Listen and Speak Before You Write
View CommentsWhen children learn their first language, they listen, speak, read, then write. That’s the order in which they construct and connect words and meaning. That’s how they make language their own. They get to know it as a process.
It’s also a sensible way to approach blogging.
Blogging isn’t a new language. Yet the deeper I become a part of blogging, the more I know it as it’s own unique genre with it’s own characteristics. Blogging is different from other forms of public writing, in the same way that an email is different from a letter, because blogging is meant to start a conversation.
Listening and speaking before you write makes sense in becoming familiar with this new genre.
Listen, Speak, Then Write
Read some blogs and RSS feeds before you start. Some blogs also offfer email subscriptions and newsletters. Reading allows you to get a sense of what a blog post is and can be. It also offers a view of how readers and blog writers form relationships — the many shapes those relationships take to match the personalities and the content. Blogs are formed by the people who inhabit them. Their nature is organic in that way.
Comments are a way to speak. Make a few comments. Say hello and add to the conversation. Soon enough folks will be talking back to you. You’ll get to know the neighborhood into which you’re moving. You’ll learn a lot from watching/listening and speaking/interacting with the folks who are already blogging.
Bloggers are incredibly friendly, helpful people. You’ll have a network of blogging colleagues as soon as you’ve commented on the same blog for a few days. Then you’ll also have some idea who you might be writing for.
Knowing your audience before you write, what a great way to get started.
Liz Strauss
