Why write essays? Why write essays concisely? Why write well-reasoned essays concisely?

I've been thinking a lot about writing recently. Specifically, I've been considering:

• What are my intrinsic motivators for wanting to write more? How about extrinsic?
• What's the extrinsic ROI? Intrinsic?
• Do I have the willpower to ignore something with a poor extrinsic ROI and a good intrinsic one? Should I ignore it, even if I do have the willpower?
• What about short and long term implications of the near-term decision I must make regarding spending more time on writing?

Of secondary concern to me are the topics of my writing, the format, the audiences and my writing's relevance. These are by no means unimportant. Indeed, they inform the answers to the questions I mention above, but they have not been the primary variables under consideration.

This morning I spent about 15 minutes and wrote a thousand or so words in a stream-of-consciousness format. I wrote about topics I wanted to write about related to my position at Cornell. I've been finding recently that I've been having a specific kind of communication problem with my staff. That is, with some members, it has become obvious to me that I'm assuming too much preexisting knowledge, or that I've been assuming that I've communicated that knowledge in the past. It is clear that I haven't, or didn't, communicate well.

Therefore, I'd like to start building up a library of essays on various topics related to what I do professionally. I'd like to use that exercise to both understand how to communicate my desires more effectively, and to provide a set of documents for future reference.

This got me to wondering: is a collection of short essays more valuable in this context than a collection of detailed compositions with reasoned arguments and citations? Academia has historically eschewed the blog entry as a medium for developing and delivering reasoned arguments, in favor of the well cited scholarly article. The writing I'm considering is not scholarly, but perhaps the motivations behind requiring arguments to be well considered and cited still apply? Is there room for scholarly-style writing in the realm of short essays on such mundane topics as "Why We Check In Our Code Periodically"?

I have several thoughts, but in the spirit of short essays without well reasoned, substantiated arguments and conclusions, I figure I should publish this entry before I add any of them!