Every few years, I revisit or reshare the list article. The reason why is simple. I don’t want to lose a reminder of how I got my start in publishing my writing. But there are other formulas for writing.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

The Power of a Formula

If you start out with a blank page, writing can be hard. But if you’re following a formula, you’re filling in the empty spots with words. When you’re done, you edit and revise until you have something. Would it help to get an example?

An Example: Writing Strategies

One project I am up to my nose in (think quicksand) right now is, “Write something about writing strategies.” What’s my angle? How do you start something like that? For fun, here’s my 10-second outline of what I’m going to write:

1. Problem statement that captures what the issue is
2. [Optional: Say, “Before we get into what we can do about that, let’s take a look at the research behind that.” Then you explore research findings, etc.]
3. Three to Five subheadings, a few words each, that describe the strategy (an aspect of the solution) to the problem
4. Include an image that captures the essence of each subheading, or a short video clip
5. Finish with a quick concluding thought or recommendation

Here’s the outline for that blog entry, that I can write on my memo pad that I carry around with me:

• Problem intro with this statement at the end of Paragraph 1: Let’s explore a few strategies young writers can put to use right away.
• Research Review: Why Teaching Writing is Important
• List of Strategies or solutions to the problem: ** Strategy #1: Prepare Teachers To Write with research citation ** Strategy #2: Teach Sentence Structures with research citation ** Strategy #3: Write About Academic Content with research citation ** More Strategies: A collection of strategies that I recommend
• Wrap It Up

While writing my problem intro, I came up with the title of the piece. Now, if I want to get controversial, or “provocative,” I can take an opposing view on ChatGPT or Artificial Intelligences (AI). 

Writing Formula

It may surprise no one that I follow a formula when writing a blog. Sure, there are a variety of formulas for blog writing. My favorite is one I learned awhile back, the List Article. These days, I write that type of blog entry ALL the time. But it’s not the only formula I follow.

Here are a few formulas, and I don’t claim to be an expert in any of them…no one is beating down my door with a book deal. I suspect it may be my own laziness. But this is a lot of fun, and that’s enough.

;-)

Formula #1: The List

1. Start out with an engaging question, quote, or scenario.
2. Develop a list of follow-up questions (e.g. frequently asked questions are a good source of these kinds of questions) off the main topic. For maximum effect, you will want to develop an engaging quote, or scenario for each question before offering a short, pithy solution.
3. Conclude with a short summary or end with the final question that references how you started the article.

If you do a search on Google for “TCEA Responds,” you’ll find a ton of examples. If I wrote it, that’s the formula. Here’s another example, not necessarily my best, but close enough. This second example falls into the list of “Five Steps” or “Five Ways” or “Three Tools” or something along those lines. This is the easiest approach. You can use anything to kick off the article. 

This was the easiest entry point for me, and is what helped me best understand how to write something for publication. Here’s one of my favorite formula examples

Image Source

Formula #2: Inverted Pyramid

Ever since I read, Bruce Grundy’s “So You Want To Be a Journalist,” I have wanted to write more inverted pyramid pieces. Reading my notes, it goes something like this:

• Put the news, what has happened, the most significant thing up front
• The least of those, the least important shows up last.

Here’s a quick attempt at inverted pyramid…lots of fun opportunities to write stuff like this example. I wrote it for fun to celebrate that Google finally has an onboard, built-in screen casting alternative to third party apps like Screencastify (a great tool), or any of the zillion other similar tools.

My First Attempt at an Inverted Pyramid

Chromebook users won’t have to pay an annual subscription for a third-party app. Licenses for educators and students can cost thousands of dollars in fees. The Screencast app eliminates those costs. Built into the Chrome OS, the app integrates into the Chromebook like the Chrome browser or Docs.

Google expert Eric Curts says this new tool makes recording a simple matter. It offers users an onboard tool they can use that’s more powerful than what was available before.

“This is an easy way for teachers to create instructional videos, and for students to make recordings to demonstrate their understanding,” he said.

Free Tech For Teachers author, Richard Byrne, said that you can need to update your Chromebook to the latest version of the Chrome OS.

This will make it easier for you to record a screencast on your Chromebook without using any extensions or 3rd party tools.

Your Chromebook will need to run Chrome OS M103 at minimum.

Gee, I hope I don’t get into trouble with Eric and Richard for quoting/paraphrasing them. Well, that was fun. I can definitely see trying to write that as a blog entry for quick dissemination of information.

Formula #3: Visual Storytelling

Want something a little different? Try Visual Storytelling. You can easily adapt something like this:

• Engage with image/video
• Be brief, to the point, and inform/entertain
• Offer a call to action

You can keep it happy or sad, provide information or make it entertaining. 

For fun, I revised this news story and got this…it’s a rewrite and borrows heavily from the original.

If you have advanced prostate cancer, you are less likely to respond well to treatment. The data comes from an American Cancer Society study published in early 2023.  The second leading cause of cancer death in U.S. males, it rose 3% every year from 2014 to 2019. Researchers explain why in  CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians. The uptick in cancer deaths is due to increased diagnoses of advanced disease.   Advanced prostate cancer is “extremely difficult to treat,” says the study’s lead author, Rebecca Siegel. She is senior scientific director of surveillance research at the American Cancer Society. She goes on to say, “There is no durable cure for those with metastatic disease.”

Sorry, I couldn’t resist. Or another way to point it out

“Better get your prostate checked every year after 40,” my dad would say. We had just walked out of the doctor’s office. I was seventeen, and had the funny walk every man gets when he’s had a doctor’s finger, wrapped in a rubber glove and jellied, checking his prostate. I vowed to never get my prostate checked again. Fast forward a lifetime, and I remember crying into a towel on the couch. My Dad dropped by to let me know the news.

He’d been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Allow me to share a few tips you need to keep in mind if you are a man.  Before I share those tips for surviving prostate cancer, let me share some new information that came out in early 2023.

The Skinny on Advanced Prostate

You may know why prostate cancer is so hard to treat if not caught early. One minute, your PSAs are fine. The next, they warrant a visit to the Doc. The doctor calls you in, and gives you the bad news. There’s something wrong. Worse, there’s no cure for advanced prostate cancer that has metastasized, which spreads to multiple sites, all of them hard to reach. From 2014 to 2019, the CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians reported that it became the leading cause of cancer death in males in the United States. That’s a three percent increase for a disease that has, as Rebecca Siegel puts it, “no durable cure.”  How do you avoid getting prostate cancer, or catching it early? You drop your pants and let the proctologist have his way with you. Getting old sucks, doesn’t it? Let’s explore five ways to keep yourself alive and kicking. 

1. Adopt a Mediterranean Diet. Avoid trans fats and saturated fats. Go for healthy fats from nuts, seeds, and fish.
2. Drink green tea and eat soy. These can reduce your risk for prostate cancer.
3. Eat more vegetables and fruit. Broccoli, cauliflower both contain sulforaphane, which may protect against cancer. They may make you gassy, but lower your risk. Cooked or processed tomatoes also slow the growth of prostate cancer cells.
4. Skip the charred meat. Avoid that charred steak, whether fried or grilled. Charring meat produces a chemical that may increase your risk of cancer (source).
5. Stay healthy. Get regular exercise, don’t smoke or drink alcohol, and take Vitamin D. Oh, and have lots of sex.

Note to Reader: There’s more ways to get it done, and I’d probably write a bit more about each, but this is a quick summary of info from Hopkins Medicine.

A Final Smoke

My Dad always wished for a final smoke before he died of lung cancer many years later. Yeah, that’s right, my Dad didn’t die of prostate cancer, but cancer got him all the same. Darn those stogies. So, in addition to the five ways to stay alive, try to work some diet, exercise, and fun into your time on earth. Who knows, your prostate may let you live a long life.

Wasn’t that fun? Here are a few more tips I decided to throw in for fun.

Miscellaneous Tips

Some miscellaneous tips:

• Practice Linktribution, as Alan Levine says it. Be generous in your links to others. In a blog entry, link to lots of other people. Swipe a sentence from their blog entry, put quotes around it, link to it, then head off in a different direction than it suggests. Or argue with it. Don’t be afraid to pick fights with other bloggers' ideas.

• Run other’s ideas through your mill, and see what happens. If poop comes out, share that. Maybe you don’t know what the heck you’re talking about. Say so. It’s a blog, not an academic journal.

• Keep it short. Maybe, limit yourself between 500-1000 words. Write a lot of short pieces that are centered around the same theme or topic. Then put them together.

• Use subheadings. I use subheadings for emails, and they can break up long paragraphs. That’s why list articles are so easy.

• Try bulleted lists…they are easy to process.

• Feature Image that engages never hurts…include one!

• Put images for each major section to provide a visual for an idea.

Entertain yourself with your blogging piece. I had a laugh writing this! Juxtapose ideas or formulas to get creative. Take something serious and mix into a comedy, or vice versa. 

A Fun Exercise

What might be fun is to go back to my original writing strategies blog entry that I’m writing. Then, re-write it using the different formulas. Well, I did that with the prostate thing, throwing in an inverted pyramid and a listicle. I also threw in a funny cat pic. Why not do all three when playing with a blog entry’s content?

As much as I loved my graduate level professors, I have found their approach to teaching reading…problematic. I remember beginning my year teaching third grade bilingual, working with children who needed to learn to read in English. At the time, as I was prepping my classroom in the portable building, one of the paraeducators was shocked at my actions. “You aren’t going to teach phonics?”

I remember chuckling, and saying, “No, that’s not the way it’s done anymore.” But, now, I know better. Fortunately, all but one of my students knew how to read. My Writing/Reading Workshop approach worked and they learned to read and write in spite of my ignorance.

Phonics Works

Now, I know that I should have learned how to teach phonics. This was driven home when I read Nate Joseph’s piece, A Meta-Analysis and Literature Review of Language Programs.

MyNotes

1. Despite the fact that this meta-analysis was conducted 20 years after the National Reading Panel meta-analysis, with studies included up to 2022, I found the identical mean effect size for phonics, of .45. I also conducted a secondary meta-analysis of 13 phonics meta-analyses conducted over the last 25 years, which found a mean effect size of phonics, of .43.
2. Phonics interventions showed efficacious results, both for early primary instruction, and for older students with reading deficits. This suggests that students should receive phonics instruction during their foundational education years and that if they miss this instruction that they benefit from getting it later on.
3. Phonics heavy programs outperformed Balanced Literacy programs across all grades, and sample types. Indeed phonics programs showed roughly double the impact for grades 1-2, at risk learners, and class based instruction. This research does not show support for the use of Balanced Literacy programs, over phonics focused programs, in any context.
4. The data showed higher outcomes for shorter phonics studies, and for longer balanced literacy studies.
5. one logical explanation might be that phonics programs might work more efficiently. As teaching students to memorize large amounts of words takes more instruction, it makes sense that Balanced Literacy programs might take longer to show a positive effect for students, as it is an in-efficient method for instruction. Whereas, some students might learn how to decode from phonics quite quickly and the phonics programs might show diminishing returns over time.

Nate writes a bit more, but these are the parts that jumped out at me as most profound. And, that I had to spend some time worrying at, a dog with a bone.

Looking for writing prompts for nature? These YpsiWrites folks have put together a series of prompts or writing resources you can get as a book.

YpsiWrites

The website offers a lot of nifty resources:

Are you looking for writing activities, tips, or ideas on how to start writing? Our wide-array of resources aim to support and inspire every writer — whether you’re writing alone or with others.

The book offers sample prompts that will have you exploring the outdoors. Here’s one:

Indoors or Outdoors. Explore the landscape to determine how many types of trees are present. Which are deciduous? Which are conifers? What can you notice about each tree’s branching pattern, bark, roots, leaves/needles, twigs, or buds? What roles does each tree seem to play in its community? Sketch or photograph and write about the trees you see.

I admit that it’s been a long time since I’ve gone outside and studied nature. It’s too easy to ignore that in my mad dash to hurry off to where I need to be next. In all the hurrying to and fro, nature is ignored.

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” -Marcel Proust

Starting a new blog, goofing up the domain name for an established blog (www.mguhlin.org isn’t working anymore, but you can find Around the Corner at mguhlin.blogspot.com) hasn’t been fun. What has been fun is

• Writing in Markdown. It slows me down a little, making me think a bit about what I’m saying. It’s like getting a new pen and pad of paper that you want to write on. Do you put the ** to bold something before or after the link in parenthesis? (after, BTW)
• Asking myself, “What do I want to focus on in this iteration of my blog?”

Photo by Ruben Ortega on Unsplash

One question that hasn’t really arisen? Is blogging really dead? Well, I mean, I wrote about it in this entry, but obviously, the answer is, “No” as @noplasticshower responded via Mastodon.

Harold Jarche’s Take

Harold makes some great points in his 02-19-2024 blog entry. He even quotes that venerable favorite every blogger back in the day read, Rick Levine’s The Cluetrain Manifesto:

Last year I said that I hoped that we see a return to more people blogging as they realize how much surveillance capitalism and the platform monopolists are robbing from citizens and civil society. “A knowledge worker is someone whose job is having really interesting conversations at work.” —Rick Levine (1999) The Cluetrain Manifesto — and that’s what blogging is all about.

I can get behind the idea that “surveillance capitalism” is bad (capital “B” bad?) and that platform monopolists are stealing from us all. It often feels quite difficult to imagine…we’re drowning in all the PR and services shoved down our throats.

Takeaways from The Cluetrain Manifesto

The Cluetrain Manifesto is full of great ideas whose time has come and then been ignored to some degree. That said, here are a few ideas that continue to ring true for me:

• We are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers, we are human beings. And our reach exceeds your grasp. deal with it.
• People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors. So much for corporate rhetoric about adding value to commoditized products.
• Respect for hands-on knowledge wins over respect for abstract authority.
• Command-and-control management styles both derive from and reinforce bureaucracy, power tripping and an overall culture of paranoia.
• When we have questions we turn to each other for answers. If you didn’t have such a tight rein on “your people” maybe they’d be among the people we’d turn to.

Harold shares that he uses his blog as a way to connect with other professionals. That’s less true for me these days. What I use it for now is getting my “half-baked ideas” out there, not only for future use but to exorcise them from my thinking.

It’s so easy to fall for stupid stuff, to think and believe stupid stuff. Pretty soon, it starts clogging your brain paths. By writing it down, you’re getting it out of your head. At least, that’s what I see happening.

Doug Johnson Responds

Doug from The Blue Skunk Blog dropped a comment via email to me, which I’ll share here:

I continue to struggle with the need/reason/content for my blog, especially now that I have stepped back from education and technology and school libraries. (Retired now for nearly 5 years!) As always, I continue to blog for my own amusement and if others get some joy from reading my posts, all the better.

Finding purpose to write reminds me that we’re not our jobs. Around the Corner was a blog I started to process and explore new technologies in a leadership role. But these days, while I might still be in a leadership role, I lack the same enthusiasm to write about the latest gadget.

I’ve seen edtech come and go, and it’s mostly a flash in the pan. Every year, you get some new tech and then people chase after it, trying to be the ONE who shares or makes something everyone will want to click on and read. In a few months, it’s over and onto the next big thing.

ASIDE: Right now, that big thing is AI. AI is everywhere, you can’t swing a mouse from the tail without hitting somebody or something discussing AI. But in the final analysis, will AI as it is now and how it might be next month going to fundamentally change how the human brain works? Probably not. That doesn’t mean it isn’t useful, that we all don’t need to learn more about it, but…calm down folks.

Instead, I find myself, in this blog (Another Think Coming) trying to find my voice again, that sense of authenticity. Whether people read it or not, eh, who cares? That was never my reason for blogging. But if I can make it a little more fun, why not?

Doug goes on to write:

I enjoyed your recent posts. One of them made me think of a book I recently read titled The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef. I was sufficiently impressed with it to buy copies for my grandson. Clarity of thinking seems more important than ever in this crazy world.

Not surprisingly, I have also picked up a copy of Galef’s book. It’s sitting in my pile of unread books I need to get to. That will be another blog post, I’m sure. Soon.

A Cemetery of Ideas

As I go back over old blog entries, I realize how many other blogs have simply faded away. But there are also old web pages, blog entries that have vibrant stories to tell…if only someone would read them. They are a cemetery of ideas, waiting for a zombie virus to reanimate their corpses, to see what, if anything, they can spread their ideas to.

The concept of an idea virus isn’t new. I became aware of it when Seth Godin shared it in 2000 with his book, which you can still download online for free, here: Unleashing the Idea Virus.

A short summary:

Marketing by interrupting people isn’t cost-effective anymore. You can’t afford to seek out people and send them unwanted marketing messages, in large groups, and hope that some will send you money. Instead, the future belongs to marketers who establish a foundation and process where interested people can market to each other. Ignite consumer networks and then get out of the way and let them talk.

Let them talk. Or, blog.