After reading “Why I blog” by Andrew Sullivan (which was longer than I expected) I started looking for the reasons that Andrew Sullivan blogs, and I kept coming back to this short little sentence that he wrote and which, I feel, sums up the entire article. “It [blogging] is, in many ways, writing out loud.” Many times through the article I felt like he was just pointing back to that sentence while outlining individual pieces that fit together to form this little puzzle of a sentence. Now when I compare it to a puzzle I don’t mean that it’s complicated or confusing, but that while it is one sentence, it encompasses many different ideas about blogging in this one, small, simple sentence. So my next order of business is to outline a few other ideas about blogging which Andrew Sullivan wrote in his article and to show how they point to or are connected with this sentence.
There are many things that he says about blogging which can also be said about talking or speaking. One of these is that blogging is “the spontaneous expression of instant thought”, a big difference from what he says about other public writing, like a newspaper. “If you added up the time a writer once had to spend finding an outlet, impressing editors, sucking up to proprietors, and proofreading edits, you’d find another lifetime buried in the interstices.”
Another Idea he puts forth is that unlike most writing, blogging is strongly affected by the public who can respond almost instantly to anything you decide to post, allowing a blog to be more than just words on paper, it becomes a discussion or even an argument.
To wrap this up I want to give you one more thing to think about. “Blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.” Emphisis on the “writing out loud” part.
“If you added up the time a writer once had to spend finding an outlet, impressing editors, sucking up to proprietors, and proofreading edits, you’d find another lifetime buried in the interstices.”
ReplyDeleteI also found that to be a very profound statement in Sullivan's article. It points out very bluntly that blogging, as stated in my blog, is an instant form of writing that is basically unchecked and uncensored.
I think you're right about Sullivan going back to the same points and piecing all of them together. I think that's what makes his article a wonderful piece of writing.
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