Blog
This is a page about my pages*.
Right now, I have 4 kinds of posts that I’m working on.
Articles: posts that are formally researched, aka me channeling my research and engineering tendencies to finding answers to problems. I’m trying not to make them dull reading, but having spent decades writing business and science reports, it’s taking me time to unlearn some habits.
Explorations: this is me exploring topics of interest and also represents works in progress; here, I’m definitely doing the Newbie to Expert journey and bumbling around; the hope is once I find a decent solution, I can write about it as an article. Since I’m still figuring out stuff, I would like to hear and learn about others’ experiences. This is a good place to visit and comment. (Though no promises I will be responsive).
Lessons Learned: here, I share my life lessons. The things that I wish someone had told me in advance instead of me stumbling into them.
Reviews: I’m calling them Reviews**, but it’s a combination of review and my insights I got from books that I have read or courses that I’ve taken.
*If you’re wondering why the structure and formality, it’s because I’m a recovering perfectionist who tends to be anal-retentive about structure and consistency**. Coming from a science and business background, my default writing style is analytical with bullet point after bullet point about facts and statistics, and it’s frankly dry reading.
As a blogger, I need to get practice writing in an informal and empathic tone. And frankly, this is utterly alien to me. Articles and Reviews represent my transition attempts, but I’m still too stuck in my STEM mentality, so my output is low. Explorations and Lessons Learned are my desensitization attempts to write less formally and get more into the mode of sharing.
When I created these boundaries, I discovered it easier to write – the power of cognitive reframing!
** Just as an example, I mulled for the longest time on how I should handle my assessments on books (which incidentally is in a different category on my website).
Should I write “Book Summaries” – where I felt compelled to read the entire book, even the sections I’m not interested in since it’s technically a summary?
Should I write “Book Notes,” where I data dump my impressions of the book?
Or do I do “Book Reviews” where I share my assessment on whether you should get it or not?
The problem is as a reader, I tend to have different expectations depending on the format, but as a writer, each one has different requirements. In the end, I said, “Screw it,” as most readers don’t care about these formal definitions and whether I follow them (maybe the exception is Book Summary). So I went with Book Reviews, but in reality, they are a weird hybrid of my top lessons learned from Book Notes and my recommendations on whether you should get it or not. I figured for a good book, you should always read the full text since I can’t do full justice to what the writer achieved, and your insights might be different than mine.