Trying to make blogging a "habit"

This blog includes my reaction to various readings and events in connection with digital literacy. I am just starting to teach a course on digital writing in the classroom in which one objective is for students to live the blogging life. I myself am also trying to live the blogging life on a consistent basis. It is serendipitous that I would happen just now to read "The Laws of Habit" by William James (1899)--also a good fit for January when everyone's attention turns to resolutions or the forming of new habits.


James points out that we tend to speak only of bad habits--smoking, procrastinating, etc.--but that in fact "All our life...is but a mass of habits--practical, emotional, and intellectual--systematically organized for our weal or woe." This reliance on habit is what enables us to make it through the day without our heads' exploding under the stress of constantly having to make decisions in "new" situations. The more activity we can turn over to habit, the more of our mind we can free up to creative intellectual work.

James recommends five principles for acquiring habits. These principles boil down to taking a public pledge to the new habit (i.e., sharing it with others), and then doing something concrete to act on the pledge. Make no exceptions to the pledge, however small. Try instead to exercise the habit every day. Turning to blogging, for example, this post can be a public pledge. Posting daily might develop the blogging habit most quickly, but three-times-a-week might be more reasonable. Also, since I am planning to use this to respond, among other things, to readings in my study of digital literacy, a commitment to respond to each reading might be an appropriate benchmark.

James suggests that frequent exercise of a new action is what turns it into a habit and makes it easy to continue without taxing our attention. Will blogging have this effect on writing? We know that writing is hard. We recommend informal writing like journaling and quickwrites as a way to make writing easier. It may be that blogging exists in a middle ground between informal and formal writing where it can support the writing habit. I say this because blogging provides an audience, and yet that audience is somehow closer to the writer than we are used to with published writing.

It follows...that the teacher's prime concern should be to ingrain into the pupil that assortment of habits that shall be most useful to him throughout life. Education is for behavior, and habits are the stuff of which behavior consists.

- William James, Talks to Teachers (1899)