my english degree vs. my new media savvy

Vacations are good for creating a distance from one’s normal circumstances.  This has been useful as I’ve got a more accurate, I think, view of what I’ve been doing right and wrong in many creative and professional endeavors.  I’m not going to examine every conclusion I’ve come to, but I’ve spotted a large number of holes in how I’ve been conducting my online life, especially through this blog.

I’ve been playing to my personal strengths and habits, rather than the strengths of the medium.  In other words, I’ve been spooging habits from other writing I’ve done in my life into my blogging.  My English degree is showing through the cracks in the following prominent ways.

1)    What I write here is generally far too long.  Reading 1200-1500 words on a blog isn’t pleasant, and most people won’t do it.  But given my experience writing Lit papers, this feels like a short amount of space to express complex ideas from beginning to end.  I’m naturally verbose, but this is an easy thing to fix in two ways, I can either be concise, or break things up into multiple posts.   Which brings me to…

2)    Blogging is naturally serialized.  As in, nothing HAS to be expressed in terms of one long essay and complete idea.  I can take it piece by piece and spread it out, as most of it isn’t time sensitive.  If I published more complex ideas in 3 -5 post sections, it would also help me with my other major problem…

3)    Inconsistency makes it difficult to keep people interested.  I tend to not write at all, and then write 3000 words in a week, then not write for another 6 days.  Things don’t need to be all boom and bust, but here we are.

I’m hoping that by addressing these issues, I can point them out to other people, and watch them more closely myself.  The other big issue, or course, is that all I’ve posted here in a long, long time is text, which is, to say the least, not very engaging to all readers.

More to come.