How blogging has helped me: writing July 31, 2012
Posted by mareserinitatis in meta, writing.Tags: blogging, writing
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Blogging has been beneficial to me in so many ways I can’t even begin to count. At the very least, I have a place to complain about things to my heart’s content. This has, in turn, prevented me from driving my husband nuts. Therefore, we are still married.
Aside from that, there is the fact that I write a lot faster and more smoothly than I used to. Sitting down to write just about anything was difficult in high school. When in college, I spent a brief time as a journalism major, which got me used to writing. However, sitting down and doing it was still a chore and my progress could be sporadic and sluggish.
Now, however, I do a lot of composing in my head and that makes it easier to get things down on paper…at least the electronic kind. Admittedly, I have to go back and revise almost everything. On the other hand, it comes out a lot better than it used to. It also doesn’t seem like such a chore to edit. I’m so used to deleting paragraphs of my own writing on the blog that it doesn’t phase me to do it in more professional compositions.
There are down sides to blog writing. I have this tendency to uses ellipses unnecessarily, which I’m sure is a result of using them excessively on the blog. I tend to write in a stream of consciousness voice… I’m undoubtedly more conversational in some of my professional writing than necessary. However, I think I can forgive myself since I can now at least get the words out for later editing.
What about you? Have you found that blogging has made a big difference in your writing?
I also blog at Engineer Blogs, home away from home to some of the best engineering blogs.
Maybe now is not a great time for me to answer this because I’ve been sort of put off blogging by the whole weird drama that happened on my blog a few weeks ago.
But on a good day, it lets me get my more philosophical thoughts out there, which my hubby definitely doesn’t want to discuss in detail. It’s also a good memory book for me re: kid stuff. And yeah, it exercises the writing muscle, which makes it easier for me to crank out documentation at work.
Yes!
I find it helpful, because as a researcher who often needs to write up fairly technical reports for publication, I sometimes get stuck on the jargon and lose sight of how obscure some of the technical vocabulary is to some of the potential readers who would have trouble understanding the report if I didn’t rephrase. Blogging helps me practice talking about my research interests in colloquial English, relating the concepts using a common sense frame of reference instead of in terms of the obscure statistical procedures and analytical conventions involved, and just thinking about science without formulating my thoughts in jargon. I’m hoping it will pay off in my scientific writing, because jargon becomes so specialized that two people with PhDs in public health who did dissertations on different topics could end up failing to communicate with each other if they couldn’t get around their non-overlapping technical vocabularies, so it’s not just a matter of explaining things to non-experts, it’s an obstacle to communicating among experts or even within research teams trying to collaborate when people have different specialized backgrounds.