What to look for in a good blog post

Here’s a possible rubric for marking your blog posts, once you’ve revised them. Feel free to use the comments to suggest changes to the rubric (hint: if you’d prefer a different way of marking them, here’s your chance to say so!)

  1. Choice of topic:
    • Is it relevant to the course, and/or relevant to the challenges of climate change?
    • How important is the topic (e.g is it trivia, or does it get to the heart of some of the dilemmas we face)?
    • Is it timely (e.g. relates to current issues)?
    • Is it interesting to a broad audience?
    • It it likely to inspire, motivate, create discussion, etc?
  2. Use of resources:
    • Are the cited resources relevant to the topic?
    • Do they show some depth of research (e.g. not just a random google hit)?
    • Are they used in an appropriate way to illustrate / support the article?
    • Does the post link together things in an interesting new way?
  3. Style / Coherence
    • Does the writing style suit the blog format?
    • Is there a suitable introduction and a suitable ending?
    • Do the ideas flow in a natural way? (or does it seem disjointed?)
  4. Understandability / Clarity
    • Is the article readable by a wide audience?
    • Does it strike a good balance between being overly technical versus dumbing the subject down too much?
    • Is any specialist terminology explained?
    • Are the ideas explained well?
  5. Insights / Originality
    • Does the post add interesting new thoughts/ideas to the cited source material?
    • Does the post approach the topic in a new way?
    • If the post is a summary of source material, does it highlight the main points without being verbose?
    • Is this the kind of blog post I would want to twitter to all my acquaintances?
  6. Good use of blogging features
    • Are images, graphs, etc used to make the post more interesting?
    • Are links to source material included in the right places?
    • Is it clear to the reader whether they would want to follow the links?
    • If other features are used, are they used appropriately (e.g. text formatting, layout, bullet points, etc)?

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4 Responses to What to look for in a good blog post

  1. avatar Juliette says:

    Thank you for posting this Sir! 😀

  2. avatar Sarah says:

    For the use of resources I mainly just linked a key word to take you to the website that it was concerned with, but should I do a brief of the article in my blog post and link the introduction?

  3. avatar Steve says:

    @Sarah: I think the way you did it is fine. In each case, it was fairly clear what the link was (i.e. more information on a particular key term). It was also good to see your list of reference material at the end of your post, although it might be nice to add a sentence or two about each of them, as it was less clear to me which of these I might be interested in following up on.

  4. avatar Sarah says:

    Ok thank you

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