my longest post in weeks

Prompted by the aforementioned Inquirer article on blogging, I suddenly feel the need for one of those meta posts on Why I Blog. As you've probably noticed, I haven't posted much lately. There's a few reasons for that... one of them is that I've been trying to answer that very question. For a few weeks, I had no good answer. I don't have a good one now, but I've got a few fair ones.

Ultimately, I agree with Jim Capozzola. "One doesn't blog for other people. One blogs for oneself. Plain and simple." I might have said it differently, trying to avoid all those clunky ones, but the substance of it's dead-on.

While I'd certainly like to believe that readers get something positive out of reading no loss for words, when it really comes down to it, that hope probably exists for selfish reasons. Satisfied readers come back for more. More hits = an ego rub. I'd be lying if I said otherwise.

With that admonition out of the way... blogging does more for me than stroking my ego. I see two primary benefits I get from it (with a fair amount of overlap between the two).

1) It's a place where I can improve my writing, ability to express myself coherently, and so on. It's absolutely the case that I could just write down my thoughts privately as a means of practicing writing. Frankly, though, if it were only for my eyes, I wouldn't put all that much effort into making anything halfway decent. Knowing there's an audience increases my motivation to polish.

2) This'll probably sound weird, but I think blogging makes me a better thinker. It hasn't always. When I started with the whole online journal business, I had diarrhea of the keyboard. I wrote about the most inane and miniscule details of my day. Back then, I didn't have an audience in mind. But at some point I realized how boring it all was. Even writing that way was boring me. Now I try to limit myself to saying interesting things. Whether an entry's about politics, sports, or just a tidbit from my day, I strive to say something that's at least mildly entertaining or thought-provoking. And that's not a simple task (at least not for me). It's all too easy to observe life passively, without engaging with whatever's going on at a particular moment. Blogging makes me look for the interesting things in life.

So. I use blogging as a crutch. I'd like to wean myself off of it at some point (huzzah for mixed metaphors!), but for now it works for me.