Yes, I'm Trying to Impress You

Image by Mike Licht via Creative Commons

Mariam, Carol, Kate, Tatiana, Traci, and the dozens of women who are a part of See Jane Write. These are some of the people I imagine are peeking over my shoulder each time I sit down to write a post for this blog.

Last month in a post for Independent Fashion Bloggers called Manfluence: A Single Girl’s Guide to Blogging, Taylor Davies called discussed how knowing her new love interest was reading her style blog forced her to improve the quality of her content. She said once her guy revealed that he’d visiting her site she made sure her posts were smart, funny, and well-edited.  

I confess that when I first read this post the feminist in me was ready to rant. And no, not because she was going ga-ga over a guy. We’ve all been there and there’s nothing wrong with trying to impress your man (or woman.) I was upset because it seemed that she was implying that when she thought only women were reading her posts there was no need to add humor, improve her vocabulary, or proofread. But upon second reading I realized I was overreacting.

Her point, as she later states, is that we should all blog to impress someone.

Many of us come to see our blogs as spaces where we are free to be ourselves and let our creative self-expression run wild. And while that’s a good thing on one hand, on the other hand we can be tempted to get too comfortable on our blogs and the quality of the content suffers as a result.

So, again, blog to impress someone. It doesn’t matter if it’s a spouse, a parent, a co-worker, or a crush, but write your blog posts with that person in mind. You may even want to write your posts as if potential literary agents, editors, or publishers are reading.

When people ask me what inspires me, it never takes long for me to answer. I am most inspired by creative women, creative women like the ones I named above. And it is my hope that I can somehow inspire them. And so with each blog post I’m striving to do just that.