After writing this blog for over five years I felt that it was a good time to look back and gather a few lessons for its future direction.
When I started the blog I had two aims: improve my writing skills and develop the discipline of publishing something on a regular basis. I am from a generation whose education missed out on the importance of grammar to express ideas clearly. I have struggled ever since. The title of the blog is - Thinking Out Loud - which describes the impact of ideas on how we live and therefore it is important to describe those ideas clearly. Also, talking to many would-be-bloggers it was clear that after about three or four posts they’d run out of steam and stopped. I wanted to challenge myself to keep going. I was not targeting any particular audience which is at odds with the normal motivation of a blogger who is trying to establish the writer in the public consciousness either to promote themselves or a business that is related to them. There are thousands, if not millions, of posts published every minute on the web. Therefore, I decided to keep mine down to a two to three minute read; in other words something that could be read while having a coffee. This meant that each post had to engage the reader quickly and make its point clearly - another challenge! To give myself a chance of maintaining the post frequency I kept them at one post per month. This gave me enough time to explore ideas before putting pen to paper ( yes I draft ideas on paper! ).
I wasn’t sure how the blog was going to go so I wanted to keep my running costs for the web site down to zero. I used the free GitHub Pages to run the web site and Jekyll with a free theme to display the posts. This approach allowed me to modify the software so that I could try out different formats for the blog. Google Analytics is used to gather data on how often each post was being accessed and which search terms were picking up the posts.
So what have I learned? The biggest achievement is that I have kept the posts flowing for over five years which against a background of the trials and tribulations of life I can justifiably give myself a big tick. The results on readership have been mixed. The most popular posts had a business flavour, with the most popular so far Being Creative With A Bear And Honey Strangely, the posts relating the work of Wittgenstein to current issues were being regularly picked up by web searches. Looking back over five years worth of posts it is clear that I write in a formal way which is understandable because of my business background. This is something that needs to change for future posts. I also learnt that editing is an important part of the writing process. I can re-write an article several times until it has achieved what I want it to say. Having an independent pair of eyes looking over the final post is a must - big thanks to my Editor!
The biggest lesson was to focus on a theme and look at it from different angles. That theme will be the one that will increasingly dominate our lives the climate crisis. For example, Margaret Heffernan in her book Uncharted points out that we are addicted to prediction and desperate for certainty. But modern life is complex and therefore most experts in forecasting are reluctant to look more than 400 days out. What does this mean for the future targets set by governments and business that involve looking tens of years ahead? Another area is using Wittgenstein insights into how language works and applying them to sift through the endless media discussions to separate facts about the climate crisis from what Greta Thunberg succinctly puts as blah, blah, blah.
The last five years have been hard work and there have been many days when I have asked myself why I am bothering. But after I have published each post there has been a feeling of achievement. I have learned lots about the art of communicating through words. I am looking forward to many more years of publishing posts but with a clear focus on the climate crisis and with a louder voice!