Write in blog style and draw the reader in!
A blog post is different from an academic article. We encourage you to write in an easily accessible way, with an interested reader of a blog as your imagined target group. Give your post a short and interesting title.
Draw in your reader from the first paragraph. Use an active tone and short sentences. Have short paragraphs.
Add headings to break up the text, after the introductory paragraph(s) – i.e. no heading over the first paragraph(s). Make the headings interesting, giving the essence of the text that follows, or posing a question to keep the reader interested. Avoid ‘introduction’ and ‘conclusion’ or ‘concluding reflections’ as headings.
End the blog post with a paragraph that gives the reader something to take with them into their work, their studies, or their dinner conversation with family and friends.
We envisage an international readership, also outside of academia. We therefore ask you to explain terminology that you use for the ordinary reader. We also discourage use of abbreviations. If you do need to use an abbreviation, always introduce the abbreviation the first time – e.g ‘in the European Union (EU)…’. Do not use abbreviations in the title or in headings.
What is the basis for your statements?
Blogging for Sustainability does not use footnotes, endnotes, or a bibliography. Rather, use hyperlinks to the source whenever you make an empirical statement. E.g., ‘investors care about climate change’. How do you know this? Show the reader that you have a basis for your statement, by adding a hyperlink to the source, whether that it is, for example, a research article, a white paper, a newspaper article, or another blog post. In general, any empirical statement should include a hyperlink to the source, unless it is obvious and generally known information.
Sources should be in English. If a source is only available in another language, please add ‘(available only in [other language])’ directly after the source link.
The nitty-gritty details
British English is our default, which includes using single quotation marks ‘except for “quotes” within quotes’.
Word length: blog posts should be between 600 words and 1000 words, title and author information excluded, and headings included.
Please use our template for blog posts, and submit your draft to sustainabilityblog@jus.uio.no as a Word document (or equivalent), so that we easily can edit your post.
