(Reading time: 2 – 2 minutes)

It’s Saturday morning and you’re surfing the internet. Perfect, here’s something just for you.

Liz Strauss over at Successful and Outstanding Bloggers gives us The Only Way to Attract a Vibrant, High-Trust Community, with 14 points integral to success.

#8 is my favorite:

#8 Be visible authenticity. Lean toward full disclosure, but avoid over-exposure. Most of us look better with our clothes on.

That’s good advice. Most people do look better with their clothes on!

What could have inspired Liz Strauss’s advice?

I think it’s this: many people mistake “oversharing” for intimacy, for authenticity, for transparency.

But it’s none of those. It’s simply inappropriate self-indulgence.

It’s easy to step across this line. Once you get into the writing groove, and start unloading, all those emotions come burbling up. You feel you can’t hold your emotion back… it feels good to share. There’s nothing like a good rant to get everything sorted out.

A friend (Deacon) and I came to this conclusion last night:

Just because it feels good to write… doesn’t mean it’s good writing.

This seems to be a key mistake of many people apparently driven to overshare. Don’t mistake the feeling you get from the writing with the quality of the writing. Great writing will inspire great emotion. But great emotion may or may not produce great writing.

The upshot: if you feel compelled to overshare, your writing had better be good.

No, your writing ought to be superb.

If you think differently, let’s hear about it in the comments.