The Poynter Institute's writing guru Roy Peter Clark has an interesting column about finding one's voice as a blogger.
During the first week in December, I am leading a seminar at Poynter titled "From Report to Column to Blog." I'll have the help of such brainiacs as Matt Thompson, Jay Rosen and Josh Benton, along with a team of Poynterites. Our goal is to help journalists become better bloggers; and to help bloggers make their work more journalistic –- if that is their goal. We want to help professionals and amateurs. To paraphrase Jay Rosen, it's a pro-am event.
Along the way, I'm sure we'll be asking these questions over and over: What is a blog? Will being a blogger change the way I think, report and write? Can I learn something called blogging style? Should the blogger strive for what writers like to call a distinctive, authentic voice?
Here's Clark's six simple rules for determining if something is a blog:
To my eyes, something looks more bloglike if:
1. It is updated more frequently rather than less frequently.
2. It is composed from shorter rather than longer blocks of text (although this may be changing).
3. It links more often rather than less often to other sources of information or wisdom.
4. It speaks to a more focused rather than less focused audience of interest.
5. It invites that audience more often rather than less often to add comments, offer clarification or correction, and define the community of interest.
6. It is compiled in reverse chronological order, that is, with the most recent post at the top, previous posts down below.And while the creator of the blog is present everywhere in the work, the identity of the creator may be deemed less important than the community he or she creates.
This is another interesting nugget:
In looking for literary precedents for the blog, I bumped into an old college text of mine, a book that in 1968 I found electrifying: "Love's Body" by Norman O. Brown. Brown was one of those authors and philosophers of the 1960s whose work became part of the counterculture, which made it popular in its time, only to burn out like an old star.
"Love's Body" is about myth, culture, religion, politics and Freud, expressed in provocative aphorisms, compiled into short fiery paragraphs. Here are three:
Love is all fire; and so heaven and hell are the same place. As in Augustine, the torments of the damned are part of the felicity of the redeemed. Two cities; which are one city. Eden is a fiery city; just like hell. Cf. Augustine, De Civitate Dei, XXII, 30.The truth concealed from the priest and revealed to the warrior: that this world always was and is and shall be ever-living fire. Revealed to the lover too: every lover is a warrior; love is all fire. Chandogya Upanishad, V. iii 7. Heraclitus, frg. 29
Broken flesh, broken mind, broken speech. Truth, a broken body: fragments, or aphorism; as opposed to systematic form or methods: 'Aphorisms, representing a knowledge broken, do invite men to inquire farther; whereas Methods, carrying the show of a total, do secure men, as if they were at farthest.' Bacon in McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy, 102-103
This last paragraph speaks of the fragmentary nature of truth, Brown's defense of his own aphoristic style. Brown, then, might have approved of Twitter, with its limit of 140 characters per message.
In addition, I'm struck by the way in which Brown includes "links" to other sources in a unique system of footnoting. As he explains on the first page of text, "Thanks to the publishers, a page has been designed which, by including the references in the body of the text, is a perpetual acknowledgement of my indebtedness to a very great company, both living and dead: my authorities, my authors."
This foreshadows the same spirit I see in good blogs, a willingness to send you off from the text in search of additional links for information, wisdom, and inspiration.
It's an interesting read. Check out the whole thing.