Paul Scrivens over at 9rules Network wrote a short opinion piece asking the question. It’s a good one to ponder. His position is basically, “how can an independent consultant afford not to”?

His arguments boil down to two points. The first is that blogging is “free” marketing. It only costs time. That’s true as far as it goes. What he doesn’t address is that writing can be hard for most people.

Barbara, a consultant I’ve worked with has been given the WORD from her mentor that she needs to blog to promote herself. As she is an extremely knowledgable and articulate person with several advanced degrees, I can only agree. And, as I’m very interested in her field of expert knowledge, I look forward to her getting going.

However, she is also a very private individual and one steeped in the academic writing style. The informality and personal voice that we find in most blogs is a challenge for her. The thought of knocking a few hundred words off the top of her head is alien, to say the least. Years of conditioning make that transition very tough.

Her mentor tells her that she will need to develop a distinctive voice, a practice that is verboten when writing for academic publication. She asked me how to do that. My answer was just write and try to be casual. Voice will happen on its own over time. Yet, when I recall making the very same transition from the formal, indirect writing style academic publishing that requires every statement be filled with qualifiers, phrases like, “it seems that,” or “the likely outcome,” or “considering the evidence,’ I can feel her pain. Conditioning is hard to break, for a private person who is used to hiding behind the anonymity of formal writing, doubly so.

Or, consider the other end of the spectrum. Bill (not his real name) is convinced that he can’t write. Instead of having formed years of habit that he needs to break, he finds writing a shopping list a challenge. His only experience of writing came in painful homework assignments that convinced him that writing is only for the gifted and special few. He was taught to believe that they would never be a chosen one, so why bother. His bad experiences coupled with a lack of skill stand in his way. He too needs re-educating.

Then there are those who have no writing skills but don’t know it. No names here. We all know of people like this. They write but to little or negative effect. Poor writing does not build readership and poor writers find that nobody visits their blogs. They do write, at least for a while, then decide the effort is not worth it. Why bother? Nobody visits or cares.

All these people are in need of developing skills, which takes time and practice. Who has that much extra time? Only the motivated. Having time is not a matter of how busy we are but of how much we want it. Without belief in one’s self as a writer or being convinced that blogging is a good use of time, there will never be enough time. And there shouldn’t be. We do what we do because feel a desire or compulsion. We do what we do because it is fun. Look back at years of New Year’s resolutions and it quickly becomes clear that we don’t do things because we think they are good for us. That definitely includes blogging.

Scrivens’ other argument is that blogging only reinforces what we claim to know. Here he makes an interesting point:

That will really show how well you understand a topic. Your blog doesn’t have to have comments and doesn’t even have to be public. Do it for yourself first and foremost and if you want to help your business do it for that second.

Setting aside my other considerations, I can’t argue with that. Though it is difficult to keep writing a private blog. With no feedback, writing can be very lonely.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, March 25th, 2006 at 10:52 am and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.