Blog into chapter

A couple of blog posts have worked their way into Chapter Three, Book Two, and it's interesting to see the tensions between blog form and scholarly form.  Obviously, the colloquialisms, comic hesitations ("er..."), and (frequent) parentheses have all had to take a long hike.  In the blogs, the arguments themselves proceed more by association--point X sparks off point Y--than by strict logical development; this is not necessarily a problem in the draft phase, but looking again at the original posts, I find that historical context crops up in odd places, that significant claims emerge out of order ("shouldn't I say that before I say this?"), and that important points often appear as throwaway asides.  Besides moving chunks of text around, of course, I've also found myself supplying more (or different) evidence, not to mention doing a better job putting the books into their scholarly context.  And the posts have been significantly expanded in terms of length, too. 

The problem with repurposing blog posts, I see, is that the arc of a single post does not necessarily mesh well with the arc of an overarching chapter--especially when, like me, you have a bad habit of sticking thirty different authors into a single chapter.  (Actually, there aren't thirty authors in this chapter, but there are at least a dozen who get significant page time.)  In this case, as I realized when I started revising the chapter, the revised posts worked well enough with the chapter's overall argument, but they failed to shake hands with the individual texts featured therein--even though, when I first reworked the posts for the chapter, I thought that the fit was relatively seamless.  It can be hard to subordinate what used to be a standalone argument.