Writing a "Blog"
By Anak Wannaphaschaiyong
- Last edited
- [2022-06-23 Thu]
Note: This blog will mostly likely ever changes as I form my preference of what I think a good blog should be.
Blog. Piece. Article. Whatever you called it doesn’t matter. I will redefine it here. For the rest of the blog, I will use the word blog.
I define blog as followed
Blog is a collection of text with a goal’s guided narrative.
IMHO, all blog should have timestamp. Timestamp helps you deal with dynamic nature of the reality. At the minimum, it provides you with an type of indexing that will let you get back to it. There are many indexing technique you can do for your blog. However, it just happen that physics of the reality also use time as index. This blog is not about indexing. I will omit it here.
I often forget to add timestamp after I edit my blog. But I am trying my best to follow my own advice.
I wrote an article titled “Note Taking Pipeline framework.” As of [2022-06-23 Thu], in the article, there are 3 steps in the pipeline: note lake, note warehouse, and note compression. Writing a blog is the last step of the pipeline, note compression step.
As of [2022-06-23 Thu], I quote property of output of note compression step .
content of an output note is expressed via one or more forms of
representation of your understanding.
I explains approaches one can take to express representation of understanding in my article titled “Assess Your Level of Understanding.” Check it out for more information.
Expanding on concept of representation of understanding, the narrative (aka blog) is categorized based on who you write it for. There are 2 ways to write a blog as followed:
- writing for yourself
- writing for others to read
The best blog for your own consumption should be written in Zettlekasten style. Zettlekasten has been written about by many others. If you don’t know what it is, read that.
One property I want to add on top of Zettlekasten note taking style is that I think you should inject life into your notes by capturing your emotion, excitement etc. In the other word, inject a part of your experience into your notes. The reason is nothing scientific. I just think that blog written in this way is more enjoyable to read and have higher sticky factor as you can compare and contrast feeling you have now vs then. I would compare it as a form of journal with reusability property at its core design.
In Zettlekasten notes, notes are highly reusable which value conciseness over redundancy. Note that Zettlekasten argues that text in notes should be redundant. Basically, explaining same thing in many notes. I agree with it on that point. My point was based on the act of replacing a redundant content with a name of your Zettlekasten note rather than the act of writing text in the Zettlekasten note.
I would love to believe that I am quite advance when it comes to writing blog for myself, but I am a novice at best when it comes to writing blog for others to read.
When writing for others to read, you must avoid hidden assumption. Requirement for reading the blog should be clearly stated at the beginning. representation of understanding should be non-bias and unemotional to avoid pushing your representation of understanding to others. To do this, you need to build your narrative from different point of views.
Ultimately, the goal is to allow readers to form their own representation of understanding by injecting their experiences, emotion, and story telling on top of information you provided in your blog.
One approach to allow reader to related their experience to your blog is to write a narrative to trigger a reaction, but leave your reaction out. Writing the narrative as if you discovered things with readers.
That’s it. Peace.