Writing for a general audience: what I've learned from running my own Substack publication

Writing for a general audience is becoming an increasingly important component of the academic job description. From scholarly blogs to institutional websites, newsletters and social media accounts, as well as specialist outlets such as The Conversation — all these platforms now form a major part of the research communication ecosystem, and offer a good way to satisfy the growing dissemination and public engagement targets imposed by funders.

Unfortunately, the skills and experience that make you a good researcher can often work against you when you need to write about your work for such platforms. Hyper-precision, extensive referencing and contextualisation, thinking like a specialist and signalling how well you know the field — these can all be barriers to writing well for a general readership. And to top it off, you've probably never had specialist training on the matter, and don't have much time to devote to developing this new skill.

Besides my work with Smart Phrasing, I also run my own Substack publication about the North Sea and the shared stories that unite the communities living around it. It began as an experiment, and an excuse to explore the history, geography and culture of some of the places I have come to love over my life so far, on nearly all sides of this shallow sea. Little did I know that it would be an essential training ground for the professional work I do now in the field of research communication.

The readership I've grown over the past year and a half or so is pretty broad and, week-by-week and post-by-post, I've enjoyed nurturing the skill of writing in this context. Sometimes, a piece seems to write itself; other times it emerges more slowly through a process of doubtful deliberation, with some serious patience required along the way!

But generally speaking, the decisions to be made and the hurdles to overcome are similar each time, and I thought it would be useful to share a bit about these here on the Smart Phrasing Blog, because not every researcher has eighteen months to learn all this through experimenting with their own Substack publication.

Below are some key things I've learned are worth paying special attention to when writing research-informed pieces for a general audience.

Photo by Alicia Christin Gerald on Unsplash

1 | Beginnings

General readers tend to be much quicker to walk away from a text compared to specialists who are more willing to persevere with something they know is likely to be useful. So the opening sentence or two really do matter much more here than in more typical academic writing contexts. Start in the middle of something interesting, not at the beginning of an elaborate explanation.

2 | Endings

How you choose to end a piece is also important: aim to round off in a way that feels complete but is not too definitive and in no way a summary of what has come before. Instead, try to leave the reader with a feeling or thought that will linger in their mind long after they close the tab or scroll on to the next thing.

3 | Headlines

A headline for a general readership has to do several different jobs at the same time: be intriguing enough to engender curiosity, yet clear enough to signpost the topic, and of course accurate enough not to mislead. Sometimes the headline is the first thing that comes to mind from which you then write the full piece, but often it comes later, once you've found your way through the topic through the actual writing of the thing. Having the discipline to wait until the last moment to settle the headline is an important skill in itself!

4 | Humour & personality

Often people think that turning an academic piece of writing into a more accessible and engaging piece for a broader audience is simply about adding a healthy dose of humour and personality. Of course, it's about much more than that, and anyway one needs to be wise about how much humour and personality is actually appropriate. Too much and you risk turning the interested reader off (humour and personality are in the end deeply subjective). Generally, a light sprinkling works best — that is, enough to show that you are a real human behind the page, but still keeping it within sensible limits so as not to distract from the key story.

5 | Images

The job of an image in this context is not so much to be informative (like the figure in an academic paper) but to complement the narrative as the main event and set a particular tone or atmosphere. The key here is to think outside the box and find images that add a layer of meaning that the prose hints at, but doesn't explicitly say. Remember of course that any image you use has to be appropriately licensed and credited in the caption, and that at least one image needs to work well as a thumbnail for promoting the piece on social media — that is, will be visually arresting even when displayed in a small format and make sense alongside the headline.

6 | Mindset post-publication

Finally, once the piece is actually out in the world, one needs to learn how to fight the instinct to control how it is received and interpreted — to let it go its own way and simply sit back and enjoy the varied and (likely) unexpected responses that come in. When your professional identity is built around being precise and accurate, this can feel particular challenging. But it's a feeling that's worth getting used to — after all, where would any writer be without their readers?!

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I hope you found this post useful!

I'm Hannah, a former academic in linguistics, and in my work at Smart Phrasing I help researchers communicate their work with confidence, clarity and impact, so their ideas and discoveries reach the people who most need to hear them.

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