A month or so ago I attended a brief workshop on academic blogging held at my university. For most of the session I sat in the corner, raising my right eyebrow and nit-picking the recommendations listed on the handouts.

Probably the face I was making. Subtlety has never been my strong suit.

“Post three times a week? Who has time for that!? Inconceivable – no graduate student I know keeps a schedule that allows them to post several times a week!”

“Keep posts short? But I love writing rambling missives that only Caroline will read in their entirety! Why on earth would I want to fine tune my writing and make it more focused and succinct?”

“Link to other blogs frequently? I mean, I understand that it’s great to showcase colleagues’ wit and talent, but to do it all the time seems obnoxious; that’s like being the Facebook friend who tags twenty people in a photo with no humans in it!”

And so forth and so on.

I know, I know – hard to believe someone only a year out from her PhD can demonstrate SUCH high levels of maturity SO consistently.

I digress. Despite my initial skepticism, after allowing some of the advice to ferment for a few weeks I’m ready to give some of the tips a shot. In particular, I’ve continued to be intrigued by the idea of a pithier series of posts that will force me to winnow my typically expansive output into something more concise. Twitter for the lazy bioarchaeologist, basically.

I bet old school archaeologists would have been good at Twitter, because they were used to sending telegraphs.

So this summer, I’ll be testing this out with a series of Bioarchaeology Vocabulary posts*. Each post will cover one key bioarchaeology-related word, phrase, or person, and will be a paragraph long or less. The post title will be the word, phrase or person being discussed, and I’ll keep them all searchable within a new “Bioarchaeology Vocab” category.

If you have suggestions of topics you’d like me to cover, or have strong opinions on the matter  (e.g, “What a fabulous idea, you’re the next V.Gordon Childe!” or “What a terrible idea, you’re the next Jared Diamond!”) let me know what you think in the comments. The first post will go up later today.

Happy weekend everybody!

*I vaguely remember paleopathological having a similarly-themed glossary of anthropological terms a while back, but because it is 930 pm and my brain is a wobbly mass of turgid mush after a day of ploughing through Spanish archaeological writing, I cannot find the page.

Image Credits: Angry puppy found here. V.Gordon Childe and bear companion found here.