When sitting down to write a blog, I find it helpful to think about who my primary audience is. Am I writing for the Patients Doctors Decision makers
Identifying who you want to reach can help you shape several important elements of your blog. First, it helps you figure out how much background knowledge about your subject you can take for granted. If you are writing a blog about post-graduate medical training, for example, you can take for granted that doctors will know what residency is, but if you are writing for can’t make that assumption.
Different audiences also require different approaches. While decision makers may respond well to blogs that focus on cost and other policy issues, patients are often more interested in how your blog relates to their care.
Identifying your audience also helps you select the best venue for your blog. If you want to reach doctors, you may want to If you want to reach decision makers essay may be your best choice. For op-ed in a major newspaper may be most appropriate.
There are a lot of health care blogs on the internet. To stand out, you need to hook your readers from the very first line. If you can capture a reader’s interest in the first few seconds, there’s a much better chance they’ll read all the way to the end.
One effective tool for hooking your audience is to make a bold or provocative statement right at the beginning. Some of my favorite the harm the Heart and Stroke Foundation’s Health Check program is causing children and Michael Law on the price of generic drugs. Their opening lines suck you in and make you want to keep reading.
Another powerful hook is a well executed anecdote. The right story can immediately draw an emotional connection between the reader and the subject, which can carry the reader right to the end. Two of my favorite examples from Debate are from on raising the minimum wage and Farrah about health literacy. Both of these stories are very effective because they connect readers to the problem emotionally, and humanize what could otherwise be an inaccessible or academic issue.
You can still write a very good, engaging blog without using one of these devices, but it’s important to avoid starting off a blog with “I read an interesting report recently” or “I went to a talk the other day.” An interesting report or talk may indeed be what inspired you to write, but don’t let this be the first thing you tell your reader. Instead, find the idea in the report that you found so interesting, and share that with the reader, so that they get engaged the same way you did.
When you write a blog, try to have a tight focus. It’s tempting to cram everything you know about a topic into a single blog, but the result is almost always confusing or unengaging.
Let’s say you want to write about genetic testing. There’s a lot to write about here! There are the ethical challenges around reporting incidental findings, the difficulties in interpreting results, costs of the tests, and the tension between the hype around personalized medicine versus the realities of what can actually be achieved with genomic information. It’s easy to feel like you have to address all of these if you are going to engage in the issue at all, because they’re interconnected. But if you try to take all of these on at once, you’ll run the risk of either writing something the length of a master’s thesis or creating a superficial survey of the area. Instead, you need to focus on a single dimension of the area that you can cover well in 500 to 700 words. You can acknowledge the other issues and their interconnectedness, but pick one issue and make that your subject. Dhaliwal’s Healthy Debate blog on personalized medicine does a very nice job of this. If you find you have important things to say about the other issues you didn’t cover, that just means you should write a few more blogs!
Following this rule can be tricky when you want to draw connections between two or more issues. It’s tempting in cases like this to ignore this rule completely. However, it’s worth keeping the rule in mind, even if you can’t follow it to the letter. In pieces like this, keep your central thesis in mind, and make sure whatever additional issues you are raising are directly relevant to your overall point. If something doesn’t serve your central thesis, cut it out. I tried to do this in this piece that draws a connection between the of anti-depressants and the lack of publicly funded, evidence-based psychotherapy (I’ll leave it up to you to judge how successful I was in keeping the focus tight enough).
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