Magic spell blog posts
What makes a blog post good?
It must exist.
It must introduce a catchphrase.
The blog post can cover other ideas. It can talk about 10 other things. But somewhere in there, there must be an idea with a very sticky catchphrase. This catchphrase will be the title of your blog post.
It must have at least one moment of a specific “aha” feeling.
The best blog posts have these 2–3 paragraph clusters, that are written with both a simplicity and denseness, that make the reader feel they are understanding something important and deeply in a way they never have before.
Examples
The best blog posts, IMO, are the ones that people link back to frequently. Folks want to explain a certain idea, or story, or way of thinking about the world, and boom, here is a blog post explaining it.
It’s important a blog post have an aha moment or two, because it’s what makes the blog post feel like it has an interior—you remember what it was like being inside the experience of reading a blog post like Evolution as Backstop or The Gervais Principle because of the emotion feeling of it.
And it’s important to follow that up with a catchphrase or memorable title, because it’s what binds the experience together into a memorable package the brain can hold on to.
So for example, this post is about how blog posts are like magic spells: you simply invoke them, and they bring up a whole experience.
Next time you want to invoke that experience, all you need to do is link to that blog post. Anima scripti!
Not all of the blog post needs to be written well. But a part of it needs to be written well enough to produce those moments at least once or twice.
Worked examples
Universal Love, Said the Cactus Person is both such a compelling, strange story, and has such an unusual phrase, that it becomes a concept handle on what is otherwise a very slippery set of feelings and insights.
Bargaining with Your Right Brain introduces a single main idea—negotiating involves telling a story and moving it towards its conclusion—and in the middle is filled with rich insights and examples.
The Gervais Principle is both long and unified in its presentation and observation of otherwise assorted office dynamics through its lens of losers, clueless, sociopaths, and ties even that triad together as The Gervais Principle.
Evolution as Backstop wanders through fascinating, insightful topics, and unifies it all with a consistent image: a hard outer stop, on an inner runaway optimisation loop.
These posts are rich because of their content and years of genuine experience they compress, but they are also highly linkable, because of the way they compress it all into a few catchphrases and concepts that can hold the web of insights together.
When you remember the catchphrase, you pick up all the web of insights associated with it. You remember all the bargaining examples, and the dozen nuances to go with it. And if you ever want to give someone else access to the same web, you can simply link them to the blog post.
Good blog posts are exercises in information architecture.
