This article is a part of Series: The Knowledge Workflow
- Personal Knowledge Flow. Find the missing links of your mental process
- Note-taking workflow: To build and extract knowledge from digital notes
- Building blocks of true Knowledge: Atomic understanding
- Beginning of original thinking: Reflective thinking
- Purpose of Trigger points in PKM (No, NOT keywords)
- How to make your ideas powerful? & The first actionable step.
- The difference between “journaling” and “note-taking”
- Is instant gratification bad? How long I can postpone my gratification?
- Measuring the ‘ethical’ quality of a writing
- To Do… to Done… & things in the middle…
The quality of writing is not measured by how much time your reader spends reading. Neither on reader engagement metrics. To be clear, I am talking about ‘non-fiction’ writings.
It is in how much time the reader spends in thinking about the idea you shared in your writing. How many thoughts do your words trigger in his/her mind? More importantly how many changes it may or might bring to them.
While reading, the reader may nod their heads agreeing with your idea, shake when they couldn’t agree with you and they can even take time to chew (what they just read) in their mind. Finally, they can come up with an understanding or decision after a thought process. In my opinion, that’s a good quality writing.
Some considerations for ethically responsible writing…
Write your ideas and then bring them to the right audience. Not the other way around. This piece of advice looks counter-intuitive. But in the long run, your reader base increases as more and more relevant readers find your content.
In the end, they should forget you (the messenger, the writer) but take away the idea (message) with them. Ideas should be the core of your writing. Not gimmicks. Aim for perpetuation of your ideas.
It’s not how much they retain or remember the exact words. It’s all about how much they built a new ‘thing’ in their mind with it.
Help them to make their decision. Do Not push yours. And don’t try to decide for the readers.
Incept. Don’t try to manipulate. (Readers can sense this tone easily sooner or later). Convince by reason, not by emotions.
Worry only about how it will be perceived. Be precise. Try to be more clearer and less ambiguous.
Be responsible for your words. Be more responsible for the readers’ understanding. After all, the goal is to make them reconstruct your idea in their mind in the way you want. Making them feel as you wanted them to feel.
P.S. Ethics are judged based on intentions and values. Not based on the skill of writing.