Writing Blog Posts

I’ve always been a terrible writer. Not sure if it’s because I started my career as an engineer or if I’m just not that creative. I think my mind is more analytical which helped me through engineering school, business school, and my current career. However, I often find myself just repeating facts in these blog posts, and not really telling a story.

I have a few friends that also maintain blogs and some of them are wonderful writers. Even my ex-wife, who only moved to the US during high school, is a much better writer than me. Their writing just seems more expressive and interesting; my posts read like an academic paper. I guess knowing is half the battle. I’m going to try and Goggle a bit to see if I can get any pointers on being a better writer.

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I remember in college, I had to take a lot of history classes. That year, UCLA decided that electrical engineering majors cannot read or write so we had to take either History 1A/1B/1C or Humanities 1A/1B/1C. That’s three college courses where you read and write a lot. I took the History series. I remember I hated writing papers. I would look through the readings, find interesting quotes to use, then use the rest of the paper/essay to connect the quotes. It worked pretty well; I got mostly A’s in my history classes and I took about 8 of them, almost enough for a History minor. I don’t know if any of the papers made a coherent argument but for me, as long as I met the minimum number of words required, I was done. I didn’t have any non-engineering classes for graduate school, and writing for the MBA program was totally different. There we were only allowed two double-spaced pages and 5 exhibits per case write-up. The challenge was making you case in such a limited amount of space. Maybe that’s why my blog posts are kind of terse.