He preceded to quickly diagnosis some of my blog’s aliments by telling me my titles were not catchy enough and the paragraphs were too long. Huh? “You should never write a paragraph over four sentences long and a one sentence paragraph is acceptable. You need more white space around your paragraphs and a photograph of yourself.” Apparently people are more attracted to short thoughts that will fit on their cell phones and they want to see who is doing the writing.
“Have you ever read a book on blogging?”
Well of course I did…seven years ago.
It appears I need re-education in blogging, Twitter...and Facebook.
Spiritually speaking, I suppose one could find themselves in a similar
predicament if they hadn’t picked up their Bible in seven years.
1 comment:
Gail;
-----There’s writing to satisfy the masters. There’s writing to satisfy the masses. There’s writing to satisfy yourself. And there’s writing to convey reality, to satisfy the truth, if I might be allowed the freedom of dissatisfying the masters and the masses. How do you want to write?
-----I thought so. What an author best reasons to be true is the most important part of her writing. It is like the trunk of a tree. It is there to hold together all other aspects of the writing, to carry factual nourishment for the growth of conceptual fruit. Without that trunk of reality, the writing may be as entertaining as a cartoon, as crafty as a lie, or as detaching as gibberish, but it will not be beneficial.
-----The trunk will be known by the nourishment in its fruit. Granted, it should be crisp and intense rather than big and peffy. You’ve taught me that time spent killing words and wrestling better order into sentence and paragraph forms delivers more nourishment. So I do agree with your blogguru, as long as short paragraphs do not mean wringing either truth or depth from your writing simply to achieve form. For a most dangerous fallacy lurks under the skin of his advice: form over substance.
-----To be widely read in today’s society, it is best to present tidbits and ignore the volume of what you mean. Most people don't care about what you mean, anyway. That’s why such brevity attunes to the masses, and therefore to the masters. These groups revolve around each other like binary stars having little more social glue than the gravity of popularity. Most people care only about what they themselves mean. Thus they thrive on mere tidbits expressed from a communicator’s system of ideas, around which they can better form their own unrelated concoction of ideas. Then, very little is communicated. The tidbit might entertain, craft notions, or detach, but without ability to deliver the communicator’s meaning into the recipient’s mind, it has no more chance of carrying truth (and therefore benefit) than a poke in the dark. I think this is why tidbits are becoming the cultural way of communication. They serve today’s massive yet subtle swerve from truth into an Alice in Wonderland of self conceived notions.
-----Thank you for considering your message to be more important then a blogguru’s knowledge. Your second paragraph is as many more than four sentences as your message was more than a mere tidbit. I felt I had read something that somebody wanted me to know particularly.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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