The Voice of a Blog
Part 5 of What Is A Blog?
(Creative Commons)
The final defining element of a blog is, for me, its voice. Not what is said but how it’s said.
Blogs were initially purely personal vehicles for self-expression, many still are. In this case the voice is clear, the author is talking directly to us, often about his or her personal beliefs, concerns or life issues. The personality of the writer comes through strongly.
Things become more complicated with subject based or corporate blogs. What does “voice” mean in these cases?
Let’s take Blogduction itself as an example. It’s not about me and my life in any way, it’s about blogs and how to write them. Yet I like to think it still has a unique and recognisable voice. That’s because I try to write as if I was talking to you personally – which, indirectly, I am. So I use personal pronouns like “I” and informal sentence structures. The information in these pages could easily have been presented in a more formal, encyclopaedic fashion – but then it wouldn’t have been a blog.
Speaking of encyclopaedia, a good example of the distinction is Wikipedia. When this began it was pretty much an informal collaborative project. Articles would be written by people who were experts and/or enthusiasts and often had an relaxed, sometimes even jokey style. Wikipedia as a whole didn’t have a single voice but individual pages often did. The site could well have been labelled a multi-author blog. That all changed recently as Wikipedia imposed stricter rules for style and citing of sources. The result is a more reliable source of information but one that no longer even remotely resembles a blog.
With company blogs a distinctive voice can be more difficult to achieve. Writers aren’t speaking just for themselves and will often be handicapped by legal and commercial sensitivities. However a good corporate blog will still manage to convey the sense of a writer communicating directly with the reader and show personality. A poor company blog sounds like bland committee generated corporate-speak and is unlikely to attract readers.
Which brings us back to the previous point that blogs are interactive. People are more inclined to interact with a person than an encyclopaedia.
It all comes down to “be yourself”.
