Some Knowledge

A blog is a collection of your own thoughts on some subject.  You might get ideas to write about from just about anywhere.  What is important is that you write about something you care about.  You don’t have to be exact or precise in your writing, but it helps to have your facts straight.  People will probably not be citing your blog as a source of information in any scholarly work.  What you want is to give people some information that they can use.  Or, maybe you just want to tell a story.  It’s really an open thing what you blog about.

I get most of my ideas off the Internet.  I look something up and find out about it from various sources.  Then I write something short that has the most probably correct interpretation of the facts.  It’s easy to find out facts online.  It’s as simple as typing up your questions for a search engine.  The Internet runs off of information.  In your blog you will want to add new material, if possible, or at least sort things out for people.

A lot of times if you look something up online you get multiple stories of sometimes conflicting facts.  It takes some time to sort through all this stuff.  The time you spend finding something out can be used to save people looking for the same information some time.  The time you spend reading some material for salient facts can be used to save other people time and reading.  Often, there are only a few important things on a website, buried in a bunch of useless information and verbiage.

If you are good at condensing information and writing in a clear and easy to understand style, you can generate some good content for your blog.  If you have a hobby or interest that you have specific knowledge about, you might incorporate your understanding into your blog entries.  If you are a good observer of the world your writing can be useful to people who are in similar situations as yourself.  In many ways, what you write about is what you care about.  If you write about things that interest other people, they will eventually find you.

If you have some books at home, go through your shelves and look at the titles.  The books you have read have all imparted some kind of knowledge to you.  Even if you just read fiction, you still pick up on what the author is talking about.  You can always write a review for a book you have read.  You can recommend different writers to people, or comment on what you liked or disliked about certain books.  Literary criticism is not about writing a book report describing what happens in a book, it’s about your reactions and thoughts on reading a work.

What you don’t want to do in writing your blog is to just blindly copy what other people have written.  This is plagiarism.  You can quote briefly, if you attribute the quote to the original author, and you can re-word information you learn.  You should compose your own work.  Search engines are smart enough to identify duplicate material.  You don’t want to be excluded from search results because you have copied something exactly.  You don’t want to be sued for stealing somebody else’s words.

If you can’t think of anything to write about, just write your opinion on something.  It could be on something you read in the news.  People are always writing up their opinions on politics.  Your opinion might not be valuable to another person, but who knows.  Somebody might read your words and start thinking about things in a different light.  If you are skilled with language, you can attempt to persuade people to think about things the way you do.  Salesmen do this all the time.  They attempt to persuade you to buy something.  It’s very interesting to read sales copy.  If you can identify the ways you are being manipulated, you can see how these people are trying to get you to do something.

Once you have your thoughts on some subject written up in your blog, it’s time to move on.  Some people say the same thing over and over again in their work, and frankly, this can be very annoying.  You might be able to say something is great five thousand different ways, but after the first time, I get your point.  A lot of what is shown on television is very repetitious.  Even the jokes are the same.  The news on CNN repeats in a loop every fifteen minutes.  Find something different to write about and people will come to your blog looking for something interesting to read.

If you want to have the best content on your blog, stay on top of your subject and get as many interesting facts into your writing as possible.  Be specific about details that give your work interest.  Maybe you will want to write about your trip to some place.  Maybe you are writing about some person you know.  Include as many important things about places and people as you can remember.  Find all the interesting facts about some place you are writing about and include these in your work.  Use as many different sources as you can in researching your topic.  It’s a blog entry, so you will not have to include footnotes or cite references.  You want to convey all the important information in the body of your work so people can learn about what you are communicating.  If you have links you want to add, go ahead, add them.  It might be distracting to navigate away from your text in the middle of reading it, but a reader can always click the back button and continue.

A blog entry does not have to be composed like a term paper.  It can be more like a stream of consciousness on some topic.  You are just writing as if you were talking to somebody.  If you want to get more technical, you can, but it is not necessary.  You are just trying to convey your thoughts on some subject and get the important facts across.  If you are documenting your life, there’s nobody who is going to tell you that you are wrong.  Whatever interests you can be the subject for a blog post.  Take your time, clear your head, and write something that you would enjoy reading yourself.