Speaking as someone who has been writing forever and blogging-as-we-currently-know-it since 2004... It always depends on what you want out of it. Some people a

Speaking as someone who has been writing forever and blogging-as-we-currently-know-it since 2004... It always depends on what you want out of it. Some people are outcome-oriented. They want reputation and/or the affirmation of crowds, and for them, writing is a process of reverse-engineering what people want to read. At a deep level, they don't want to write, they want to have written something popular. Others are journey-oriented. They write to work ideas out. paulg championed this o̶v̶e̶r̶ ̶a̶ ̶d̶e̶c̶a̶d̶e̶ ̶a̶g̶o̶ almost twenty years ago when he wrote an essay explaining that the word "essay" is not just a noun, but also a verb suggesting an attempt or experiment: http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html. For some ideas, trying to explain them forces us to confront the idea cheaply and identify areas where we haven't thought things through all the way. And of course, sometimes it's a little of column A, a little of column B. Speaking for myself, my taste is almost entirely for column B: http://braythwayt.com/posterous/2014/10/30/write.html http://braythwayt.com/posterous/2014/10/30/write.html. But this is a big world, and if someone wants what's in column A or to sprinkle some column A on their column B essay, well, this post provides some hints.