This Post Includes You

Blogger makes it very easy to obsess over how many people are reading your blog.  You get day-by-day and post-by-post counts of how many people are reading.

Those of who know me know that I think I'm quite clever.  When I looked at my first round of post counts, it looked like the most popular posts had "yoga" in the title.  So earlier this week, I made sure to squeeze yoga into the post title.  This proved unsuccessful at spurring the masses to click.

So then I gave it another look.  It turns out the most popular posts were those with titles that seem the most approachable.  Big, pompous words didn't work.

I should have known better, since I spend a good part of my time telling undergraduates to take big words and jargon out of their papers.  All those words do is put up barriers between you and your audience.  The key to good writing is to express complex ideas completely but in the simplest possible terms.

Also, I think pictures matter.  So here's a man pretending to be a hobo.  His clothes are way too new, and his features far too unforked, for him to be the real deal.