Benefits of Blogging

There are many benefits to blogging. Just Google benefits to blogging and pages of articles and information is at your fingertips. Most of them have to do with business, marketing, and promotion. In a way, that's true for writers' too. Aren't we trying to market ourselves?

Dictionary.com defines blog as follows:  A Website containing a writer's [or group of writers'] own experiences, observations, opinions etc., and often having images and links to other websites.

At first, I had a hard time believing what I have to say is of any importance. I started my blog as a diary-like log of my experiences with our move to Texas and the adventures we have here. It is a creative outlet; one that makes me think, draw upon things I've learned, and lets me sprinkle in a little humor on top--or at least I try to.

But according to a feature story on UT Austin's website titled Writing to Heal there are health benefits too.

In the article, Vive' Griffith highlights Dr. James Pennebaker's, a professor at UT Austin, ideas on the benefits of writing.

Making a story out of a messy, complicated experience may make the experience more manageable. Linguistically, Pennebaker looks for words that are associated with more complex thinking, including certain propositions such as "except," "without" and "exclude" and casual words such as "cause," "effect" and "rationale." An increase in these types of words over the writing process suggests that the experience is becoming clearer and more narrative. 

So, why do I blog the mundane narrative events in my life? Maybe it's to make sense out of complicated experiences and make them more manageable. Or maybe because I'm a narcissistic writer with a story to tell anyone foolish enough to happen upon my entries. Or maybe I use the blog as space to upload photos and crap so I have more room on my computer's hard drive.

To quote Tootsie Pop's 1970's How Many Licks Does It Take To Get To The Center of A Tootsie Pop commercial, "The world may never know."