Just a few short months ago, I jumped into the blogging arena somewhat reluctantly. I knew blogging was an increasingly popular way to information share, but I pondered exactly what I had, or even wanted to offer. There are thousands of blogs out there covering almost every topic. I had some ideas on the overall theme but I needed to be more specific. Finding a distinct direction was my initial goal. So I did some research and found some great articles on blogging. This one on "how to be interesting" really helped narrow my focus. I decided that my interest and further exploration in technical communication would be a good start. The constant development of new technologies, combined with their sizeable challenges, would offer limitless topics for a theme. I hoped to offer readers awareness and clarification in the advances that are being made with Web 2.0 capabilities. The new developments in this field are affecting personal and professional communication in countless ways.
So once I decided the theme of my blog, I then had to navigate the technical aspects of setting it up. Blogger made this process pretty simple. Although, adding a banner and customization was more of a challenge (good material for another post).
Then came the actual writing part. This proved to be the most challenging (and still is). For me, providing useful information to readers and using a conversational tone to relate my message has been difficult. Most of my educational communication experience has been the opposite, professional and to the point. I have made some progress in this area but will continue to work on it.
In addition, formulating posts proved to be extremely time-consuming. Some of my first posts required at least six hours of writing and rewriting. I only wanted to publish my best efforts. I also started adding images and links to my make my posts more interesting. Technically, this took practice but I became much more competent at this over time.
My blog has evolved over these past few months but there is still work to be done. My writing has improved but there is always room for growth. I would also like to track readers and encourage followers. I just started using tag labels for my posts which should at least help with others finding my blog. It's a start. One thing I learned through blogging is that you have to start somewhere.
image from istock photo
I do not follow authors who claim writing is easy. That means her writing is either hard to understand or boring or both. I admire your frankness. I have been blogging constantly for a couple months and found out one way to find good writing material is to keep pushing my boundary by taking in new information. I write about technical communication too but try not to care too much about whether I am within my topic or not. As long as I am aware that writing ultimately belongs to the reader I will try to incorporate some technical communication stuff and it works. Also putting some part of my private life's aspect (carefully) works too, I think. All these stuff I learned from Penelope Trunk, my favorite blogger.
ReplyDeleteGood advice. Thank you. I read Penelope Trunk when I first started blogging. I have to make time to read more blogs. Perhaps I will learn a thing or two and then blogging may become a bit easier for me.
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