Dan Cohen writes on why academics should blog. Especially, I like how he relates an idea from Paul Bushkovitch, who had argued that the key to being a successful scholar is to become completely obsessed with a topic, which, after a while, makes you into what others perceive of as an expert. This, according to Cohen, can take place on a blog.
Echoes, thus, of Alex Soojung-Kim Pang’s ideas about why we blog. Transparency and trust. There, Pang also relates to the skill component in blogging; it is a way of training, and he compares it to speed chess.
I like Howard S. Becker’s Writing for social scientists: How to start and finish your thesis, book or article and his idea of lowering the thresholds on writing by writing often (and talking about your research all the time). Becker, at least to judge from his homepage, is definitely from the pre-blog era, but I think some of his ideas about writing are applicable to blogging and blogging’s relation to scholarly work in general.
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