Why you should be blogging or YouTubing

It looks like blogging isn't as popular as it used to be. YouTubing has become more popular. I still prefer blogs over YouTube videos.

If you're trying to improve your knowledge and understanding about the various topics surrounding Christianity and Christian apologetics, you really should be blogging or YouTubing. It is possible to read a whole book with your mind in neutral and remember almost nothing of what you read. But if you have to explain it to somebody else, then you have to learn it. If you are introduced to a new idea in a book you read, it's a good idea to blog on it because blogging on it forces you to understand the idea. You may find that in the process of writing the blog, you have to go back over what you read a few times as a reminder. Engaging with the ideas in this way will make it stick in a way that it wouldn't have if all you did was read about it.

Blogging has the added benefit of allowing you to engage with other people on the topics you are learning about. If you're lucky enough to have people comment on your blog posts, you'll be forced to think even harder about the subject because you'll want to respond to those comments in a thoughtful way. Even if you don't respond, you'll at least get to see a different take on the subject, and you'll get some feedback that reveals how well you understood (or misunderstood) the topic and how well you were able to communicate your thoughts on it. All of this engagement will make the information you're learning about stick even better. It will also improve your ability to communicate clearly.

If I'm reading a book that I plan to write about later, I take notes. Taking notes also makes the ideas stick. It's crazy, but I remember quotes from books I read a couple of decades ago because I took notes and because I used the quotes in things I wrote later on. When I take notes, I include both quotes and summaries. Quotes are useful if you plan to write reviews or use the book or article as a source later on, but writing summaries is really useful for both understanding and memory. You'll want your summaries to be accurate, so you'll be forced to read carefully enough to understand what you are reading. If you can accurately summarize a passage you are reading, you should understand it well enough to explain it to somebody else.

I encourage you to blog or find some medium that involves writing. I know a lot of people are reluctant to blog because they think, "Who am I to pontificate on this subject or tell other people how things are as if I know something?" I had that same thought when I started this blog. But the purpose of this blog wasn't primarily to inform the world. It was to hone my own noetic structure--to express myself in the hopes of getting feedback and pushback so that I could improve intellectually. You don't have to put yourself out as an expert on a subject to justify writing about it. It's just a blog after all. You can use your blog to bounce ideas off of other people.

But blogging is also a release when you have a lot of pent up thought and imagination running through your head after reading something, and you're just dying to get it off your chest.

With that being said, you don't have to be an expert on a topic before your opinion is valuable. People often have interesting things to say about topics that are new to them. Everybody is entitled to having a point of view, however ill-informed it might be. If you had to be an expert on a topic before you were justified in expressing a point of view, there would be no reason for most of us to ever have interesting conversations with each other about these things. I'm often curious what people think about a topic when they are not experts. I'm often curious what people's initial impressions are upon first hearing about something or having it explained to them. A lot of my blog posts are just that--intitial impressions upon first being introduced to something.

YouTubing may be useful in the same way that blogging is, but I really think writing is better. If the way you YouTube involves writing scripts, then I suppose that's just as good since you are writing.