So I was reading someone’s blog the other day, and while I was reading I thought to myself, “I should write on my blog, too.” Not because I have anything important to talk about right now, but because their writing was so bad. As I was reading, I thought, “Man, I could do so much better than this,” because what they wrote was so stilted and sounded like it came out of a bad novel. The writing was what I think people think writing should be – lots of big words and elegant phrases, but the meaning, the heart, the personality was drained out of it. This person’s writing was like that – they used lots of two-dollar words, and all the words together sounded very melodic, but there was no life to it. You could tell that this person read a lot as a teenager and young adult, and so they thought they knew what writing should be. So they tried to copy everything they had read and crammed it all into one blog post. And it was utterly boring.
Now, I’m not saying I’m the best writer in the world – far, far from it. But I do think, when you read my writing, you can hear my voice. I think writing should sound like the author’s voice is inside your head. And in really good writing, you can hear the author’s voice even though you’ve never met them before – that’s how good they truly are.
I have two favorite blogs that I read all the time. Over the years, I’ve tried out many other blogs, and there are some that I go back to from time to time, but I always keep coming back to these two consistently. I’ve become invested in them, you could say. I feel like I know these women and I follow their lives and their journeys as if they are good friends who’ve simply moved far away, and this is how we keep in touch. When I read their writing, I can hear their voices inside my head – it helps that I’ve also seen video of them, so I actually do know what their voices sound like, but what is exciting is that, their real voices sound like their writing voices, and vice versa.
It seems these days that everyone thinks they should have a blog, and so they do. There are many, many great ones out there, but there seem to be a growing number of mediocre blogs as well. Again, I don’t count myself in the former (or latter) company, but as a fan of good writing, I find it annoying as I search for my next favorite blog, that I have to comb through all the sub-par writing to get to the gems.
