let's be honest...

From Mark Bernstein's "10 Tips on Writing the Living Web":

Write honestly. Don’t hide, and don’t stop short. When writing about things that matter, you may be tempted to flee to safe, familiar havens: the familiar, the sentimental, the fashionable. Try to find the strength to be honest, to avoid starting the journey with passion and ending it with someone else’s tired formula. The work may be hard, it may be embarrassing, but it will be true – and it will be you, not a tired formula or an empty design. And if you can be satisfied with that tired formula, you aren’t writing for a reason.

I'm all about honesty. Which is why I wouldn't mind telling Mr. Bernstein that I respectfully disagree with aspects of that paragraph.

Honesty is essential to all forms of personal expression. That fact seems fairly obvious to me since, well, one's craft isn't a personal expression until a little bit of the artist's personality shines through in its creation or execution. What I do reject, however, is Bernstein's notion avoiding safe constructions when writing about things that "matter". Sure, that may be true for the big time bloggers who are read by thousands and receive hundreds of comments. But on a smaller scale, preaching such an aversion to the familiar could actualldetrimentalental to beginning bloggers.

What matters to a writer and a reader are often two different things. I think it would be safe to bet that most readers don't take away the author's intention - they don't take away what "matters." With that in mind, however, it should be the goal of the writer to make what he or she is writing about important. Let's be honest, people are self-centered. Unless the blogger has something to say that particularly touches their lives, their emotions, internet surfers aren't going to take the time to read. And the best way for a beginning blogger to do that is to start out with the familiar, the sentimental, the fashionable.

The idea here is to learn to appeal to basic human emotion. That'll get you a great starting audience. Then, learn to do it with flare, uniqueness. The audience will then grow.