King’s Social Journal

The King’s Social Journal is a social sciences blog focused on four themes:

• Gender & Sexuality
• Race & Ethnicity
• Environment & Society
• Education, Childhood & Youth

Your blogpost should critically discuss a specific social issue and analyse what it can tell us about a larger phenomenon in society relating to one or more of these themes. The more specific yet exemplary of a larger phenomenon your topic is, the more it will be relatable and interesting to the reader.

What is an academic blogpost?

The academic blogpost is a literary genre that aims to make academic ideas and analyses accessible to a wide audience.

The art of writing a good academic blogpost involves combining a more journalistic, entertaining style with the depth and complexity of academic analysis – not an easy task!

A few tips:

• Choose a catchy title to grab the reader’s attention.
• Now that you’ve got your reader’s attention, give them a short teaser (no more than 50-100 words) to announce the overall topic and argument of your piece. This will help them decide if they want to keep reading, so show how fascinating/disturbing/enraging/whatever else your chosen social issue is.
• Then you can develop your argument: introduce your chosen social issue, analyse it and explain what it can tell us about a larger trend, concern or phenomenon in contemporary society, culture and/or politics.
• Use at least 2 academic sources as support for your analysis.

About academic blogging

• Blogging is a way to supplement other channels of knowledge. It can further learning, contribute to public understanding of complex and sometimes controversial topics and has the potential to engage vast new audiences. It is a highly dynamic genre that allows the communication of new and alternative perspectives.
• Blogging diverges from more traditional forms of intellectual communication. It does not necessarily follow the same principles of engagement, and producing stimulating blogposts can require a different approach.

Content

• Write about something that is important to you, that you are an expert in, or that holds a significant interest for you personally. If it inspires, aggravates, sympathises, outrages, humours, or perplexes you, then blog it! Any issue that evokes a strong opinion from you will be reflected through your writing; that energy will attract other readers, like-minded or otherwise.
• However, ranting is best avoided – open-minded and non-polemic preferred!

Language

• Blogs are meant to be an accessible medium for sharing ideas and one of our principal aims is to extend the content of academic debate to a wider audience. With that in mind, it may not be necessary to draw heavily on Roget’s Thesaurus (or indeed, the word processor’s synonym function).
• It is useful to remain aware that some ideas and experiences may not translate well into academic terminology; some academic disciplinary jargon can be inaccessible. Posts should be written as if you are explaining an idea or a concept to a well-read, informed friend who doesn’t happen to be knowledgeable in the area.

Length

• Maximum 800-1,000 words.
  • The following will not count towards the word limit: title, teaser, references, and any captions of images, videos, or other media.
• Use short sentences and paragraphs to develop your ideas.
• Cut out all unnecessary adjectives or long descriptions.
• Don’t feel intimidated by the word limit. Shorter posts that illustrate a compelling point in a few sentences can often be the most engaging blogposts. Online content works in an attention economy in which few users read anything that is longer than 800 words.

Structure

• Start with snappy introductory sentences to engage your reader early on. Make sure to outline the key points of your article and your argument at the beginning as opposed to the end.
• A clear structure, using sub-headings, can help create a sense of coherence to more expressive posts that draw on opinions or experiences.
• Images, graphics, videos, or even tweets or other social media posts, can help to break up long blocks of text and make the reading experience fun.
• Feel free to also include quotes.

Tone of voice

• This can be an entirely personal decision, but it should not be formally academic.
• Feel free to adopt a more informal or conversationalist tone using the first person, which is a common characteristic of blogs.
• At the same time, your blogpost should be aiming to engage readers with academic social science understandings about issues of crucial contemporary relevance. So personal pieces need to be tied back to a larger social, political, or cultural issue.

References

• We recommend including only the most important references in your blogpost, and no more than 10. 
• For blogposts, links work better than footnotes.
• Links should link to the academic articles or books you are using as your key sources, but you can also link to other websites, blogs or videos that have helped you make your argument.

If you would like to look at some examples to get a sense of the genre, a good starting point would be the website of the London School of Economics which hosts one of the largest collections of social science blogposts in the UK.