Last year, the Open University's Gill Kirkup published Academic blogging: academic practice and academic identity in the London Review of Education. Although this is a small study, I found it a thoughtful reflection on the purposes, practices (and pitfalls) of academic blogging. I'd recommend it as handy reading whether you already blog – or are thinking of taking it up. I found many of my own thoughts about blogging in this piece, particularly about identity, audience, self-censorship and the costs it imposes on other forms of writing.
For example, Kirkup notes
There was a strong indirect relationship between the writing people did in their blogs and other professional academic writing. As they became familiar with the medium of blogging they were surprised to find that it had its own rules, it was not simply a notebook, or a place for making drafts which might be turned later into full scholarly publications. When it worked well there could be synergy between blogging and other writing. But the entire sample described how blog texts were different from other texts, and demanded care and effort to produce at quality. ‘Dr C’ described this very clearly:
I fondly imagined that a blog would be a good way of getting ideas off the ground for papers and proposals and things like that – it doesn’t do that … the initial draft of a paper often looks like a blog post and I could just post it… but I don’t choose to because it doesn’t feel finished.
He described how a paper is reworked with gaps and un-evenness, while a blog post has to have its own sense of being ‘complete’. ‘Dr C’ also described what he calls the ‘hierarchy of levels of reflection and thinking and effort’ that go into creating texts for different media. He ‘bangs out a tweet’, but a blog takes a little bit longer. ‘Professor R’ also described how he composed his blog posts like ‘little articles’. He considered their length (about 500 words) and tried to make them a ‘rounded piece’. He estimated that it took him about two hours to create a blog post. ‘Dr K’ who has also published extensively in traditional academic media found that the blog fed into her other writing.
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