On Blogging Australia

Joh mentioned that she does not reveal some of the blogs that she reads in her blogroll:

My blogroll has blogs I like to read. I have a few hidden that I like to read, that I don’t feel I want to promote. I have no niche on my blog, I do it for my own personal satisfaction and whilst I don’t have a huge readership, I have to keep in mind the variety of people who do read it, including students and parents at the school where I teach!

I responded:

Hi Joh,

thank you for your comment.

The wearing different personas thing is interesting - I wear a different hat here for example than I do at humaneia.com (which is about more work-y stuff I guess) and fauxcuisine.com (which is purely recipes and cooking as slackly as possible).

Best regards, Andrew

We each wear a persona when we blog - this is the personality that we show to the outside world. This may be different to our day job/work personas - what is appropriate after hours may not be appropriate at work, and vice versa (and blurring these boundaries can lead to unemployment).

The situation gets a little more complex when you have multiple blogs. Most people start out bioblogging - talking about their everyday lives, work, family, movies they’ve seen, places they eat, that sort of thing. Narrowing down the topics can lead to multiple blogs, such that each can contain niche-specific pillar posts.

So what do you do when you have, say, a work blog (related to your professional life, be it a corporate or personal blog), a hobby blog, and a purely bioblog? Do you maintain different personas for each? If someone reads more than one of your blogs, will you seem fake to them if your writing style is wildly different between those blogs?

Why would you write differently for different audiences?
Stephen King wrote a wonderful book about the craft of writing - On Writing. In it, he wrote that you should write to your audience. Give them what they expect in a way that they can understand (and use). If you don’t give people what they expect then you will lose them as readers. It is that simple.

Following this, if you have multiple audiences of different types, then they will expect their information served to them in a way that they are used to receiving it - that is, in a way that they can readily assimilate. Technical audiences expect the technical treatment, with complex domain-specific language. The complexity doesn’t make it better - indeed, it is easy to spot the try-hards who use overly flowery language (and one of the foulest insults I can offer any writer is that they read like a junior diplomat) - but all things being equal, the deeper you go into any niche, the more specific the language will be.

And where you write in multiple niches, it makes common sense to write differently for each of these audiences.

So, my advice is this, for what it’s worth: it is useful to maintain different blogging personas if it suits the audiences that you serve with your writing. If this means rereading a couple of your own posts from that blog prior to writing another for it, then so be it.