Writing instructions

Writing instructions for the Faculty of Social Sciences research blog

Target audience: The blog is intended for the general public, but we expect a large share of its readers to be from the University. We also hope that the blog will attract journalists. You should, therefore, avoid using terminology (and assuming background knowledge) specific to your own field of research or discipline. Feel free to use technical concepts, but be sure to define them comprehensibly. This is particularly important with terms that mean one thing in everyday speech and another in the research literature.

Content: The blog posts should focus on topical issues or issues of general interest and be written as research-based articles rather than as opinion pieces. You can write a post based on your own research or a study you are familiar with. Instead of treating the blog as a way to publicise your own research, think of it as a bridge-builder between research and social discussion.

Length: No exact length has been defined for the articles but try to avoid excessively long texts. Ideally, a blog post is short enough to be read in one sitting, so a general guideline might be 500 to 1,500 words. If your article runs longer than this, you may want to divide it and publish the article as a series.

Style: Blogs are less formal than academic articles. One would nevertheless do well to follow some of the norms of academic writing. For example, try to avoid statements about individuals and focus instead on the facts. In the same vein, offer arguments rather than refer to authorities. While comprehensive citations and references are poorly suited to blog posts, you should add a list of references at the end of the article to point readers to the literature and/or sources that explore the topic in greater detail.

Sub-headings: To make the blog posts easier to read it is recommendable to use sub-headings to structure the content of the article.

Language: The blog is multilingual, so you can write posts in Finnish, Swedish or English.

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