Word.Line by apesara

A few days ago, I got an email.  This email was from a fellow blogger that I was in the middle of a round of correspondence with.  This particular email.. it made me realise something about blogging, and about writing.

All the bloggers I know would write whether they got paid for it or not. We have a love of writing persuasively, and journalistically, and passionately.  We simply love the language.  And that drive to write means we get a lot of practice becoming better at our craft.

OK, enough waxing poetic about the Muse.  My point is this: We bloggers have power. And blog posts aren’t the only place we can employ that power.  That is what the email I mentioned taught me — as a writer, we can choose to write well to audiences great and small.

This may seem fairly obvious, but bear with me.  You send and receive emails every day.  But how often do you get a really well-written email, that really tells you someone sat down and spent a significant amount of effort crafting it, and then sending it only to you?

It doesn’t happen that often to me.  When I got an email like that recently, I felt, somehow, that I was in the presence of greatness.  As if a president or statesman from a time gone past, a time when fine writing was valued as much for its art as it was for its utility, had set quill to paper and hashed out a missive just for me.

I suddenly realized that this is why the electronic newsletter is still alive, and still great, despite criticism.  This is why writing a blog entry is important, no matter the size of your audience.  And this is why taking time to write an email with the same effort and thought is equally as important.

I’m going to spend a week doing something a little different here on Scribkin.  Although burdened with lack of preparation, I’m going to select  someone each day or two whos writing has made a difference to me in the past year, and attempt to give you my perspective on that person, and why I follow their writing.

I had a lot of trouble coming up with a short, catchy title for this article, and I’m still not sure if I got it just right.  But the idea, which dawned on me a few days ago and is starting to nag at me, is not hard to grasp:

I do my best writing when I’m not in the middle of information overload.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I love information overload.  I have mild ADD so diving in to a vast cyclone of links, comments, entries and pictures is like taking a hot bath.  It is amazing and wonderful.

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The Long Tail	The Bell Curve

The long tail.  For a relatively simple chart, it appears a lot of additional explanation and rumination is needed to really understand it.  And of course, what is more illustrative than a helpful chart?

Rewind back about 10 years ago, and a similarly iconic graph was getting a lot of attention: The bell curve.  Here, too, a relatively simple diagram was tossed out like a life-saver the hapless reader, drowning in a sea of information.  You can infer much from a bell curve, but apparently its mysteries, like the long tail, are only revealed through extensive research.

Personally, I got the concept just by looking at the chart (in both cases).  I think this is perhaps why these two ideas are so catchy.. we want to try to apply these concepts to any novel situation we encounter.

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