REASONS FOR ACADEMIC BLOGGING
Sharon Howard, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Wales, who also hosts the Early Modern Resources site, blogs at Early Modern Notes. In a recent post entitled So, why would I champion academic blogging? she discusses why she blogs as an academic, as well as the value of blogging for research. What she writes echoes my thoughts entirely about one of the reasons I am blogging:
“Blogging research lets you develop the very first drafts of ideas. Bits and pieces that don’t yet amount to articles (or even conference papers), but they may well do some day. And something else, sometimes: last year I was having trouble thinking up any new ideas at all, but blogging old ideas, often attached to new sources, meant that I kept writing, if only a few hundred words a week, without having to worry about it being original or impressive. And now, because it’s all archived and easy to find, I can look back over some of that work and see potential themes, little seeds of ideas that are worth working on, start to make them grow. …Another thing: writing for a slightly different audience than in the usual academic contexts. This is an amazing opportunity to reach out.”
“Blogging research lets you develop the very first drafts of ideas. Bits and pieces that don’t yet amount to articles (or even conference papers), but they may well do some day. And something else, sometimes: last year I was having trouble thinking up any new ideas at all, but blogging old ideas, often attached to new sources, meant that I kept writing, if only a few hundred words a week, without having to worry about it being original or impressive. And now, because it’s all archived and easy to find, I can look back over some of that work and see potential themes, little seeds of ideas that are worth working on, start to make them grow. …Another thing: writing for a slightly different audience than in the usual academic contexts. This is an amazing opportunity to reach out.”
