Being interested in the field of biology as well as posting weekly blogs, I want to get my information from somewhere reliable, but somewhere that I can efficiently go to and find information to bring to you. Looking at my choices, there are a few options, I can look at blogs such as ScienceDaily, or I can go deeper into information by using scholarly articles and experiments. Today I will be bringing my research to you, hopefully showing you the aspects of each as well as some of the pros and cons behind them.
For starters we will look at a blog, something that is summed up as being quick to read, many short paragraphs, photos, and most importantly, they tend to have a tone that is more "fun". They give information in small bite sized pieces which make it easy for their viewers to get the information they are interested in. One good example of a blog is ScienceDaily. This is one that I go to almost everyday to catch up on any new information that may have significance within the biological field. This is also the site that I tend to go to when looking for information that I may want to share with you guys, my viewers. Another good example that we will be comparing to a scholarly article is BioMedCentral (BMC), another blog that I view more than others. Looking at BMC and an article linked prior, lets focus on how they present themselves. The blog post opens up with a summary to let us figure out if this is the information we would like to learn about. Then the blog continues with an image of an adorable eye catching pug. They organize the blog in a way that splits it into a few separate sections, each with a bold title all including more bite sized paragraphs. In general there is never a wall of text that is not broken into smaller paragraphs with an image thrown in as well. Finally, the last thing to note about a blog is the tone at which it addresses its audience. They seem to be friends with you, terming things in an easy to understand way, nothing in blogs tend to be so complicated that you need to be an expert to even understand what they are trying to tell you. Now that we have a good feel of how a blog works and how they tend to be designed let us compare it to a scholarly article.
The scholarly article that I want to look at today is a quick article that looks at the evolution of dogs and compares them to their ancestors, wolves. The article is titled: The Origin of Dogs: Running With the Wolves. This article is made up of a wall of text that seems to be more official than the blog we looked at earlier. I was only able to view the first page of the article, but seeing that we are already on page 1647, I can tell that this one would be a long read. They use evidence as well as the studies to find this information that they have pooled together to create the article. the audience who will read this are very interested in the subject, and they most likely have experience talking about the evolutionary process of dogs and their history.
The main points to get out of this are that scholarly articles are for a more professional reader, while blogs can be generalized and brought to a much wider view or people. Blogs tend to be quicker to read, as well as broken up into bite sized pieces with photos in them to help separate the information and keep readers interested.
Morell, V. "EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY: The Origin of Dogs: Running With the Wolves." Science 276.5319 (1997): 1647-648. Web. 12 Apr. 2016.
ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, n.d. Web. 17 Apr. 2016.
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