Individual Liberty — Individual Responsibility 

Rambling

It seems sometimes that some people are afraid that if they don't talk they'll disappear. One piece of blogging advice I read a few months ago suggested that if you don't post something every day your readership will disappear. I've found though that a lot of the time it's not the quantity of posts that matters, but their quality.

Therein lies a problem. Sometimes there just doesn't seem to be much to say. Maybe those are the times to be quiet. My mother and father taught me that if I don't have anything good to say that I shouldn't say anything.

Another thing they taught me, or at least tried to, was that I should think before saying anything. Again, I think it has something to do with the quality rather than the quantity of your speech.

Douglas Adams had a bit to say about talking and thinking. In chapter 21 of "The Restaraunt at the End of the Universe" he made this observation.

It is worth repeating at this point the theories that Ford had come up with, on his first encounter with human beings, to account for their peculiar habit of continually stating and restating the very very obvious, as it 'It's a nice day,`` or ''You're very tall,`` or ''So this is it, we're going to die.``

His first theory was that if human beings didn't keep exercising their lips, their mouths probably seized up.

After a few months of observation he had come up with a second theory, which was this --- ``If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, their brains start working.''

In fact, this second theory is more literally true of the Belcebron people of Kakrafoon.

The people of Kakrafoon were afflicted with the curse of telepathy. That at least isn't our problem. Without words we have a difficult time communicating what we're thinking or feeling. Sadly too many times the words come without thinking and then the feelings intensify.

Such was recently the case with another blog I frequent. It's also why I don't visit some other blogs anymore. But this isn't where I want to go right now.

Having children teaches a person quite a few things. When a child is an infant and unable to communicate their needs it can be quite frustrating for a parent. I can only imagine how frustrating it must be for the child to not be able to say what they need.

My granddaughter has had me wishing she could talk more than a few times lately. She's occasionally quite upset and even angry, and the only way she can communicate it is to wail and scream. Is she hungry? She cries. Is she wet? She cries. Does she have an upset stomach? She cries. Does she have a headache? She cries.

Does her crying tell me what's wrong? Not really, and so I wish she could talk.

It's been said that we should be careful what we wish for, because we might receive it. I went through a similar period of frustration with my son when he was unable to talk. He gradually learned to talk, but he shares a common trait with his father. I'm stubborn as an ox and so is he. That made for some frustration when we were trying to teach him to ask for things rather than simply taking them.

Eventually though he became quite proficient at talking. At that point, the second edge of the sword started to cut and I found myself wishing the boy would simply "shut up". The quantity of speech went up exponentially.

Fortunately as children grow, the quality of their speech improves too. When they actually think before talking it can throw you for a loop. Or it can make speaking to them a joy. Or both.

We talk to exchange information. I'm hungry. I'm wet. I've got a stomach ache. My head is splitting. I love you.

I presume that we read to obtain information. So when we go to visit a website and read, we're looking for information. Or maybe entertainment. The quality of the information or entertainment determines whether we'll be back.

So, I've been told that I should post something every day to build a readership. One of the reasons behind this is that people will eventually find things that I wrote months ago, and those things may hook them and entice them to come back to the site.

I look through the traffic records for my site, and through the sitemeter and statcounter statistics. It's true, more than half of the people that visit my site are actually finding older posts and reading them. Things I wrote back in January are turning up in the traffic today.

The thing is, even though quantity is important, quality is also important. I went though quite a dry spell this summer, and often times, the only post I put up was a quick, canned open trackbacks post. There was a steady decline in traffic through the summer, because the quality wasn't there.

Quality doesn't come from the number of words though. It comes from the effort and thought that goes into stringing those words together. It comes from the ideas being expressed and how those ideas are expressed.

"Hardly worth commenting on". Now that stings. I guess I'll have to do better.

This linkfest is for the 25th of October, 2007.

If you have something interesting you'd like to share, feel free to link it here and leave a trackback.

Just remember the trackback policy.

For the best exposure, go to the blogger's oasis and use the linkfest chooser to choose the posts you'd like to hook up with.