“That’s the beauty of the blog. It’s process. It’s on the way”: Blogging Wisdom from Dean Chris Long
It's been a while since this blog has updated... 2.5 years, in fact. Wow! I should start by announcing that I finished my PhD and I'm working at Michigan State University at the Hub for Innovation in Learning and Technology and at Lyman Briggs College. I'll have way more to say about this and what I've been up to since 2016 in future posts. But right now, let's talk about blogging (how meta!).
One of my goals at work this year is to turn blogging into part of my regular practice. I do so many cool projects, and the Hub has an awesome blog where people with better follow-through than I have regularly churn out posts about their work or reactions to issues in higher ed. I even had a series of posts in mind about informal learning on campus that I pitched in the spring to write in the summer... and then it never happened. Not because I'm not interested in the topic, not because the actual writing would be too hard or unpleasant, but because I never hit the right mental space for blogging work. My academic writing and editing for my thesis has messed up my calibration for what's “good enough” writing. I'd much prefer a monthly “good enough” blog post to the one perfect post I never wrote because I'm a perfectionist. So I need to accept “good enough” and I need to sit down, turn off distractions, and write some blog posts. I signed up for the MSU Outreach & Engagement Online Presence and Public Scholarship Fellows Program - Blogging workshop that promised to not only teach us how and why to blog, but give us the tools to build a regular blogging practice. Awesome, right?
Dean Chris Long from MSU's College of Arts and Letters visited our workshop last week. This was very exciting for me because I’m a big fan of his blog and Twitter feed, where he shares really genuine feelings while avoiding the administrator-speak that usually accompanies communications from a dean. He shared his approach to writing and blogging, his background and teaching in philosophy, and how to share and be meaningful in a digital age. Here's what struck me as his 3 key takeaways for bloggers.
Be Yourself
Dean Long described how since becoming a dean, he spends more time as his “tie-wearing self.” But his online writing resonates because it comes across as genuine, compassionate, and direct. He urged us to not be afraid to express vulnerability, because your readers will connect with more authentic and less polished self-portrayals. Of course, the right amount of vulnerability for you and your blog depends on your comfort level, and might differ based on, for example, your academic position and its precarity, or other intersecting elements of your identity. He specified that he thinks it's especially important for him to speak truth about his experiences as someone with power on campus. It also helps to consider how you’re telling a story with your writing; a story about your subject matter, but also about yourself.
Writing as Process Writing, for Dean Long, is all about process. It is literally a practical process of getting words on the page or screen, and it also reflects your thinking process. The most important thing you can do is to cultivate writing as a habit. That way, you can use writing as an outlet for expression or to tease out your initial thoughts about an idea. By writing all the time and blogging about in-progress thinking, your barrier to what’s an acceptable idea to write about gets lowered. This was really useful to hear because my biggest challenge as a blogger is to sit down and write; I get paralyzed by the blank page or afraid about people’s critical reaction before I’ve written anything down. He encapsulated this advice really nicely for us: “There’s a sense that you don’t have to be perfect. That’s the beauty of the blog. It’s process. It’s on the way” and I think hearing that was a big relief. On the theme of our workshop, “What makes a good blog post?” his answer was “a willingness to surface process, to make it visible” which ties in nicely with the final theme...
Blogging as a Scholarly Practice For academics, there are plenty of good reasons to blog about your research, teaching, and other aspects of your scholarly life. Contrary to some of the grumpier received wisdom (and what gets drummed into the heads of grad students in philosophy) it’s not helpful to keep all but your very best and polished work to yourself. As Dean Long has argued elsewhere, blogging for academics is a way to build and nurture community around your work and increase the impact of your ideas (which can be counted through views and paper downloads). There’s a kind of accountability in making ideas visible earlier, as an opportunity for both feedback and discovery. While blogging doesn’t generally replace traditional measures of productivity for scholars, it doesn’t hurt and can sometimes help in your evaluation as a candidate for a job or promotion: “You’re gonna get Googled whether you like it or not” and a blog that disseminates your ideas or comments on higher education demonstrates a commitment to grappling with those issues. Best of all, though, blogging lets us share and amplify our work to a broader audience than a discipline’s sub-specialty. He advocates making academics better communicators, because “we are losing the fight of convincing people the value of what we do.” His answer to this challenge is “to communicate in a way that is hearable,” meaning to move past our reliance on jargon, tell a compelling story about our work, and get people excited.
It was invigorating to hear Dean Long describe his writing motivations, and I hope I can use what I've learned to resurrect this blog and keep sharing the cool things about my work.
One of my goals at work this year is to turn blogging into part of my regular practice. I do so many cool projects, and the Hub has an awesome blog where people with better follow-through than I have regularly churn out posts about their work or reactions to issues in higher ed. I even had a series of posts in mind about informal learning on campus that I pitched in the spring to write in the summer... and then it never happened. Not because I'm not interested in the topic, not because the actual writing would be too hard or unpleasant, but because I never hit the right mental space for blogging work. My academic writing and editing for my thesis has messed up my calibration for what's “good enough” writing. I'd much prefer a monthly “good enough” blog post to the one perfect post I never wrote because I'm a perfectionist. So I need to accept “good enough” and I need to sit down, turn off distractions, and write some blog posts. I signed up for the MSU Outreach & Engagement Online Presence and Public Scholarship Fellows Program - Blogging workshop that promised to not only teach us how and why to blog, but give us the tools to build a regular blogging practice. Awesome, right?
Dean Chris Long from MSU's College of Arts and Letters visited our workshop last week. This was very exciting for me because I’m a big fan of his blog and Twitter feed, where he shares really genuine feelings while avoiding the administrator-speak that usually accompanies communications from a dean. He shared his approach to writing and blogging, his background and teaching in philosophy, and how to share and be meaningful in a digital age. Here's what struck me as his 3 key takeaways for bloggers.
Be Yourself
Dean Long described how since becoming a dean, he spends more time as his “tie-wearing self.” But his online writing resonates because it comes across as genuine, compassionate, and direct. He urged us to not be afraid to express vulnerability, because your readers will connect with more authentic and less polished self-portrayals. Of course, the right amount of vulnerability for you and your blog depends on your comfort level, and might differ based on, for example, your academic position and its precarity, or other intersecting elements of your identity. He specified that he thinks it's especially important for him to speak truth about his experiences as someone with power on campus. It also helps to consider how you’re telling a story with your writing; a story about your subject matter, but also about yourself.
Writing as Process Writing, for Dean Long, is all about process. It is literally a practical process of getting words on the page or screen, and it also reflects your thinking process. The most important thing you can do is to cultivate writing as a habit. That way, you can use writing as an outlet for expression or to tease out your initial thoughts about an idea. By writing all the time and blogging about in-progress thinking, your barrier to what’s an acceptable idea to write about gets lowered. This was really useful to hear because my biggest challenge as a blogger is to sit down and write; I get paralyzed by the blank page or afraid about people’s critical reaction before I’ve written anything down. He encapsulated this advice really nicely for us: “There’s a sense that you don’t have to be perfect. That’s the beauty of the blog. It’s process. It’s on the way” and I think hearing that was a big relief. On the theme of our workshop, “What makes a good blog post?” his answer was “a willingness to surface process, to make it visible” which ties in nicely with the final theme...
Blogging as a Scholarly Practice For academics, there are plenty of good reasons to blog about your research, teaching, and other aspects of your scholarly life. Contrary to some of the grumpier received wisdom (and what gets drummed into the heads of grad students in philosophy) it’s not helpful to keep all but your very best and polished work to yourself. As Dean Long has argued elsewhere, blogging for academics is a way to build and nurture community around your work and increase the impact of your ideas (which can be counted through views and paper downloads). There’s a kind of accountability in making ideas visible earlier, as an opportunity for both feedback and discovery. While blogging doesn’t generally replace traditional measures of productivity for scholars, it doesn’t hurt and can sometimes help in your evaluation as a candidate for a job or promotion: “You’re gonna get Googled whether you like it or not” and a blog that disseminates your ideas or comments on higher education demonstrates a commitment to grappling with those issues. Best of all, though, blogging lets us share and amplify our work to a broader audience than a discipline’s sub-specialty. He advocates making academics better communicators, because “we are losing the fight of convincing people the value of what we do.” His answer to this challenge is “to communicate in a way that is hearable,” meaning to move past our reliance on jargon, tell a compelling story about our work, and get people excited.
It was invigorating to hear Dean Long describe his writing motivations, and I hope I can use what I've learned to resurrect this blog and keep sharing the cool things about my work.
Thank you for sharing! Keep writing Ellie!
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