question, and, honestly, that scares me. Some things that we write and think about just shouldn’t be monetized or driven by the market. So I get stuck on this one: I hope this blog provides genuinely valuable content to people, yet at the same time I sometimes just want this blog to be about the playing with ideas.

The greatest issue I have with my own personal productivity is not getting things done, but rather figuring out which muses to chase and which to let go. Dustin’s comment about rigid scheduling vs. park sitting rang rather true on this one, because if I were to plan my day down to the 15 minute interval, I’m rather sure that some of the most creative and important ideas that I would have would die on the petard of the schedule. Yet, if I don’t stick to a somewhat realistic schedule, I generate more open projects that I’ll never close.

Lastly, when you shift from being an hourly or salary worker to a knowledge worker, there comes a point in which it’s hard to figure out what your time is worth. On some days, when the muses or flow is with me, one hour of writing, brainstorming, or idea generating can equate to days or weeks of thinking. A further complication, related to the first issue, is that it becomes hard to determine whether the process of generating ideas just to generate ideas has a certain value or whether it’s the generating of relevant, useful ideas that is valuable.

I’m going to run into this problem much more here in the next few months when I take a full-time Guard job for a while. The reason I will likely be hired for it is because of my creative, out-of-the-box but insanely efficient skillset; I’m a bit unorthodox by military standards, but I’m known to generate excellent products (this is not what I think about the products, but rather what my colleagues and superiors think about what I create). But I’m not sure that they’re ready for me to tell them that I’m going to need time to sit outside on a park bench so that I can come up with the product that they want. They want the product, but they don’t necessarily like the way that I come up with the product. Oh, that I live in so many different worlds!

If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to my feed or submitting it to Digg, StumbleUpon, or some of the other social networks. I appreciate your time and support.

photo credit: redjar
Yesterday, The Wife and I went ice skating. Now, being poor and from the South, I never learned to ice skate as a kid, and this was something like the third time I’ve been. Needless to say, I looked like a very large, uncoordinated oaf sliding on marbles. After we had been skating for about an hour, my wife noticed that I had worked up a nice sweat, like I had been running for an hour. Because I had been running for an hour.

She said “You’re making it way hard than it needs to be; stop fighting it.” And it dawned on me–that’s what we do in life, generally: We fight things we shouldn’t and it makes our life harder.

7 Things We Fight That Makes Life Harder

Love

Some of us are lucky enough to meet people that we’re really compatible with and who make us happy. Unfortunately, some of us aren’t able to let ourselves love those people, and we instead push them away. We’re afraid to commit ourselves to that one person, afraid that they’ll reject us, worried that there may be somebody better out there, afraid that the timings’ not right…in short, we come up with a long list of reasons to fight the natural inclination to love and be loved. And life is harder without someone to snuggle up to at the end of the day.

Making new friends

Similar to the first. Again, we come up with a long list of reasons: they’re co-workers, he’s too hot, they’re artsy, she eats at Taco Bell, he wears Birkenstocks with socks…all belying the fact that we enjoy their company and we feel better around them.

Waking Up

The alarm clock goes off. We slap the snooze button. It goes off again. We slap snooze the snooze button. Rinse and repeat, until we’re just on time to be running really behind. Most of us know as we’re assaulting our electronic timepieces that we’ll be happier if we get up, but we still use the alarm clock as a dummy to perfect our pimp technique. And we spend the rest of the day running behind. (Need help with this one?: consider reading this.)

Working

Ever dread going to work only to figure out that once you’re there, it’s not as bad as you made it? That’s almost every day for me. Honestly, I have all different types of work that I do, but I sometimes dread doing the work that I actually enjoy. Life would be a whole lot easier if we just sat down and did our daily tasks. It’s really as simple as this:

• If you’re a writer, write. (Ever heard of bricklayers’ block?)
• If you’re a musician, play.
• If you’re a songwriter, write songs.
• If you’re a coder, code.
• If you’re a blogger, blog.
• If you’re a philosopher, flip burgers.

Why do so many of us “smart people” ride the short bus on this one?

Creativity

Somewhere between puberty and adulthood we “forget” how to be creative (I blame junior high). We become pragmatic and start to think that all ideas have to produce something. We fear that our ideas will be stupid. We worry what others will think about our ideas. Again, we come up with a whole list of ways to stifle ourselves and deny part of our nature. For a more extended discussion of this, check this out. The irony here is that we fight being creative only to complain about not being creative.

Anger

My wife is really prone to this one. I’ll do something stupid or inconsiderate (usually repeatedly and without me being aware of it) and said stupidity will get her angry with me. But, after she’s already angry with me, she’ll make herself stay mad at me, despite the fact that we’ve already talked about it and I’ve already both apologized profusely and massaged her feet. Part of her really wants to not be mad, and the other part wants to stay mad so that I don’t get off so easy. After a while, she realizes that she’s fighting much harder to stay mad at me rather than just letting it go.

Usually, the energy that we spend staying angry with people is wasted. Sometimes we have legitimate reasons to stay angry with people, but most of the time we fight letting it go, even though we’d be happier by doing so.

Family

In my experience, fighting with family gets you nowhere and generally makes life harder. I’m not talking about kids fighting over the TV; rather, I’m talking about adults that continually spat with their sibs and parents. The bottomline on this one is this: you’re either going to spend time with them or you’re not. If you decide you’re going to spend time with them, then, at a certain point, it’s best just to let it go, since it’s not likely that you’ll get anywhere and you’ll still be sitting there at Thanksgiving passing rolls to them. If you’re not going to spend time with them, then it’s best not to argue with them about it, since there’s really no point.

There’s a weird paradox here: we don’t really fight with and try to change our friends because we recognize that they’re their own persons and you can’t change people after a certain age. Yet we somehow think that we can change family members, even though they’re their own persons and you can’t change people after a certain age.

If you’re fighting with family, ask yourself whether, at the end of the day, you’re going to be sitting at the dinner table with them during the holidays. If you are, then best to stop fighting about it and move on. If you’re not, then best to stop fighting about it and move on. Yes, I recognize that I repeated myself at least twice on that one, but people get stuck on this one and make their life way harder than it needs to be.

If you’ve got the type of family that never fights about stuff, then (a) are you all being honest with each other?, and (b) can I come over during the holidays?

My ice skating experience would have been far less exhausting, and probably more enjoyable, had I stopped fighting the ice and actually skated, rather than ice running. And life is much easier, and more enjoyable, if we stop fighting the things we shouldn’t.
photo credit: redjar

Some bloggers spend a long time writing into the void when they first get their site up and going. They forget that people aren’t searching for them; rather, they’re searching for content. And it’s hard to get your content read at the beginning because, realistically, other bloggers who are more established are already saying what you’re trying to say.

So, beginning bloggers write, and write, and write, and it seems like their work is just going into the dark void. Until the day when people start reading their blog. Even better, they start commenting on their blog.

This blog has just passed a few milestones on this front. I’ve had three commenters post here in the last few days, all important to me for different reasons:

• Michelle, author of the wildly creative and hilarious Bloggrrl, commented on 10 Tips to Help You Fail at Monetizing Your Blog. I’ve followed Michelle’s blog for quite some time and consider her a senior, successful blogger, so to have someone I read everyday write back with a positive comment means a lot. Thanks, Michelle!
• Lucia from Pandora responded to Three Reasons Why I Like Pandora and thanked me for writing it. Sure, it only took her a few seconds, and she probably just backtraced my post, but it’s still nice when people reciprocate. On an additional note, it shows that somewhere, somehow my posts are starting to be noticed by the almighty Google. Thanks for the note, Lucia!
• Garuchel wrote a short comment saying “Very Nice, Thanks.” Now, the reason I don’t list his website is that it seems to be spam and have gotten through Akismet. So Garuchel, if you’re a real person, thanks for the comment. If not, then thanks for getting me all excited for nothing. That’ll teach me to get a big head!

I’ve checked feedburner and noticed that I have 6 subscribers, which means that there are five other people potentially interested in what I’m writing about (I subscribe to my own RSS to QC it). I appreciate your interest, too, and appreciate the time you’ve invested in reading this blog; please drop me a line about what you’re interested in reading so that this blog becomes more of a discussion than a spouting.

Thanks for shedding some light into the darkness and letting me know that I’m not just writing into the void.

[Abstract: This post provides tips to help you fail at monetizing your blog. It could also be seen as a list of things for you not to do if you want to succeed at blogging, but I have very little experience with that, so I'm sticking to what I know.)

I really wish I had the experience to tell you how to succeed at monetizing your blog. There are many different approaches to succeeding, all well documented and explained by Steve Pavlina and Darren Rowse, to name a few bloggers. However, I can give you tips on how to fail at monetizing your blog, seeing as I’ve done a pretty decent job on that front. What follows, in no particular order, is my Top Ten Tips to Help You Fail at Monetizing Your blog.

Pick a crappy domain name

Maybe not the best tip, but a pretty good one, is to pick a crappy domain name and theme. Yes, domain names and themes can be easily separated, but generally non-eponymous domain names are chosen due to their themes. For a good example of a bad domain name, consider this blog’s name: www.academicppd.com. It tells the reader almost no information about what it’s about, unless the reader knows that PPD stands for “Personal Productivity and Development.” For a reader to find and remember this site, they’d have to already be looking for it or already know what PPD stands for–given that I’ve got three readers, with two of them being my wife and my mom, it’s not likely that they’ll be looking for me. (Sadly, this domain name is the second that I’ve chosen, with the first being www.lifemanagementforacademics.com–perhaps I didn’t do such a great job at failing on the first go-round so I needed to do it again.)

Picking a crappy domain name is a good way to set yourself up for failure, so if that’s your goal, put that on the ToDo List.

Write posts no one cares about

I knew off the bat that writing about philosophy would not be the thing to do if I wanted to monetize this blog. After all, no one cares, and hence no reads, about philosophy. But, I thought, people care about time management and productivity! And, what’s more, academics should care about time management, given how pressed for time we are.

It took a while to dawn on me that academics generally don’t care about time management, and those few that do already read other sites that are better established than this one. Given that the site is pitched to academics, everyone else has a tendency to run off, assuming that the content doesn’t apply to them. Those brave few that do stay are then subjected to many forms of textual torture (see the next Tips #4 and #6), so that if they were inclined to stay in read, they quickly meet their threshold of pain and move on.

So, while some of my content can be pretty good, it turns out that no one cares to read it (due to my excellent domain name picking ability). To make matters worse, I often write posts such as The Three DIfferent Types of Digital Residents and On the Uncertainty of Life, which almost no one cares about.

Continually writing about stuff that no one cares about is an excellent opportunity to waste your time at monetizing your blog. So, next time your gut tells you that you’re writing about something that no one cares about it, and if you instead regard your blog as intellectual masturbation and you’re not afraid of masturbating too much, then, by all means, pay no heed to it and keep right on a-writing.

Write about many different topics without a good reason for doing it

The best blogs spend time developing a certain niche of topics and then continue to post content related to that niche. Their readers know what to expect when reading a new post, and often find their blogs by wanting to know more about something related to that niche.

To ensure that you fail, buck that mold and write about all sorts of topics. If something comes to you, write and post it! Be damned before you think about whether the particular post fits in with your theme or whether it’s something your readers would find the content valuable.

As you’ve probably guessed, I can point you to excellent examples of this without you ever having to leave this blog. I’ve written about music, personal finance, time management, philosophy (see Tip #2), rest, writing, blogging, and whatever else came to me. I figure it’s like a box of Crackerjacks, and the anticipation is figuring out what random prize you’ll get. Everyone loves surprises, but follow this tip and there’ll be no surprise when your attempt to monetize your blog fails.

Write long posts rather than splitting them up

Time is short, and people who spend time surfing the web are especially stingy with their time. Sure, you may think that getting out your entire idea in one posts makes the most logical sense–but your readers have to wade through a lot of words to figure that out. While no one likes to read a paragraph post and have to wait the next day to read the next paragraph, just a few more like to read long posts when those posts can be byte-sized and swallowed in multiple sittings.

For excellent examples on how to write really long posts, consider reading these two gems:Buying And Choosing an Instrument and The Three DIfferent Types of Digital Residents. Note that the second post violates this tip, Tip #2, and Tip #6; triple failure points! Granted, I don’t think it could have been split up easily, but it still probably never should have been written if I were looking to monetize this blog.

Splitting up long posts not only makes your posts more surfer-friendly, but also increases your post frequency, both of which tend to make more successful blogs. But that’s not your goal, so write away, my failure bound friend!

Fill your writing with bad grammar and typos

Sure, writing on the internet is different than submitting academic papers (as I’ve quite often failed to remember). There is, however, a general agreement that internet content still has to have acceptably well-structured sentences and contain relatively few typos and misspelled words. While there are very few people that are going to get picky about the rules of English writing, horribly bad writing is enough to irritate and frustrate the most charitable of readers.

(Sidebar: Leetspeak is becoming more and more accepted on the internet as an acceptable mode of writing. Generally, dropping in a few words from leetspeak does not annoy most readers. However, reading a post that looks as if it was written through text messages or video games can be very frustrating for a reader that came to your site looking for information.)

Your writing abilities are wicked, however, as your many B-’s from your 10th grade composition teacher demonstrates. You don’t need a spell checker, and subject-verb agreement is one of those hokey problems of the past. Taking the time to reread your writing is just too much to demand, and you know that what comes out the first time is write, because, well, you pwn and those that think otherwise are just snooty.

Go ahead, disregard the accepted rules of Internet writing and do your own thing. The reader will eventually figure out what you’re saying, and they’ll be all too happy with you and will reward you with many clicks on your ads. You’re not trying to make money off of your blog anyways, so who cares if people can’t figure out what you’re trying to say?

Write in a way that isn’t web friendly

Websurfers and bloggers, as I’ve already alluded to, are stingy with their time. In general, they want to get as much content from you in as little time as possible. They have become used to people helping them read their content by making the content scannable.

Most blogs and web content in general is full of bullets, emphasized words, and bolded words to point the reader to important points and to keep them moving along. But, remember, you’re not wanting to follow this successful trend–you’re wanting to go your own way and do your own thing. Go ahead, omit the bullets and other techniques, and confound your readers in massive mire of words. They’re sure to stick around and return to visit, because, after all, everyone likes a challenge, right?

I’ve already referred you to some other examples of posts written in a web-unfriendly manner, but look to the previous posts in case you need a deeper case study.

Write infrequently

Should you gain readers who aren’t legally and financially related to you, you’ll want to defy the common trends about writing somewhat frequently and on a somewhat regular schedule. I mean, if they’ve already taken the time to read some of your stuff, they’ll wait until you decide to write something else and come back and read it, right?

You’ll get bonus points if you spread your posts out between a few months and then write a post everyday, only to take a few more months off. For a great example of this, I’ll point you to none other than this very blog (surprise!). Notice the lack of posting for about six months and then the relatively high frequency as of late.

Spend a lot of time fidgeting with the site layout and features rather than making good content

It has been proven over and over again that, on the web, Content is King. The best bloggers focus on content and allow their content to do the work for them. Their readers return, day in and day out, because they know that they’ll be reading good content along the lines of something their interested in (see the tip above.)

You’re not going to go this route though, because you want your site to bling, baby. It just has to be this particular color…and what does that plug-in do…and, ooh, this new blogging software just came out…and maybe you need a forum…and, gee, what song do you need to be played in the background…and what does your logo need to look like? Nevermind that you only have two posts, with one of them being your Hey World! post. Posts can come later, but style…now’s the only time to work on that.

Whereas most successful bloggers endeavor provide the cake (content) for their readers, you don’t want to be successful, so just keep on working on that icing.

Don’t take yourself and your content seriously

People who are successful at monetizing their blogs have a business-minded perspective. They approach their content, their layout, their themes, and their whole blogging effort as a serious way to bring in revenue. For them, blogging is not an idle past-time–it is a day-to-day endeavor that requires scheduling, planning, and execution.

Not only do they take their blogs seriously, they take themselves seriously. They are writing to provide informative, quality content to their readers from the voice of a serious, experienced, and credible writer. This translates through to their writing and content, and readers continue to return to their site, and continue to develop trust, because they believe the writer is a serious, experienced person on the topic they are interested in.

You, on the other hand, don’t want to succeed at blogging, so you write with a half-ass approached and disregard the persona you are projecting. Whereas they’re branding themselves as a source of information, you will be brand yourself as someone who is flippantly creating content for purposes unknown to anyone including yourself. Your approach to blogging needs to be quite casual–write when something hits you when you have free time.

In short, leave it to your readers to figure out why they should take you and your blog seriously and you’re well along on the road to failure.

Make your readers fight around your ads or monetization schemes

Most readers get frustrated quickly when they hit a blog and have to jump through the hurdles of ads to read the content on the site. Bouncing ads, ads that flicker, make noise, cause pop-ups, and all the other things that they do do those things for the purpose of distracting the readers’ attention. What they’re distracting the attention from is the content of the site, which is why the reader showed up at the site in the first place.

You, however, have the reader figured out. Rather than coming to your site for quality content, you know that they really came to your website to click on ads. Surely they’re tired of reading posts that require little effort and instead need to do some visual gymnastics–their eyes need to jump here, zig-zag there, avoid this spot–like you’ve set up a visual obstacle course with the goal being to make it to the end of the post and remember anything you’ve read.

The single best way to do this is make ads stick to the center of your content so that the reader has to read around the ads. Remember, what you want them to remember about your blog is having to fight around your ads, so next time their eyes need a work-out, they’ll come by and visit you.

I could go back and fix some of the bad posts that I referenced, but my goal throughout this post is to give you excellent examples to copy in your own endeavor to fail at monetizing your blog. Please, if you view this post and want to help your friends succeed at failing to monetize their blogs, shoot them the link to this post. Conversely, if your friends need a checkup to see how their blog stacks up, let them know that I’ve got a checklist for them to go down.

[Abstract: This brief post discusses some of the changes to this blog.]

After several hours of tinkering with CSS code and trying to figure out where my titles went, I have completed an update to the look of APPD. I have also reinstalled some new plugins.

New Look

• Changed the font to be bigger and more readable–Century Schoolbook makes a great paper font for real paper, but it’s not the most reader friendly online.
• Changed the tannish look of the background to white. The original intent was to make the site look like you were reading a paper, but that look didn’t work so well.
• Numerous other color optimizations focused mainly on readability.

New Features

• Added Tag-this plug-in to help with tagging the articles. Please help me out with tagging my posts, as this is something that I have trouble doing. I still get tags and categories mixed up.
• Added Star-rating of posts to see what people are actually interested in. My past two posts have been muses primarily for me, but I’m much more interested in writing stuff that people want to read. At least, I mostly am.
• Added other under the hood plug-ins to help with maintenance and faster reading and loading. One of these days I’ll blog about what plugins I use, as that seems to be the thing to do.

I’ll also try to keep up with the abstracts of my posts so that you know what you’re getting into. My last post was a long one and it seemed at least courteous to let you know what you were getting into.

If you like or dislike some of the changes, please let me know, if nothing else so that I don’t fill like I’m writing out into the void.

I’ve fallen off of blogging for a long (long) time for primary reason that I spent way too much time in front of the computer and not enough time doing things that I enjoy much more.

Reasons I stopped blogging:

• Too much time in front of computer
• Not enough time to write about what I wanted to write about
• Having a hard time taking myself and my project seriously–why should anybody read what I’ve been writing?
• Focused probably too much on making money from it rather than just enjoying writing
• Having far too many things to write about and trying to keep blog focused
• Fussy computer software that I spent more time fighting and fussing with than actually writing–never found a good solution that allowed the muse to pour out

Some things have changed here recently that perhaps may change what I do:

1. I need to focus on writing, which is part of what made me pick up blogging in general. My original goal was just to write something everyday, and I thought that working on that would make is such that I would work on the writing I should be working on. Here lately I’ve been focusing more on just writing something everyday, and, voila, I’m now more keen on writing.
2. I’ve been reading more of Dave Seah’s blog. I’ve thought about responding to some of his posts individually, and I thought, why not just make the post available for everyone?
3. I’ve still had a hard time taking myself seriously, and I think, in retrospect, that I was relating taking myself seriously with making money off of the blog. Why should someone read and play for what I’m writing? At this point, I’m not focused on making money (I’ve already paid for the service, and I don’t like using blogspot for some reason; not sure why, but why fight it when I’ve already paid for the service?). The writing is for me (see point 1 above) and for those that may be interested already. I’ve changed from writing for everybody to writing for me and people I’m responding to.
4. I’m thinking of just changing the blog to just be able to write about whatever I feel like. If I can’t glue it all together, tough. I’d rather let the muses run than try to keep them corralled in a particular pen with a price tag.
5. I’m not really fighting with software anymore. I’ve gotten rather good at using Textmate (broke down and bought it) for rough writing and then dropping the product in whatever end software that’s relevant to what I’m doing. Since I can brainstorm better in Textmate, it let’s the muses run, and I can focus on polish later.

The meta-change that summarizes all of those is just a change in perspective. Rather than trying to monetize, advertise, and so on, I’m just writing and letting the rest happen. Should things need to change, then so be it. For now, it’s write for me and a few others, share with others, and be flexible. Let’s see if the rest falls into place.

Dustin over at Lifehack wrote a nice post for students on how to improve their writing. Last night I was going through the first round of this with my students, as well. The point I found most insightful was the following:

Start in the middle. One of the biggest problems facing writers of all kinds is figuring out how to start. Rather than staring at a blank screen until it?s burned into your retinas trying to think of something awe-inspiring and profound to open your paper with, skip the introduction and jump in at paragraph two. You can always come back and write another paragraph at the top when you?re done ? but then again, you might find you don?t need to. As it turns out, the first paragraph or so are usually the weakest, as we use them to warm up to our topic rather than to do any useful work.

Students often fret entirely too much about their introduction when they’re trying to write and get a block. The last thing that most procrastinators need is an addition thing to keep them from writing. My advice to my students is very much along the same lines: write out your thesis and dive into the body of your paper. If you seem to have shown something different than what your thesis stated, change your thesis instead of the body of your paper. The paper being turned in isn’t like a novel you’re being paid to write along a certain story line…you can change your mind.
Get the first draft out, read it, and then compose your introduction. By doing so, you’re sure that your introduction actually matches the rest of the paper without trying to make the rest of the paper match your introduction. Revise, rinse, and repeat.