How to blog insightful
alexkrupp.typepad.com
alexkrupp.typepad.com
This is a guide on how to blog insightful. Not insightfully. Because insightful isn't a writing style, it's a type of idea.
Insightfully is an adverb, insightful an adjective. You can blog insightfully. You can write insightful blog posts. But how do you blog insightful? To me, that makes the opening sentence of the post a confused jumble of words, which made me skim over what might otherwise have been a good read. Can someone please enlighten me as to what he's trying to express?
And just to drive the point home, let's modify it slightly. See if the following makes sense: This is a guide on how to wait patient. Not patiently. Because patient isn't a waiting style, it's a type of...
I went back and read the first few paragraphs properly. It seems that what he's trying to say is "how to increase the insight of your readers, instead of merely displaying your own insight". Maybe not a snappy opening line, but at least it can be understood. Please don't open your blog posts by re-defining common words. It detracts from your writing, which may otherwise be excellent.
Quite true. I tried reading the post but was distracted by the hackneyed technique of asserting some new, unneeded, word usage.
As I read I keep thinking, no this is about how to write an insightful item; i.e. to write insightfully. Where's his real point, the one that justifies the awkward opening text?
One insight I got was, "Don't be too clever." Just say what you want to say.
Basically it comes down to: “If you wrote something interesting its primary argument might have been of this form, or this form, or this form. End.”
From the “conclusion”:
> Once you understand the formula above, it should become trivially easy to create an indefinite number of insights.
Sorry, but there’s no shortcut for generating insight. It requires deeply understanding something and then clearly explaining it, both of which are hard work.
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Just so this comment isn’t a waste, here’s a link to a Hofstadter essay about how (he claims) cognition works, which should shed some insight into how arguments in general are structured:
http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/hofstadter/analogy.h...
So in part two I explain the difference between insightful/informative/interesting/funny, and argue for a different evolutionary role for each. I think once you get the whole theory it will be more clear how this becomes actionable.
Anyway, I have issues with everything from your premise (“generating insight is trivial”), through your specific structure (how you classify these argument styles), and the examples you use to back them up (several of which I think are either trivial or wrong), to the language at the word level (words like “actionable” are just MBA technobabble).
My suggestion would be to read a couple books on rhetoric, or maybe on construction of philosophical arguments. These topics have been studied intensively (insightfully!) since at least the Greeks.
I was using that construction. That is, it's an adjective with 'ideas' as the implied noun, because I want to emphasize that it's the structure of the ideas underlying the writing that determine whether or not that writing is insightful.
edit: See also 'think different'.
You could also say "He died insightful", which would mean that he was an insightful man at the time of dying, but the dying is once again incidental to him being insightful.
Now, logic breaks down when you say "He blogged insightful", but I'll analyse it anyway. Here you're saying that he was an insightful person, who happened to be blogging. But you're not relating his insight to the blogging at all, so it makes no sense to tell us that he was an insightful man at the time he happened to be blogging.
English isn't my first language, but I'm pretty sure the above is correct.
How do you interpret it?
The Oxford American Dictionary defines insight as...If you can't put your finger on what's going on here, you need to first learn what an intransitive verb is. Then, that "blog" is such a verb (from the OS X dictionary, which I assume is based on common usage, seeing that it's such a new word). "Sleep" is another example of such a verb. You don't sleep the bed any more than you blog the post (or the cow). That's why we have the word "write".
Now, would you even say "How to write insightful" rather than "How to write insightful posts"? Because if you would, you actually want to be saying "How to write insightfully" - writing insightfully is the act of writing "insightful x", but dropping the x. You see, they already thought of that. Grammar acrobatics should be left to people who have a very strong command of the language - it will destroy your writing otherwise.
The point of the title, as I can read it, was to avoid being parsed as "how to write insightful posts." The author went off on "how to write" as a set phrase because it implied that one was about to talk about the mechanics of writing (grammar, diction, style, etc.) rather than the content. I believe this whole thing could have been fixed as thus:
"How to find insights to blog"
or even more simply:
"What to blog"
or, now that I think about it, the simplest of all, with the least change:
"How to be insightful".
Because that's what the author really wanted to show with the rest of his post—how to be an insightful person that would then have insightful things to blog.
Even if the "blogged X" usage is accepted, having insightful things to blog means you could blog insightful things. Not blog insightful. Otherwise you could also write insightful. That's nonsensical.
There are many good insights that people reject just because they come from the "wrong" political party, religion, or a person whose vocabulary is too stuffy or too crude. There are many bad models people accept because they come from the "right" party or religion or charismatic pitchman. HN readers might be inclined to take sides on an unrelated topic because of an author's position on vi/emacs. The point is, regardless of how valid the side argument is, the baggage it brings with it can distract from the core argument, or trigger unjustified agreement or disagreement.
Writers can create value by being careful not to involve such distractions when they're not directly relevant. Writers can also create value by removing such distractions from someone else's argument.