17 Ridiculously Useful Tips Every Blogger Should Know by CJ Q. '23
i am the entire circus
Whether you blog for a job and get paid by the hour, or you’re writing yardlong screeds in a blog that no one reads, you probably know how hard it is to write good blog posts. Thankfully, you don’t actually have to write good blog posts; you only need to have the appearance of writing good ones! Follow these top tips and you’ll be writing formulaic blog posts that you can publish week after week.
If you’re having any trouble following these tips, I recommend reading CMU / Parallel Universe. It’s a great example showing everything I’m talking about!
1. Begin with a table of contents
Open strong and generate excitement by giving a preview of what you’re discussing. What better way to do this than with a table of contents, which tells your readers what the sections of your post are, and how they’re ordered? Way more useful than an introduction!
2. Choose uninformative section names
Nothing says rationalist blog post like numbered headings without any titles. Bonus: if someone asks “What’s the main idea of section Three?” you can reply with “I intended for the intellectual reader to draw the conclusion themselves.”
3. Put song lyrics in the beginning of each section
In fanfiction, song lyrics are seen as cringy, annoying, and immature. But you’re not writing fanfic, you’re writing philosophy. Doesn’t matter if it’s unrelated; no one’s gonna read the lyrics anyway. Bonus points if your song’s in a non-English language, or if it’s from an obscure Filipino artist no one’s heard of.
4. Add barely related conversations with random people
Chances are you’ve given up on your artistic pursuits in lieu of stable high-paying employment. Add dialogue to your blog post and give your inner playwright a little smidgen of hope. If you’re worried about coherence, remember that many respected plays don’t make any sense, like Waiting for Godot.
5. Use gratuitous amounts of foreign words
One way to cover deep insecurities about your cultural identity is to assert it in your writing. Go ahead and say kalabasa instead of squash and sitaw instead of green beans. If anyone calls you out, insist that they’re different cultivars, even if they taste exactly the same.
6. Look up the etymology of something
It makes you look loquacious, backformation from loquacity, from Latin loquacitatem “talkativeness”, cognate to circumlocution, eloquence, and soliloquy. If you’re more daring than I was, you can even say kare-kare comes from Tamil கறி. Don’t transliterate it, it’s cooler that way.
7. Aim for an average of one hyperlink per sentence
Unfortunately, most readers haven’t read every single blog post you’ve ever written. Help them out by linking even the most tenuously related blog posts you’ve written.
8. Repeat your arguments multiple times
If the main argument of your post is something like, “you can never perfectly predict the result of each decision, because if you did then there wouldn’t be a decision in the first place,” make sure to repeat that argument multiple times. But make sure you bury the argument with some story or conversation. You don’t want to risk readers understanding the argument you’re trying to make.
9. Make strained metaphors to a technical topic
This is likely your only chance to apply the things you’ve learned in math class. Pick whatever topic is easiest to talk about, then compare it to the topic of your blog post. Don’t worry about whether it’s interesting; your hapless readers are forced to read it anyway. For example, both “decision tree” and “college decision” have the word “decision”, and that’s close enough.
10. Insert overly complex hand-drawn figures
Figures provide visual variety, break long walls of text, and distract readers from critically analyzing your flimsy excuse of a main idea.
11. Add deep philosophical conversations with random people
Any conversation can be made deep and philosophical by fudging the details. Consider this example conversation:
“Why do you like solving such big puzzles?” I asked.
“Because it’s more satisfying to work on bigger problems than smaller ones,” he replied.
“Yeah, but wouldn’t the stakes be higher? An error in a larger project could be disastrous compared to an error in a small one.”
“Which makes it more important to be cautious about the moves you make on the board.”
“So you fill in the things that you know are correct?” I asked. He nodded. “But you can’t always have all the information! Sometimes you’re at the point of your life when you don’t know what to do, and you have to take a leap of faith.”
He thought for a few seconds, and said, “I hope I don’t get to that point, then.”
Compare this to the original:
“Wow, that’s a big Masyu. I don’t like big Masyus.” I asked.
“It feels better when you finish a big Masyu, though.” he replied.
“Yeah, but then if you make a mistake, you have way more to undo.”
He shrugs. “I only fill in things I’m sure of.”
“But what if you get stuck and have to guess?” I asked.
He thought for a few seconds, and said, “Uh, I dunno.”
12. Reference a piece of MIT history
If you’ve already made strained metaphors to a technical topic, you might as well drag another interest of yours into the mix and talk about MIT history. Wait. What’s that? You’re not interested in the history of FIXIT? You’re not interested in MIT history in general?! Too bad.
13. Quote a book or famous saying
As Abraham Lincoln once said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” He also said that “The only thing worse than being misquoted on the internet is not being misquoted on the internet.” Maya Angelou later said the exact same thing.
14. Restate your ideas in many places
If the central idea of your writing is along the lines of, “accurately guessing what happens after making a choice is impossible, for if it was possible, was it truly a choice?” make certain to reiterate that idea in many places. However, make certain you disguise the idea with some anecdote or dialogue. It’s undesirable for perusers to comprehend the idea you’re attempting to convey.
15. Never delete anything
Leave no words discarded. Instead of editing a section out, move it to somewhere unobstrusive, like the end of the post. Even if people who’ve read drafts of the post say you should cut some part, you should never listen to them, as more words can never hurt your blog post.
16. Go into too much detail about something unrelated
Okay, this is all a joke. This is April Fools’ Day, after all, and I’m making light of my style of writing blog posts. I enjoy going off on tangents from time to time, but I do try to keep my tangents to a minimum, or inside footnotes, when possible. Yesterday’s post about CMU was an exaggeration of the “tips” in this post, meant to making this post (and the CMU post) funnier in retrospect. Hence why I went on an extended tangent about buggy, though I think it’s justified, because it was the point that people cared about it a lot. Either way, there’s no excuse for bad writing, and I should’ve stuck to the relevant details. My apologies to everyone, and I hope the joke doesn’t distract you from the fact that in nineteen ninety-eight The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hеll In A Cell and plummeted sixteen feet through an announcer’s table.