Good Thing the Man on the White House Blog Doesn't Know How to Write a Blog Entry

I'm just going to post the entire "Change-sorting" blog entry of David O. Washington, Associate Director of the White House's new Office of Public Engagement, first and invite readers to peruse it carefully and think about why it may fail rhetorically as a blog entry.

It was posted on the White House blog but not reposted on the White House Facebook page, so I'm not able to see the public comments of others. But I'll post what I think the answers are to my basic question about what is wrong with this blog posting after the text.

One part of our job in the Office of Public Engagement is to help the public, and the groups that represent their interests navigate and engage with the right areas of their government. We help them navigate the Administration and its branches in order to help find the folks here who can shine light on their questions, comments and suggestions.

Surprising to me, when I shared that's what I do with the Americans I’ve interacted with since I started in my new role here at the Office of Public Engagement, they seemed surprised. It’s almost as though they don’t realize that in addition to serving at the pleasure of the President, we also serve at the pleasure of the American people –or more accurately we *work for* the American people.

A good friend from junior high was trying to describe this function of our department to another friend and he said "…it’s kinda like those old school change-sorters from the 80’s. The ones you could dump in all your pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters and the machine would sort them out into the right cylinder. It sounds like your office does that… but with requests and phone-calls and letters and more importantly the big issues facing everyday Americans… they ask you for help and you get ‘em to the right person." In some ways it’s perfectly right…

I guess that’s why I love it here so much. I’ve always loved being a dot connecter and here that’s part of my job as the public/private partnerships lead for our office: to help Americans from across the country not only connect the dots to their government, but also… and here is the best part… in the process, we help to shape the way our government works and do our best to make the lives of Americans, that much better.

Every day is a new adventure, a lesson learned, and a blessing to serve the President.

The title for Washington's blog posting seems like it could also refer to sorting through the user-generated content from the Share Your Story and Share Your Vision input boxes at Change.gov, which invited Americans to upload text, photos, and videos to the government domain about their hopes for the new administration of Barack Obama. But he provides no information about how this office for public engagement is being organized and managed, what its mission is, his own background or what types of federal employees will work there, or even how "engagement" itself is constituted and defined. He says he sorts "requests and phone-calls and letters and more importantly the big issues" that come to his office, but we have no idea how he plans to respond to them individually or use them in aggregate.

Instead he makes the following basic blogging mistakes, which I often warn my own students against:

1) Washington makes the classic "It's all about me" error of bad blogging that I warn my students against, because he doesn't seem to address a potential reader's concerns in any way. And yet he also doesn't bother to perform the basic "about me" task required in web communication of explaining to the reader why a given blogger has a unique perspective, area of expertise, voice of authority, or community of like-minded others for whom he or she can credibly speak. We're told he's a "dot connector" who is repeating the words of his "good friend" who makes an analogy between his office and a change sorting machine, but he doesn't convey any specific information to the public. For example, what are those "public/private partnerships" that he is talking about?

2) The prose is full of vague aspirations, clichés, and platitudes. Instead of days conveying specific events that one might blog about, every day is the same: "a new adventure, a lesson learned, and a blessing." For circular reasoning this paragraph is particularly bad:

Surprising to me, when I shared that's what I do with the Americans I’ve interacted with since I started in my new role here at the Office of Public Engagement, they seemed surprised. It’s almost as though they don’t realize that in addition to serving at the pleasure of the President, we also serve at the pleasure of the American people –or more accurately we *work for* the American people.

3) No links! No links! Not even to his own office website! Does he ever read blogs? Does he realize that providing links to primary sources is a key activity in blogging?

Maybe Washington should read the Director's Blog of Congressional Budget Office, which has been generating controversy along with growing readership, to see how institutional blogging can be done.