Going From Academic Writing To Writing For Humans
I’ve spent years going through the academic system. My first real writing tasks were essays for University, and I learned how to write academically because of those. Academic writing is its own beast, and sadly it doesn’t correlate all-too-well with writing for the real world.
The way Universities and colleges teach you to write is arguably doing everyone a disservice, because anyone who can write proficiently enough to do well in academia can make a living as a professional writer/marketer/whatever. However, Universities teach you how to write in a certain way, and so most of those people spend loads of time learning how to write in a way which makes their writing less attractive in the real world, which leads to STEM graduates everywhere laughing at them and them serving coffee in Starbucks or whatever.
This article is going to describe some of the ways academic writing kills your writing efficiency (or, at least it does mine) and then how to get over it.
Problems In Academic Writing
There are some really obvious things that you can do: Don’t use big words if you don’t have to, don’t worry about proper referencing, (Seriously, I saw a blog post a few weeks back that had actual Harvard referencing in it. You don’t need to do this… just link to it,) and don’t make nerdy analogies to stuff nobody has never heard of unless you’re specifically trying to make them aware of it as the point of the article.
Those things are easy though and pretty straightforward, so here are some more interesting and more difficult to get rid of habits (Again, at least for me.)
Nobody in real life follows the argument – evidence – explanation format.
Depending on where you’re from, what you study and where you study it, you’ll have a different version of this law. Essentially though, in academic writing you’re going to have a single argument within a paragraph. It will be displayed like the above; you’ll frame the argument, give some evidence and then explain why the evidence means your argument is right.
In the real world, nobody does this. They have their opinions and they’re largely stuck unless you can appeal to their persuadable parts. (See below.)
Now, you can use this structure in your everyday writing, and in some places you’ll probably want to, but there are generally better structures to write around, and you certainly shouldn’t appeal to logic over emotion unless you’ve got a specific goal.
The Political/Social Junk.
A lot of academic writing is not-so-well disguised politicising and social engineering. If you do a degree in literature, you’ll be expected to write all sorts of passages through weird political lenses that simply don’t have any real world relevance. For instance, “To what extent is Beowulf about Marxism?” might be an essay you have to write 5000 words on in an English class. In the real world, you’re free to use the answer, “It isn’t.” Readers will expect you to do this and tell it like it is.
Sadly, this type of thinking is endemic in the real world, even though it isn’t all that useful and it doesn’t sell. Believe it or not, in a games review, people aren’t generally looking to find out how they should think about gender issues, they’re wondering how fun a game is to play.
Extended Sentences.
Academic writing encourages extended sentences. This is something I work on constantly (and don’t do very well at.) Like I said above, in academic writing you’re trying to prove an argument, give evidence for it and relate the evidence to the argument in a very dense manner and a short space of time. This gives rise to complex sentences.
These are very difficult to read, especially when you might be writing for audiences (and clients!) who haven’t read a book in thirty years and think that academia is a load of rubbish.
Appeals to Authority.
By its very nature, academic writing is based on appeals to authority. In a lot of cases, you’re given credit for the amount of other academics and obscure philosophies you can mention in an essay. This leads to a weird cult of authority thing in a lot of academic writing. You’re expected to have a footnote for every sentence stating who the original wise-guy who thought up the idea was, and god-forbid you ever suggest that you have an original thought of your own – you need to spend at least another six years on your postgraduate studies before you can do that!
Fluff for the sake of word-count.
Virtually everyone who has been to college has experienced being five-hundred words short of a deadline and making the difficult choice of, “Do I learn something new or add some more words to every sentence?”
Most of us have fluffed out a lot of essays to make that word count. In fact, my best friend and I actually put together an unofficial dictionary of terms that academic-types use to pad word counts that you don’t see in real life.
“This issue notwithstanding,”
“One could assume the former, but one must not forget the latter”
Then there are things like, “However,” “In order to” and “It wouldn’t be wrong to suggest…”
If you don’t believe me on this, go to your local bookstore, check out the academic section and see how many you can find.
Don’t do this in real life writing.
Solutions
It’d be wrong of me to point out all these problems without giving you some help in overcoming them. I’m still in academic writing recovery, so I’m hardly an expert in plain talking, but here are some things you can try that’ll work:
Write like you’re talking to someone – preferably your target market.
Again, find an academic book. Open it to a random page. Take a deep breath, then try and read a paragraph. If you can do that, then you’ve got a good academic book. Most academic texts aren’t written to be read aloud, let alone discussed. This is the exact opposite of what you want your real-world writing to be like. You want it to be easy to read. You want it to sound in your reader’s mind like somebody is talking to them on their level. It’s better to be too easy than too difficult.
If in doubt, chop your sentences down (I like to write for a bored/grumpy teenager.)
Also remember:
People Are Emotional Beings; Not Scholars
Forget the political implications and forget logical arguments. Trump is good at this. People don’t want features, they want benefits. They want to finish reading your piece and take action – or at least feel better about themselves. This is the reason why motivational blogs do so well; they might lack on the actual real-world advice, but they make people feel great, and so the people come back to read again and again, getting their happiness fix.
Logic is pretty interesting subject, but you aren’t arguing with people. You’re talking to them emotionally. You can’t start a sales letter and batter a person with facts so that they’ll buy your product.
Final Thoughts
I usually have a conclusion section, but the above paragraph really sums it up: With academic writing, you’re appealing to a person’s reason, and your target market is the lone scholar sitting in the corner of a library specifically looking for wisdom.
In real-life writing, you’re talking to a market that is two seconds away from closing your boring article and going back to YouTube to watch cat videos. You need to speak to them in a way that holds their attention and entertains them so they don’t click that button.
Most of academic writing will make you come across as boring and too heavy on the brain. In the real world, you’re not competing with Einstein, you’re competing with Grumpy Cat.