How does a person approach a new blog? As someone who has never used this medium before I’ll be seeking advice far and wide to help me set the tone and themes, to make this a better and more insightful series of blogs. As a research scientist, I have experience in extended writing for research and review articles, but the style of writing and content is vastly different. Even in these first 3 sentences I’ve broken at least 3 unspoken rules of scientific writing: use of personal pronouns (although opinions on this differ depending who you ask), contractions, and a “chatty” style of writing. It might end up being a cathartic experience breaking free from these usual restrictions! (Exclamation marks are also frowned upon).
I’m going to start by asking myself some questions to help clarify the greater purpose of this blog, and hopefully not come across as something Alan Partridge would do:
Who Am I?
Without getting too deep and philosophical, I’m a research scientist who has recently started a fellowship overseas. I’ve changed my focus a bit, moving from a chemistry to a biophysics department. I will go into detail on what this really means, as I realise many people may not know what exactly I’m talking about (just as I wouldn’t have a few years ago).
Why write a blog, and not just be a twitter-er?
This is a tricky question… I think the fact that Tweets are short and snappy is off-putting for me. It seems like expert Twitter users can just drop a perfect tweet without laboring over it. That’s a skill I don’t seem to have and would prefer to share longer thoughts with whoever might want to read. I also have a couple of issues with how Twitter handles misinformation but I won’t get into that now!
Who am I expecting to read this?
Someone and anyone – with an emphasis on anyone, as this is not intended to be a blog for the scientists only. If anything, this is aiming to be a piece of scientific communication or outreach that will help people understand the life of research scientists. The majority of research at Universities is funded by public money, so shouldn’t people have the right to know a bit about what’s going on behind the laboratory curtain? (Just to clarify, labs very rarely have curtains).
What tone am I aiming for?
This might be the most difficult question and it’s something I expect to evolve over time. I’ll be very appreciative of any feedback about how it reads and what I’m doing right and wrong. I’m building up a list of pro bloggers that will be providing inspiration which I expect will help me a great deal. What I want to avoid: self-indulgence, bragging, patronisation, rambling… But there are other questions leading on from this, such as to what extent to I want to bring politics into it? It’s unavoidable to some extent, but it could easily lead down a rabbit hole and put some readers off. Do I need to react to every major world event in the blog? Not sure if I have time for that! And do I condone the use of emojis? Another complex and nuanced issue.
How long should an average blog post be?
Seems like a good time for this question, as I think it’s starting to go on a bit… But a very quick internet search tells me that 1000-1500 words is something to aim for. There seem to be two extremes of communication/entertainment styles in the modern world: the short and instantaneous snippet (e.g. Twitter and TikTok), and the slow and deliberate style that requires more attention and immersion (like those 3 hour real time videos of train journeys in Switzerland) but can easily be dismissed as “tl;dr”. For now I’ll sit on the fence and aim for something in between…
I think that’s enough of an intro to set the scene, will follow up soon with more content. So I’ll conclude (do blogs need conclusions?!) by saying that I hope in the future anyone who comes across this blog can learn something (especially myself!).
disprochemist 