There are four people in my family who choose some form of writing as a career – my niece is one of them. A few years back, she told me that the company she worked for insisted that the writers in the team write blog posts regularly. I wondered at that time if there really was any substance to that process. I mean there are just so many types of writers today. There are novelists, journalists, medical writers, technical writers, instructional designers, information architects, content writers, proposal writers, script writers, and even specialist writers to write your CVs! Each writer specialized in his or her own niche area. And all these writers wrote professionally anyway. Why this need to write something extra?
Cut back to the present. I have not posted a blog in a while. (The last was 5 months back. I am still in shock, to put it mildly!) I begin to realize that there is probably some substance in that company insisting that the writers posted blogs regularly. Blogging is perhaps the simplest way to gather our thoughts on a particular subject and then well…write about it. I think one must just write – and not really bother if anyone’s reading; much like that saying about how one should dance as if no one’s watching.
Today, writing is reduced to texting, pinging, tweeting, Whatsapping, and posting updates on Facebook. While all these methods facilitate communication, there is perhaps nothing more satisfying than writing a piece about something that catches our fancy and then capturing it on paper (so what if it is in MS Word or on a blogging site?). It’s there and it’s mine! I have a sense of satisfaction at writing a complete piece. I can’t imagine I’d derive the same sense of satisfaction from a Facebook post, for example.
I can’t help but remember a line from Francis Bacon’s essay from college where he says Reading Maketh a Full Man; Conference a Ready Man; Writing an Exact Man. He may have been hauled up in today’s gender sensitive world, but I think he did have a point. So, all you writers out there, happy writing!
Cut back to the present. I have not posted a blog in a while. (The last was 5 months back. I am still in shock, to put it mildly!) I begin to realize that there is probably some substance in that company insisting that the writers posted blogs regularly. Blogging is perhaps the simplest way to gather our thoughts on a particular subject and then well…write about it. I think one must just write – and not really bother if anyone’s reading; much like that saying about how one should dance as if no one’s watching.
Today, writing is reduced to texting, pinging, tweeting, Whatsapping, and posting updates on Facebook. While all these methods facilitate communication, there is perhaps nothing more satisfying than writing a piece about something that catches our fancy and then capturing it on paper (so what if it is in MS Word or on a blogging site?). It’s there and it’s mine! I have a sense of satisfaction at writing a complete piece. I can’t imagine I’d derive the same sense of satisfaction from a Facebook post, for example.
I can’t help but remember a line from Francis Bacon’s essay from college where he says Reading Maketh a Full Man; Conference a Ready Man; Writing an Exact Man. He may have been hauled up in today’s gender sensitive world, but I think he did have a point. So, all you writers out there, happy writing!
By Urmilla Chandran
