An announcement: This newsletter is changing its name and will become Your Career starting in May. Once a week, you’ll find the same quick tips you see here, plus links to more advice, news, job postings, and other resources to help you thrive in your faculty, staff, or administration job.
Pressure has increased on scholars, especially junior ones, to add public writing to their arsenal of skills.
Many professors and administrators are keen to write for an audience outside of academe but often nervous about taking that step. Complicating their fears is an increased sense that public writing ought to be part of the academic skill set. Some of the fears are reasonable (“What if I am pressured to oversimplify?” or “I’m afraid of negative reactions.”), while others are subtle forms of self-sabotage.
A first step in dealing with these fears is to ask yourself: Are you truly worried about entering a situation you will not be able to handle, or is the fear a trick your mind is using to keep you from writing? One way to tell: Are you, in fact, writing? Or does the anxiety over the possible reaction take over before you even begin typing your first sentence? Here are some strategies to get past it:
- Write first and worry later. Write the piece that is in you — you can always decide afterward if you want to publish it or not.
- Think more broadly about the genre and the type of publication you want to pursue. A highly visible form of public writing right now is the “hot take” essay written to discuss an event in the news, and published online with a view to going viral. The academic version often follows this formula: “The surprising way [insert your area of scholarly expertise] explains [insert seemingly unrelated current event].” It’s a respectable angle to take in sharing your knowledge with a broad audience. Use it as often as you like if it feels authentic. But if that genre doesn’t suit you, don’t force it. There are many other ways to write for the public. You do not have to mold yourself to one format, the way you did when you learned to write for academic journals.
Continue reading: “How to Cope With a Fear of Public Writing,” by Irina Dumitrescu
Thanks for reading The Quick Tip, a free newsletter from The Chronicle. Suggestions for what you’d like to see here? Other thoughts? Please email Denise K. Magner, a senior editor who compiles this newsletter, at denise.magner@chronicle.com.
