So I could probably start this post with a conjunction like ‘So’, an attempt to imply an ongoing dialogue and to evoke the hoary old trick of in medias res, to rather capably demonstrate (in one sentence) why I need an editor. And I could compound that sin (if it is a sin) with a sentence packed with even more parenthetical asides—which don’t always need parentheses, mind you, I know several ways to ramble—and it is this tendency to ramble and to try to commit to screen my thoughts more or less exactly as they form, multi-threaded, throwing off tangents, phrases spliced into a glue-laminated beam of a sentence with not just too many adjectives and adverbs but whole modifying clauses in a style that starts out with me thinking I’m clarifying my points and making a better argument but which ends up being muddied and exceptionally difficult to parse. ¹
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I have other doubts about my writing, but this matter of ‘voice’ cuts across a lot of the rest.
Having a distinctive voice to your writing is a good thing, mostly. If you have a knack for comedy, or for making complex ideas clearer through simple folksy analogies, or for eviscerating a target with insults without the crutch of profanity, that distinctive voice will help you build an audience and might also shape the topics you write about.
Depending on your chosen topics, though, writing in a ‘voice’ might be a drawback. If your writing is meant to introduce an unfamiliar issue or to persuade, an overly conversational tone either makes you easier to ignore, or puts ‘cracks’ in your writing that gives trolls in the comment section obvious places to begin attacks.
I found my voice in writing blog posts, 500 to 1500 words at a time. I refined my style on Twitter, where my projected persona is jaded and snarky and brilliant (your perception might be different from my intent) but only when I can restrict myself to a single tweet. As soon as I try to use that platform to “write“ [“Hey let me expand on this, might take more than a couple tweets. Thread, 1/x”] I will recommit all the crimes I’m guilty of when writing blog posts. This makes sense; one of the original descriptions of Twitter was a ‘microblogging’ service, so if you take the ‘micro-’ out, you’re just left with a hard-to-read piecemeal blog. ²
I’m a bad writer. ³
It’s not that I’m a bad writer, in as much as my syntax is technically correct and my diction is usually on-point. My preference for a ‘spoken-word’ style, though, for words as they might be delivered live, in a performance, can make my written words harder to read. And while my word choices are… fine, I also lean heavily towards the pretty, sparkly, & infrequent when a plainer word would do, and do more work.
If these blog posts were scripts, meant to be read—by me—then all the commas and asides and emdashes and the incorrectly-used ellipsis⁴ in the line above (and most of my writing) can be read as mark-up, code for the performance, letting me know where and how long to pause. I used to think of this as excusable, normal even, me speaking directly to my audience, but that’s an after-the-fact justification: I touch type, not super fast but fast enough, and I am in fact speaking these lines as I write – to myself in my head, not out loud, but until I wrote this sentence it wasn’t something I was conscious of. Now I’m never going to be able to forget it. In fact, after 20 (25?) years of doing it this way, I don’t know that I could do it any differently without specifically learning “writing” as a new skill. ⁵
A conversational style or written voice is best when employed in one of two ways:
First, where we agree (or I assume we agree) and a quick recap of the subject is all we need
& Second, if I am relating a humorous anecdote where the exact phrasing and the pauses and the rhythm of the joke are important to the eventual delivery of the punch line.
I don’t want every blog post to read like a joke⁶ and for the most part, I’m not going to assume my audience agrees with me. What kind of makes me sad is that this ‘conversational’ style (not pioneered by bloggers but widely adopted) is now used by some fairly toxic political writers—online, on social media, by niche publishers who call themselves ‘news’—who use it as both a knife and a shield. “Of course we all can agree” is the sneaky-snake-oil-slick way to introduce some poison and “well you’re taking me out of context” follows as the obvious defense, even though no context was given. Just the assumption that “we” (for however they didn’t define ‘we’) all “agree” allows them to talk to the in-group while coasting under radar: a nod to the people who have the unspoken context and a dodge for the rest.
Blogs are personal, even now. ⁷
Well after the blog-as-business-model has both failed, and evolved; well after the endgames for Gigaom and Gawker; well after Verizon basically bought up every not-quite-failing content farm and rolled them into Oath; and now, where you don’t necessarily think of outlets like Engadget, HuffPo, Vox, Polygon, Ars Technica, Gizmodo, or The Onion as blogs [yeah, they’re blogs] or even necessarily bookmark-and-visit any of these sites daily, since you get your links from social media or aggregators.⁸ Blogs are personal, and more present than you realize.
Social media is built on the old Live Journals and Web Logs: a post is something you write to Facebook or a picture you upload to Instagram. Twitter, as noted, was a ‘blogging’ platform; Medium tried to be Twitter but longer (and a lot of other things) but Medium is perhaps most notable as a blogging platform for people who really only need to write the one, long blogpost.
The bones and the idiolect of ‘blogging’ are all over the web and have largely overtaken traditional media, at least in online translation. A ‘post’ is an article; news articles have comments; and news articles are dated, tagged, archived, & linked to. Online newspapers and newsweeklies are blogs now, despite themselves.
We’re surrounded by blogs and yet it feels blogs are dead. If I might be allowed poetic license for a bit: corporate ghosts are animating the corpses of what used to be individual, personal blogs, stealing the topics and mission statements but lacking any warmth or life.
But, call me a romantic or a nostalgist, the old blog format is still good for something more than just its building blocks, taken by other media. So long as it is still sort of affordable for one person to buy a domain name & web hosting, with easy CMS tools like WordPress, or combined platforms like Squarespace (and future competitors for both), there will still be blogs and bloggers. If you have something to say, you should still be able to find your voice.⁹
Just don’t plan on getting rich. A blog, by itself, can’t support you. Same as it ever was, you’ll need something else (merchandise, historically and most commonly, and with Patreon as a new-ish source but not significantly different from PayPal aside from the agreed-upon monthly billing aspect of it) – Despite how corporate-and-business blogging can seem to be these days, for a lot of us—who still do this casually because we want an outlet for words—it’s a hobby paid for by the day job. It’s not a wide open frontier anymore, there’s no get-rich-quick or getting-in-on-the-ground-floor left.
Just words and people to read them. Just the outlet, and a voice.
.:.
##¹⁰ ¹¹
¹ If I had an editor, the advice would probably be to cut this intro. or tone it down. or streamline, clarify & move it, if it had a point to make.
² another paragraph that could be cut, no loss. additional sin count: two parentheticals, reliance again on italics and on single- and double-quotation marks to enforce a voicing of the line that probably only works when I’m reading it in my own head, a ‘quote’ dropped in without context with the assumption the reader will understand this is supposed to be a typical ‘thread’ tweet intro, a [*shudder*] semicolon, and a point that does not necessarily follow the paragraph above. not that it has to, but again, a paragraph that could be cut
³ “see, this would be the better line to lead this article with”
⁴ originally just intended to mark where words were intentionally omitted (elided) from a quote, the dot-dot-dot of the ellipsis are now read by most as a long pause, and is used as such in most scripted/novel dialogue and in transcriptions of spoken word. an intentional pause. but unless this entire post is meant to be a transcription of a speech as delivered the ellipsis is technically incorrect in this particular written context.
⁵ editing. I think they call that skill editing.
⁶ at least not yet. I may get there.
⁷ ooof. bad transition. honestly this should be a separate article, not an add-on to a essay on personal written ‘voice’. Give me three paragraphs, I’ll try to ham-handedly tie it back to the blog title.
⁸ this isn’t actually a sentence, just 3 similarly formatted sentence fragments and a 4th fragment that is different enough it seems like a conclusion but there’s still no SVO to start diagramming this sentence on, just 4 adverbial clauses. It only works because it’s anchored by the short sentences immediately before and after
⁹ told ya. took five paragraphs, but booyah
¹⁰ the double-hash is a proofreaders mark to signal a page or section break. I’ve been using it for that purpose in my personal drafts for decades and at some point I don’t quite recall exactly when I began using it in blog posts on the regular as well
¹¹ endnotes aren’t going to be a thing. it’s a one off that worked in this particular post, I don’t plan to make a habit of this.
