Blog format

Introduction

Blogs and other online discussion forums are a common part of courses at university today. They provide students and faculty the opportunity to explore ideas that arise in lectures in a more relaxed way than in essays and research papers. Whilst less formal than them, online discussion forums nonetheless keep some characteristics of essays: they are still written in language that is more formal than would be used on Facebook, and the usual standard of developing ideas to clarify a point or to support a position is followed. We would not write a sentence without a verb in a piece of formal academic work, but we might occasionally do that in a blog post — provided it did not interfere with the aim of effectively communicating our ideas.  

On social media, we might say, "That's your opinion, but I don't agree." In academic contexts, disagreement is normal: it's essential to the methods of science, history, economics, law, and other academic disciplines; without disagreement, there cannot be progress that corrects or improves on previous ideas. You can present and argue for any opinion you like in an academic context, but you are expected to support that opinion, with explanation, details, examples, analysis, definition of terms, logical argument and any other support that helps. This also applies to writing on online discussion boards in academic situations: we do not normally just state an idea in one short sentence and stop. 

A blog post is not, however, an academic essay. It is written quickly, and after posting, is not normally revised. This is why I generally suggest you spend five to ten minutes writing each paragraph or response to a question. Blogging and similar discussion is response writing, and replies to our initial ideas can prompt further discussion of an initial thought, including a change of mind. The interaction between us is recorded in the series of comments and replies. 

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Formatting blog posts 

Because a blog post is not an essay, it need not follow the more formal style guides for academic work used in essays and research papers written in MS Word, Google Docs, or similarly sophisticated word processing apps. 

In fact, online forums, including Google's Blogger, our app for quick response writing, offer a relatively limited set of formatting options. This keeps it simple. We need not worry much about fonts, line indents, and so on: they are not options. 

Specifically

• do not indent first lines of paragraphs. Blogger does not have a ruler tool to indent first lines of paragraphs, and we don't want to get into undesirable habits like typing space space space or even "Tab" to indent the first line of a paragraph. 
   
• to start a new paragraph, just type "Enter" as you would in an app such as Google Docs or MS Word, and carry on typing the new paragraph. 
   
• in comments on blog posts, we have even less control over format. Again, just type your comment or reply to a comment without worrying about indenting first lines. Nor can we avoid Blogger's use of justified lines in comments and replies to comments. 
• To create a space between paragraphs, type "Enter" twice to create a space before the next paragraph. 
• If you use html, you can add italic and bold formatting in comments, also links. See the page  "Comments - italics, bold, links" for notes on how to do these things. 
   
• in new blog posts, the template normally sets the format. Please don't change it. 

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Images, video, etc. 

We don't normally include photographs or the other images in essays, but they can enliven a blog post. Please feel welcome to try out Blogger's image and video tools. 

• I usually align inserted images on the right, and size them to "small". When readers click on an image, Blogger displays it full size. But play around with the image options to find what works best for your blog post.