Jargon-Free Is the Way to Be

Seven reasons why graduate schools must teach writing for national media outlets.

Reviewed by Monica Vilhauer, Ph.D.

Key points

• It's important for graduate students to know how to write for national media.
• Senior faculty will need to know how to write for national media to best mentor graduate students.
• Writing for the general public positively affects one's writing practice, content, and process.
• Writing for the public enlarges the conversation and boosts the relationship between colleges and the public.

It’s increasingly essential that graduate programs require that students publish at least one piece, preferably related to their research, in a respected national media outlet geared to a general audience. Here are seven key reasons why.

1. It’s essential to know how to successfully translate ideas for more general consumption. Anything worth learning about is worth sharing and passing along in digestible ways so other people can gain insight and inspiration. And, it’s the “Who cares?” factor that’s most important. Readers need and want—and deserve—to know why they should care about what you’re writing. They need to understand why it matters.

For example, how might your research on the water crisis impact public policy? Or, how does poetry impact people’s ability to read more effectively? Moreover, how does overreliance on family caregivers affect physical and mental health and family dynamics?

2. Writing for a general audience will change what you write for the better. When you write for the public, you have to avoid jargon and communicate in a way that others can understand without prior knowledge about your specific field. We must communicate that way when we teach, and it’s a valuable lesson to know how to do that in writing. Publishing in nonacademic outlets enhances your versatility and fluency.

3. Writing for a national media outlet will reshape and improve your writing process and practice. Most outlets want pithy, snappy, substantive pieces that run between 600-1,000 words for a newspaper op-ed and about 1,000-1,500 for articles in magazines. Learning how to write concise, cogent pieces, densely packed with key insights, richly nuanced, and layered, and that invite readers to self-reflect, can be deeply challenging yet also supremely rewarding.

In graduate school, I had two terrible tendencies: I overwrote everything and procrastinated. A tyranny of perfectionism weighed heavily on me. As I see it now, some of my tendency to wait to the last minute was a warped way to deal with fear and imposter syndrome; if I didn’t do as well as I knew I could on something, I could attribute it to not devoting endless time to it. I know I’m not alone as an academic who struggled with these issues. Procrastination and longwinded writing are basic love languages in academia that don’t serve us well.

When I started to want to write for a much larger audience through the national media, those habits had to change. I got comfortable with the rhythms of writing in a way that’s more edited, that tells things more plainly yet arguably much more elegantly and creatively. And I now meet deadlines with far greater ease.

4. Submitting work to a national media outlet is good practice for developing a thick skin. In order to maintain writing momentum, you must be able to deal with rejection and criticism. When you submit an article to a popular media outlet that wants to publish it, someone might get back to you in as little as a few hours or within a few weeks. It’s generally a far more streamlined process than submitting work to scholarly journals.

That swift pace is advantageous. First, knowing so quickly where things stand puts you in a great position to either have your work out in a timely fashion, or to know sooner that you should try to send it elsewhere. Second, you learn to deal with failure and to keep pitching your work regardless, and the act of doing so can help you value and protect your work. Finally, such a quick turn-around time with an acceptance also means that editors want changes fast, motivating you to meet deadlines and helping you stay less attached to every word and idea. The key is to keep your work moving on an assembly line of your own making.

Having your work available to many more eyeballs means that more people might critique it. Whereas a scholarly article may garner zero to 100 reads over a lifetime, a single article in the popular media may attract thousands or million viewers in a day. That can be exciting or daunting, depending on your perspective. In general, writing and publishing involve you in a larger conversation, and the possibility of so many more people interacting with your ideas is a good thing.

5. Publishing in a well-read outlet can be transformative for your career. Vibrancy and aliveness come from crafting shorter pieces for a wider and more diverse audience. The energy of ideas in those articles can ignite curiosity and connection that leads readers to reach out. Writing for a major outlet can give you exposure among new audiences, expand your networks, and even present opportunities for scholarship, teaching, and service you had never imagined.

6. Public scholarship and mentorship reinforce each other. Whether by choice or by circumstance, many people finish graduate school and don’t go into academic jobs, and many others transition out of academia to pursue other lines of work. It makes sense for graduate students to have the preparation and experience to write for a general audience.

Consequently, senior faculty need to know the ropes of how best to navigate this different writing landscape, so they can mentor graduate students to successfully do this. While some may presume it’s much easier to write and publish for a general audience, a good number of faculty may find themselves surprised by the multitude of different challenges involved. It would be a positive step to see institutional support flow in the direction of professional development for these endeavors.

7. Publishing outside of the traditional constructs of academia can ultimately benefit higher education. At a time when higher education is under constant attack, and when the public is questioning if anything of worth is happening within these structures, it makes sense for faculty to write for the greater good. It also behooves us to mentor graduate students to do this regularly. At its best, engaging in public scholarship helps build bridges and increases trust between colleges and universities and their constituencies.

A version of this post also appeared in Inside Higher Ed.