Guest Post
by Riley Kissel
Imagine the Best
Blogs are in no short supply these days. The World Wide Web is packed with them and you could spend your entire lifetime going through the annals of amateur online journals, posts, articles, and musings that exist and continue to be published every day.
Unfortunately the majority of blogs are mediocre; there are a few solid initial posts when the energy was there, and then they fizzle out into oblivion. Personally, there’s nothing more depressing than reading an awesome blog entry then seeing that the author hasn’t updated their site since early 2007. If they aren’t given up on, then the blog itself typically falls flat. The subjects aren’t interesting, the ideas aren’t insightful, and the writing itself is poor or poorly edited.
It’s bad. But blogs are incredibly popular. In order to cut down on all this content clutter throughout the Blogosphere, there should be a cutting-edge academic way to teach people how to blog properly. If it were up to me, places like online college courses would develop solid courses aimed at teaching students how to be a state-of-the-art blog writer.
Think about it. There’s a reason we have English majors, Journalism majors, and countless other college programs geared toward educating students in the art of a language or particular writing style. It’s the reason that’s been driving the entirety of education since the dawn of time: we want to streamline eagerness into better performance. Knowledge and the opportunity to perfect yourself are what classes are all about.
So what I’m saying is that since blog writing has become such an immensely popular subset of the written word, our universities need to start offering focused, accredited courses that teach students how to be better bloggers. Assuming half of every one of such a classroom’s students would be bloggers or aspiring bloggers, this would be enormously beneficial in improving the quality of blogs.
Hopefully, traditional universities would embrace such a program. But in the meantime, I see online colleges as the likely place where we could see new blogger classes being introduced as course options. Consider it a sort of beta phase. I don’t doubt for a minute that such a course wouldn’t be immensely popular with current generations of students.
Imagine what such a class could be like:
*Students could be taught on ways to stay inspired when the amount of ideas start to run flat.
*Classes could impose a daily blog entry, so students could get adjusted to churning out content on a daily basis.
*The basics of good writing can be reiterated, but with particular attention paid toward the need for blog writing to vivid, to-the-point, and insightful.
*The nature Blogging itself â with a capital B. Blog writing classes can present to students the (what I believe to be correct) idea that the blog is it’s own separate entity apart from journalism, diary-keeping, and so forth.
Once upon time every established art form had to break away from former foundations. Sculpture broke away from carving, film broke away from photography, and now the blog is breaking away into it’s own definition. This will include new rules, new concepts, and new beliefs when it comes to judging quality. These rules, concepts, and beliefs are all being worked out as we speak, and could finally be presented to writers in a digestible fashion if blog writing were taught within an academic setting.
I’m completely confident in the idea that one day universities will start offering blog courses to students. My only hope is that it will be implemented sooner rather than later. There’s a whole lot of clutter in need of getting cleaned up when it comes to blogs.
I want to see a day when the average blogger is confident, creative, and consistent. While offering college courses for blog writing won’t eradicate the enormous amount of junk out there on the Blogosphere, it’ll certainly help to make blog writers more creative, consistent, and confident.
What would you like to see in a course for bloggers?
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Riley Kissel is a freelance writer who covers many industries with style. You can find out more about him at RileyKissel.com
Thanks, Riley, for new insights on a critical topic.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!
