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I’ve been getting more requests asking about the “write a guest post!” section I’ve been placing at the end of most posts. Since we’ll be having our first guest post this week (if my editing work is done in time), I figure it’s a good time to explain what guest posting is like, as well as provide broader advice for writing about data for your own blog. Especially about finding what to write about, because that seems to be the biggest hurdle.
Overall guest posting process
Reach out! — If you are interested in writing a guest post for Counting Stuff, the first step is to just reach out an express your interest. If you have an idea for a post in mind, great! But it’s okay to have only a vague notion in mind and I help you come up with an idea.
Figure out a topic — This is always a conversation, whether you have something in mind or need help coming up with one. There’s two goals here, 1) to come up with a topic that everyone else would find interesting to read, and 2) to find topic that the author is excited to write about.
Sketch out a very rough outline (optional) — With a broad topic, it’s a good idea to sketch out where you think you want to take the post. Instead of writing “a post about ChatGPT”, maybe you might want to specifically take it to “how chatGPT ruined your Normconf MC experience”. This will also help you avoid hitting dead ends.
Write the post — Now’s the hard part, putting fingers to keyboard and typing out a post. Starting is the hardest part, so just have to sit down and do it.
Submit for editing —Randy gets final say in whether a post fits the vibe of the newsletter enough to be published. This sounds scary, but Randy tries to be fairly light-handed as an editor. Expect it to be more a collaboration on how to make a post better than a “Reviewer #2 has logged into the newsletter” experience.
We publish!
Some frequently asked questions
I work for a company/brand/whatever, can we propose a guest post that talks about our stuff?
Yes, but with some strong caveats.
No one wants to read a promotional spiel about whatever service you’re building/selling and your “added value”. BUT, people who are deeply involved in building a product to solve a specific problem also have stories and insights about the specific problem space. I think those stories can be interesting for everyone to read.
For example, I’m not interested in reading a comparison between how different DAG frameworks/products do things. But I’m might be interested in hearing the specific edge case and stories that prompted the creation of a specific feature that aren’t obvious to normal users. Every product has features that many people don’t understand why it even exists simply because they’re not hitting the use case in mind.
So if there’s detailed, interesting, expertise you’d like to share and you just happen to earn money from it, we can have a conversation about what might work.
Any length requirements?
No strict limits, min or max. But posts here typically range from 750 words to over 3000 words. Interesting often stories take lots of words. Go with whatever makes sense.
I’m interested but need help with finding something to write about!
Read on!
How to find something to write about
Lots of people have asked me how the heck do I manage to keep finding things to write about on a regular basis. The honest answer is that every week I’m searching for topics and have managed to find something each time — some more interesting than others. But there is a vague process to the whole thing.
1- Find a spark of inspiration from anywhere I can in life
By this, I mean finding an beginning of an idea that makes me feel something — a surge of emotion, a twinge of curiosity, a rabbit hole that I want to explore. At the end of the day, it’s got to be something I’m willing to put at least a couple of hours of exploration and thinking into, so I want to find something that will at least keep me interested for that much. The trick is to find a way to connect the spark to something data-related. It’s a broad space, so there’s usually a way to do so with a bit of creativity.
Very early in my writing career, I’d mainly focus on things like pet peeves (like how I hate SQL joins being explained using venn diagrams). Or maybe I’d go deep on a topic that isn’t usually covered in depth, like user-agent strings, because I wanted to know myself what the technical specifications were behind them.
More recently, I take a lot of inspiration from problems I’ve faced recently at work, or hear about from colleagues, or stories and articles on the wider data internet. I’ve mostly run out of things to fly into flaming rants about.
Occasionally, if I manage to think ahead far enough, I might start on a small project of some sort with the explicit intention to write about it. These usually take much more forethought than I am capable of mustering on any given day, so it’s very rare.
After doing this for three years, I’ve realized that there’s inspiration all around, just like there are interesting photos to take of everyday subjects if you’re willing to put some effort into looking from different perspectives. Seeing a chart and wondering where the data came from, having some dinner and getting interested in the logistics behind the ingredients on the table, having a conversation about cloud technology and getting stuck while explaining something.
One tip I’ll add on is that inspiration is fleeting. If something comes to me while I’m out and about, I always find a way to note it down somewhere before I forget it — usually within fifteen minutes. I don’t quite keep a notebook full of links and notes that might come in handy in the future like many authors say they do, but it comes close.
2- Take the inspiration and see if it leads to anything
Many raw bits of inspiration probably won’t lead to interesting stories to write about. I’m pretty sure no one here wants me to write anything about how I replaced a faucet over the weekend. So it’s important to follow ideas to see where they leads. Similarly, the same idea can be taken in different directions.
In my case, I try to see if the idea can link to something I want to explore or say. Is there an opinion I’d like to share about the topic? Is there a new thing that I’m learning and want to bring everyone else along for the ride? Once in a while, I just want to think through the implications of an idea and see where it goes and I just trust that I can take it somewhere interesting as I go.
2a- Don’t worry if what you’re saying has been said already
It’s a big world, it’s rare to have a completely novel idea that no one else has written down before. It doesn’t matter if you’re not the first one to have an opinion or idea. It doesn’t matter if someone else has, in your own opinion, “said it better”.
The one thing that is reliably going to be unique is you, yourself. No one will ever have the same past experiences as you, and that’s going to provide a unique and interesting view on things. You just have to find a way to share that twist with the readers.
3- Get a draft out, even a bad one, then fix it
One recurring theme about writing is that a lot of the work is in the re-writing and editing process. It’s easier to make something more coherent when the thoughts are all on a page and you don’t have to juggle it all in your mind.
So my goal is to do what I can to at least push out a draft and clarify things in the second pass. I get to cut out nonsense, expand on ideas, and generally turn a senseless mess into what you typically read. Knowing that the first draft doesn’t HAVE to be good makes it easier to sit down and write out something, anything. With lots of practice, it’s taken less time but everything takes a minimum of 2 read-throughs to fix issues.
Occasionally, a draft just doesn’t work out and can’t be turned into something worth sharing. It’s good to recognize when that happens and throw it out. If you realize it soon enough, you can throw it out and still come up with something new in time for a deadline!
4- Getting things out is better than getting it perfect
It’s very easy to worry too much and not publish whatever it is you’re writing. There’s ALWAYS going to be more research, more citations, more polish, more of everything that you can do to a piece of writing. The only thing I can say is that, past a certain minimal bar of competency, it’s okay to make mistakes — so it’s best to just publish the piece and learn for next time.
There are things that you can only learn by doing. One example I have is how you can spend an eternity worrying about what “your voice” will be when writing. But you won’t really develop one without actually just writing. I’m really jealous of writers who can write in different registers, for different audiences. It’s something that I’m not very good at. The tone and voice you’re experiencing right now is the one that I just fell into as I wrote over years. It’s mostly an ingrained habit that I try to refine as I get older, but not something I consciously developed.
So long as the writing is coherent and you’re not (too) embarrassed to show another person, let it go.
Finally, get feedback from peers
Writing in a vacuum is hard. This is the reason why I couldn’t keep blogging way back in the day — it was just throwing words into the void with no feedback. The conventions of social media is actually what closed the feedback loop for me because one or two people will usually react in some way to give me a sense that the words didn’t go into the void.
Obviously, it’s hard to do this while starting out. So instead, share what you’ve written to people you know, friends, colleagues. If you specifically want them to point out things for improvement, then you should let them know that they should do so.
Or, you know, you can ask to do a guest post and suddenly you’ve got a very invested editor that’s going to give you feedback no matter what.
If you’re looking to (re)connect with Data Twitter
Please reference these crowdsourced spreadsheets and feel free to contribute to them.
A list of data hangouts - Mostly Slack and Discord servers where data folk hang out
A crowdsourced list of Mastodon accounts of Data Twitter folk - it’s a big list of accounts that people have contributed to of data folk who are now on Mastodon that you can import and auto-follow to reboot your timeline
Standing offer: If you created something and would like me to review or share it w/ the data community — my mailbox and Twitter DMs are open.
New thing: I’m also considering occasionally hosting guests posts written by other people. If you’re interested in writing something a data-related post to either show off work, share an experience, or need help coming up with a topic, please contact me.
About this newsletter
I’m Randy Au, Quantitative UX researcher, former data analyst, and general-purpose data and tech nerd. Counting Stuff is a weekly newsletter about the less-than-sexy aspects of data science, UX research and tech. With some excursions into other fun topics.
All photos/drawings used are taken/created by Randy unless otherwise credited.
randyau.com — Curated archive of evergreen posts.
Approaching Significance Discord —where data folk hang out and can talk a bit about data, and a bit about everything else. Randy moderates the discord.
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