Yeah, so like, I do think there’s a skill issue component, and it’s possible to write stuff with popular appeal that is not about a subject people immediately care about. There are probably limits—like, it might be possible to get your reader invested in some niche piece of academic terminology drama or whatever, but it’s gonna be hard. But like, it is possible to get people to care about weird apparently-boring things.
One of my posts that got a lot of good reception both here and on the broader internet is There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically), which was on tree evolution, a subject I can’t imagine much of the audience previously gave a shit about. I didn’t exactly intend for it to go big, but I did put a fair bit of thought into helping the “my blog reader who is interested in biology but doesn’t know much about specifics” get why I thought it was interesting—stuff like “what kind of context might they have about convergent evolution”, the kind of “but a banana is technically a berry!” ‘knowledge’ of botany people have heard. Also, like, bringing them into my emotions and surprise about what I learned—which does make a piece easier to follow along. Most people have emotions and it’s great fun to read someone freak out about something.
(Like, I couldn’t say how much of this I was intentionally doing at the time, but it felt like the way to go and it seems like it worked in terms of convincing readers it was an interesting topic.)
Yeah, so like, I do think there’s a skill issue component, and it’s possible to write stuff with popular appeal that is not about a subject people immediately care about. There are probably limits—like, it might be possible to get your reader invested in some niche piece of academic terminology drama or whatever, but it’s gonna be hard. But like, it is possible to get people to care about weird apparently-boring things.
One of my posts that got a lot of good reception both here and on the broader internet is There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically), which was on tree evolution, a subject I can’t imagine much of the audience previously gave a shit about. I didn’t exactly intend for it to go big, but I did put a fair bit of thought into helping the “my blog reader who is interested in biology but doesn’t know much about specifics” get why I thought it was interesting—stuff like “what kind of context might they have about convergent evolution”, the kind of “but a banana is technically a berry!” ‘knowledge’ of botany people have heard. Also, like, bringing them into my emotions and surprise about what I learned—which does make a piece easier to follow along. Most people have emotions and it’s great fun to read someone freak out about something.
(Like, I couldn’t say how much of this I was intentionally doing at the time, but it felt like the way to go and it seems like it worked in terms of convincing readers it was an interesting topic.)