They say that one of the best kinds of posts a blogger can write is a “Top (#) Favorite something-or-other.” I suppose it has something to do with the way you’re supposed to write for scannability. It turns out — and you probably know this from living it — that people don’t read most of the words on a web site. They scan it.

When you’re writing for more traditional websites, this means bulleted lists about the product you’re trying to sell; on a blog, it means writing lists derived from your passion. I’ve only got so many passions. Writing is one of them. Blogs are another. Writing for blogs is…well, you get the idea.

Outside of my passion, there’s another reason why I’m writing this particular list. It has to do with the virtual community we’ve got going here on Fluid Imagination, where a large percentage of our regular readers are also regular contributors to the site. With so many of you writing blog posts, I’m hoping that you’ll find something useful in this list, something that helps you improve your game a little bit, and in the process, improve this site.

So, without further adeiu, my Top 3 Favorite Blog-Post Writing Tools.

3. Wikipedia

During the process of writing almost any post, I visit Wikipedia. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, because it can’t be said often enough, I use Wikipedia not as a primary source, but as a kind of human-powered search engine. I let it begin my research process, rather than end it. Regardless of how I use Wikipedia, a visit to the user-created encylopedia enhances my own understanding of a particular subject, which has the effect of deepening the edificatory possibilities of my posts.

For example, one of our writers blogs about what it’s like to be a first-time homeowner. Had this been my particular subject, I would probably spend about 30 minutes clicking around Wikipedia, trying to find something that might be interesting and/or beneficial to my audience. I would start by looking up the word “house,” then scan through the entry for links to something that may end-up being inspiring (for example: the entire list of real estate topics housed on Wikipedia).

I use the things I find on Wikipedia to begin developing my thoughts on a particular subject, and then I write with the knowledge that most of my readers probably haven’t spent 30 minutes researching whatever it was that I just researched. I try to use the opportunity not to come off as some sort of expert, but to offer my readers information they may not have time/energy to discover on their own.

In short, much like the army of volunteers who’ve created Wikipedia in the first place, I try to consider the time spent researching and writing my blog posts as time that I am donating to a public service.

2. Online Etymology Dictionary

Most of the people who have read this site for a little while probably know how much importance I put on the origins and histories of individual words. I suspect that my love for etymology, not just as an interesting subject, but as a practical tool for conceptualizing the meaning of words, has its roots in my philosopic studies of deconstruction: most of the philosophers who’ve influenced me in some way — Joyce, Heidegger, Borges, Derrida, Calvino, Barthes, etc. — had a strong working-knowledge of the history of word usage (Heidegger and Derrida pretty much made their names because of their ability to tease “new” meanings out of old worlds, and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake might be considered a dream-language mashup of an etymology dictionary and a cultural encylopedia).

The Online Etymology Dictionary’s use as a writing tool is not the same as it would be for a regular dictionary. As it says on the website, an etymology dictionary “is a map of the wheel-ruts of modern English. Etymologies are not definitions; they’re explanations of what our words meant and how they sounded 600 or 2,000 years ago.” A regular dictionary is synchronic: its concern is the way language works at a specific time and place–it doesn’t bother with the context of history. An etymology dictionary is diachronic: it is most interested in how words evolve and change through time. Where a writer uses a regular dictionary to look up the definition of a word, a writers use an etymology dictionary to understand the life of a word.

As a practical tool, the Online Etymology Dictionary can help a writer extend the power of a word at the same time as it deepens the writer’s conceptualization of that word, making the word not only something the writer knows, but something the writer understands. It changes the process of building your vocabulary from one of memorization to one of intimacy. By virtue of becoming familiar with the word’s life in time, the word stops being just another word for the writer and becomes a valuable friend.

For example, one of our writers on Fluid Imagination concerns himself with the simplification of his life. If I were to focus my attention on simplification and simplicity, I would want to make sure that I had a strong understanding of where these words and concepts come from. A trip to the Online Etmology Dictionary would reveal the origins of their common root, simple:

c.1220, “humble, ignorant,” from O.Fr. simple, from L. simplus “single,” variant of simplex (see simplex). Sense evolved to “lowly, common” (c.1280), then “mere, pure” (1303). As opposite of composite it dates from 1425; as opposite of complicated it dates from c.1555. Disparaging sense (1340) is from notion of “devoid of duplicity.” Simply (adv.) in purely intensive sense is attested from 1590.

There are several interesting things here. For instance, the change that occured between 1280 and 1303, where simple went from meaning “lowly, common” to also meaning “pure.” The latter didn’t just spring up out of nowehere. In some sense, its purity was already there in the Latin simplus (”single”), and the former had its own roots in the “humble, ignorant” of 1220. But it’s interesting to see that it only took about twenty years from the seeming negative connotation of “lowly, common” to almost reverse itself into the positive connatation that comes from “pure.”

If I were focusing my efforts on the concept of simplification, I would use this information to perhaps inspire some investigation into my own motivation. I wold allow it to spark some questions about whether I was trying to make my life more “common,” more “humble,” and/or more “pure.”

Like Wikpedia, the Online Etymology Dictionary is not a place to seek out answers, but a place to discover new questions. And I think you’ll agree that, when it comes to writing for a blog, the question is usually not how end a post, but more often than not, how to start.

1. OneLook Reverse Dictionary

I’ve written about this tool before, on the day I originally discovered it, so allow me to save some time and, as the man said, quote myself here:

I’m sitting here, trying to think of the word that describes the quotations that come at the beginning of some books, and instead of my mind remembering about the thesaurus process, I somehow get fixated on the idea of a “reverse lookup dictionary.” Now, I’ve never heard of such a thing. In the days of hardcover books, it just wouldn’t make any sense. I mean, how would you arrange such a thing? Alphabetical doesn’t work. I guess you could arrange it by general concept (as some thesauri do), but anyway you arrange it, it’s not going to be what the technology folk calls user friendly. But if you get rid of the concept of the book and just have a database to which the computer can match any queries, then the concept of a reverse lookup dictionary starts to make a lot of sense. I’ve been looking for such a thing for a long time, I guess, but I just had no idea what to call it. For some reason, today it hit me. A quick Google search later, and there it was: The OneLook Reverse Dictionary.

It usefulness is easy to see, but you gotta wonder, why is this my number one writing tool? Well, I’ll tell you. When you partake in certain recreational indulgences, as I do, you start to have some difficulty with your memory. The indulgence doesn’t make you stupid, per se, but it does limit your ability to remember what you know. As a writer, the things I know are words. So, when I’m writing, I often — and I mean often — find myself sitting there, staring at the keyboard, with the word I want being caught somewhere in my arcuate fasciculus. At such times, when I know the meaning of what I’m trying to say but not the specific word, there is simply no better tool than the OneLook Reverse Dictionary. Without it, I’d be stuck. And there’s nothing worse for a writer than being stuck.

And that’s why it is my #1 writing tool. Like a winter hiker’s shovel, I never go traveling through the backcountry of my mind without it.