Hundevad Productions

Alex Reid, from Why Blog? Searching for Writing on the Web, writes up an enthralling script on what makes a good blog. He pulls wisdom from his own experience as a blog writer and from the peers he follows and has learned from over the years. First point he makes is that blogging is a way to develop as a writer. For him, he writes about technical writing in his professional field. For others, blogging may be a personal journal or it may be a way to communicate to a larger audience to share your stream of consciousness. Either way, blogging, or writing in general is a great way to become better at writing. Blogging specifically can help build your skills because it allows what a journal can’t, feedback. Your audience can give feedback and interact with your blog which helps build your writing capacity. What makes one write though? 

Alex Reid explains the struggle to write could be a cause of extrinsic motivations. In academia, writing can become a nuisance and even burdening because of extrinsic motivators, like due dates, format and length protocols, and subject matter that may not be keen to the individual. Intrinsic motivators are complementary to the writer and come from within, providing a sense of purpose, worth, and authority for the individual to write such subject matter. A blog is the perfect backdrop for the stage of writing, nothing but your own follies and whimsy, no external stressors, just the pure internal urgency to write that ticks away at your cranium. 

So you start a blog? Big whoop. Everybody has a blog. What’s yours about? Alex Reid dives a little deeper now into the rabbit hole of blogging. Blogging will help you become a better writer, but it is not just about how to write. A point Alex makes is not how to write, it’s how to identify writing – “how to identify the particular writing practices at work in the specific writing situations that you face as a writer,” (Reid). It’s an understanding that writing is not only how to write well thought-out paragraphs or write enthralling stories, it is important to understand the writing practices at work, i.e. being able to identify tropes, allusions, strategies, and tactics. Likewise, knowing how to write for an audience of biology majors, or to an audience about technical writing, and everyone in between. Each audience cohort will assume a different style so each should look and read a bit different.

Next, Alex points us to the elements of Autonomy: Task, Technique, Time, and Team. Each of these elements must be self defined for your own purpose, but simply the task is the objective you set out for blogging, (every day, every week, how much content, what kind of content), the technique Alex describes his own as “quasi-academic” style, again the technique is something you should define on your own, the ‘writing practices’ of your literature. Time and Team is when you post online, and who gets to see it. As a blogger, you will have control over these elements, which should start to become intrinsic motivators by themself over time. 

A true intrinsic motivator is something that engages you, something you can write about that is both a challenge and relaxing. Reid alludes to psychologist Csikszentmihalyi with the concept of ‘flow.’ The optimal experience of writing is when this flow state is obtained, doing a task that is both engaging and accomplishable, but neither frustrating nor anxious. One won’t flow every-time they write, but every-time they flow, good writing will appear. Therefore, it is a point Alex makes to choose content and technique for a blog that is truly engaging to the writer. This will ensure moments of great writing, engaging content, and a purpose for that content. 

Though to really become excellent at blogging, one should read blogs. Alex makes this point that by reading more and more blogs, information is collected on not just content, but how to interact with the audience, grow as a blogger, and discover things you didn’t know before about blogging. “But reading other bloggers with similar interests can help you in understanding the kinds of choices you might make and will also aid you in finding an audience for your work,” (Reid). 

Fifth point Alex makes is writers require exigencies to write, which is different from autonomy. Exigencies are requirements for writing, which may appear as intrinsic motivators. Reid describes them as urgency, purpose, authority, interest, and audience; the currency of the event, the purpose of the content, (inform, apply, persuade, etc.), what authority is held when writing, any conflict of interests or the reason for wanting to write, and an audience that will give feedback. These motivators often encourage people to write, and as the blogs become more consistent, we may not need these specific exigencies anymore, and discover new ones, and hopefully with more time, we will think less about reasons to write, and think more about just writing.

Title of Blog. Your blog needs a title and a website to bounce off of. URL or HTML or use numerous sites which can create a website for you for free. Your title should reflect on your content, and provide a cool catchphrase to let people know what you’re about. Alex Reid describes “The title of your blog and your URL will also be two of the main ways that your blog will be indexed by search engines,” (Reid). So choose wisely, you may change it over time, but best to keep it to one for consistency. alexreid.typepad.com is the website Reid created for himself, HundevadProductions.com is what I have created. Once you have a title and website, the next step Reid tells us is a theme. Layout is important for your website because it is how your viewers interact with your content. Are there too many links, not enough buttons, things are hidden, etc. Reid describes to us that knowing how you’re going to write will help with those decisions. Short frequent posts perhaps read better with a scroll layout like social media, so it can intuitive, fast, and stimulating. Long essays on your blog maybe deserve their own space, a sub-tab that brings viewers to a different layout and can pick their blogs like books at a library or your podcasts episodes like movies on Netlfix. Think about how frequent you will publish, images, videos, or a range of media being implemented on your website. These are points, Reid tells us, that will help signal what is important to you and your theme and layout. Three basic concepts of a blog, Reid points out, is banner, sidebar, and the main column text. 

The banner is your flag, your main point of communicating your content and your personality. This is usually where your title is, or a snippet of something you’ve created. The sidebar is usually the index where the viewer can engage, and direct themself across your platform and may provide links to other platforms like Twitter and Youtube. The main column text might be your latest blog. “As you will discover, the choices we make as bloggers reflect upon our identity and reputation,” (Reid). Art reflects life, and life reflects art. 

Final point of Reid is give yourself a month. A month is enough to dedicate a good amount of quality posts, and will reflect is you enjoyed it or not. “The main task of every blogger is to seek out interesting topics and write posts about them,” (Reid). Of course, most importantly is just to write. Write, and good things will happen. 

References: 

Reid, Alex. Why Blog? Searching for Writing on the Web. Volume 2. http://writingspaces.org/essays.