Weblogging is writing, darn it
As he so often does, Collin hits the nail on the head, writing about writing on weblogs. I’ve been thinking about this a bit lately, because I’ve been doing this weblog thing for about a month now, and I’ve noticed several of the happy developments apropos writing Kathleen and Collin write about. None of this should come as any surprise to a writing teacher—don’t we all tell our students that writing is a process, that doing a little bit each day makes for a better end product, etc?
Last week I told a colleague that I’d applied to five conferences in the next academic year. (I expect to be accepted to three or four.) She asked, “How can you do that? Where do you find the time?” And I immediately thought of this weblog: of knocking out a draft of a post and saving it, then coming back to it later and getting a little insight. Or when I wrote about my research plans for the next year—travel funding pushed me to do that thinking, but it was blogging about the plans that really crystallized some of the ideas for me.
For me, the next step is not just using the main thread of the weblog as a writing laboratory, but starting to use secondary pages to develop ideas over time. I’ve been fooling with WordPress a bit more lately and should get it to do what I want in the next few days.
So I guess the problem isn’t getting folks to believe weblogging is writing, but the reverse: that the academic writing we do would be better modeled after weblogs than the scholar hiding in her office for six weeks to bang out an essay or conference presentation.
