quantity

Blogging Insights — Quantity Versus Quality

Fandango18 Comments

Dr. Tanya has decided to change things up a bit for her weekly Blogging Insights prompt. Instead of using the Q&A format, she’s going to provide us with a quote about blogging or writing and ask us to express our opinion about said quote.

Here’s this week’s quote. It’s from Jon Morrow.

“Blogging isn’t about publishing as much as you can. It’s about publishing as smart as you can.”

As a blogger who posts anywhere from three to six posts a day — I averaged 4.6 per day in July — I struggle with this question. Is publishing high quality posts while also publishing a lot of posts even possible?

I enjoy blogging and probably spend a few too many hours a day doing so. There are a number of prompt posts I host each week and many of the posts I publish are in response to prompts from other bloggers. So I think I’ve got the “publishing as much as you can” part of the equation down pat.

As to the other part of Morrow’s quote, I like to believe that my posts are “smart” as well. And by “smart” I mean well-written, articulate, witty, engaging, and reasonably intelligent. But I do worry that the volume of posts I churn out each day makes it tough to publish high quality posts to extent I’d like them all to be.

To use a baseball analogy, I know I’m not going to get a hit every time I step up to the plate, but I at least hope that each at bat is a quality at bat.

Bottom line, I think Morrow is right. Personally, I’d rather be recognized for the quality of my posts (i.e., “smart” posts), than for pushing out a bunch of crappy posts. I suppose I have to figure out where that fulcrum is for me and for those who read my many posts.

I suppose, too, that all of you have to figure that out for yourselves as well. I can’t wait to read what you have to say.

One-Liner Wednesday — Deep Thoughts

Fandango25 Comments

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“It is better to speak profoundly to just one than to blather at a world of idiots.”

Suze who blogs at “Suziland Too or Obsolete Childhood”

Yesterday I wrote a post in which I bemoaned how my blog stats were recently in a nosedive. I admit that I was being a bit whiny, and that’s when Suze put me in my place. She commented, “It is better to speak profoundly to just one than to blather at a world of idiots…yes, you can quote me.”

To which, knowing that today, Wednesday, is Linda G. Hill’s One-Liner Wednesday prompt, I replied, “I just may do that. Stay tuned!”

I thought that Suze’s highly inspirational and motivational one-liner perfectly fit the bill for this prompt. I believe that Suze was telling me that

  1. I shouldn’t give quantity a higher priority than quality,
  2. most of my posts are nothing more than me blathering on about nothing,
  3. most of the people who read my blog are idiots,
  4. all of the above, or
  5. none of the above.

In any event, I thought Suze’s comment was, in and of itself, profound. Unfortunately, she has now set the bar quite high for me because I feel as though it’s incumbent upon me to come up with something profound to post about.

Omigod, where is Jack Handey when I need him?3A9F642F-96FA-47D1-8E56-1EB1EA37F669

 

Quality and Quantity

Fandango15 Comments

76351817-81EE-409D-975E-FF584641CCD6Proclivity is a tendency to choose or do something regularly; an inclination or predisposition toward a particular thing.

Apparently I have a proclivity for blogging. It’s something I choose to do regularly. I am inclined to post to my blog every day. Sometimes two, three, or even four times a day.

But a proclivity for something should not be confused with proficiency at that something. Proficiency is a high degree of competence or skill, an expertise, a mastery.

I sometimes worry that my proclivity for blogging focuses too much on quantity at the expense of quality. If I cut back to just one post a day, or even one every other day, would my less frequent posts be more engaging, interesting, informative, and/or provocative?

But then I realized that, in today’s world of Twitter and Facebook and the myriad talking heads on all of the cable news networks, it’s not what you say, but how often you say it that counts.

Thank you, Donald Trump, for teaching me that.

Written for today’s one-word prompt, “proclivity.”