An article from Elizabeth Bird from School Library Journal that discusses the purpose of children’s literature blogs got me thinking about focus in writing as it relates to one’s blog:

Yearly conferences take place, and each week children’s literary bloggers of all stripes contribute to Nonfiction Mondays, Poetry Fridays, blog carnivals, blog tours, interviews, reviews of new titles, and more.

It all begs the inevitable question: To what end? Sometimes I wonder if this is just a case of bloggers reading one another’s posts, commenting on one another’s blogs, contributing to an insular community that doesn’t have much impact on the outside world.

This resonated with me because I too find myself wondering, “To what end?”  I often witness the “echo” of one blog posting about another’s post - in all categories of my feeds, not just kidlit. I subscribe to quite a few home design blogs and you can see a topic or item pop like popcorn around the web - going “viral” it’s sometimes called. And while this is to be expected and totally fine, I sometimes wonder what the point is of my blogging about something I’ve seen on another person’s site. Why contribute to the hollow echo? That leads me back to the question of focus. What’s the point?

These are good questions to discuss with students to help them frame their own blogs, writings, or communications. If my blog is just “things I see on the web and want to remember”, then that is fine, but it will not have much focus. If my blog is “Filtering the web for reading and writing ideas for the intermediate classroom”, then what I read and whether or not I post about it will be a much easier decision. Focus. It helps make things clear.

Extending it further, is your contribution valuable if you don’t add some new learning to the topic? This speaks to those higher order thinking skills: application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation. For a piece of writing to be worth posting (or sharing in the classroom, or submitting as an assignment…) shouldn’t it be more than just a regurgitation of information accumulated elsewhere? On the other hand, how exhausting! All that THINKING. hmmmm…