Writing about things you are not an expert on
I got an email today asking me why I don’t write more about Social Networking, to which I replied “that whilst I have some knowledge on the subject, I am very far from being a specialist in the matter.”
I received a prompt and very curious reply: “why don’t you write about it anyway? Writing can be learning process you know…”
Now I am not disputing the fact that during the process of writing one inevitably acquires a lot of information on whatever subject he/she is writing about, even more so when the subject is on a particular field that we are not 100% comfortable.
My slight quarrel with this argument is not so much on what people write about, but how they do it. I have no problem whatsoever in reading an article on a subject written by someone who is not a specialist on that area, provided he does not place himself on a position of expertise.
It just seems to me that with the proliferation of the Social Networks and the massification of Blogging we have an excess of self deliberated experts everywhere.
All you need to do is make a query about any particular subject on Wikipedia, and congrats, you have graduated!
The constant necessity for fresh unique content hasn’t helped at all, making the quality of the content secondary. This is more noticeable to me (for obvious reasons) in the Web Marketing and Search Engine Optimization arena, where I have read unbelievably patronizing articles written by people who haven’t got a clue on what they are talking about.
The information in most of these articles is useless, just a regurgitation of basic principles that bring nothing new and add no value whatsoever to the reader.
Of course that in order to have value an article/post does not need to be innovative nor does it need to add anything in particular to a topic, provided that it does not self proclaim that it will.
It’s all about the intention of the article that can be controlled by the tone and construction of the article.
Most of the content that I post is not innovative at all, yet I do not proclaim that it is.
There are undoubtedly exceptions, where it can be useful to write or explain something that has been talked about before in a different way, perhaps simplifying the main point of the article, but this is rarely done with a “sales pitch” tone to the writing.
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