19.3: Discovering What to Write

Since you are probably reading this as part of a composition class, there’s a good chance that you will be asked to blog as part of the course. Within the context of a composition course there are a few general types of blogs that you might be asked to join. Certainly, the kind of blog you are asked to write will have some impact on what you decide to do, and unfortunately, the nearly inescapable carrots and sticks of the classroom can serve as an impediment to creative thinking. At the same time, as writers and creative thinkers, we always work within contexts that provide both unique constraints and opportunities. The task therefore is to gather whatever autonomy you can within the situation in order to customize your work in a way that will allow you to engage productively with your work and tap into some intrinsic motivation for writing.

Table 1. Types of course-assigned blogs.

Type	Characteristics
Class Blog	In a class blog, the students and the instructor post to a common blog on the subject of the course. Often students are asked to post new material and comment on their peers’ posts.
Individual Reading or Learning Blog	Here, though you are keeping a solo blog, you are asked to write specifically about the topic of the course. Perhaps you will write in response to readings or other assignments in addition to reflecting on your learning experiences.
Class Team Blog	In some classes, students work on group projects and are asked to keep a blog that updates the class on their activities. Here you may have a wider degree of autonomy on the subject matter of your blog, depending on the particulars of the assignment you are given.
Individual Blog	This type of blog would give you the greatest autonomy, which can also make it the most challenging kind of assignment. For example, I might ask students to post 20 times with posts that are at least 100 words in length over the course of a semester, but provide no assignment requirements beyond that.

As with all writing, perhaps the most challenging task is finding a subject on which to write, or what we rhetoricians term “invention.” By claiming an interest and reading other bloggers with similar interests, hopefully you will find a worthwhile topic. Perhaps you have already declared a major. If so, that should give you a good place to start. If not, then you might have to get more creative in thinking about a subject that you would like to read and write about. As the educational theorist and activist, Sir Ken Robinson, explains, our talents and passions are sometimes hidden, submerged by well-intentioned but misguided schooling experiences (Robinson). Perhaps you can think about the moments when you find yourself in a state of flow. Csikszentmihalyi conducted an experiment where he paged people randomly 40 times during a week and had them write about what they were doing at that moment in an attempt to discover and describe flow experiences (4). You might do something similar. Wherever you experience flow, your interests are likely close by.

Once you’ve decided on a subject, you need to investigate other blogs with similar interests. Read a wide range of blogs—the most popular blogs on your subject, blogs by experts on your subject, blogs by those with amateur interests, and blogs by students like yourself. Reading is an essential part of blogging. Once one gets beyond the diary blog, it is quite common to blog about what one reads elsewhere on other blogs (aka the “blogosphere”). In fact, writing about other bloggers is one of the primary ways you can build an audience and community for a blog. Researching for blog writing is much like researching for course assignments. You can begin with a general search engine. Google allows you to search specifically for blogs, or you might try Technorati.com: a site that indexes blogs. The goal here is to find a handful of the most popular blogs in your area of interest. From there, things get trickier. Most blog sites include a list of links called a “blog roll” somewhere on their sidebars. This is a list of blogs that blogger also reads. Sampling the blog rolls of bloggers you like is a good strategy for finding other worthwhile blogs. I’m not suggesting that you have to do what everyone else does. To the contrary, one of the great things about blogging is the opportunity for autonomy the genre can provide. But reading other bloggers with similar interests can help you in understanding the kinds of choices you might make and will also aid you in finding an audience for your work.

Of course, knowing what to write about (and even what you might wish to say on the subject) and knowing how actually to compose your post are two different things. In my view, the fundamental challenges of blogging are not very different from those of any kind of writing. You require sufficient exigency to write. Where does this come from?

1. An urgency to the subject matter (e.g. a current event)

2. An important and reasonable purpose (e.g. writing a job letter
to get a job)

3. A sense of authority, feeling qualified to write about a subject

4. A strong personal interest (e.g. creative writing, political writing)

5. An audience that will give you positive feedback

The familiar advice about brainstorming and free writing applies as much to blogging as other types of writing. However, blogging has a special relationship with serendipity and inspiration. As a blogger you have no deadlines. You are not required to write about anything in particular, and you’re not required to write in a particular format or for a particular length. As such, you are free to write whatever and whenever you like. For example, maybe you are interested in graphic design. You take an interest in reading about graphic design and seeing examples of interesting design. You read an interesting article or see an image of an interesting design, so you write a brief post about it. You write something about what you saw and why it interested you, and you include the link. Perhaps you read something interesting in a design course or learn something during class discussion, and you blog about that. Before you know it, you’ve started to build a collection of brief posts. At some point, something will come of all that posting. You’ll start to see a trend. You’ll make connections, and suddenly you will have something longer to write. Over time, as you continue to blog, it is likely that different exigencies will emerge. More importantly, as you develop a writing habit, you begin to think less about needing a reason to write. Hopefully there is always some reason of course, but I think, as a writer, the act of responding to your experiences with writing becomes more natural or expected. It simply becomes what you do. As a regular writer or blogger you begin to trust that exigency or purpose will become clear through the act of writing. 

This is the great advantage of blogging. Out of necessity, classroom writing assignments are short-lived. They usually take place over a few weeks and then you might never write on that subject again. You take another class with new writing assignments, and there is little or no relationship between those assignments and the ones from the semester before. Blogging gives you the opportunity to write many, informal, short posts over a long period of time. As a blogger you might commit to spending 10–20 minutes, two or three times a week, for a year. In the end, you’ll have 100 or more posts chronicling your thoughts and interests. Even if you don’t end up writing longer posts, your blog could serve as a reservoir of ideas and links for writing assignments, especially if you choose to blog about your academic interests. Ideally though, the regular writing practice of blogging will help you discover some intrinsic motivation for writing. Outside of the extrinsic carrots and sticks of classroom assignments, you might find some value in writing itself, a value that you can then bring to your assignments.

So my advice to you is to give blogging a try. It’s easy. It’s free. And if you give it a decent try, you might discover some tremendous benefits that will carry you through college and into your career.