Writing for Blogs

A reader named 'Tammi' posed a comment to the cross-post of 'Sgt Missick's Rebuttal' that nicely phrases some real concern about the whole idea of 'reviewing' blogs and asks what criteria I use. Because I think her questions probably reflect a fairly general attitude toward writing blogs, specifically, I thought this was the appropriate place to answer them. I'm not going to reprint her whole comment, but I'd like to suggest you click the link above and read it for yourself before you read the rest of my reply. It's thought-provoking, and well worth reading for its own sake.

Here's my issue - and please, if I'm off base I will apologize up front. This has nothing to do with politics, religion or anything. It's actually just a question.

You're not off-base at all. They're perfectly legitimate questions and you have a right to know the answers. In fact, I figured when I started LitBlogs that at some point I needed to lay out what the criteria were so people knew where I was coming from and could judge whether or not my opinions had any relevancy for them. Your comment gives me the opportunity to do that.

And I want to state again for the record that my reviews have nothing whatever to do with politics or religion, either, except in so far as the blogs themselves deal with it, and then my concern is how well they express themselves, not how 'correct' their positions are. The purpose of the reviews is to give people some idea where to go and what they'll find when they get there. Finally, what I pick is what I like. Fortunately, I like a lot of different things for a lot of different reasons, so my choices tend to range along a fairly wide spectrum.

When reviewing a blog what are your criterias?

It depends on where I'm reviewing them. For Omnium: How well do they communicate what they're trying to say? Are they informative or just re-hashing the same old stuff? How original are they? What's the quality of the thought they express? How well-written are they, if writing is an issue? (It isn't always; a lot of blogs are information-spreaders, and mostly what they publish are links and quotes with very little writing by the blogger.) Who is the intended audience? A blog written for friends and/or family is a very different matter from a blog intended for public reading and response. I don't review the former unless it's so good it would be of interest to outsiders as well.

For LitBlogs: How well written is it?

That's pretty much it. I began LitBlogs because I realized there was some marvelous writing going on in blogs that was going largely unnoticed and I wanted a site dedicated to finding them and turning readers onto the ones they didn't already know about. So my criterium boils down to that: if it's written well, that accomplishment should be acknowledged. That's all LitBlogs is intended to do.

The next logical question is: 'Well, what's your criteria for good writing?' I'll let Tammi define it because she said it better than I could.

I don't have to state my thesis clearly and then show footnotes or a bibliography. It's what's in MY mind, in My heart said My way.

Exactly. Tammi seems concerned that I'm coming at this like a strict grammarian or a professorial technician. I'm not. Tammi, read my review of My War. My criteria for good writing is laid out right in the first paragraph.

His grammar isn't great, his spelling is OK, his punctuation is horrible. All of that is beside the point. Like Emmett, he can communicate a sense of time and place so clearly that it's almost physical--you can hear it, you can see it, you can almost reach out and touch it.

That's half of my criteria in a nutshell. The other half has to do with what you're saying: Is the blogger being honest with us? Do they write with passion and heart? Or are they hiding behind cliches and institutional language? Are they telling us what they feel and/or think directly ? Or are they putting up walls of words that don't mean very much?

William Faulkner, as I was reminded recently, said in his Nobel Prize speech that the only subject worth the sweat and pain of writing about it was the human heart. That's my criteria, too.

Have you looked at the situations in the which the blogger is creating?

As I said in the advice post:

I know you have other and better things to do, and for all I know you're blogging on your laptop for the few moments a day that you're not being shot at. This advice is only for those who would like to and/or are able to blog to a larger purpose...

I acknowledge it but ultimately it's irrelevant. It doesn't matter what the circumstances are that produced the result, only the result. If it works, it works, if not, not. As I've already said, the reviews aren't generally intended to trash anybody, and they're certainly not meant to set up some stone wall of grammatical or format 'acceptibility'. I said quite clearly I don't give a damn about the first and I will add now that I revel in the diversity of the second--I love originality and difference; I love people who risk doing things their own way. Whether it works or not is a separate question.

Is there a list of dos and don'ts out there they we need to be aware of?

A lot of what I said in the advice post--more than I originally thought--is good general advice for other bloggers as well, especially the bits about writing what's in front of you and daring to be honest. Carrying a notebook is a good idea for all writers, so are writing as much as you can, and deciding who it is you're writing for. But the answer to your real question--which is to say, the one I think you meant to ask--is 'not really'. The rule of good writing is simple: if it makes the reader feel something, if it's honest about what it's trying to convey, if it calls more attention to the people or events or story it's telling than it does to itself, then it's good writing whether it follows 'rules' or not.

Sloganeering is a cop-out; it's dishonest; it's hiding behind cliches to avoid having to say what you really mean, or do the work to discover what that is. My point with Chris was that it weakens his voice and his case, and that he's good enough that he doesn't need it. I hope he understands that.

The reason I ask this is simple. I blog. I love to read them I love to write them. But one of the things I love best is that there are NO RULES.

Blogs may not have set formats and grammatical rules everybody is expected to follow like in your graduate thesis, and thank god for that (some of the worst writing I have ever seen in my entire life outside the works of Jackie Collins has been in graduate theses; horrible horrible!) but writing still has rules, and they are the ones I gave above and the one Faulkner gave 50 years ago: It has to tell some truth about the human heart or it's just literary masturbation.