The Synthetic Librarian

What does it mean to find your voice in blogging? I believe there are two parts to the answer of this question. First, If you want to be relevant, people must be able to distinguish you from others. Second, you must be authenticate: 100% you. The first part is important, because no one will read you unless they find you relevant, and they won’t read you unless you stand out. The second part is important because, without it, you cannot consistently achieve the first part.

I have some rules that I follow to help me achieve these two things and I’ll explain them below.

I’m not going to quote any scholarly research. That is because everything I learned about finding my voice, I learned from Copyblogger, a blog written by professional copy editors and writers, not from scholarly sources. I was once employed, on contract, as a technical writer and, when I stumbled and experienced difficulties, I spent a fair bit of time reading about writing. Copyblogger was the turning point for me and I’ll refer to a few choice posts below.

Rule 1: Construct a Niche

Copyblogger asks Why Should Anyone Read Your Blog? and in answer they suggest that you pick the “spaces” you write in carefully. You want to compete in an idea-space. Yes: Compete. You won’t get noticed if your ideas are the same as everyone else. At the same time, you want to be relevant. This implies that when you write, you need to post in place where your topic is valued but you must say something different from others.

I accomplish this not by picking arguments but crossing boundaries. I like to combine knowledge taken from different fields and apply it to things I’m interested in. I have found this to be a remarkably constructive approach to building relevance in a niche. For example, the title of my blog is an allusion to “synthetic psychology” and librarianship two different fields that can inform one another.

By the way, what copyblogger means by “space” is the conversation that your writing is part of. Even if it is on your blog, it needs to be part of a bigger conversation. You need to link to the sources you are responding to (technical mechanisms called trackbacks and pings will alert others that your responding to their posts automatically usually).

My past “niches” have involved combining librarianship and cognitive science, information security and usability, systems administration and psychology. I can always distinguish myself from other voices by “mashing up” the topics a bit.

Rule 2: Don’t bury your lead

A big part of being distinguished from others is being remembered. To be remembered you need to be noticed, and to be noticed you need to attract attention long enough for new readers to get your point. My rule for this is “don’t bury your lead.”

Burying your lead means that you take a while to build up to your point.

An important rule of writing for the web is to never bury your lead. It’s good to tell a story, but no one will stay around long enough to read your story, if they don’t trust that you have a point. What that means, for someone like me with a small audience, is that I have to get to the point right up front.

If you want to get noticed, you need people to understand your point. But not everyone is going to take the time to read every word of your post, so you need to get to the point. That way, even if someone doesn’t read everything you wrote, they still got your point.

So I have come up with a rule of thumb to help me with this. My rule is, “Say it in a sentence, a paragraph, and an article.” I will figure out the essence of what I want to say in one sentence: if the reader has time for just one sentence what do I want them to “take away”? Then I will expand on that with just one paragraph. Finally, I will write the same thing up with much more detail: premise, assumptions, argument, and resolution/conclusion. Copyblogger describes this in their post “Your Unique Story Proposition“. You want the reader to be clear about what you are saying no matter where they start reading your post or how long they stay. This gives them the chance to see the 100% authenticate you even if they don’t know you yet.

I should point out that my recent blog posts were for a course and I haven’t followed this rule very well. I wrote dramatically longer pieces, due to the requirements of the grading criteria, than I ever would in a “real” blog post. In part this is because it takes a LONG TIME to be concise. My blog posts for this class take about 8-12 hours to research and write. But because of the deadlines involved (every 3 days) I cannot justify the extra 2 hours it would probably take to cut them down and weed them (it kills me actually… really kills me to post stuff that long).

Rule 3: Say something controversial

If you’ve managed to be relevant and to make your point, you need for people to remember you and find you remarkable. To do this, it helps to say something controversial (remember that part about competing in an idea-space?). Honestly, this scares me, and when I first blogged years ago, I avoid saying anything controversial. I wanted to be objective and rational.

Copyblogger however advises that you have the courage to be wrong. You need to walk the fine line of stating an opinion and supporting it, but not being so brash that you are offensive. You’ve got to give yourself room to be wrong.

This is important not just as an method of getting attention (and therefore distinguishing yourself from others in the minds of your readers) but because it makes you part of “the conversation”. If you can say something and be corrected by someone else: that’s a conversation.

In “Markets Are Conversations”(Chapter 4 of The Cluetrain Manifesto by Levine, Locke, Searls & Weinberger, 2001), Searls and Weinberger argue that, in the online world, everything is a conversation because people are empowered to respond as well as read. The Internet has transformed marketplaces from producer-consumer environments into conversations in which everyone is a participant. They advise that business must find their “authentic” voice and that people will easily detect unauthentic marketing.

Being authentic is how I try to prevent “saying something controversial” from being “something offensive.” I like to use attention getting headlines, but nothing that I cannot defend or be corrected for. Take my most recent blog post for this class where I call Facebook a “Creepy Privacy-eating Monster.” That got your attention right? I’m will to stand by that. I’m also willing to be proved wrong or discuss the matter at depth where the sensationalism is irrelevant. I know this is the case because Facebook does creep me out. It creeps a lot of people out. On the other hand, I know facebook has a lot of privacy controls (and I know them intimately and technically). So I can go either way and that is the nature and value of discourse.

Things my rules don’t help me with.

I’ve been struggling with one piece of advice from Copyblogger for some time: Formality. In “How to write with a distinctive voice” (oh how very relevant to this week’s topic!) Copyblogger advises that bloggers avoid formality. This is a big problem for me, and I suspect for other grad students. We spend so much time writing formal papers that blogging can be a jarring experience.

When I follow my steps of “say it in a sentence, a paragraph, etc.) I naturally star following a kind of assertion-evidence teaching model. But that leads me into formality pretty fast.

In the assignments for the course I just finished, its been killing me to read what I’ve posted on this blog. It’s a hodge-podge of formal/academic writing and informal blogging. I don’t think the posts I write for this class are representative of my overall blogging style, but I still think the formality thing is something I have to conquer.

On the other hand, given the niches that I attempt to fill all of which are either academic or highly technical… how can I avoid a certain formality and still remain clear?