I have longed to start blogging for quite a while, but I never had a drive strong enough to make it real. Recently I read what Jeff Atwood and Steve Yegge said about blogging, where I realized tons of good reasons to start off, and start right now.

In a sense, I blog to help clarify my thinking. One thing that gradually dawned on me over the last six months is that, you don’t really understand something until you try to write it down and explain it to others. You might think you get it when you hear it, read it, and absolutely agree with it, but hey, try not to stop there; try to take it further and retell the story. It’s important to have a mental picture, but it’s not enough – the image is all too often not as clear as you think it is. The tiny little flaws (even fundamental fallacies) in the mental picture can be indiscernible until you truly figure out how the elements are logically structured, link them up with a smooth curve, and squeeze everything into linear natural language. By writing, I get to think about questions that I do not normally think about, and I develop ideas that might otherwise slip away. Meanwhile, by maintaining a blog, I will tend to think more and harder in everyday life.

Also, I blog to practice my articulation, both in a logical sense and a literary sense. Writing is hard, and it only takes practice to get better. I do not expect to achieve writing mastery, but I’ll be pleased to suck less every year.

This reminds me of how Daniel talked about scientific communication in many of his Research Methodology lectures last semester. Writing is critical: your work is meaningless if you cannot prove otherwise to your audience; and in the scientific world, you prove it by writing. Yet writing a technical report is hard. According to him, researchers typically revisit a paper (for major revision, not spell check) >5 times before submitting. I can testify that with my own experience in Daniel’s practicum. It gets especially hard when the object of the writing is at once complex and brand new, as it is in our case. It’s complex, so we have to put numerous parts, some of which are merely marginally related, into the box. It’s brand new, so not many previous works could be utilized, and we have to explain our concepts from the ground up, adding more material to the box. This isn’t the end – we have to be extra careful when structuring what’s in the box to make sure that everything is perfectly coherent and understandable to outsiders.

Hard as it was (we as a team worked for weeks on the report), I kind of enjoyed the process. I enjoyed producing paragraphs that make sense, and I even thought it’s such a pity that we don’t write technical reports more often.

Apparently I didn’t realize back then how blogging resembles writing papers in terms of communicating thoughts, though composing a blog post is probably much easier, in that:

• Blogging is way more casual.
• The topic of a blog post is probably not as complex.
• I will not have to explain everything, since the topic is probably not brand new for my audience (if I have any).

Even though what I have to say has been said a million times before, I would still write them down, in my own words, sprung from my own thinking and researching. I like the way Steve puts it:

Often I’ll get discouraged because I feel like I’m writing about things that have already been discussed into the ground by others. The thing I have to remember is that there’s a “right time” to learn something, and it’s different for everyone.

……

Each person in your audience is on a different clock, and all of them are ahead of you in some ways and behind you in others. The point of blogging is that we all agree to share where we’re at, and not poke fun at people who seem to be behind us, because they may know other things that we won’t truly understand for years, if ever.

These are my reasons to blog. Hopefully I’ll discover more as I carry it on.