Do I need to convey a moral for each of my blog posts?
I'm thinking of starting a blog. I'm confused about whether giving a moral in each blog post is a good idea or not. Will it sound like a lecture to my readers? Will they see it as monotonous and eventually not return to my blog website?
FYI: I'm trying to write about my daily experiences and my thought processes behind them in general.
So is it useful or not to provide morals?
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2 answers
You can try to add a "what I learned" sentence to the end of your blog posts, when there is something interesting to say, if your aim is to give "morals" to the readers.
But overall, no: you don't need to convey a moral.
Clearly stated morals are actually fine for a small subset of written media (e.g. fables or religious parables). In both cases the audience is supposed to be in a certain state of mind.
Morals aim to teach you about something, but for them to succeed you need to:
- be recognized as an acceptable teacher
- find someone willing to learn
A blog where you talk about your daily experiences it's not the best context for this. Sure, you are the most expert person about your daily life, but it's not something you can teach. There's a fine line between drawing conclusion and being arrogant.
For example, it's perfectly fine to end a post with:
... in the end, this whole experience taught me to pay my bills on time, everytime.
but it's kind of different to force it in this way:
... So, a good man always pays the bills on time.
It seems harmless, but it can be perceived as arrogant. You'd be generalizing from your own experience to something virtually every man should do, regardless of the situation. This could go pretty wrong pretty fast.
If your daily experiences are interesting, and if there is a lesson to be learned, readers will get that by themselves - as Ron Mike already mentioned.
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No, you don't need to convey a moral. And probably shouldn't.
Many blog posts are just informative and explanatory about what is going on in the world, from your point of view. The scope can be global (like global politics, or climate change effects, etc) down to private life; say you want to describe the cute kids next door playing pirates in the yard.
There doesn't have to be a moral, it just has to be interesting. If you are using it to practice writing, you may write short-stories, or even write a critique of a published book, or write about technicalities of writing with examples of books.
In fiction, there is very little gain in moralizing, or trying to sum things up into a moral, unless your readers are little children. For teens to adults, if readers don't get the "moral" you are trying to convey, you aren't writing well, and a final "moral" that disagrees with everything they just read (from their point of view) can seem like a bad ending. It's kind of like telling somebody a joke you made up, and the explaining to them why this joke is funny.
The end of the book and the last lines should leave the reader immersed in the story world. A moral talking about the book will break that immersion, and seem out of place. And finally, just the fact that you've written a book to illustrate a moral breaks the immersion even more, because it makes the story feel contrived to serve this outer purpose, so the story feels less real to the reader.
If you are writing a blog to practice writing, practice without a moral, and write to entertain. So your blog entry might have a theme or topic, and might illustrate a moral, but Leonardo Da Vinci didn't paint footnotes on his paintings telling us why he painted them or what he wants us to see. Let your work speak for itself.
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