Blogger's Secret

Convince yourself that you can write about anything

If you know nothing about a topic when you start writing about it, use the writing process as a way to locate just enough of a toehold in the subject so that you can ask a good question that advances the understanding of the subject you are addressing.

The lazy blogger finds that someone else has done a thorough job of writing up an event or a subject, and tries to rewrite someone else's work as their own. The diligent blogger treats any account, no matter how detailed, as just the starting point for asking some question not previously anticipated. There is always some way to advance the story, even if it's only at the periphery.

What questions are left unasked? There is always one more thing to say. 

Book covers as a sign of expertise

When you are looking for art for your blog, look to collect book covers that are relevant to the things you are writing.  Cover art for books can be wonderful, and showing good taste not only in the works that you can cite but also the edition or version which appeals to you can be a nice touch.

Make sure that you link to the book in question in such a way that you can get your hands on a copy quickly if you need to refer to it - that might be a Google Books search, an Amazon link, some online digital repository or your local library, depending on which of them is best suited for rapid fulfillment of a portion that's relevant.

Image: Henry Petroski, The Book On The Bookshelf, Random House, 2000.  One available at the Ann Arbor District Library.

So what are you expert at anyway?

If you don't know what you are going to be expert in, or if you're not already an expert in something, it can take some time to get up to speed with a writing pace that gets you to the point where you discover that indeed you actually do know something.  And if you are an expert among your immediate circle of acquaintances but don't have a broad reach, the blog can be a way of placing your expertise out for view.

This particular blog, if read carefully, should convince the reader that I am an expert at helping people spin up from an idea that they want to get started writing to something that generates some other positive outcome, like presenting an invited talk, writing a book, or teaching a class.  That's my hope, at least.

The blog becomes a sign of your expertise, because everything you collect and produce with it is a sign that you know something about that narrow field of choice.  It also becomes the raw materials around which you shape a presentation, the draft chapters of a book, and the reading list for the class.  Some fraction of it is dross, that gets edited out in subsequent repetitions of the same observation until you get it right.

One of the ritual exercises in academic education is the process of writing a "review article", which does a comprehensive survey of the literature or the law on a specific issue.  The person who has written the review article has identified all of the relevant experts and all of the relevant issues. This University of Texas article gives some details.

seven things I want to remember to tell you about blogging

Here's a short list of topics to cover, with some pithy quotes and links to other things I've written (or need to write).

Seven things I want to remember to tell you about blogging, mostly things that people have told me along the way. The first thing (thing 0) is very easy, the Blogger's Secret: write about something twice a day for six months, and you will be an expert on it. That is easier said than done.

1. Find a voice. This is the hardest part of writing; you want to sound like a human being, not a press release and not wire service copy and not marketing copy. Be who you are, because things that are standardized are boring, boring, boring.

2. Spelling matters. Find one of the many ways to quickly spell check your posts before they go out. Find someone to read your posts after they go up and tell you if something doesn't look right or sound right. Newspapers are regularly ridiculed for even a single typo; you are not writing for print, but expect the same level of criticism from ex-journalists who love to edit copy.

3. Brainstorm a bunch of headlines. One of the best things I've ever done when starting a new blog on a new topic is to spend some time with pen and paper making a long list of titles that sound like they would make good entries, even if I didn't know at the time what I wanted to say or the details that I'd fill in.  As a blogger, you get a special grace period that journalists don't often get to ask questions that you don't know the answers to.

4.  Pointless numbered lists. If you can't write a big, long, 7000 word all-inclusive essay about something, don't worry.  One very reasonable format that can be overused but is often handy is the numbered list where you bounce around from one idea to another idea without needing to deal with telling a single story.  Readers will pick out the piece that's relevant and note that, and if the list is too long it still works for later reference or search.

5.  Cherish your comments. People will comment on your posts, if you are lucky. Even if you are not lucky, you can make your own luck by commenting on your own posts, adding in the pieces that you found later or that changed after the original post.  It always helps to tell people what you wrote, e.g. by sending a link via email or twitter, so that you can capture some of the reaction.

6.  Be interested.  Don't force yourself to write about something that doesn't interest you, just in the interests of filling up space.  If you don't have any new ideas on a topic, a perfectly good perspective on the world is to find some people who do and to quote from them (and link to them) to give you some material to work from.   Done well, even a simple list of interesting things that crossed your path will be worth sharing.

7.  Every blog should have its reader.  You are writing words for people to react to, and it may be easiest if this is new to you to fix one person in your mind who you are writing to or for, and write to them.

More reading, from people who have been through this before:

Missy Caulk on writing for real estate blogs.

Muphry's Law: if you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written.

Cory Doctorow's sage blogging advice for newbies, via Sarah Granger.

On metrics and pointless numbered bullshit.

Much more on comments.

Edited September 25, 2010, to omit some needless words, fix some HTML, and follow some of my own advice.

Be an expert by finding the experts

One way to be the expert is to find the experts.

You may not know everything about that new field you just got a job in.  The interview could very well have been bluffing your way through the tough questions making the hiring manager assume that of course you had that experience because of your background.  And yet then you start and need to know what you should know.

If you are fortunate enough to be inside an organization big enough to have its own intranet, and big enough to have to a world of people as co-workers bigger than what fits in a room comfortably, then there is probably some expert inside that group who can answer any plausible question to fit your knowledge gaps.  And if you are fortunate enough to be in an organization small enough where everyone fits in a room, there is bound to be someone outside the confines of that room who knows more than you do on some key aspect of the world that matters to both of you.

Building networks of expertise is key to professional growth and development, and regular, practiced, measured blogging is a part of that effort.  Have a place where you can write intelligently about the work you do without necessarily sharing trade secrets or company inside information.  This might be contributions to a standards body, a professional journal, or a trade association's publication, and increasingly these bodies are going to be online as opposed to completely offline.

Writing for a public that is solely made of interested professionals is a way to attract more professional input.  By sharing your insight and knowledge into some field, you can unearth others who contribute email or comments that are relevant.  Quoting from other experts can cause them to show up unexpectedly as their names appear in clipping services, and at times you'll find them being extremely helpful as you spin up a set of interests. 

If nothing else, your extended writing effort should seek to collect people as you go.  No doubt you'll be doing more in your life than writing, so some colleagues will appear from meetings or conferences, but you might expect that to get the broadest reach you'll want to have an intended audience that might be very small yet still very relevant for any given post you put together.  If you write for an audience of as few as just one other person who you want to read what you just wrote, you can collect over time each of those audiences of one into a body of expertise that can find out anything you might need or want to know on the subject.

Note that the person entering a new field has some leeway and slack that old-timers don't ever get and that people in mid-career have had burnt out of them too often.  As a new entrant into a new world you aren't expected to know the landscape, and the networks that form around you outside of the job are yours to define and defend.  If you bring to the field a perspective that is unusual - a comparative literature perspective on architecture, or an art historian's perspective on medical records standards - the inferences you draw will not be the same as everyone else. 

By spending time finding experts and expertise, reaching out to them and bringing them into your web, you fill some key role - it's a role that bloggers can play perhaps better than anyone else by virtue of the links and quotes that fill their writing.

I'm not sure you can be an expert on anything in six months

That's not that it's impossible to spin up quickly on some things, but the people who are really experts have many years of experience.  So perhaps the title of this blog is completely bogus.

On the other hand, blogging twice a day narrowly on some topic gets you 365 posts in six months.  If each of those was the first draft of one page of a book, you'd have a first draft of a book.  (A crappy book.)

It does seem plausible, though, that you could collect a representative sample of experts on any field within six months, and that by persistent blogging you would look like you belonged to that group.  You'd want to play the role that grad students seem to play when they are starting out - there's a big survey article that needs to be written, and a lot of research ground to cover to make sure that you haven't missed anything on the way to the next discovery.  Having six months worth of diligence (and all it would be was diligence, not brilliance) would be a good start.