Summer 2020 Post 2: Getting Ideas for Posts and Papers

We are exploring the early phases of writing in which we are casting about to discover what we want to say. I have given you some ideas, and the posts, articles, essays, and videos that I've shared with you offer lots more ideas. But I have another method to share with you today, and I'm actually using this method now to write this post. Let me explain:

When I saw on my schedule that it was time for me to write my blog post for this class, I wasn't really sure what I wanted to talk about. I was finished tweaking your Assessment 8 (yes, they are all done), and so my mind was full of stuff that we will discuss at the end of this term — not now. So to procrastinate (yes, all of us procrastinate), I decided to check my Gmail, and I saw this link to a blog post by Stephen Downes, a Canadian educator whom I've been following for almost 20 years now. To procrastinate just a bit more, I followed the link down the rabbit hole to find just the article that I wanted to share with you this morning. Wow.

Downes' post is entitled (take note as Downes writes pretty good titles) "Where Do Blog Post Ideas Come From?" Can you already guess what his article is about? Of course you can. So learn something here: titles for blog posts and chemistry research papers are important. They are like the big red X on a treasure map. They point to whatever message or value your reader is supposed to take away from reading your document, from following the winding path through your maze of words. After reading your document, your reader should be able to look back at the title and say, "Yeah, I got that." If they add, "And it was worth it," then that's even better.

Downes wrote this post in response to a question from one of his blog readers who is also trying to write a blog, just as you are doing in this class: 

Do you have any advice on how to come up with blog post ideas? I recently launched an informational website, so far I have around 40 articles and I'm already finding it difficult to come up with ideas that aren't just a regurgitation of something else I already discussed in another article.

Appropriately, Downes uses a standard response pattern of question/answer to organize his post. He starts with the question and then he answers it. This is easy for his readers to follow and for him to write. We will talk more in the term about organization patterns, but the lesson now is to see how a skillful writer does it. If he wants his readers to find the X, the message in his document, then he has to start where they are (in this case, clueless about how to get ideas for blog posts) and then lead them turn by turn to the X (in this case, with some ideas about how a prolific blogger gets ideas for his thousands of posts — really, thousands). He sets up the question and gives the answer. Simple and very effective.

I could stop here, but I really haven't told you yet how I'm using Downes' post to write my own post, though you may be seeing hints of it already.

For me, Downes' advice boils down to paying attention and taking notes. Downes connects to lots of people and ideas, and he keeps notes about what he sees — lots of his blog posts are his notes about something that he's read or some conversation that he's had with an interesting person (see his post "The TRUST Principles for digital repositories"). He then gives a six phase heuristic for processing all these information flows that he calls the "critical literacies":

I link things together. This is what can be called the 'idoru' phase of the work - the intuitive perceiving of patterns of phenomena (and like anything 'intuitive', it takes practice, a lot of practice). Over the years I've identified six major forms (which I call the critical literacies): 

1. evidence of similarities, rules, patterns, regularities
2. patterns of meaning, truth, valuation
3. uses and applications of things, affordances 
4. influences of frames, contexts, environments 
5. cognitive applications, such as explanation, inference, definitions 
6. patterns of change, including cycles, exponential change, tipping points

So not only is Downes constantly alert to the information flows that he has set up for himself and constantly taking notes about what he observes, he is also constantly massaging that information and looking for new connections, new meanings. These new connections and meanings allow him to write things that are from time-to-time of value to his readers. For instance, I do not find all of his posts of value. His post about "The TRUST Principles" does not directly affect me just now — or I don't see the effects — so I did not pay it much attention other than to use it as an example in this post. No writer always writes something of value for every reader (snarky aside: only your mother sees ultimate value in everything you write, but she doesn't grade your papers).

This approach to writing takes a lifetime to master. I'm still working on it. I read a post from an information flow that I attend to regularly and made a connection between that info and my need to communicate with you today. Hence, this post.