Why Do I Recommend College Students to Write Blogs?

After the gaokao, I came to a city 1,800 kilometers away from home for university. I walked out of the stage of life where exam scores were almost the only standard, and I encountered many things that made me start thinking. I also faced many choices that I had to make by myself. Sometimes one small thing would stay in my mind until midnight, repeating itself before sleep, leaving me with a stomach full of things to say. The next day, when I tried writing it down, I realized it was often just one or two short paragraphs of scattered thoughts, not much content at all. Writing helped me ease a lot of anxiety, and it also left clues for me to look back on later.

Now when I turn back and read those records, I can clearly see how my worldview was pieced together from fragments of daily life. Writing a blog is a very good way to record these bits and pieces of life, making the origins of your thoughts traceable.

As a College Student, What Can You Write About?

The main audience of a blog is yourself. Many people do not write, and some are even afraid to write, because they think, "I'm not an expert, so nobody will read what I write." But the opposite is exactly why blogging is valuable. The most precious stage is precisely when you have not fully thought something through. Writing it down is itself a process of organizing your knowledge and the information you have. When writing, in order to express your thoughts, you gather related materials, check relevant content, and clarify the chain of logic. The goal is to squeeze that vague cloud floating in your mind into a visible shape.

Actually, blogging does not have that many rules.

You can record your hobbies, record the things that went wrong, and record the thoughts that make you feel "different" (your "difference" is actually a clue and trace that helps people like you find you).

You can also share your views on trending internet events. For example, regarding the recent popular "Jiahao" behavior, I feel it is a stage of life that may be embarrassing to look back on, but is still full of chaos and heat. Like the changes in adolescent thinking described in FLCL. There is no need to pick up a magnifying glass after growing up and start judging everything, suppressing the expression and emotions of teenagers who are still in adolescence.

You can share knowledge you have learned: bugs and solutions from small projects you tinkered with, difficulties and challenges you encountered, how you completed an experiment, reflections after finishing a book, or experiences battling Linux. All of these can become small articles, like save points in life that you can come back to from time to time.

How Do You Publish It After Writing?

A blog is meant to be seen. Publishing it is like turning the sign at the door of a small shop to "OPEN," opening a door on the internet. Andy Matuschak calls this "working with the garage door up." Passersby glance inside, see you knocking things together, and naturally know someone is working here.

If you have a bit of spare money, you can try buying your own domain name and use AI plus open-source projects to build a small website that fits your own taste. There are also many ready-made blog templates online. You can learn to adapt one, or directly deploy a site that belongs to you. If you do not want to deal with all that for now, you can simply write in any note-taking app and publish selected pieces to platforms with broad audiences, such as Zhihu, Bilibili, or WeChat Official Accounts. Good content will eventually find people willing to read it.

As for things you do not publish publicly, you can keep them as your own archive, as clues to your thoughts. Looking back later is not a bad thing either.

What Is a Good Blog Like?

When it comes to what kind of blog counts as "good," I do not think you need to make it too complicated at the beginning. But there are a few points I want to talk about.

The Audience of a Blog

A blog is a public article once it is published, so you first need to consider the audience: who is reading it?

Although I said earlier that the biggest audience of a blog is yourself, what you write should still have a certain public quality. It can be a place to clarify your own thoughts, but while you benefit from thinking and organizing, others should also be able to see something in it. The more professional and niche the topic is, the more you need to think about this.

Of course, you can also use your blog like a "QQ Zone." Many bloggers dislike this concept and find it childish, but if your purpose is socializing and sharing, I do not think there is anything wrong with it. Through many similar personal blogs, I have seen the worries and joys of many peers like me. It feels like meeting a stranger who somehow becomes a friend. I think that is pretty nice.

The Labeling of a Blog

A blog should have its own theme. If a good blog wants to be remembered, it is best if people can easily attach a label to it. For example, when people want news analysis, philosophy reading notes, historical explanations, economic changes, or technical blogs, they can immediately think of whose website to visit.

But this requirement is a bit too high for a college student. A normal college student, after coming out of the gaokao experience, usually does not have much life experience, deep reading, or even a writing habit beyond the style of exam essays. That is completely normal. When you have fewer topics to choose from, you can write as much as you can and record many aspects of your life. At this stage, you can use category management so that readers who need specific content can filter things simply. They can block out your daily fragments and focus only on your main output. This may be a passable solution. After you accumulate enough experience, it is not too late to open a dedicated column.

I partly refer to the ideas of the 2750words blogger. I agree with most of his philosophy, though perhaps our life stages are different, or our entry points into blogging are different. I think a blog should still be centered on the blogger. Since it is already a personal blog, it is unreasonable to let someone else's design philosophy decide everything. If you do not like a website, you can simply choose not to read it. There will always be people who do like it. Just keep your own strong authorial presence. After all, the owner of the blog is you. Comfort will always matter more than being "correct."

The Word Count of a Blog

There should be some limit to word count. Many people do not like reading overly long articles, or rather, overly verbose articles. If a simple matter is hard to explain in fewer words, it probably means the writing is not clear enough yet. Verbose but unclear expression is a big problem. My advisor once gave me a requirement: "Your writing should have key points, so readers can roughly understand the intention within 30 seconds. It should have a two-minute reading path and a five-minute reading path." Proper bold text and well-designed section headings are fairly good ways to solve this problem.

A Rational Discussion: Benefits and Costs

I have said many things above, and it may sound like writing a blog is a "guaranteed profitable" deal. But if I do not tell you the corresponding costs and price, that would feel a little irresponsible.

Writing a blog is not a social shortcut. It is more like opening a quiet little shop that few people visit. A good blog is a good way to speak on the internet. What you write represents the things you care about and the way you think about problems. But this does not automatically bring traffic, make your personal brand explode, make important people suddenly discover you, or bring opportunities on its own. Most of the time, blogging is slow cultivation by one person.

From a personal perspective, maintaining and persisting with a blog is not something everyone can do. I have seen too many blogs disappear after the first three or five posts, sometimes even with the domain name no longer renewed. To be honest, I am also still in that "three-minute enthusiasm" stage, and future updates probably will not be as frequent as they are now. Also, "being misunderstood is the fate of anyone who expresses themselves." If you are sensitive, you will pay some emotional cost. Maintaining a website also requires continuous financial input. How it develops later is indeed hard to say.

Blogging, as an activity that has already declined, does not bring many direct returns. We are now in the era of new self-media. Making videos and short videos is a more popular and mainstream choice. With platform support, there is more traffic and more visibility.

Considering so many disadvantages, why do I still recommend it?

First, as discussed earlier, writing articles is, so far, the fastest form of output, the one that most forces you to think, and the one that exposes logic most directly. What is truly valuable is the thought behind the words. Writing can greatly train a person's ability to think. Second, as a flexible form of output with low time cost, low storage cost, and a low entry threshold, writing has the highest cost-performance ratio among output-oriented hobbies. Pure text publishing is supported by many platforms, and a good article can be lightly modified into a video script, serving as the foundation for other forms of output.

Create Boldly

The confusion, awkwardness, sudden happiness, and unexplained sadness we are experiencing now are all gifts that belong uniquely to this stage of life. When we look back later, perhaps we will be grateful that we once made the decision to lay out our thoughts and record them. After all, in this empty space of the internet, only when you keep a light on will someone follow that light and come over to say: "Hey, I am here too."

I am not sure how far this light can shine, nor how long it can stay lit. I simply believe that some things do not need to prove they are worth starting before they become worth starting.