Art Of Blogging

It may be said that there are three kinds of bloggers. In the first place, there are those who blog without thinking. They write from memory, from reminiscences, or even direct from other people’s blogs. This class is the most numerous. In the second, those who think whilst they are blogging. They think in order to blog; and they are numerous. In the third place, there are those who have thought before they begin to blog. They write solely because they have thought; and they are rare !

But although the number of those bloggers who really and seriously think before they write is small, only extremely few of them think about the subject itself; the rest think only about the articles written on the concerned subject, and what has been said by others upon it. In order to think, they must have the more direct and powerful incentive of other people’s thoughts. These become their next theme, and therefore they always remain under their influence and are never, strictly speaking, original. On the contrary, the former are roused to thought through the subject itself, hence their thinking is directed immediately to it. It is only among them that we find the authors whose names become immortal (sorry e-immortal).

If a blogger has something to say that is worth saying, he need not envelop it in affected expressions, involved phrases, and enigmatical style; but he may rest assured that by expressing himself in a simple, clear, and naive manner he will not fail to produce the right effect. But on the contarary we find many bloggers implicitly displaying their poverty of ideas, mind, and knowledge. A great number of bad bloggers seek out their existence entirely by the foolishness of the e-public, which only will read what has just been written without putting anyconscious effort to ‘understand’ the head and tail of the subject.

Obscurity and vagueness of expression are at all times and everywhere a very bad sign. In 99 % of cases they arise from vagueness of thought, which, in its turn, is almost always fundamentally discordant, inconsistent, and therefore wrong. When a right thought springs up in the mind it strives after clearness of expression, and it soon attains it, for clear thought easily finds its appropriate expression. A man who is capable of thinking can express himself at all times in clear, comprehensible, and unambiguous words. Those bloggers who construct difficult, obscure, involved, and ambiguous phrases most certainly do not rightly know what it is they wish to say: they have only a dull consciousness of it, which is still struggling to put itself into thought; they also often wish to conceal from themselves and other people that in reality they have nothing to say. Like many blogs that I have seen of my batchmates in sastra, they wish to appear to know what they do not know, to think what they do not think, and to say what they do not say.

Truth that is naked is the most beautiful, and the simpler its expression the deeper is the impression it makes; this is partly because it gets unobstructed hold of the reader’s mind without his being distracted by secondary thoughts, and partly because he feels that here he is not being corrupted or deceived by the arts of rhetoric, but that the whole effect is got from the thing itself. A blogger should guard against using all unnecessary rhetorical adornment, all useless amplification, and in general, just as in architecture he should guard against an excess of decoration, all superfluity of expression. Everything that is redundant has a harmful effect (except in RDBMS !). The law of simplicity applies to all fine art, for it is compatible with what is most sublime.

A blogger must always try to say what is worth saying with true brevity of expression, while avoiding diffuse explanations of things which everyone can think out for themselves… and if all this you could have thought without me giving a small assistance then may be I should apologise for wasting your precious time !!