Blogging and writing style

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I was invited to pay a visit this month to something called the Inkhaven Residency in California “to talk about the craft, advise, and give feedback on the writing.”

It happens that I was already going to be in the area so I agreed to stop by Wednesday morning.

As the organizer, Ben Pace, describes the program, “We’re bringing 40 writers to Lighthaven to write-and-publish an essay online every day.” So, it’s for people who want to blog. That sounds cool–I’m a big fan of blogging–beyond the evidence of the 12,000 posts and 200,000 comments here, you can see my various posts on the topic, including:

Traditionally there have been four sorts of blog posts:

  1. Annotated lists of links
  2. Online diaries
  3. Open-format op-eds
  4. Tech explainers

My own blogging is a mix of the four:

  1. I rarely just supply links, but often my posts are motivated by things that people send in.
  2. Each day I write what comes to mind, so it’s a form of online diary, even if I usually don’t write about things that happened that day.
  3. I offer lots of opinions on a wide range of topics (voting power, statistical graphics, Bayesian inference, literature), often with the goal of persuading or influencing or just getting people to think about a topic.
  4. I write statistics textbooks!  So no surprise that the blog is full of tech explainers, case studies with code, stories of life in the trenches, etc.

Nowadays, I get the impression that blogs (sometimes brand-named as “Substacks”) are focused on op-ed-style posts, without so much annotated lists of links or online diaries.  The lists of links are less valuable now that there’s google, twitter, etc., and the online diaries . . . I don’t know why that’s less of a thing.

To get me prepared, Pace pointed me to the Inkhaven webpage webpage and suggested I read a few posts ahead of time.  So I did so, keeping in mind the traditional forms of blogging as described above.

  • I started to read the very first post, Kill Yourself Cave, by Remy, but then halfway through some sort of ad popped up and I couldn’t read the rest–I guess I’d need to buy some sort of subscription?
  • The second post is called Against Against Romance, by Viv.  This is traditional blogging in the sense that it’s a response to earlier blogs by others.  The only thing that put me off was that it was framed as advice for the reader (as an “op-ed”) but I think it would be more valuable as an online diary or personal story.
  • The third post on the page, Contra Aiella on Status, is by Alexander Wales.  As with the two posts above, I’m struck by a sort of online writing style, with phrases such as “status maneuvering,” “downstream of,” “dominance hierarchy,” etc. Nothing wrong with that–everyone has a style and a vocabulary–; it’s just something I noticed.  I don’t really care so much about status, but that could be a life stage thing, that I’ve aged out of such things, in the same way as it’s hard for me to relate to posts on “securing a husband” or whatever.
  • The next post is a poem by Alok called Why homeless people hide drugs from kids.  Oddly enough, this one mentions “status” too.  I guess the concept is in the air.
  • Next is Late Pregnancy is Pretty Bizarre, by Viv.  It’s kind of refreshing to see a straight-up online diary!  She’s not telling me anything I hadn’t already heard before, but that’s fine:  an important product of writing is that it helps you work out your own thoughts.
  • Next, Kamikaze Dreaming, by Drew Schorno.  This one’s a tech explainer–or, maybe I should say, a business explainer–the sort of post where someone tells you what it’s really like in some corner of the economy.  Kind of like the blogs of Dan Luu and Nikhil Suresh.  Here’s a characteristic passage:

    When I said that I worked on pine point and they gave me a standing ovation.
    a fucking STANDING OVATION.
    Little did I know that this was the beginning of the end of my lucky streak.

    There’s something compelling about this sort of story.

  • Next, Adventures in Dieting, also by Drew Schorno.  I don’t know why they have multiple posts by the same person on this one page; I guess that tells me that they’re selected by an algorithm, not a person.  Of course there’s nothing stopping the person from updating the algorithm to avoid repeats.  The crazy diet advice reminds me of my late friend Seth Roberts (see here for the sad part of the story).  In a world of online hucksters promoting crazy health ideas, I’m relieved to see Schorno expressing some skepticism!
  • Scrolling down a bit, we come to Is Salt Salty, by Itsi Weinstock.  A pure tech explainer post, it seems!  I don’t see this one as being of general interest, but that’s fine; as noted above, writing is a way of working out ideas.

One thing that made me happy about the Inkhaven bloggers is that none of them are writing in that aggressive style that I associate with some business books and internet gurus.

The above comments are not intended to be dismissive, or “patronizing,” or “punching down,” or whatever.  People write for all sorts of reasons, and that’s fine.  As I wrote above, writing is a way to work out what’s latent in your head, to work out the implications of some partly-formed ideas.  This is true for nonfiction and also for fiction, which I see as a sort of posterior predictive checking, a working out of implications.

To put it bluntly:  when you’re blogging, you’re not writing for me, you’re writing for you, which is how it should be.

When my colleagues and started blogging, back in 2004, we were already sending lots of long emails to each other, and it made sense to make these public, for three reasons:

  • Many others were interested in these topics too, so we were doing a service by sharing our ideas with anyone out there who wanted to look,
  • Commenters provide useful feedback, including correcting our mistakes, revealing where we aren’t expressing ourselves clearly, and pointing us to ideas and literature we hadn’t been aware of.
  • Knowing you’re going to post something in public pushes you to be more aware of what you’re saying.  When I blog, I’m usually expressing myself more clearly than in an email, and that’s useful to me as well as to my correspondents.

That last item cuts both ways:  writing a blog post takes more work than writing an email, and for some people it’s not worth the effort.  For me, though, I like it; I’ve gotten used to expressing myself this way.

What’s my advice to the Inkhaven bloggers? Just remember that your first audience is yourself. Write clearly enough that you can come to terms with whatever implicit incoherences are in your thoughts. Don’t worry about being persuasive; just try your best to see through your own fog. And learn from each other.

Also, blogging. Writing a blog is like writing a book: you can aim directly for your audience (first that’s you; after that it’s everyone else who will read it). In contrast, if you write for a newspaper or a magazine or a scientific journal, you’re writing for the editor. I hate writing for the editor. Editors can be great, but it’s such an indirect process. I remember back when I was writing for the Monkey Cage, the political science blog, and it got absorbed by the Washington Post. Which was great–we reached a broader audience–but then we had an editor, who was a nice person but kept telling me that my posts were too bloggy. Which they were–I’m sure the editor was correctly judging what would work for a Washington Post product–but I absolutely hated not being able to write directly. The prospect of more readers wasn’t worth the unpleasantness of having to write in a style that wasn’t mine, and the degradation of the quality of the writing and of the ideas being expressed under such a style.

So, you be you. And, if you find that your blogging style is very similar to that of some other bloggers out there–even me!–I recommend mixing it up a bit. Try to write in the style that’s most transparent for you.

3 thoughts on “Blogging and writing style”

  1. Your notes on the common language and style of these posts makes me think that new bloggers should probably avoid reading other blogs. It’s hard to offer something new when you’re deep in a subculture or community.

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