A few weeks ago, I was on a catch-up Zoom call with a friend I hadn’t chatted with in a while. He made mention of the recent uptick in my blogging activity and then, very good-naturedly, took me to task for using footnotes and citations. He joked that he was going to have to level up if he started blogging again. (He is a far more talented writer than me.)
What he was referring to is my increased use of an essay (or “term paper”) format in my posts. I’ve done it at least six times this year. Rather than a typical blog post, which can range from pure opinion to commentary to technical how-to, these posts tend to be longer, more academic than my usual tone, and supported by in-text citations and lists of references in APA 7th edition format.
A few years ago, I completed my “pandemic MBA.” During the course of pursuing that degree, I wrote a lot of papers. I joke that this was the world’s revenge for the lack of term papers during my computer science undergrad in the late 1980s and early 1990s. My wife, a history major, had to write so many papers during her undergrad that she practically kept a cot at the Library of Congress. My MBA program balanced the scales somewhat.
The university required all papers to use APA 7th edition for citations and references. I found a few decent tools online to help with the onerous formatting requirements. I finished my degree five months before the first release of ChatGPT, so I couldn’t lean on AI for that formatting. There was at least a paper a week and, as the old joke goes, on any particular Sunday evening around midnight, I was the world’s foremost authority on whatever that week’s topic was.
About a year after I finished my MBA, I was self-employed and navigating the emerging world of AI. Additionally, I was digging back into open-source after spending several years in the SaaS wilderness. I was reading a lot of material, often simultaneously. Keeping it all straight was a constant challenge. A few months after that, I took on an engagement to write a white paper on the applicability of AI to the end customer’s operations. The entire engagement took about four months and resulted in a 45-page paper and an oral presentation. There were few formatting requirements, so I used the one from my MBA program, including APA citations.
In the process of organizing and writing that paper, I read approximately 200 academic papers on AI and related technologies, some dating back to the mid-1990s. When I was done, on one particular Wednesday afternoon, I was the world’s foremost authority on AI. It was stressful, but I found I enjoyed the experience.
After that, I had to keep digging into AI. As a consultant, I also had to dig into a range of topics such as volumetric calculus, dredge management, and fiber network design. In each case, I decided to write a paper. The process of researching the paper, finding primary or credible sources, and pulling together a paper for myself helped both my understanding and retention. So, I’ve kept up the practice.
This year, I brought the essay format to this blog. As I am exploring or researching a concept, I write a paper. When that paper is done, I publish it here. I see it as an extension of the original motivation for starting this publication. Back then, before Github and Gist, a blog was the easiest way to both share and archive code snippets. As I solved a problem, I’d write a post and share some code. I have often since found my way back to my own code through Google.
Now, I post an essay, with all the formality of sourcing and review. (Some AI tools are great at assisting with review, which is a huge help for a single practitioner/blogger.) So, rather than code, I am sharing and archiving my research and hoping that I may stumble on it again one day in whatever tool takes the place of Google.
Obviously, not everything I’ve written this year is in the essay format. A couple of posts have had code snippets and some didn’t even mention AI.
I’ll wrap things up here. The least interesting thing a person can write about is their own writing, but I will say that pulling together essays has helped me rediscover an appreciation of research. Methodical, deliberate research followed by structured authoring of a fully-sourced essay has improved my comprehension and retention. I’ve been reminded that blogging was never only about publishing. It has also been a way to leave a trail back to what I was learning at the time.
Header image: Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
