ACCESS: A Guide for Academic Blogging

You’re an academic and you want to reach a wider audience. You are going to translate the kickass science in your area of expertise for the layperson in the awesome form of open access online essays(doesn’t that sound better than “blogpost”?). After years, if not decades, of honing your acadamese, your new challenge is jettisoning all that obfuscation and jargon to make nuanced information accessible, interpretable, and communicable among non-experts. Here is a handy-dandy definitive guide that has everything you need to know in its entirety and no reader could possibly benefit from reading additional essays from numerous brilliant others by google-searching phrases like “how to blog as an academic.”

the internet

But obviously this guide is superior because it HAS AN ACRONYM! The ACCESS guide to academic blogging™

Audience • Current • Content • Expertise • Story • Social media

A. Identifying your AUDIENCE early in the process is key. Make a list of categories of people you are hoping to reach with your essay. I fantasize about reaching broad swaths of social scientists, life scientists, animal scientists, parents, neonatologists, formula-makers, policy-makers, and my mom. 

Whatever you do, DON’T imagine the 5 other specialists who know your topic as well as you do. Don’t let the spectre of the boogeyman in the closet insidiously influence the writing. Don’t think “oh man, Professor Graybeard will think this is such a shallow treatise of the topic, I better add in this, this and this and jargon jargon jargon.” 

Piled Higher and Deeper

Instead imagine a classroom at a community college for an introductory course- a diverse audience across numerous dimensions of age, race, socioeconomic class, nationality, ethnicity, faith, gender identity, sexual orientation, and educational background. Imagine the audience as mostly motivated (they clicked your essay didn’t they?!) but variably-prepared. 

If (or when) colleagues fault your essays for glossing over nuance, quibbling that you left out essential details, or bemoaning that the essay wasn’t written just for them just as they want it...  you can politely remind them about the actual target audience.

C₁Academic blogposts will generally have the greatest impact when they are CURRENT- when they are about breaking events, recent papers, or other aspects of the now. An example of this would be when I wrote about male lactation on Father’s Day. Being able provide valuable content (see below) as an expert (see further below) can be incredibly valuable in the wake of media stories. People will start to expect your contributions to these community dialogues.

xkcd.com

C₂ A blog post is a synopsis of a particular topic area. Organize your thinking about what themes you want your essay to incorporate and what specific examples will be most useful. Also, humor! Sprinkle jokes throughout the essay. Jokes make an essay more fun to read and more memorable. Altogether these themes, examples, and other elements provide the CONTENTof the essay. 

I tend to do a lot of free-writing for my blog posts, typing out points, phrases, jargon to be unpacked, studies I want to include as they occur to then be later crafted into a coherent narrative or story arc (see below). You can have a long-form read that brings together multiple papers and info, or summarize a new study in a paragraph. And it is important to provide content not only citing one’s own research program but also the research programs of others (colleagues, collaborators, your field, adjacent fields). Integrating info from disparate sources is a prosocial good and enhances one’s reputation for expertise and collegiality.

E. Despite the ubiquity of essays on imposter syndrome plaguing academia, dust the shoulders off, because we have EXPERTISE. We know A WHOLE LOT about something, and way more than average about a few things. We can wield that expertise with gravitas, with enthusiasm, with charisma, and/or with references to pop culture that reveal our age. 

If you want to be critical, try and find a way to be constructive. A dash of disparaging and/or pendantry can be pulled off, on occasion, especially if done humorously, but requires finesse to not come across like a pretentious ass. 

And nothing will compromise the value and impact of your expertise faster than depriving people of dignity... and then doubling down. cough <Tim Hunt> <James Watson> <Richard Dawkins> cough. Lastly, and counter-intuitively, jargon does not showcase your expertise, but it does reveal your capacity (or lack thereof) for theory of mind.

S. So you have your themes, examples, and jokes, now craft them into a narrative or STORY arc. Use the known-new contract; front load with something people know, and then introduce something new that they might not know. Then use that newly known thing as the anchor for introducing the next new thing! Weave together findings form multiple papers. Channel your inner “intro lecture” for undergrads sprinkled with conversational snippets, rhetorical question devices, sign posts, and section headings. A finale can highlight new questions, new directions, or new funding priorities.

S. Posting an online essay will reach people who have an RSS feed to the blog, but in general it is worthwhile to have a more integrated SOCIALmedia approach to encourage traffic to your essay. FB, pinterest, twitter, tumblr, and other such accounts can be great places to post and link blog essays. Academics, especially early career academics, who aren’t embracing social media are paying opportunity costs for visibility, networking, and broader impacts. Online social networks are the new professional spaces. And unlike conferences and workshops which can be expensive, invitation-only, and benefit people with fewer child-care responsibilities, most everyone can participate in online social networks.

Bik & Goldstein 2013 (see citations)

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And fun fact, the ACCESSheuristic (audience, current, content, expertise, story, and social media) actually applies to every kind of writing we do as academics.

Resources & Further Info:

Bertram, S. M., & Katti, M. (2013). The social biology professor: Effective strategies for social media engagement. Ideas in ecology and evolution, 6(1).

Bik HM, Goldstein MC (2013) An Introduction to Social Media for Scientists. PLoS Biol 11(4): e1001535. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001535

Darling, E., Shiffman, D., Cȏté, I., & Drew, J. (2013). The role of Twitter in the life cycle of a scientific publication. Ideas in Ecology and Evolution, 6(1).

Lin, M., Thoma, B., Trueger, N. S., Ankel, F., Sherbino, J., & Chan, T. (2015). Quality indicators for blogs and podcasts used in medical education: modified Delphi consensus recommendations by an international cohort of health professions educators. Postgraduate medical journal, postgradmedj-2014.

Puschmann, Cornelius. (Micro) blogging science? Notes on potentials and constraints of new forms of scholarly communication. Opening science. Springer International Publishing, 2014. 89-106.

Shema H, Bar-Ilan J, Thelwall M (2012) Research Blogs and the Discussion of Scholarly Information. PLoS ONE 7(5): e35869. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0035869

Other professional development posts:

-Literature Sleuths & Science Fairies
-Adventures in Academic Publishing
-Open Acces, Impact, & Strategery