I was following my links back and forth and ended up at Kaye Trammell’s metablog. There’s lots of neat stuff there if you want more of an insight into how blogs can work than you’d get following around the academic/political links I normally post.

I really liked her little post on thinking in terms of blogs. It reminded me of some of the ways this little page has changed my way of philosophising.

One of the changes is potentially unfortunate. I’ve really cut back on how much technical work I do, largely because it’s so hard to use symbols in HTML. It’s not impossible, it’s just hard, and that’s clearly had a motivational effect. I can still do some technical work – I was fairly pleased with the way I was able to use the canonical model for KT to build a semantics for truer that brought out some small differences between my approach and the supervaluational approach – but I’m doing much less than I used to be. And my technical skills are pretty clearly degrading as a consequence. (In the first logic class yesterday I completely forgot how to prove that the set of sequences of integers is the same size as the set of reals, and had to rearrange the class plan on the fly so that proof wouldn’t come up until the end, when we ran out of time. Not good times. It seems I’m going to have to do more preparation for logic classes in the future and rely less on my ability to just do things on the spot.)

The other changes are better.

I’m using many fewer footnotes now, again because footnotes are a pain in HTML. In part I’ve made up for that by using more parenthetical asides, but I think it makes my writing much clearer. It’s one of the (many) nice features of Lewis’s writing that he is very sparing in using footnotes. I think getting addicted to footnotes is a very bad habit, one that I fell into probably as an undergrad, and only got off when I started blogging.

There’s also a lot more jokes in the papers now that the papers are often trialled here before they appear. Sometimes I edit out some of the (less respectable) jokes, but usually they mostly stay.

I’m probably not the best one to judge this, but I’m pretty sure that my writing has improved significantly from when I started blogging. This is improvement from a pretty low base, but we take what we can get. Some of the improvement is just from practice. And some of it is from thinking that I have to write for an audience that doesn’t all read Linguistics and Philosophy from cover-to-cover as soon as it comes out. (Though if you don’t I really think you should.) Between those two things I’m losing some of my old annoying habits, and getting better at communicating. I’m not claiming I’ve suddenly turned into one of the great stylists of philosophy. At best what used to be a rather striking negative characteristic of my work is en route to not being a major flaw. As I said, progress from a low base, but progress.

One surprising non-consequence of letting blogging be first philosophy is that my papers aren’t getting noticably shorter. In part that’s because I’ve always been prepared to have very long blog posts. But in part it’s because I always wrote papers that were fairly modular, so sections of the paper could, without much tinkering, stand as posts on their own. And paper sections were never much longer than a TAR-sized blog post. I don’t know whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. On the one hand, churning out a 3000-5000 word paper every three to five weeks would keep the tenure-file ‘scoreboard’ ticking over nicely. On the other, serious 8000-12000 word papers are more likely to be noticed. On the third, my ‘long’ papers are actually a bit too long for good journal articles, so a bit of a weight loss program for papers wouldn’t be a disaster.