Tips on Academic & Scientific Writing for All Kinds of Readers

Academic & Scientific Writing for All Kinds of Readers
It is safe to say that today’s academics and scientists write for readers far more than their predecessors did in previous generations. Yes, scholars have always written up their research to disseminate it to interested readers, but in the past fellow scholars constituted the grand majority of the audience, and there was an assumption, for the most part backed by reality, that if your work was important enough, everyone who specialised in your field would have to read it. This is still the case with the most striking new discoveries and developments, and, to a certain extent, for other research as well, but there are so many more articles and books published today that readers have a myriad of choices no matter what their interests and specialisations may be. There are also many different venues today that enable the accessibility of advanced scholarship to readers of all kinds, and these venues and readers have become far too essential to successful scholarship in the twenty-first century to be ignored.

New venues and new readers have inspired a somewhat new style of scholarly writing. Sound research methods and processes, convincing evidence and persuasive arguments are still required for the best scholarship whether it appears in a university publisher’s monograph, among a scientific journal’s pages or on an academic website. However, the ways in which to present this content have altered with an eye to reaching a wider audience. Discipline-specific terminology serves as a clear example. It was at one time rather fashionable to load a scholarly document with specialised terms and jargon that worked to exclude the mass of readers as much as to include a select in-the-know audience. Many scholars may not have been aware of just how extensively they did this while reporting their research, but it is virtually impossible to remain ignorant of such an exclusive style in today’s publishing world. Even the most specialised journals now tend to ask authors to use common language that will be clear to general readers, and for online venues this sort of language is absolutely necessary. Writing to include a larger audience does not mean that specialised terminology cannot be used when it is appropriate and necessary, but that it must be clearly explained or defined to be understood, and this is a general development that can only be positive for both authors and readers.

It is also wise to write about your research in a manner that engages readers immediately with fascinating information, especially when writing in informal or online venues. In achieving this, scholarly authors can take valuable lessons from creative writers and journalists. The object is to hook the reader and draw him or her into the text just as the author of a novel or short story would aim to do, and then to communicate the most vital pieces of information right away as a journalist might do, only elaborating with evidence and detail after the main points have been made. This approach is very different from that of the traditional scholarly monograph that slowly builds its argument by gradually introducing bits of evidence, discussing them and then coming to a resounding conclusion that brings everything together to make those fascinating main points. You can of course, still include a conclusion that briefly summarises the most important information, but this now tends to be a somewhat repetitious reminder for the reader who has been engaged by those important points at the beginning and continued reading through to the end.

When drafting short documents such as blog posts and brief articles it is far more important to include as much content as will prove interesting and persuasive for readers than to include everything you consider important to your research. Detailed descriptions of methods, for instance, can be eliminated from a blog or website, and it is also effective to remove any results that contradict or complicate your main argument. You can certainly mention such methods and results in passing and refer your readers to the complete published document or, in the case of a brief article, to an appendix or archive that contains these details, but bogging a short piece down with too much information will likely lose those readers before you have shared the most essential aspects of your research.