Blogging about blogging (Part 1)

This is the first in a series of posts intended to help you identify something to write about in a blog entry, narrow down the scope of the topic, and ask the right questions so that your readers come away having learned something. While it’s a blog post about creating blog post, I want it to be a little more—an attempt to help you think critically about your topic at hand.

Step 1: Find something that interests you…

This may either be the easiest or the toughest part of the post. It could be that you found an interesting research article in the course of research for your cancer project. However, many ideas may pop up serendipitously, after talking to a friend or simply reading the morning paper (okay, website).
Often, you will come across a story that describes a recently published study making some newsworthy claim. Usually marketing and communications directors at the scientists’ institution will hold a press conference to announce a major discovery: “the moon is made of green cheese!” The press get very excited about this news and report the finding in their papers or web sites summarizing the key points that the discoverers—who invariably show up in ill fitting suits—made at the news conference. A few quotes from a disinterested third party, say a scientist who works in the field, may help to underscore the importance of the discovery: “These guys have made a huge discovery…our field will never be the same…” says the independent expert. And the reporter will need to explain why this is important to us: “ …this means every kid in America [it’s always America] will have free slices of green cheese in their lunch boxes forever.” Of course journalists, trained to cover every side of the story (whether one exists or not), will want to balance the praise with a quote from a skeptic or curmudgeon: “Very interesting if true, but there’s still a lot of work to be done before we start mining the moon for green cheese.” Or the skeptical, “Is it really green or aqua? Maybe teal?” Or the even more skeptical, "But look at the study size, n=1!"
Obviously, to know whether the claims made in the news story fit the data, one must consult the study. This is something very few journalists are trained to do—some science writers were trained as scientists, but shockingly many were journalism majors in college or even…[pause for effect]…english majors. No disrespect to english majors here, but don’t take what you read in the paper as truth until you have confirmed it yourself. This requires some work.

Next time… finding the data.