How to Write an (In)Credible Blog

69,548,000. By the time I finish writing this, that’s how many blog sites will be on WordPress. People add about 47.2 million new blog posts every month, according to the company—which tallies to approximately 65,555 per minute. Thankfully, dedicated curators help us find the best of the best, 24/7.

Want a useful blog about gluten-free cooking or climate change? You can find one through a Top Ten website. Best blogs about blogging? Yep. You can find them too.

With so much online content, readers face a daily conundrum—figuring out what to read. And content creators face a reciprocal challenge—figuring out how to write what people want to read. My high school English teacher, Mrs. Farnsworth, had ideas for doing that. But if I followed her formulaic admonitions, I’d begin my paragraphs with First, Second, Third, and finish with a towering crescendo, In summary . . . .

But one thing that Mrs. Farnsworth beat into my adolescent brain has stuck with me. “You can’t persuade anyone if your writing isn’t credible.” She was prescient about how important that advice would become for Writing2.0.

Credible blogs have some common characteristics:

1. Level voice. Credible blogs aren’t inflammatory or alarmist. The reason I won’t read any blog with more than one exclamation mark following the title.

2. Balanced. While readers expect many blogs to advance a point of view, credible ones acknowledge opposing arguments, and offer fair comparisons.

3. Don’t promote eternal dogmas or immutable truths. As mathematician Bertrand Russell said, the aim of science is to “approach the truth by successive approximations, without claiming that at any stage final and complete accuracy has been achieved.”

4. Provide attribution. A credible blog cites solid, accessible research, or quotes people who corroborate or support an idea. Not just “studies show . . .”

5. Appropriately uncertain. Statements such as “78.6% of sales people using social media to sell outperformed those who weren’t using social media,” invite skepticism. “Using social media . . ?” “Outperform . . ?” When precise results are given for things that are difficult to measure, or attempt to explain complex outcomes, credibility suffers.

6. Appropriately certain. “Where you have to draw the line is to be very clear about where the uncertainties are, but to not have our statements be so laden in uncertainty that no one even listens to what we’re saying,” according to Michael Mann, Director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University.

7. Acknowledge unknowns, and ask questions about them. As Nate Silver wrote in The Signal and the Noise, “To articulate what you don’t know is a mark of progress.”

Looking at this list, I wonder if I have painted myself into a credibility corner. Can I, or anyone else, pass a basic credibility litmus test? I’m not sure, but I managed to find a recent blog, Nine Things to Know about Influencing Purchasing Decisions, that combines many of these elements.

. . . And Mrs. Farnsworth, if you’re reading this now, in summary, thanks! This one’s for you!