I remember becoming aware of blogs when I was in college; before that time, I hadn’t really spent any time online at all. In my initial judgment, I saw blogs as ongoing egotistical opinion articles—basically newspapers with only an editorial section. I didn’t have much motivation to be involved with them at any level.

Having been a blogger for nearly a year and a half has changed my opinion. Of course I have realized that blogs aren’t just people’s opinions on what’s going on in the news.

I admit that there’s a self-serving aspect to blogging. If you blog, you should write for yourself to a large degree. I usually write about whatever aspect of tech comm or writing crosses my mind, and I just have that urge to write about it. It’s a bit strange that I want to write in my spare time about what I think about at work, but there you have it. (If I want to write in this space but not about writing itself, I write a Tale.)

More than writing just to write, though, is the practice. My blog gives me an incentive to write something other than software documentation throughout the week (although occasionally there’s some of that here, too). It lets me write in my own voice rather than the voice of the style guide. And, like singing, as I practice using my literary voice, it has greater potential to please the ears and project greater distances. And I’m not good at projecting over distances in any sense.

Blogging is also a way for me to create content that I can be proud of. There’s just something satisfying with thinking that I’ve written 211 posts. Some of them I really like, too. I can publish my own words. Being published is a writer’s goal, and blogging gives me the means to that end. And if nothing else, it’s a personal reference, a repository of experience and knowledge, and I can go back to look things up if I feel the need. It could also be a reference for members of the user education team at work.

One of the attractions of blogging is that there’s no need to write more than a few hundred words. Trying to sit down for some larger writing project can be intimidating. But a blog doesn’t require as much commitment. It’s digestible, both for the writer and for the audience. I can fit it in my schedule fairly easily and say something meaningful (I hope) in one sitting.

That kind of exercise is good for the professional life, come to think of it. It has been suggested that Twitter can help you be a better technical writer. I think blogging can help do the same thing because it’s generally meant for a smaller space than even magazine articles.

I think I’ve used up my editorial space for now and laid out plenty of opinion. And that’s number 212. Not that I’m counting.

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