Are two authors better than one? Can writing in pairs affect the readability of academic blogs?

Abstract

The literature on academic writing suggests that writing in pairs leads to more readable papers than writing alone. We wondered whether academic blog posts written alone or in pairs would vary in style. We collected a corpus of 104 posts published with the LSE Impact of the Social Sciences blog. We found no differences in average sentence length between single- and co-authored posts. However, the posts written in pairs were slightly less readable than the single-authored posts, which challenges the current view on the advantages of writing in pairs.