One of my roles in the lab has been to encourage everyone to write entries to the lab blog. As you all should know, the rate of blogging has gone up tremendously compared to how things were before I began, but it has been a difficult process. One reason it has been difficult is that we have not, as a lab, articulated why we blog. Why should we spend the time it takes to write a blog entry? In this first in a short series of blog posts, I simply want to state the obvious. If anything, we don’t write often enough. In the blogs that will follow over the next few days, I will explain in greater detail how to blog about our own work, how to blog about others’ work, and where to find examples of good blogging that we can emulate.
The single most important reason we should blog regularly is that blogging lets us practice our writing. Most of us spend an awful lot of time doing science, i.e. working on code for data analysis or designing and running experiments. We spend quite a bit less time actually writing. Do you know how to plan a narrative arc for your idea? Do you know how to flesh-out that narrative arc in a comprehensible way? I can manage to produce a good piece of writing with a disorganized process, but when I employ an organized process, the clear and concise result develops much more quickly. If writing our blogs take too long, it means we do not write often enough!
If it takes you more than a half-hour to plan and write a five-paragraph essay, you need to write more, and the easiest venue for that is to write more blogs.
— David Mertens