Miscellany - Ms. Manasvini Rai

The Department of English organized the first in its virtual series of sessions featuring practitioners of literature called "Miscellany" on 05 February 2022 with Ms. Manasvini Rai, a scholar, poet and blogger from MNIT Jaipur, on “Literary Blogging".

Ms Rai began the lecture by talking about the importance of commitment and clarity in blogging, how quality over quantity should be preferred as refined content is better than frequent content. As themes can be either contemporary or technical, a target audience has to be kept in mind when creating a space. 

She then elaborated on the themes that usually surround literary blogs which might include books, cinema, art criticism, forms of performance, pop culture, academia, etc. The nature of the blogs varies from opinionated essays to sponsored, commercial literary blogs. She then gave her insights on how to technically tune a blog. Since literary blogs are not an elementary topic, the clean categorization and dissection of the writer's content help re-emphasize the intention. Through examples of successful literary blogs like Hazlitt, Electric Literature, she demonstrated how subcategorization offers ease of navigation to the readers. Blogs can be opinion-based or research-based but a benefit in humanities is the endless possibility of ideas.

Following this, Ms Rai shared formulas for creating an efficient and effective username that can be designed in the format of (Adj. + Noun), (Noun + Noun), or (Verb + Adj.). 'Name' and 'about the writer' of the blog identify a person's space in the blog-sphere and describe one's direction, which can further the chances of networking with like-minded individuals and act as a form of resume. Regarding the upkeep of the blog, she suggested it should be updated at least twice a month. Moving towards the concern of traffic on sites, she emphasised the importance of methods of search engine-optimisation and interlinking sites/ articles in the blog. These help immensely in adding to visibility and credibility, respectively. She used the reference of Lit Hub to show how popular blogs have friendly user interfaces which accelerate the growth of readership. Adding to this, she also talked of travel essays and how they're emerging as refreshing and diverse pieces of literature.

Thereafter, she shared a couple of prolific and thoroughly researched literary blogs for deeper insights into the technicalities of English literature. She navigated the audience through her own work on various blogs.

The session was neatly wrapped up with a Q&A which further explored the guest's creative process, plans for collaboration, and future goals in this regard.