Everything You Will Ever Need to Know About Academic Blogging

Blogs are an excellent platform to air your views on just about any topic under the sun. From blogging about informative topics such as ‘How to mentally prepare for examinations’, to venting out your personal anger about ‘How bad the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie was’, there are absolutely no limitations when it comes to writing blog posts. However, blogs can be a lot more than just the musings of a self-absorbed mind.

Academic Blogging

An academic blog, in the simplest of terms, is a blog written from an academic point of view. This doesn’t necessarily imply that the target audience needs to be students, professors or other academia. A blog, unlike other academic journals and scientific research papers, carries an informal tone that can easily be understood by the general populace too. Moreover, academic blogs give you the freedom to integrate your own personal analysis with factual information provided by credible academic sources. To this end, academic blogs can be a great place to focus on an interesting topic related to academics that you personally want to address.

The question, then, is how should one go about writing a great academic blog?

3 Key Rules of Writing an Effective Academic Blog

• Focus on the topic you want to address and get to the point directly

  More often than not, academic blog writers ramble about a topic without focusing on specifics. Academic blog posts need to have the same focus that formal academic papers do, yet they need to be much more concise. What this really means is that an academic blog post must comprehensively cover the intended topic along with adequate citations and analysis of evidence where needed, but in as few words as possible.

• Images and other multimedia are less important than information

  The placement of a relevant image, or an explainer video, at the start of the post is perfectly acceptable. However, use too many images or info-graphics and you are diminishing the rhetorical power of your writing. Ultimately, the primary aim of an academic blog is to inform and educate. Do not rely on multimedia tools too much. Rather, make your writing, and the information you are looking to convey through it, the defining feature of your blog post.

• Be creative and use your own ideas, but always stay connected to the topic in question

  An academic blog post need not cohere as an academic analysis of facts and figures the way a formal academic paper does. This is a platform where you can allow your thoughts to meander a bit. The post should be factually correct, but you can get creative with the structure and viewpoint it is being presented in. You can choose to lay emphasis on any point that you consider as important, or you may raise an interesting, maybe even provocative, question in a post and ask readers to opine on it. The possibilities are limitless. Just ensure that it makes sense, and has verified facts and figures.

Conclusion

In the end, academic blogging is not something that requires too much expertise or academic flair. Just adhere to the facts, and write to your heart’s content. You will be fine.