Writing Hierarchies

One thing that Marketers do is write blogs for people. A blog is made of easy to digest information that people find useful or helpful.

Marketers write blogs for three reasons. One is that a company’s business will show up closer to the top on Google Searches. Two is that it’s the beginning of a funnel: a customer who looks for information on a website that offers that information is likely to consider the information/service that the website offers. So for example, if you need help immigrating to France, and a business writes a blog about immigrating to France, then you go check out what the business offers and what they can help you with.

The reason I told you this is because I thought you would like to know why companies like Buzzfeed publish blogs. I’m showing you how the sausage is made in the factory. Doesn’t mean that blogs are no longer useful.

Different companies have different audiences to which they are trying to appeal. And based on the audience to whom they are trying to appeal, they modify their writing style.

All attempts at anything have hierarchies. There are good students and bad students, good entrepreneurs and bad entrepreneurs, good writers and bad writers, you get the point. There are also always more people who are less qualified than there are more qualified. That’s why a hierarchy is depicted as a triangle. The top of the triangle is obviously where the good people are, and the bottom is where the bad people are.

Okay. So. How do you get to the top of the hierarchy? How do you become a good writer/student/entrepreneur? Well, it depends on the hierarchy. And even more, sometimes the judges of the hierarchy don’t even know themselves. For an example, I’ll give you a very particular case: writing an essay for a philosophy class in university.

When everyone submits their essay’s on the due date to the professor, there are better and worse essays. And the one thing that makes them better or worse is how well they can communicate what they’re trying to say.

You can extract things that all of the things good essays do that bad essays do not, and then you can say that those are the things that an essay needs to climb the essay hierarchy. For example, all good essays need to have proper grammar, they need to be written in English, they need to have paragraphs that are structured well, they need to have strong thesis sentences, etc.

These basic rules don’t really care about what the person is saying, they just care about how the person says it. And how a person says something is a big part of what the person is saying. If someone says something that doesn’t follow the rules, then you can dismiss it as being nonsensical (*cough, like postmodernism). Following many of these rules ensure that what you’re saying is not nonsense, or is not illogical. For example, if you have an opinion that is just full of logical fallacies, then you’re not following the rules to your own peril. The more of these rules you follow, the higher up your essay goes on the essay hierarchy. Got me?

For your philosophy essay, once you get past these rules, there’s the ingenuity of your argument, and also how well you communicate that argument. Those three things: following the rules, ingenuity, and ability to communicate, are what makes your essay a good one. There’s also depth and knowledge and stuff like that, but I could fit that into ingenuity.

So I’ve tried to convince you of a few things. One is that hierarchies exist. Two is that there are specific things that you can do to rise in hierarchies. Three is that the higher you get in a hierarchy, the less obvious these risers are.

 

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