Why Academics Should Blog
I've gone back to school; or at least, I'm taking one Master's-level course in Media Theory at Concordia University. So I've been reading a fair bit of academic writing. I've come to the conclusion that all academics should blog. Here's why:
1. You need to improve your writing
I have never read such dismally bad writing as that which is prevalent in academia. Not all of it is terrible, but the stuff that is bad is just atrocious. It's wordy, flabby, repetitive, and filled with jargony mumbo-jumbo. I realize that jargon is the very stuff that you work with and to the extent that you need your topic-specific jargon to make a point, then you should use it. But there is a whole other class of general academic mumbo-jumbo that you need to cut out of your writing right now. Go read Orwell's rules, and then Strunk and White, and then we can talk about it again. Hint: utilize=use, militate=block, empower=mumbojumbo. You need lots of practice writing clear, good prose and saying what you mean. Blogging will help you get that practice.
2. Some of your ideas are dumb
The sooner you get called out on bad ideas, the better. Blogging has an almost-immediate feedback loop, and if you write a discipline-specific blog, then your colleagues around the world will read it (if they don't then you are doing something wrong). That means that when you have a dumb idea, you should hear about it quickly, and you can then reconsider. When you have a good idea, you'll hear about it; when you have an incomplete idea, and some others chip in with suggestions, you'll get a better-formed idea. Etcetera.
3. The point of academia is to expand knowledge
If you believe that the reason academics publish is to expand knowledge, then expanding it beyond the few tens or hundreds of your colleagues that read the obscure journals you publish in should be a good thing. Your ideas should matter (if they don't you should try to come up with some better ideas). If they matter then more people should know about them, and right now almost all your ideas are locked up inside the walls of journals, academic conferences, and university quadrangles. Set them free, and the good ideas will spread, be built on by others, and knowledge as a whole will benefit.
4. Blogging expands your readership
Cross-polination of ideas makes for a more healthy intellectual ecosystem, and blogging means that anyone, not just those in your discipline, will be likely to read your stuff. This includes other academics, as well as the rest of us (politicians, policy developers, artists, engineers, designers, writers, thinkers, kids, parents, and on and on). Anyone might have an interest in your work, or nuanced ideas about how it might be improved, or indeed thoughts on how your thoughts might improve their own thinking on a particular (perhaps nominally-unrelated) topic. More readers, from a more varied background, means your ideas will have a bigger impact.
5. Blogging protects and promotes your ideas
By blogging a new idea, you put your stakes in the (cyber)ground, with dates and readership to attest to your claim. When you blog, you've published, meaning people know you have published, and further meaning that a much wider audience - anyone with an Internet connection - can get access to your ideas. Which leads to the next point.
6. Blogging is Reputation
In blogging links are currency: your reputation is made by who links to you and how often. It's a built in, and more-or-less democratic system of reputation as defined by interest. By having your ideas online, the value of your ideas (as reflected by who is interested in them) becomes immediately apparent. The academic/journal system works in similar ways, with Journal references as the currency. So you should be right at home.
7. Linking is better than footnotes
Linking is much better than a footnote. It allows your readers to visit your source material immediately (assuming it too is online), so again is likely to expand knowledge by giving readers direct access to the ideas that underpin your ideas.
8. Journals and blogs can (and should) coexist
Blogs and (online) newspapers exist in a symbiotic relationship: bloggers sift through and refer to newspapers, sending traffic to them. Newspapers now blog, and bloggers write newspaper articles. There is a general sense that blogging can be a bit more free-form, a bit less polished. While newspaper articles are more rigourous and final. Something similar should happen with blogs and journals. If academics blog, they can evolve and develop a series of ideas. When the ideas are clearer and polished, they can move on to be journal articles. But let's get those journals online and free as well. Speaking of which:
9. What have journals done for you lately?
Journals define your reputation, and don't pay anything. That's like blogging. They are exorbitantly expensive, have abusive and restrictive copyright terms, and are not available online to the general public. You can't link to them, and often you can't find them. That's unlike blogging. Journals should all be open access and free online (as newspapers have come to be), and you should tell them that, and choose to publish in open access journals whenever you can. It's good for knowledge, and you are in the knowledge business. You should support whatever is good for knowledge.
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I would like to expand on your comment # 3 regarding the responsibility of academics to "expand knowledge.
You may have read this already, but I thought this may be of interest.
"Why I Blog" by Andrew Sullivan:
http://www
Interesting piece. Some random thoughts:
I wish you all the best in developing, researching, writing, and defending an original dissertation project. It will take you 1-5 years to complete, depending on the topic and scope of the project.
You will work your fanny off while teaching, doing research, and taking classes. You will be living on Ramen noodles and dealing with your committee - who will insist on at least 5-10 rewrites and countless edits - and you will want credit for every idea and every 60+ hour work week you put into it. You will not want to put your hard work out into the public for someone else to steal.
I find statements like, "...force academics to try harder to be relevant to the universe" offensive. But I'm an academic. I won't argue my relevance to the world, although the many students whose lives and careers I've influenced might want to do so. I've been involved in Internet discussions about scientific research and they end up troll-infested and useless. In worst cases, I've seen academics stalked because someone on the internet didn't understand/didn't like what they said.
Krugman, Westen, and Lakoff are a few of my favorite scholars who've blogged some terrific stuff, and that's great. (Huffpo is a good venue for expressing an opinion in blog format.) For the rest of us in the establishment phase, we're not likely to use a publically accessible blog to develop our ideas. Risk v. reward..
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My larger point is that academic knowledge should be open, not closed. Clearly there are many systematic reasons that academic knowledge tends to "closed" - the journal system, intellectual property holding sway over public knowledge, and a host of others etc. I will wave the flag for the other side - open - and while I sympathize about some of the systematic reasons for "closed" winning out, I would like to see the system changed in favour of open. Blogging (or online publishing of some kind) is part of that, I believe.
re: "force academics to be more relevant to the universe ..." I don't mean that academics are irrelevant, but surely thinking about how to be *more* relevant is a worthy enterprise? That applies to all areas of human activity. Having more academic discussion open on the web will help in that larger project. Not meant to be offensive; maybe provocative.
And, I've been involved in many internet discussions that have been fruitful and challenging; almost all of them in fact. Not to say there isn't trollism online, just that I don't have much time or interest in it. This discussion, for instance, seems useful and illuminating to me.
Nicely stated and concluded.
Thanks for this post. It's fantastic and a really great motivation. As an academic who has tried to blog but fell off due to a) not having enough time due to so many obligations in the race for tenure, and b) not really understanding how to do post most effectively with video, links, etc. (need some more training).
Do you have any suggestions for those of us who would like to do more, but maybe need some strategies for time and training?
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The time factor is a problem I don't have a solution for, and I sympathize.
As for training..
http://www
Other thoughts:
1. write about things that are of interest to you, and readers like you
2. stay on topic, but don't be afraid to veer off-topic occasionally
3. link to articles by your colleagues (or wherever) that you find interesting, quote a bit and then link
[4. you should get your own domain name
5. wordpress is a nice blogging software that is really easy to use]
Hmm. Depends. I can't imagine that most physicists, for example, care what most readers think about their research on a detailed level (one point of journal publication is to elicit informed response).
On a more popular level, of course, there's plenty of good science writing -- blogs and otherwise.
While I don't doubt that some of the writing you've been reading is awful, I have to say I've read some pretty awful blog writing. Further, you should be careful of your own assessment: Part of the reason you may find the writing awful is an unfamiliarity (hence, you're taking the course) with the subject at a more advanced level. Academic articles sometimes seem obtuse to the unitiatied because of their own limitations, not those of the writers.
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re: physicists: I guess I should have specified that my particular interest is academics in the arts & humanities, though there is a whole other reason (to do with promotion of the understanding of science) why scientists should blog...
re: blogs as bad writers: indeed many people are bad cooks, but I think those who make food for a living should practice their craft as much as possible. that is: that bad bloggers exist (in fact are overwhelming) has no impact on the benefits that blogging will bring to academics.
re: awful writing: I can tell dense difficult writing (that is fine) from flabby, bad writing ... it's the flabby kind I object to, not the difficult stuff (which I much prefer).
I beg to differ, AuntSally. One of the best books on physics I ever read is by Brian Greene, the string theorist, who made understanding the subject easy-to-grasp, readable and entertaining. His book was turned into one the most visually amazing series about science to run on PBS.
Given that the US is lagging behind in bringing new students into the sciences -- especially women -- better writing, of textbooks, monographs, articles, journals and more would be beneficial to increasing and retaining students in the various science fields.
But science is not the only field that can stand a style overhaul. Bloated writing happens everywhere, in every discipline and eventually finds its way into business and professions.
I'm with Hugh on this one: blogging encourages you to write more frequently, write faster and for a wider audience. And all of those things will help you write better.
You're right, Jade, and Brian Greene is one example of what I mentioned -- plenty of good science writing for the public.
What I was trying to point out is that journal articles (the medium Hugh has been delving into lately) are meant for a different audience. What Brian Greene has been able to do in his books and television work is give nonphysicists a sense of what string theory, quantum mechanics and general relativity are all about. But I challenge you to read one of his journal articles! You might not find the writing so much to your liking -- but that's because it's meant for a different audience, one which deals in the details of his work, not the layman's description.
Hugh:
Academics do blog. They don't spend as much time blogging as you do, I would think, because 1) most posts do not address the issue under discussion in an informed manner, and 2) most bloggers, sad to say, do not write well. Their posts oftentimes lack clarity, continuity, even relevance. Too frequently their comments degenerate into a pissing contest. Your an intelligent young man. You know this.
The average bloggers poor writing skills is not surprising given the fact that most high school graduates in the U.S. score very low on reading comprehension and writing tests. The majority of them, over 50% in some studies, score somewhere between a 3rd-grade level and a 9th-grade level on reading comprehension tests. Their writing scores are even more abysmal. Our students' lack of preparation for college has been a common topic in the press for many years. Their have been endless books written on this topic.
I currently subscribe to three professional journals: the New Left Review, The Wallace Stevens Journal, and the Monthly Review, but I have in past years subscribed to College English, Salmagundi,
and others. In all of these journals, I've found the writing to be of the highest quality.
I hope in the future you'll swear off this right-wing "doublethink" and sheepspeak. You're better than this.
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re: academics do blog: yes, but more should. and if they are writing the posts, then they are in control of their posts, and their contents - so if the posts are bad and off-topic, that's the fault of the blogger, and not blogging in general. and again (and again!) that most bloggers are bad writers (I agree ... and most people are bad cooks too), does not imply that academics should not blog. see my article above for reasons they should.
re: average bloggers with poor writing skills: I'd suggest that encouraging more writing (eg blogging) and more reading will improve those scores. especially if more informed people who are good writers are writing on the web.
re: well-written journals: I wish I had been reading those.
re: right-wing doublespeak sheepspeak ... ? I don't understand what you mean.
I do not disagree with most of what you have written above. Actually, I agree with much of it. Everyone should blog more. It is a democratic medium. Blogging is a good thing, but it is not the only way academics can communicate with others on the web. For example, they can be more selective with whom they communicate on MySpace and Facebook, screening out users who they feel are not contributing to the discussion.
My gripe is mostly with parts 1. and 2. of your article/blog. I believe most academic writing is of a high caliber. Academics have colleagues, editors, and proofreaders look carefully at their submissions before anything gets published. This process does not always work well, certainly, but it usually does.
More importantly, what raised my hackles was the (arguably) anti-intellectual thrust of these sections of your piece. "Poor academic writing" and "thinking" has been a talking point for conservatives and neocons for the last 3 or 4 decades. It is so pervasive in the media today that most young people don't realize that behind these arguments lie the desire to censor and severely limit the freedom of speech of those on the Left in academia. See, for example, Tenured Radicals, Professor Narcissus, The De-valuing of America, The Closing of the American Mind, and Illiberal Education, to name just a few I've read.
Continued
I could not help but think whilst reading through this post about the old saying (by whom I cannot remember) that the arguments in the academic world are so egregious because the stakes are so small. Blogging will just give the academics another venue for these tedious, never-ending disputes. Time better spent on research will be expended on internecine blog wars. Although entertaining for us non-academics, it might degrade scholarship rather than improve upon it.
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It might also force academics to try harder to be relevant to the universe.
Thank you for your response. This is the first time a blog poster has replied to one of my postings. It is a genuinely new experience
Point well taken. When we try to converse with others we quickly find out how well thought out our ideas truly are. However, is the improvement of writing skills the most important goal? Many researchers have specific knowledge that the public needs to find out about. The strides forward being made in biology, medicine, atmospheric science, astronomy, archeology, and other areas are important because they teach us about ourselves and the universe we live in, and help us to make better informed choices. As the world seemingly flattens and shrinks, the need for rapid adaptations to the stresses we are witnessing in our environment increases.
There are other blogging sites where scientists and engineers seem to congregate more than here, which for the sake of Huffpo is regrettable. Other sites may have more researchers blogging, but Huffpo has more readership. Some of the arguments posited at Huffpo as logical may not be well informed, but at least discourse is being encouraged.
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Agreed that the argument changes significantly for scientists, though in some sense there is more need for understanding of scientific knowledge to spread outside academia.
But I'm not suggesting that academics should blog on Huffpo - rather they should blog on their own. Plenty do - more should.
Hugh the Blogger. Spot on.
Point well taken, sir.
agreed.
it is great if academics would blog and engage in comment system feedback, but unfortunately at the moment, blog publication is still not the same as the coveted journal publication. it is therefore not surprising that academics, particularly young graduates or postdocs, are a little reluctant to write about their work openly for fear of being scooped when it comes to the good old rule of "publish or perish" in journals.
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Sad, eh?
it is. and my PI is particularly skeptical after a chapter of the thesis of one of the former member of our lab was plagiarised word by word and published in a journal. this leads to a series of correspondence to the journal editor etc but to date it's still not completely resolved as far as i know. since then my PI wouldn't let our webmaster to put any complete and defended thesis on our lab website anymore, least to say talking abour our work on blogs.
I liked your article. I did find some humor in it. Right off the bat, one class towards a masters does not an academic make (smile) ! Many doctoral candidates end up writing more poorly, at least for a few years because they are sick to death of writing, this includes juris doctor candidates as well (writing is their bread and butter). Still, I will agree that more effective discussion of analytical issues does arise when the level of discussion is more logical in nature. No offense to HuffPo, but a classic example is the blogging that you find on Truthdig. The arguments are cogent, less personalized, and exhibit a linear type logic.
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Oh, I didn't mean to imply that taking a course makes me an academic..
One thing I am though is a reader.
And as a reader, I can say that my experience is: academic writers are the worst writers I have ever read, by a long shot. Being sick of writing is not an excuse for writing poorly. The reason they can get away with writing such tripe, and so badly, is that no one reads their stuff. As for HuffPo/Truthdig, I have no comment ... but it's beside the point. I'm not arguing that bloggers are better writers than academics (though some of them are), I'm arguing that blogging will help academics become better writers. Which is something they desperately need, in my opinion (if they care about their readers, and their ideas).
You say that you are a reader and that, in your experience, "academic writers are the worst writers [you] have ever read, by a long shot." How broad is your reading of academic writing? I admit some academic writing is unforgivably appalling, and absolutely the worst writers seem to be "experts" in rhetoric/c
On the other hand, even the worst academic writing can't compare to the semi-literate, ill-spelled, poorly punctuated, unsupported ravings of SOME bloggers, and SOME academic writing is elegant, illuminating, witty, insightful and even entertaining.
I have nothing against academics blogging; I don't really know if it would make them better writers or not. I suspect they would just pick up different bad writing habits. However, when you dismiss much of academic scholarship as badly written tripe that no one (or no one who matters) reads, you are making a sweeping generalization that is both unfair and anti-intellectual.
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