Darren Rowse has an interesting post over at ProBlogger regarding the use of humor in blog posts.
I’m a frequent joker, both online and in life, and agree with Darren for the most part. Actually, on rereading his post, I guess I agree with him completely, but I’m probably just a little more stubborn than he is. Humor is one of the last things I’d give up in my posts, if ever.
Those of us who like to joke around and be sarcastic definitely run the risk of obfuscating our writing or even really angering someone. But where do we draw the line? How much humor or sarcasm should we use and how much should we leave out?
I think this is a very interesting topic. For one thing, the longer you have a reader coming to your site, the more time they have to learn about you and your writing style. Their comments and your responses to them, the emails of theirs that you respond to, all these will help frame your personality in their eyes.
For another thing, the longer you’re online, the longer you’ll be establishing yourself in your niche. The more posts you’ve got, the less hard you’ll have to work not to stray. For example, if you’ve got 1,000 blog posts about your niche topic and a dozen on “life stuff” that came up, you’re doing pretty well and most likely giving your readers what they want.
But here’s where the monkey wrench hits the main drive belt: you’re going to be getting new readers every day. The search engines, directories, other readers and bloggers will be sending you new traffic every day, and to these peoples you’re not established personality-wise.
I think this is where the care for your posts and discretion with humor come in, but I don’t think anything should kill your writing or your personality. There are a lot of bloggers I read because of the humor they inject.
I mean, this is the internet. There are a gazillion places to get news, finance info, celebrity gossip and the like. But there’s only one place where readers can find Darren, Dooce, or Scaryduck.
I also look at it this way: you’re always going to offend someone. It’s not hard. There are, to be blunt, stupid people around, and skinny people, and fat people, and people who like celery and some who don’t like vegetables at all. There are negative people around who won’t even care what your view is one way or another but will disagree just to disagree.
So it goes. Take Darren’s advice and be careful, but don’t let anyone get you down. You’re the only you the world’s got.
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