An Academic Learns to Blog

Lenaaera, pixabay

For over three decades now, I’ve written academic articles. For over three months now, I’ve written blog posts. Guess which one I find easier and which one I struggle with? But it’s not because writing a blog is harder. It’s because I’ve been writing academic articles for three decades.
 
Part of my struggle with writing this blog has come from learning to do something new. That’s always a challenge, though a good challenge. I struggled when I learned how to use online resources in my teaching. I struggled learning how to use twitter (okay, so I’m still figuring that one out a bit). I struggled when I tried to learn to sing (in front of people). I trust you’ve had your own struggles with learning new stuff. It’s hard.

But learning to write a blog has been a struggle not just with the unfamiliar but with the familiar. I’m all too familiar with writing scholarly academic articles, and that has been getting in the way of my writing blog posts for a broader audience.
 
Take a look at some of the big differences I’m adjusting to. (Already I can see that this post is going to demonstrate what I’m talking about—I’m struggling to keep it from being too academic-y.) So, some realities of blog-writing:
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• Nobody has to read a blog post. Of course, nobody actually has to read academic articles either, but at least the journal editor and reviewers have read it, and others who work in a discipline are expected to keep current. But it’s nobody’s job to read a personal blog. The blogger has to give people a reason to read it.

• Bloggers don’t know how much readers know about the blog post’s topic. Readers of academic articles share at least knowledge of the same discipline, and at most knowledge of the particular topic. But blog readers might have stopped to read a blog because of an intriguing title or because they want to learn about a topic. Or because the post is about one of their favorite subjects and they know as much as or more than the blogger does. Bloggers have to figure out how much to explain, how much to assume with each topic.

• The readers who do read a blog usually read quickly, while they’re browsing through multiple sites, maybe while watching TV. Academic articles take time to read, even if the reader just skims the abstract, conclusions, and bibliography. So blogs have to stay pretty brief and make their highlights easy to spot.

• Blogs can be hard for readers to discover. Academic articles appear in academic journals, and readers usually know which journals have the subjects they want to read about. But blogs exist out in the blogosphere, somewhere. Some platforms like Medium might make it easier to find, but if the blog stays independent, bloggers have to figure out how to find readers and help readers find them. And readers matter.

• Even if a blogger pulls it off once, the blogger has to do it all again for the next post. Finishing an academic article brings a sigh of relief and cause for celebration. Finishing a blog post brings a sense of accomplishment and joy—for a day. Then the blogger has to start all over again. And then do it again. And again. And again. . . 

via GIPHY

The good side of the last point is that I can mess up one week and get to try again the next week. Some of you who’ve been reading my blog for a while (thank you, thank you, thank you!) have seen the messes as well as a few successes.
 
My very first blog post, on the Psychology of Genre, summarized an article from the New York Times by Tom Vanderbilt about cognitive research on categories. I found it fascinating! But my blog post used terms like “rhetorical genre scholars” as if readers knew who that was. And it included sentences like these:
 
“It offers psychological backing for many claims of rhetorical genre studies: that we put symbolic acts into generic categories, that those genres are social as well as cognitive and shape us even as we shape them, but that genres are not fixed and we can change them. But beware, especially with our students, of the habits of mind that genres can instill and make difficult to disrupt.”
 
Phew. And I began that paragraph with, “You can see why I was so excited reading this article.” Yeah, maybe not.

I was learning, and that first post showed I still needed to learn a few things to shift me away from my academic article habits:

• Start with something to engage the reader, rather than assuming they’re already interested. I’m still struggling with this one, but I’ve never been very good at introductions in academic articles either. In doing research for this post, I just found Michael Pollock’s great list in his own blog of “10 Brilliant Examples of How to Open Your Blog Post With a Bang.”  I’ll be trying some of them

• Focus on one main idea directly and simply. Most technical terms aren’t necessary. Focus on one main point or idea, and develop it. Repeat it. Highlight it.

• Develop the idea with stories and illustrations. That one main idea in a blog post doesn’t need academic detail, evidence, and nuanced complexity. It needs storytelling and interesting illustrations. I’ve gotten better at illustrating with media and links, I think (maybe too many). But I still struggle with telling stories. My academic focus has been on abstractions, and that shows in my blog every week, I suspect.

• Write in an engaging style. Make it easy and fun to read. I’ve always enjoyed writing and crafting sentences. But teaching writing and style has helped me with this one, too. I apply lessons I’ve learned from Joe Williams’ various books on Style: The Basics of  Clarity and Grace.

• Promote the blog on social media. Tell all your friends and family. Erk. That one gets me, but I’ve been trying. I post a notice of each new post on twitter and Facebook. I’ve started adding LinkedIn. But it’s hard to get past my academic mindset that if what I write is good, other people will find it and share it. (And probably my mindset from being female and Midwestern and introverted.) But potential readers need to know the blog is out there and why they might want to check it out.

So far, my most successful posts have been the series of three I wrote on apologies: good ones, bad ones, and impossible ones. It got comments, on the blog and on social media. Some people shared it. And some kind souls told me how much they liked it. So sometimes I’m able to leave my habits from writing academic articles behind and give the blog post what it needs.
 
This particular post? Not so much. It’s too long (I’m shooting for 750 words; this one is over 1100 so far.) Those bullet points are too long, and there are too many of them. Where are the illustrations? And why should you want to read it? What’s in it for you?
 
I'd intended to comment on more individual posts, but I've run out of space. And I'd hoped to share more links to others' tips on writing good blogs, but there are so many of them, especially commercial ones.  One good column I found on academic blogging that applied to non-academic, too, was "So You Want to Blog (Academic Edition)" from Liana Silva on the University of Venus blog, from Inside Higher Ed.

I had two reasons for starting this blog. I wanted to reach a broader audience because I think seeing genre and language and rhetoric can improve lives. Being able to see means being able to change or make a difference. I can apologize better once I see how it works, and that can help me with relationships that matter to me.
 
And I wanted to write more often in non-academic ways, for fun. I like to write. And I was losing my flexibility by writing all academic all the time. This post was hard for me but fun—reflecting back on what I’m learning and how it’s going. 
 
I’ve been having a great time writing this blog, whether or not anyone reads it. But if you’re seeing this, you’re reading it. And that makes it even better.