Cognitive blogging, early and often

During my vacation I fell out of my blogging routine. I successfully managed to blog at least every day, but often several times a day. My blogging is fueled by what I read but also by itself (blogging fuels blogging). My ideal routine is “cognitive blogging, early and often”.

The “early and often” part (inspired by Chapter 4 in The Cathedral and the Bazaar, by Eric S. Raymond) is something I’ve blogged a lot about (for example here). Early and often ensures that blogging fuels further blogging.

By “cognitive blogging” I mean that in order to more deeply understand a topic, blogging about it during the course of reading really enhances the understanding. Your reading style isn’t quite the same when you read a text with the intention to write something about it. Sometimes I find myself reading the entire text once, then thinking about which parts were the highlights. If I can identify the highlights during the first reading, I sometimes mark it with a pen. Then I go over it again, quickly scanning the text for which parts to cite and write about.

Before my vacation I had developed the habit of continuously reading articles that I had printed out, but during the vacation all I had was my books and the daily newspaper. As for the newspaper, it didn’t always contain things I found interesting to delve deeper into. I did blog about articles and what I read in books, but I also came to a point where I felt that my mind was satiated – that I couldn’t do any more “deep reading” – so for I while I switched to reading fiction.

Now I’m trying to resume my blogging and I’m sure that it won’t be a problem. Before writing this post, I felt completely devoid of anything to blog about, but having read One Continuous Mistake (see my review) I knew that it just was a question of getting started. Hopefully this post will fuel more posts, and my daily reading will pick up speed again.