Anybody who reads the lab blog will know that we write lengthy entries filled with lots of original content. In the language of a course on writing, we write our blogs as if they were 10-page essays. I think we should focus, instead, on the five paragraph essay. We should use the blog as a stage to practice writing well, practice writing quickly, and practice stirring conversation. In this post, I make a few recommendations that I think will help us do this.
We are our audience and we should write our blogs to each other. A blog only makes sense when it has an audience that participates, and at the moment the only audience that we can hope to participate is ourselves. Therefore, write about topics that you want to share with the lab members. This may be about some technical piece of your work that you want to practice explaining; it may be some thoughts about how we manage the lab coffee; or it could be a summary of an article that you enjoyed or disliked. Others—those from outside the lab—may stumble upon our writing occasionally, but don’t worry: they will not be confused. They may even learn something about how real science gets done. By focusing on ourselves as our audience, we make our writing more direct, more functional, and easier to write, but no less accessible.
Stop trying to generate entirely new content all the time. Multiple individuals have turned in late blog entries because they were stumped with where to start. Instead, talk about what others have written. Hear something interesting in the news? Link to the article and add your commentary. The goal here is not to illuminate the world with your insights: it is to quickly write a well structured essay on something of relevance to the other members of the lab. Only write about your own ideas when you genuinely want to explore them. You still need to write something in your commentary. Simply linking to another article does not constitute a useful blog entry. Choose something—anything—that grabs your attention, and explain why it is interesting.
We should default to the five paragraph structure. If you are like me, you probably think that you are a good writer. However, when it comes time to write, you spend far more time writing than you anticipated. If this sounds familiar, it is because you, like me, have not yet honed your skills of organizing your writing. To write your next blog, start by writing five complete sentences that contain your basic premise, three supporting ideas, and a summary sentence. You may think that this is your first paragraph, but it is not. It is your outline. Look over the basic five sentences to be sure they present a coherent set of ideas. Now, take each sentence as the opening sentence of your five paragraph essay. Provide three sentences that expand upon the concept of each topic sentence and write a final sentence that transitions to the next idea. In this way, you will generate a coherent essay in short order. It will have a consistent structure that is clear and easy to read. Some of the folks in our lab are good writers and don’t need to do this. The rest of us need practice at organizing our writing before we begin, and this is a full sentence outline of a five paragraph essay is the simplest way to do it.
We should write to an audience that cares: ourselves. Our blogs should contain both new content as well as commentary on others’ material. We should keep the structure of our writing simple. Keeping these as our guidelines will accelerate the process of blogging and ensure that the material we produce is relevant.
— David Mertens