Do I Need a Blogging Self?

Greetings Traveler!

Naithin was talking the other day about a Separation of Self on Discord. While I now can't find the thread, I believe he was responding to Roger's post about Your Writing Persona.

I guess I fall more on Roger’s view of this topic. A long time ago, a supervisor commented that I write the same way I speak, which made my correspondence much more warm and readable. Since we were part of a customer service (billing inquiry) department, this was an important trait. I took great pride in that assessment, and have never felt the need to alter my written communication to edit out that warmth.

Now, it is true that I don’t always speak as well as I write. No one does, and linguists in recent years have worked to capture that difference between spoken and written language. However, by profession, I train people how to use computer systems to do their jobs. So I am experienced at speaking precisely and thoroughly to cover a topic and also engaging with my audience. Writing is a little more solitary in the beginning. But hopefully, I am able to engage with you, Dear Reader.

Which is to say, you generally get “the real Rowan” when you read my posts. Now, what I say is filtered. I tend to focus on games and my gaming experience, because that’s the type of blog this is. But my political views have occasionally spilled out . . . when I am particularly agitated. And, of course, when I have cool pictures from some foreign land that I have visited, I share them here among other places. Also, you may have gathered that Rowan is not my real name. Like Naithin, I am a little leery of sharing that much about myself. I don’t think any of my views are particularly controversial, and certainly nothing I am ashamed of.

While we all “perform” to some extent, depending on the people around us, I think some others may feel more pressure to not be themselves in certain situations. I either learned to resist that pressure long ago, or never really felt it. For the most part, I am the same whether at home or among friends as I am at work. And I always have been.

So the extent to which you share yourself or adopt a blogging persona is really up to you. Your comfort level in sharing yourself with the world. Some will flock to read you just for your unique voice, whichever way you decide to present yourself. But having met a few of the bloggers on my blogroll, the ones I most enjoy reading are the ones who are essentially themselves in written form on their blog.

~~~~~~~~

This article from I Have Touched the Sky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. If you repost part or all of the work (for non-commercial purposes), please cite me as the author and include a link back to the blog.

Scooter proofreads almost all my articles before I post them, for which I am very grateful. However, any mistakes are mine and mine alone (unless otherwise noted). If you are reading this post through RSS or Atom feed—especially more than a couple hours after publication—I encourage you to visit the actual page, as I often make refinements after publication. The mobile version also loses some of the original character of the piece due to simplified formatting.