I’ve been prodding my (former) students to join me as guest-bloggers or even just to respond to my blog posts. So far with little success. I know that they (or someone else …) is reading because our weekly visitor stats show around 200 visitors to this blog per week, which I’m told is a great visitor rate seeing that we only started www.languageonthemove.org two months ago. So that’s gratifying, as is the fact that our visitors come pretty much from around the world and we’ve had visits from most nations.
So, why don’t we get those guest-bloggers?! What makes guest-blogging, or even commenting, so hard? I’ve only been asking people who I know have great ideas about matters of language and communication on the move, so it can’t be lack of content.
I’ve been thinking that maybe I should give up prodding because everyone is busy and maybe it’s just too hard to add another writing task if you are already suffering from multiple deadlines, an overdue thesis and writer’s block … However, I’ve just read a great article about the benefits of editorial prodding in the Chronicle of Higher Education, where Rachel Toor argues that it’s unhelpful to authors to stop asking them about the writing they’ve promised. With all those competing demands on our time, it’s easy to get to that point where it becomes too embarrassing to ask someone how their long-overdue writing is going. Rachel suggests helping authors move forward by offering the chance to talk their argument through. I’m suggesting that blogging is the contemporary equivalent to a chance to “talking it through” – or rather a useful addition to talking about your research: blogging allows to put your argument together in an informal way; you’ll have that lovely feeling of achievement (Facebook status update: “Just finished writing another 500 words!”), someone other than your supervisor might actually read about your work in progress, and maybe that blog post is your next thesis chapter or research paper in nuce…
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Sometimes those browsers just read your writings and feel resonate and enjoy the reading.
Maybe time is not always enough for them to write down their feeling.
😉 I guess it’s hard for many people outside the academic circle to critically reflect on langauge-related social issues which they may consider as ‘common sense’.
All the best with your blog. I’ll be an active visitor and a guest-blogger soon…
In regard to your suggestion long time ago, Kimie, I did not think you were serious. Sorry if you were.
I can tell you this, the word “fashion” is treated as trend. So this does not apply to everybody in the world. (and it shouldn’t do either) If you are not interested in trend, no point of fashion. So our market being a lot shallower than you think. I do not recommend to anybody.
But the word “fashion” is something you create in another word, individuality rather than trend, so I think if you are happy with what you wear and also comfortable, I think that is fashion to you and others.
I think of fashion as part of me, other people put priority to other things so I can suggest coordinate of clothing individually but never to mass people.
My website is just creating the talking point , connection and also giving inspiration to people never to suggest what is good or bad.
It might be interesting to research on fashion followers. I think there are difference in young to old, male to female maybe where they live, too.
I just read this excellent book chapter by Aneta Pavlenko on academic writing and valuable tips for how to work with editors. In it, she talks about how her editor’s prodding helped her with one of her first major publications (see p. 188 on).
http://astro.temple.edu/~apavlenk/pdf/The_Priviledge_of_Writing_as_an_ImmigrantWoman.pdf
I’ve always admired her work since my phd years, but having read this particular paper, now she’s my personal hero…
See, Ingrid, that’s where Sei and her team of experts come in at http://www.yshlondon.com/?mod=11 – making fashion not a worry but a joy for us(right, Sei?;-)! Btw, fashion seees to be one of these areas only few sociolinguists have gone in….any interesting research projects/publications on fashion, language and identity???
don’t mention it, Kimie! Imagine the horror of adding worries about fashion to the woes of academics ;-(
Sei, welcome to the Language on the Move blog;-) Btw, what happened to my suggestion to you a while ago, including fashion tips for academics in your online magazine? We are an untapped market for the fashion industry;-)
Hi. I am a friend of Kimie living in London working in fashion. As I run textile orientated online magazine, blogging is very important for us to let people show what we do. It works well, too. I myself have difficulties trying to invite guest blogger, so do understand the difficulties.
For my online magazine, blog is very important tool to show what is inside the magazine like sharing part of your research, I guess. Surprisingly so many people from any kind of profession are interested in what we write, this encourage us and show the path we should follow. So blog is a very important tool of research.
To be honest, I wasn’t a keen reader for your blog or website because I don’t know anything about the subject, but today I found out few common ground for me to be interested in. Thank you for your blog post. I enjoyed reading what you have written. Please continue writing. I look forward to reading your post as well as Kimie’s post in the future.
Thanks
Sei
Just read Rachel Toor’s advice and found it very, very useful (to be honest, I felt relieved that I’m not the only one having heart attacks about failing to meet deadlines and being overwhelmed by the feeling of guilt…). I feel blessed with my colleagues who keep asking me how I’m going with my (often overdue) publication projects and who are always ready to help with useful comments and moral support. I’m sure that many academics and phd students are very independent, but as far as I’m concerned, I wouldn’t have been able to finish half of what I have done to date without the generous support from my like-minded friends/colleagues.
Also as a supervisor of a few PhD students, I also learned a lot from Rachel’s advice. So thank you for bringing the post to our attention and reminding us that blogging can be a fun way of talking our idea/argument through and getting it out there for wider readership:-)