My pedantry is getting the better of me. I'm glad I can see that now, while I'm still in the early stages of putting out this Substack grammar curriculum. Among my 17 or 18 subscribers (the numbers seem to be fluctuating) are people who really need help with language and people who know so much about grammar that they don't belong on my Substack at all because there's nothing I can teach them. So who is my core audience? To whom am I really teaching? I think I can safely ignore the super-astute subscribers; they'll get whatever they get out of reading my drivel. That leaves the people in the middle and at the bottom, so a practical question arises: what benefit do those people get from a curriculum in which each post/chapter is getting longer and more detailed?
Teachers usually learn that they have only a finite amount of time in which to impart a finite amount of information. To use one's pedagogical time wisely, it's sometimes necessary to prioritize the material, cut out whatever is least important, reduce the rest into small chunks, and dole out those small chunks at a steady trickle. What I'm doing right now, especially in my paid Substack (the section I call The Profound), is making increasingly massive posts because each topic is proving to be such a rabbit hole, and I want to explain everything as thoroughly as I can, leaving nothing out. This means a lot of thinking and research and typing-typing-typing. The felt obligation to overwrite is one of my worst urges.
If there's one bit of praise that I can give my former boss, it's that he was good about curbing my worst tendencies when it comes to prolixity. The ex-boss—a terse, blunt man—was an excellent editor in the "violently slash and burn" sense, cutting out anything he saw as irrelevant or pace-decreasing. Now, it's true that, on occasion, his extreme cuts in the early part of a textbook chapter would sometimes inadvertently affect later material in the chapter (and I would complain loudly whenever he did this), but I learned to appreciate the cuts all the same. Alas, I don't have my ex-boss with me now to rein me in when I start to go off the reservation and plunge into excess, so it's up to me to get my head out of my ass and realize when I'm going on too long. The best solution, I think, is to cut my "chapters" into much shorter, more easily digestible segments for learners to handle instead of blasting them with a fire hose's torrent of new information, then expecting them to take a quiz. (Of course, when they take a given quiz or test is entirely up to them; I can't control that, so they'll have to know the state of their own knowledge to decide whether they're ready for a quiz or test.)
I'm also beginning to wonder whether I should cut my output down to only one newsletter (of each type of Substack post) per week. This, too, would give learners more time to digest information (especially if it's a Friday newsletter that they can peruse at leisure over the weekend), and it would sure as hell cut down on my workload. But at the same time, having published at my current rate for a few weeks, there's a chance that some people might feel cheated if the newsletters suddenly go from 2X/week to 1X/week. Fortunately or unfortunately, I have only my two paying subscribers, so I can just put the question to them directly: Would paying $5/month for a once-a-week newsletter be worth your while? Do you think it'd be worth it for future paying subscribers?
The answer could be a tentative yes because there are other things I could publish in the meantime, like Notes, which are the Substack version of tweets but with no character limits. Back when I was on Twitter, I would often tweet up a storm of inanity.
So those are my warring urges: detail-conscious prolixity versus a desire to present material in a more easily digestible form. As always, I have a lot to think about.
"Would paying $5/month for a once-a-week newsletter be worth your while? Do you think it'd be worth it for future paying subscribers?"....Maybe do a bit of market research. I guess while people don't want to be overwhelmed with content, especially proper educational stuff, they might wonder whether 4 pieces per month justifies the cost. I don't care, you understand. But social media is such an ornery place. You want to hit that sweet spot where subscribers are borderline impatient for your next jewel but not narked enough to unsubscribe. I'd say that's exactly one piece of content every 4.1 days. Or a tad more.
ReplyDeleteI will bow to your greater experience with the publishing market and make decisions based on caution rather than whim and sudden urges, which means that, practically speaking, I'll stick to my current Monday-and-Friday publishing schedule for both my free and my paid Substacks. However, when I'm out on my cross-country walk, I'll likely put out only one paid-subscription post per week. I will, however, announce the change before I shove off for the walk, and I'll promise to add a bunch of Notes, maybe one per day, with an accompanying photo. I see that a lot of Substackers think a good way to grow your "subscribership" is via Notes, which are normally easier to digest than regular posts. I've put out a few Notes, but come late October, I'll try to make it a daily habit.
DeleteIn a large class, I generally find that the top 15-20% of the students are highly self-motivated and will end up learning something no matter what I do, and the bottom 15-20% will, for whatever reason, not respond well to learning opportunities. That leaves the 60-70% in the middle, and these students end up being my primary target. Your situation is a little different, I think, because subscribers have at least shown a willingness to learn simply by subscribing. So your strategy of focusing on the middle and bottom seems appropriate.
ReplyDeleteAs for prolixity, while I am nowhere near as prolific as you are (in fact, I might even describe myself as "antilific"... heh), it will often take me a little bit of warming up in my writing until I get to what I actually want to say. Once I've figured out what I want to say, I will stop, scrap what I have written, and start over with that new starting point. I try to do something similar when I realize I've gone off on a tangent. I ask myself if the tangent is worth it, and if it's not I will scrap everything from the point that I left my main argument and start again. The important thing, for me at least, is that I allow myself to write what I wanted to write--to get it out of my system, so to speak. I try not to edit while I'm writing. I wait until afterward, or until I've reached a natural stopping point, and then cut. No idea if this is helpful to anyone else, but that's how I do it. It doesn't always work perfectly because I am inclined to be more generous to myself than an impartial editor would be.
Charles,
DeleteI need to dig up the old blog post where I wrote about how little influence I have as a teacher: the self-motivated "A" students will always get something out of a class no matter the quality of the teacher; the unmotivated duds will remain duds no matter what I try to do, which leaves me with the fat part of the bell curve—the mediocre middle. And the middling students generally remain middling. So what do I do, exactly, as a teacher? How am I changing the courses of people's lives?
I can relate to scrapping everything and starting over, but I admit that most of my crap is pretty close to first-draft material; I edit while I'm writing. And that may be why the writing varies so much in quality. Lots of times, I'll go back to a post a few days later and find all the typos I missed, all the illogical sentences I'd written, all the weirdly structured paragraphs that need rearranging. But for the most part, I've bought into the idea that, for most of us bloggers at least, blogging has long been a "hot take" medium. That said, there's plenty of room in this strange, little cosmos for more deliberate, methodical writers.
I'm probably not your typical paid subscriber and won't be bothered if you choose to post less. That said, folks looking for value for their money might think a 50% reduction in content isn't what they bought in for. It does seem that you are going to reach a level of overextension with all your projects. Maybe a less work-intensive post on Fridays would be one way to go.
ReplyDeleteI'm probably going to cut down on the sheer size of my paid-subscription posts. After I finish my current post for the 19th of this month.
Delete