Our genre is educational blogging, a work that simplifies complex topics for a general audience.To develop our model, we first looked at various works that fit the category; the first of these included xkcd: What If and Wait But Why. We skimmed through a few posts, noting the effective use of imagery and analogies, and then emailed the authors of these blogs to get an idea of their writing process. We also decided to include video media like YouTube channels that addressed the same questions and used similar techniques, but instead of written text, featured audiovisual methods of conveying the images. Both forms have their pros and cons, but we ultimately felt that in order to capture the true spirit of the genre we were targeting, we would need to draw from both. We briefly attempted to visit online forums including Reddit subs like r/askscience and r/explainlikeim5, but decided that they were members of a related but different genre, as they followed different conventions. We also explored more typical “newspaper” science blogging as featured on sites like Wired.com or IFLScience.com, but felt that they served more to announce publications and report on them rather than break down topics in the way that the other members of our genre did.
Oliver received a brief response from Tim Urban, the writer of Wait But Why, who said he was unable to do a direct Q&A but directed to an article that described that for a large complicated post, he would generally begin his research at the “surface of the topic.” Gradually, he will stumble across “foggy spots” where he would dive deeper uncovering more and more “fog” until he “hit the floor,” or the core of the subject to be studied and taught.
We also looked at different media, such as video blogs and comics, and extracted their commonalities. Looking at YouTubers like Minute Physics, Veritasium, and VSauce, it became apparent that each author had a particular style of doing their work, but there were common themes. Of note, Veritasium, whose creator has studied the learning process, often includes misconceptions people have about the topic before diving into the science and dispelling the myths, an element which we have included and made optional as it is a useful but not necessarily genre-required element. Video media often introduced the topic, explained the science, and then ended with a resounding conclusion or answer to the question, laid out clearly and succinctly, which has served as inspiration for the “conclusion” element.
During our research, we realized that educational blogs vary greatly in content and structure, so we made our schema flexible by creating “anywhere” tags for section headers, visuals, analogies, and roadmaps. Section headers are short phrases intended to divide the post into relevant parts to make the material easier to digest. Visuals are any accompanying images, comics, graphs, or charts intended to clarify the text it directly precedes or follows. They work well with our analogies tag, which compares complicated topics to ones that the audience can relate to. The roadmap is a list of section headers serving as a table of contents to guide the reader. It precedes a section with multiple parts.
We decided to allow our sources follow a formal citation format (APA, MLA, etc.) rather than solely an informal one (linking), to account for various sources (print, interviews, etc.) and to maintain the credibility of our posts.
Initially, we included a tag following the sources called community_interact, representing an ask-box or a comments section. This section is typical in blogs and is important in creating a responsive audience. It gives readers a way to interact with the writer to gain clarification and prompt new posts. However, we removed this in our schema to focus on the content of our post because we felt that a false audience would take away from the piece.
