The Process Of Skeptical Blogging – Part One

Welcome to ‘how to write a skeptically-minded blog-post by someone who sails on average around five hundred hits a day for their writing, after slightly over a year of composing various entries ranging from research on women and belief to funny YouTube links about cats‘.

Although I clearly have an audience (hello!), the voting for the blog post of choice was fifteen in total, so I guess the vast majority are not particularly picky nor particularly interested (both of which I can completely understand!). Either way, the tally was straight-forward and I’ll be writing about the blog post ‘Tis the Season For Superstition.

There’s a couple of things I should say up-front – the question I continually got when I was a working artist was ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’

I got in the habit of saying ‘I get them posted to me from a little old lady in Nebraska; she knits them out of alpaca wool’.

I’ll say more about the ‘finding of ideas’ later, because this is something that will need some further explanation than just a frequently-used retort. There is a kind-of-answer, but I’d like to structure it with a diagram or pdf. Call it the habit of a former high school teacher who liked to have hand-outs. I just thought I’d get that out of the way first…

The second thing is – don’t expect this to be the best advice or the most authoritative, as you might guess by the opening paragraph. Recently a good friend of mine started reading (for the first time) the Ender’s Game series. When I discover friends are only just discovering things that I consider to have been rather self-evident or a well-known fact due to it being a part of my life in a significant way, I’m usually:

a) Incredibly rude to them – “What do you mean you ‘didn’t know that X was doing / does / is responsible for Y’? Are you mad??”

which is usually rapidly followed by,

b) Sending them every back-issue / album / book / document / link I can get about X and Y, so they no longer suffer my slings and arrows of outrageous outrage.

There’s a few people reading this who will be going ‘ah, that’s why I’ve got mail. She’s spamming me again and cluttering up my in-tray. But it’s not my birthday…’

So, because my friend has led me to reflect on ‘how Ender’s Game made such an impression on me as a teenager and led me to teach it in English classes years later’, I note how this particular XKCD cartoon about Valentine and Peter really does say something about gaining popularity on the internet with a humble site. I wonder if Orson Scott Card is shuffling his feet somewhere, muttering ‘it’s only a novel’ (the same way Neal Stephenson might give the two-finger salute if I sneered about the Metaverse).

In short, don’t expect anything dramatic like a world-revolution due to the content on your blog – ultimately, write because you want to write.

There’s some other people I’ll link to at the end of this post who I enjoy reading / listening to in regards to this topic, but I thought being somewhat pragmatic was an important thing to begin with.

Blog-writing, in my experience, fits into what is called the exposition writing genre. The majority of writing that I’ve read on blogs are ‘weblog-style’ and autobiographical. There are blog entries which incorporate elements of feature article writing, human interest stories, news reports, and even reviews and magazine-style editorials – of course, a multitude of variations beyond those exist, such as fiction writing and even podcast episodes. I don’t really count ‘Twitter’ as a blog-post vehicle, but it could certainly act as such and I’ve seen a few templates for sites that cater for that mode.

Essay-style posts are probably the most commonly-found amongst the most popular skeptical writers, as they take positions on some rather heavy topics like creationism, pseudoscience, paranormal claims and the like. Structuring a post well is an important factor if you are tackling a ‘big issue’, because you can better organise an argument (which you’ll find generally happens – especially if you’re challenging predominant beliefs). A formal structure helps make strong links to contributing factors and hopefully help round up a blog-post with a neat summation which might resonate with those who are not your typical ’skeptically-minded audience’ – but could have stumbled upon your site to learn more and be challenged. Keep that in mind!

In the end, you do write in the genre that you are most comfortable with. I like to mix it up a bit and of course, factors like time-constraints, purpose (I occasionally write for various blog-carnivals and they can have set themes or topics) and access to resources will naturally dictate length and level of complexity of what you write. Speaking of which – the Down Under Feminist carnival is now out and you should certainly keep up submissions to the Skeptic’s Circle, at the very least.

I go for ‘don’t be afraid to say “This is the first post of several on this topic and I’ll write more another time”.’

A science blog like ‘Pharyngula‘ tends more towards short, snappy posts rather than lengthy ones, which I would say also has something to do with an established popularity with that site. I’m intrigued by science writers like ERV, who have their own individual, energetically-quirky style. There’s the Digital Cuttlefish (responds to social issues like religion and science in verse) and even Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted), which occasionally features photographs for blog-posts. You can vote for her to go to Antarctica here.

So, I suggest that you get comfortable with a particular style in terms of length / composition and DON’T push yourself to lengthy blog posts if you’re wanting to feel as if you’re doing the right thing by your site. In the end, this is your work that you should enjoy maintaining.

Interactivity is a significant factor. I go through the spam filter and fish out comments regularly and check the comments of people – particularly if they have sites too and then go visit theirs. Looking at where people find my posts is also enlightening and I’ve had some fun with that with a short YouTube video: Got Pussy? Search Terms For Podblack Cat.

If people post comments, I try to respond, but more often I’ll make a note and try to write a blog-post later. I’ll revisit and edit posts now and then, but usually it’s better to just start a new post later on and nod to earlier work. Make sure that you check your links so they direct to what you want, rather than default back to a site error! It’s not difficult to learn some basic SEO strategies and there’s search-engines (like joining Technorati, DMOZ and Quantcast) which can help with developing an audience.

I use Imageshack where I can, just to add some visuals and break up the text of posts. I’ve become fond of using YouTube for short documentaries rather than writing out too many ‘live blogs’ from events I attend; I think that people enjoy sharing my films (with due credit – not slashing out a section that featured them and posting it without asking me), rather than cutting and pasting a swathe of text. It also encourages them to link to me – and I go visit them in return when I see I’m mentioned.

On the craft of writing – I enjoy listening to podcasts by writers, such as Mur Lafferty and I Should Be Writing (even though it’s not really about blogging, it’s excellent impetus). I’m fond of Australian authors and interviewers like Tim Winton, Paul McDermott, Antonetta Gambotto, Andrew Denton, Phillip Adams,  Kaz Cook, Thomas Keneally, Clive James, Helen Garner, and so on and so forth and so on – I’d say I have too many influences to nail it down easily. But that’ll have to wait for another blog post too.

I’d say my biggest problem is never been ‘I lack inspiration‘ but more like ‘I lack time‘. The ‘muse’ never really seems to shut up (a topic of a poem I wrote once, in fact) and those who notice me awake at some absurd hour of the morning, messing about online, can probably figure that out. I’ve even been known to sleepwalk-write, which is seriously freaky.

If you have any particular questions, feel free to comment – there’s also the Twitter option at http://twitter.com/podblackblog.

Tagged as: All About Me, blog, blogging, Education, how to write, podblack, process, Science Blogging, skeptical blogging, structure, writing