Keyvan Nayyeri

You should have noticed that earlier than myself but it took a while for me to realize that recently I’ve been writing lengthy blog posts!

I think that the main part of writing style is something adaptive that becomes a part of our behavior in the long time; therefore, it’s difficult to notice the changes in your writing style. It’s enough to follow a constant manner for a short while, and it becomes a part of your style!

Verbose blogging may have some advantages and disadvantages just as terse blogging has, but I think that for lengthier posts advantages outweigh disadvantages to some extent.

Longer posts open the topic to a good extent and give additional details that make it easy to understand, and this is a good point, at least in my opinion. I can remember the university days when we were reading a Mathematical Analysis book as our course book in which a theorem was proven in a single line by pointing to a few theorems here and there. The proof was very short but actually the proof for those referenced theorems could take 1-2 sessions! Unlike this book, another famous book that we (as students) could find useful had given all the details to prove a theorem, and I can’t remember even one student who liked to read the first book!

While I think that this wordy blogging style is something good for readers, I also think that it’s been a serious challenge for my blogging activity in the past few months. When you care much about the quality and the flow of content, you certainly fall in a trap to spend much time reviewing something and writing the relevant text. For this reason I’ve had a lower activity in the past 5-6 months, and I think that it’s not such a good thing!

Besides, this writing style encourages me to write abstract and general posts rather than programming posts with source code, and this isn’t also very good for a blog that mainly focuses on technical stuff!

But I can guess what’s the main reason for my sickness! In the past 7-8 months I’ve been studying some writing themes and have been practicing my skills seriously. During this while, my writing changed a lot (and most likely you have noticed that in my blog posts as well). Even though I’m not studying those things anymore, I feel that I have adapted these techniques and styles as a part of my daily knowledge and stops me from writing something superficial! If you want to see how this has influenced my mind, check out my post that just wants to reference an announcement but ends up with such a long discussion even longer than the original announcement! Shame on me!! Seriously, I’ve been training to analyze everything that I want to write about, and I think that this has had its effect after all.

Surprisingly, I had a completely different style when I began blogging on this blog back in June 2005 when I was publishing terse posts. Day after day my posts got longer to come to this point!

All in all, I think that this style is driving me to a point that I can’t resume to my normal blog style, so I should think about skipping away from this point. This knowledge in writing and such techniques are very good, but I don’t think blogging needs such a solid style.

Also don’t forget the role of new micro-blogging tools especially Twitter which eliminates the need for shorter blog posts. But lately I realized that I don’t like Twitter and I want to reduce my appearance there!

In Persian we have a very good proverb which implies that when poet loses the rhyme, he starts saying doggerel! That is my case!!