So, in spite of having pretty consciously tweaked the science blogging community when I wrote, in Monday’s post

Blog posts are best when they’re less than 700 or 800 words long, and their contents are readily summed up in a headline and only slightly expanded upon by the first paragraph. Think newspaper, not magazine articles. Do people read posts longer than that? Sure they do. But the longer a post is, the more possibility there is that some fraction of the readers will quit reading before the end, and maybe even pass on links or comments based on that incomplete understanding. I realize I’m not in the majority of online science writers in taking this position, but I think this better reflects how the average online reader reads.

I nevertheless managed to miss when Bora Zivkovic gently tweaked back over Twitter:

Do you agree? Losing the scientific lede: http://bit.ly/94zroM by @JBYoder compare: http://bit.ly/cJj3vs Long is fine.

But I did notice a larger-than-usual traffic spike associated with the post, and, being pretty sure of the source, I thought I’d just add to what I said previously, in light of the quite coherent and reasonable defense Bora makes for long-form posts.

In Bora’s older post, the point is not so much that blog posts should be long, but that blogs are a good venue for science communication because posts can be long:

Context – there is no space for context in a short article. Yet it is the context that is the most important part of science coverage, and of science itself – remember the “shoulders of giants”? Placing a new study within a historical, philosophical, theoretical and methodological context is the key to understanding what the paper is about and why it is important, especially for the lay audience. Even scientific papers all provide plenty of context in the Introduction portion (and often in the Discussion as well) which is sprinkled with references to earlier studies.

I strongly agree that context is important, and I also agree that blogs are great at providing context—but because a post can link to context, not necessarily provide it itself.

Much of my feelings about what a good blog post should look like are determined by two things, both of which are more aesthetic than empirically justifiable. Both are also related to my all-but-minoring in English as an undergraduate: I am a devoted follower of Strunk and White, and I wrote for the campus paper and took courses in newspaper writing. So I try to follow the inverted pyramid to some approximation, and when a post starts to spill below what displays in a browser window without scrolling down, much like this one, I start to worry that I’m not omitting needless words.

It’s my own online reading experience that short posts, which communicate a single scientific result, work better than longer posts trying to synthesize lots of different results. Again, that’s mostly an aesthetic judgment, but as I said in Monday’s post, I think that short posts are more likely to be read to the end, and less likely to result in distortions as a post propagates across social media (or, rather, only has the distortions I’ve introduced myself!).

Of course, maybe that’s a moot point. If a reader mischaracterizes my post in a Facebook update, but includes a link to it, everyone who clicks through will see that the post said something different. Right? Well, again, when they do click through, I suppose I’d like them to be able to take in the point of the post quickly, and understand what it actually says without needing to read all the way to the end.

Over at SEED, Dave Munger reflects on how online publishing and dissemination methods can strip the nuance from scientific news:

I thought I was being careful to explain the results of several studies, showing that suicide is a difficult problem with many potential contributing factors and confounding variables, including mental illness, depression, and the seemingly contradictory influences of intelligence. Yet on social-networking sites, many readers latched on to one finding: That countries with higher average IQ tend to have higher suicide rates.

Munger suggests that this problem can be mitigated by careful consideration of both the nut graf sent out via Twitter and RSS and the audience receiving them, and that’s clearly right. But I think it’s also worth considering whether some subjects are less appropriate for blogs.

Consider your medium! Photo by K!T.

Blog posts are best when they’re less than 700 or 800 words long, and their contents are readily summed up in a headline and only slightly expanded upon by the first paragraph. Think newspaper, not magazine articles. Do people read posts longer than that? Sure they do. But the longer a post is, the more possibility there is that some fraction of the readers will quit reading before the end, and maybe even pass on links or comments based on that incomplete understanding. I realize I’m not in the majority of online science writers in taking this position, but I think this better reflects how the average online reader reads.

Posts about individual, straightforward results work well in that context. For example, my colleague Jeanne Robertson recently discovered that desert lizards under divergent selection for camouflage have also become confused about visual mating signals. It’s simple—one lizard population moved to white sand dunes and evolved lighter coloration, so now light males think that dark males from the ancestral population look like females—and it supports a lot of catchy headlines that don’t sacrifice accuracy. The title of the talk at Evolution 2010 in which Robertson presented the discovery was “Dude looks like a lady.” I’d say the Wired Science article I linked to above captures all the interesting details.

Complexity doesn’t work so well. Scientific papers based on broad surveys of the literature, or many interrelated experiments, are inevitably going to lose some potentially important nuance when translated into an RSS-suitable post title, and explaining them accurately may take a lot more than 700 words. I’ve run into exactly this trying to write about complicated papers—either I go on for longer than I think my readers are likely to follow, or I have to omit detail and rely on readers to follow up with the links to the literature.

Mind you, this length-versus-content balance is a universal problem in disseminating scientific results—just look at the short-form journals Science and Nature. Some results are perfectly suited to the three-pages-and-online-supplement format, like an experimental result showing that sexually-reproducing lines of the worm Caenorhabditis elegans maintain more fitness in the face of mutation than asexual lines [PDF]. (I’ve posted about another result in this experimental system.) It’s a simple result easily understood even without getting into the Supplementary Material. Compare that to a recent statistical survey of evolutionary trees that concluded species interactions weren’t important in the history of life [$a]. That, too, fits into three pages of Nature, but the result is deceptively simple—even after delving into the Supplementary Material, the statistical reasoning underlying the core result isn’t clear, as the comments thread on my post about the piece reveals.

Which isn’t to say that online science writers should stick to covering simple experimental results or flashy natural historical notes, any more than scientists should never tackle complicated projects. They do, however, need to consider the limitations of the medium in which they report scientific results. Is a topic too complicated to fit in a single post? Maybe it’s suitable for a series of posts. I like how Slate handles this, building collections of interrelated articles that can stand alone, but link into something like a long-form magazine article—see Will Saletan’s great series on memory manipulation for a recent example.

And now I’ve blown through 700 words in the service of an extended, hopefully nuanced, discussion. Take from that what you will.

References

Morran, L., Parmenter, M., & Phillips, P. (2009). Mutation load and rapid adaptation favour outcrossing over self-fertilization. Nature, 462 (7271), 350-2 DOI: 10.1038/nature08496

Venditti, C., Meade, A., & Pagel, M. (2009). Phylogenies reveal new interpretation of speciation and the Red Queen. Nature, 463 (7279), 349-52 DOI: 10.1038/nature08630

On the heels of Science Online 2010, the ResearchBlogging.org community has announced the Research Blogging Awards, honoring online writing about peer reviewed research in a wide range of categories. Nominations are open until 11 February, and can be submitted by anyone; a panel of judges will select 5 to 10 finalists from nominees in each category, and winners will be selected by a vote of the RB.org membership.