Bump on the Blog

I've been doing quite a bit of thinking lately about the process, or lack thereof, I go through when posting my thoughts and observations here.  I have come to the realization that the reason I struggle to find something meaningful and well-thought out to say, at times, is due to my lack of research and reflection prior to writing.  All too often I find myself staring at the computer screen, asking myself what I am going to blog about now.  Sometimes the thoughts come easier than at other times, a fact that is reflected in the quality of some posts over others.  The need to spend the time reflecting and researching has become obvious to me, and has been reinforced by a couple of posts I have read recently by fellow edubloggers Miguel Guhlin and Vicki Davis.

Miguel gives us a glimpse of his writing process, at least for his early published articles, in a January 18 post.  Miguel states:

…People would always ask, "Wow, when do you have time to write?" not knowing that I'd done all the work over a period of a week or so…and it wasn't really work, just learning along the way….

More recently Vicki Davis states, in a footnote to her insightful post "Spies Like Us":

If you subscribe to my feedburner feed, you'll see that I have spent all week researching this article. It is my goal this year to step up the quality of my writing better and to spend time researching. I know that all of the "pro bloggers" tell you to post a lot, and I hope that although the frequency of my blog posts is going to go down that the quality will bring you back!

Like Vicki, I too, after an extended break from blogging, am setting a personal goal for myself this year,  to spend more time researching and reflecting on topics I write about around here.

The current "5 Things You Didn't Know About Me" meme that has been making its way around lately has inspired me to begin a new meme that focuses on our processes as a bloggers.  I truly believe that this can serve as a way for us all to reflect upon and improve our writing processes.  The basic idea here is to write a short post that speaks to how you go about developing posts for your blog, then tag four or five other people you'd like to learn from.  I suppose we could call this the "How Do You Write?" meme.  So, if you're up to it, then I would love to hear from some of my favorite edubloggers…Miguel, Wes, Doug, Vicki, and Jeff.

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