Writing Dirty

Aug 29, 2007

There is an argument to say that, in the realm of the printed word, what is written is not as important as who writes it. When it comes to web content, however, most people write as if the rule doesn’t transfer — as if the web is the realm of information only, and authors are loathe to leave a mark on their writing.

Writing dirty, as I see it, is not the same as talking dirty. It means writing with humanity. It means encouraging readers to unwrap words and get at their source: the author, the person.

Your readers can’t build a relationship with information. They can build a relationship with you. In this post, I want to discuss how we can de-sanitize our web writing and leave a big, colorful, human smudge on our words.

How did we get so clean?

It doesn’t help that a significant portion of web copy is produced by automated processes and strung together with lines of code: the search results, error messages, and increasingly chirpy user interfaces. There is a human (or several of them) behind all of these things, yet great pains are taken to remove every trace of that contact — as if it would only make everything seem messy.

Wikipedia, for example, is a one-stop information shop borne from the hard work of thousands of authors. You almost wouldn’t know it, though — as if acknowledging human creation would taint what the information is worth.

Social media, too, encourages the author to withdraw from what they create. The hordes of Digg users, stumblers and del.icio.us bookmarkers are treated like (and perhaps deservedly) a horde of locusts: descending on content, utterly consuming it, and moving on to the next thing as quickly as they came.

Who can blame them, though? One prerequisite of so-called ‘Diggbait’ (or so people who write on the topic would have you believe) is that it must be information concentrate. Apparently, any mention of the author behind it will bring tears of boredom to the masses. It seems logical, after all: they don’t know you, so why should they care?

I think the opposite is true. I think this might just explain one reason why social media visitors are deemed to be so fickle. They form no attachments to the content because they aren’t given the chance to.

People are not meaningfully beguiled and intrigued by a funny photo, a bullet-point information list post, a dry-as-bone tutorial. They consume the entertainment value, the usefulness, and then leave, searching for other content with the same qualities. After all, it can be found anywhere if you look for it.

Dirty is interesting

If you write dirty, however, if you situate yourself very much in the content you create, you will intrigue readers — whether they came from Digg on a whim or have been visiting your site for years.

When you learn something about someone it leaves a mark. If you resonate with readers they will want to know more about you. They will travel to your ‘About’ page rather than navigating away, and they may just dig deeper into your site in an effort to learn more.

The argument that people who do not know you are not interested in you is, I think, a falsity. How do you get to know someone in the first place? They give something of themselves, your interest is piqued, and you decide to learn more.

Giving something of yourself, even if it’s just a tidbit, leaves a unique mark. The information you’re communicating can probably be found elsewhere, although in different forms. The mark you’ve left (your signature, if you will), cannot.

Start making a mess

What follows are a few dirty habits you can develop over time.

It’s not about you, it’s about me
Next time your content sings out for an anecdote, reach into the cookie-jar of your own life rather than outsourcing memories. It’s often easier to illustrate your point with someone else’s life, but consider why that anecdote (and that person) are still being talked about: they gave something of themselves — or perhaps journalists did it on their unwilling behalf. Either way, they left their own mark. Leave yours instead.

Sharing stuff-ups
The phrase “We all make mistakes,” is usually met with general acquiescence. Sure, it’s a cringe-worthy cliché, but it’s true. You wouldn’t know it, however, from the way many of us write.

Web writers are more than willing to write about their successes, their expertise, their superior knowledge, omitting completely the years of learning (and failing) that went into forging that expertise. Unsurprisingly, it’s hard to develop a human connection with someone who presents themselves as super-human by omission.

Of course, this isn’t intentional. It seems counter-intuitive to acknowledge where we fall short, or have fallen short in the past, particularly when we want to attract praise, not criticism.

In most cases, though, acknowledging mistakes and discussing what you learned from them will resonate with readers, particularly those who’ve made the same mistake, or are doing so right now.

Timothy Ferriss writes a great blog. One of its short-comings, though, is that the novelty of someone being perfect at everything does start to wear off.

What I’m really interested to hear, and I imagine a lot of other people are too, is what Mr. Ferriss absolutely sucks at.

Writing about your mistakes shows your readers that you’re not an expert, or a talented person, because you’re somehow better, but because you made yourself that way. By inference, you’re saying that what you write can help them do the same.

“What are you wearing?”
You’re not producing content in a vacuum. Where did you get the idea? Who inspired you? Why are you interested in the topic? Will how you’re feeling at the moment affect what you write? Are real-life experiences affecting your out-look on things?

You write content at a computer, or in a notebook, and as you do so you’re situated somewhere in time and space. You’re at a specific location, you’re in the middle (or the beginning, or the end) of a day in which stuff happened. You’re not a brain in a vat. Your experiences influence what you write. It’s never a bad thing to acknowledge the world outside your words.

Make it personal
We’ve got something pretty good over those who write for print.

In the print-realm, authors are ‘far too busy’ to deal with reactions to their work. You read a book and, regardless of how deeply it affects you, there’s no easy way to let the author know. Services like Wikipedia seem to deliberately emulate that detachment, as if a certain level of distance were necessary for information to be of real value.

Authors shouldn’t forget that this interactivity is one of the prime attractions of web content. Unfortunately, I think many writers do forget, particularly those who create content which is incredibly popular. How many A-list bloggers or webmasters participate actively and regularly in their comment threads? How many respond promptly to reader e-mails, or respond at all?

Yes, they’re incredibly busy, but it does reach a point of absence where it seems the writer has decided the gains of interacting are far less than, say, the effort required to post a comment.

There also seems to be a tendency, once responding to every comment and e-mail becomes unfeasible, to give-up almost completely, and to respond only when it might damage a friendship not to do so (you may have noticed that a few A-list bloggers tend mainly to comment in response to people they seemingly are already chummy with. New readers? Forget about it.)

This seemingly pragmatic view of costs vs. gains is short-sighted. Each comment, each courteous email goes towards a greater perception that this author respects and is accountable to her/his readers. This author/reader relationship is absolutely invaluable, and worth all the effort it takes to build.

If you can’t respond to each comment, acknowledge that you’ve read and enjoyed them all, picking out those that you can easily respond to. If you can’t respond to emails at the moment, let the person who sent it know, and file it away to be tackled at a later date. There is nothing more defeating than crafting an email only to have it met with silence.

Don’t fall into the trap of failing to acknowledge readers. Get amongst them, get messy with them, get to know them, if not individually then collectively. Don’t negate one of the best aspects of writing for the web.

As you get to know your readers they will get to know you. If you let the balance tip, however, withdrawing from interaction as your content becomes more popular, you’ll inevitably find that new readers won’t develop the sense of intimacy you prized in the early days.

In the long run this neglect could hurt you. It’s easy for visitors to ignore or forget about a faceless author when they go quiet for a week, or write a dud article.

It’s much harder to forget about a friend when the going gets tough.

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31 Comments, Comment or Ping

Michael from Pro Blog Design

It’s a shame when the busy bloggers don’t have the time to comment anymore. On the other hand, when you see a popular blogger who does take the time to comment (Like David Airey, or Liz Strauss), then you really do appreciate them. I think that the neglect of the majority of bloggers actually helps those who make the effort to take the time, because readers really will notice it.

Aug 29th, 2007
skellie

Hey Michael, you make a good point. In a sense it’s even more powerful when a popular blogger takes the time to comment because you know how busy they are. It’s something you remember.

For example, Liz Strauss interacting with your comments would probably mean more than myself doing so, because she’s busy and prominent and well respected and so on. So the effects of interacting with readers, ironically, become more meaningful just as many bloggers stop doing it!

Aug 29th, 2007
Michael from Pro Blog Design

Absolutely. I keep a little Word Document of my blogging milestones, and a few of them are comments left by my personal favourite bloggers. It does mean a lot to know someone you look up to considers your words worth commenting on, whether that’s in a comment on their own blog or on yours doesn’t matter that much.

Aug 29th, 2007
Better Blogging with Michael Martine

What irks me about posts like Mashable’s “500+ Insanely Redundant Links About One Particular Thing” type of posts–not “dirty” enough. No writing, really, and all links. Sure, it’s a resource and it’s linkable. It’s also forgettable. Nothing against Mashable, and they certainly write enough of the more human kind of posts, as well.

One thing you want to be careful about when writing this way is that you still want to be conscious of writing well and not say “awesome” and “actually” too many times in one post. Oh, wait… that’s just me.

Aug 29th, 2007
skellie

@ Michael: I also keep a little list of milestones on my PDA. I don’t include comments left by prominent people but that might be a good idea. At the moment it’s mainly RSS subscribers, guest-posts and so on. I think keeping a list of milestones is something every blogger should do… it’s great to look at when you want to get motivated

@ Michael: I agree — most of what makes it big on social media doesn’t have any ’staying power’ because it’s as sanitized as a page of search results. No wonder visitors find it so easy to love it and leave it, so to speak.

And you’re also right, writing dirty shouldn’t be conflated with writing informally (or sloppily) but writing with humanity and personality.

Aug 30th, 2007
Michael from Pro Blog Design

Skellie - I figured you would. It’s a great way of remembering the rewards you’ve gotten from the effort you have put into your blog.

I just like including the commenters because of how pleased I was when I saw they had commented. It wasn’t a milestone for my blog (Wheras something like 100 RSS readers is a big thing for the blog), as much as it was a personal milestone.

At the very least, it showed that anyone can have their opinion heard on the internet.

Aug 30th, 2007
skellie

You make a good point. Perhaps it would be a good thing for bloggers to keep track of two types of milestones: blog milestones and personal milestones, which would include things like networking, being heard by significant people, contributing something worthwhile to debates, and so on. I think sometimes we place too much emphasis on numbers when maybe those human factors are just as important. Yep, definitely think you’re on to something there :).

Aug 30th, 2007
cardiogirl

I find your suggestions extremely helpful and appreciate your suggestions and ideas. I’m not quite sure how to “define” my blog. It’s really just me investigating the details of life. But I think I have “dirty writing” down to an art.

Now I am looking to increase readership, stickiness and ad revenue. Do you have any suggestions (pros or cons) on a blog set up with one post per page versus multiple posts per page? I have noticed the “ad people” want multiple posts per page.

I would assume the multiple posts per page would increase the time a person spends visiting your page. I have seen bloggers put one month at a time on one page, then archive each month. What are your thoughts about that?

And lastly, I would like to be so bold as to invite you over to my space http://cardiogirl.diaryland.com

Sep 1st, 2007
Bloggrrl

What an incredibly clickable headline! I love and absolutely agree with your point about Mr. Ferris, as well as everything else you’ve mentioned here.

Sep 2nd, 2007
skellie

@ Cardiogirl: Just sent you an email

@ Bloggrrl: I did think being a bit scandalous might make it a little more clickable I actually think you’re already writing pretty dirty (sometimes literally as well as figuratively) ;).

Sep 3rd, 2007
CHESSNOID

WOW! Your post was eye opening and for me personally thought provoking. Thank you for this post. I will be back to read more.

Sep 11th, 2007
skellie

@ Chessnoid: Thanks! Look forward to seeing you around

Sep 11th, 2007
Monika @ The Writers Manifesto

Hi Skellie

Great thought provocativeness. I’m not afraid of using dirty words every now and then as I write like I talk. Well, except for the f word. That would be a bit harsh on my readers I guess.
Plus coming from a professional kitchen environment my “kitchen” language wouldn’t go down too well in the more serene business world.

I also think it sucks how some of the top bloggers don’t make an effort to reply to their comments. I actually blogged about this not so long ago too.
Anyway, thanks for another fantastic read.

Monika

Oct 25th, 2007
Ricardo Bueno

I couldn’t agree with you more on the statement you made here…
“There is nothing more defeating than crafting an email (or comment) only to have it met with silence.”

I’d say I’m in the earlier stages of invoking comments on my blog (I know what the problem is…I’m in the service industry and so I’m sure my content can come off as a hard sell. That’s really not my intention… I to talk about my industry and tell it like it is. If I happen to work with someone, that’s just an added bonus. What I really want is to connect with peoples’ varying concerns).

In any case, acknowledging people and making it a two-way conversation is what a relationship is all about. You can’t expect to generate readership and discussion without responding back!!

Dec 20th, 2007
Anthony Lawrence

If you aren’t memorable, no one will remember you.

Obvious, but all good salespeople know that many of their brethren are not memorable. As bloggers, we are salespeople: we are selling our blog with each post (or should be).

One of the things that helps us remember that we like a blog is when we associate a personality with it. Whenever I read Skellie, I can almost see her - I’ve never met her, don’t even know what she looks like, but because she always inserts plenty of humanity and personality, I automatically envision a real person. Contrast that with many other blogs where I may like the content but don’t give a darn who wrote it! I’ll remember Skellie’s more easily: I’ll remember that she wrote about “X” rather than just remembering that someone mentioned “X”.

It’s important..

Dec 20th, 2007
Writing For Your Targeted Audience

This is a great resource to learn about writing. I like the part about making it personal. As a writer that I am learning to be, I realize it is important to engage with your audience.

Dec 28th, 2007
CatherineL

Hi Skellie - Great post. I’ve been reading your posts on Problogger and decided I wanted to check you out.

I too get bored when people come across as perfect all the time. It just makes them seem unbelievable. I screw up several times a day - sometimes big, and sometimes small, so I find it difficult to swallow that some of these people have a “perfect gene”.

Jan 10th, 2008
dan

Yeah. I get it and I write dirtiest when I write ‘fiction’. It seems easier to be yourself when you don’t have to be.
But I reckon all writing is fiction to a degree - and because I write about soul most of it is in the mud - at least at the roots. What do you think? Should I dish up more raw and less purr in every bit of writing or does it all have to be dirty? Clean can be comforting.

Feb 6th, 2008