Hey there writers! Today I felt inspired to publish an episode about harnessing the power of plain language in your scholarly writing.
Lately I’ve been listening to a range of podcasts and reading books that discuss more holistic ways of approaching work and life.
One idea that keeps popping up is that in modern capitalistic society, we are always striving to be extraordinary.
This means that being “ordinary” or “commonplace” in any way is seen as a flaw, as something to be staunchly avoided.
Which is rather ridiculous when the vast majority of what we do in our lives, for even the most extraordinary people, involves ordinary stuff.
You still have to brush your teeth every day and respond to emails and pay your taxes and buy groceries, etc., etc.
Does that regularity take away from our lives? I think we just accept it for the most part.
But it has gotten me thinking about how this striving to be extraordinary extends into academia and the realm of scholarly writing in particular.
And here, I’m not just talking about output and maintaining a high level of externally measurable productivity, although of course that matters a lot.
This need to be different also shows up in how people push themselves (and are pushed by their fields) to use innovative, original language.
This, I believe, starts in grad school. Students try to emulate the styles of the books they read.
Consciously or not, they tend to adopt a more formal tone that moves their work further and further away from what “regular” people (as in, the general public) can understand and relate to.
There is pressure to use fanciful jargon that signals to others in your field that you, too, are a serious scholar.
I’ve joked before about my dislike of the word “interpellate.” I still hate that word, but there’s tons more terms on my list.
Another one is “interlocuters.” I mean, I’m sure there’s some very specific reasons to use that term, and I’m showing my ignorance in not knowing what those are. But I just don’t get why we don’t just say, “people I talked to”?
But getting back to what I was saying before, to get established in their fields and add new lines to their CVs, most people publish journal articles first.
Due to the limited audience, these papers necessarily utilize a lot of specialized language and a more objective tone in which the author as a human being, as a real person, usually completely disappears.
This writing style gets rewarded in the form of publications.
Then, a few years later, a lot of folks try to use this style when writing their books and it just doesn’t work.
So often we complain about the Ivory Tower and ideas and information not being made accessible to the general public.
But too often, scholars themselves don’t see how the language they’re using is itself exclusionary to most other people.
The choice of words either invites people in or keeps them out. The problem with keeping people out is that the potential impact of your ideas is vastly limited.
So in this episode, I want to propose something drastic.
And this is, to subvert power dynamics in the academy, we need to say what we actually mean in extraordinarily clear and simple language.
In short, there’s power in plainness.
What Inspired this Episode
So let me talk first about what inspired this episode.
A little while ago, I received an update from one of my earliest book coaching clients–someone I’ll refer to as May.
She’s a non-native English-speaking junior faculty member at a top research institution.
Because books take such a long time to write and to go through the review and publication process, I often lose track of what’s happening with my clients’ books.
But I love to stay in touch, and I was thrilled when May shared the full reviews she received about her manuscript after having been reviewed by a top press.
Before I get to that, I’ll say that this client was amazingly focused and productive during our 8 months of work together.
She wrote two new book chapters and planned another couple of journal articles from her dissertation data.
She created an interesting and useful theoretical framework that goes far beyond her specific case.
I also helped her figure out a distinct book writing voice–which she wanted to make engaging and accessible.
By the time we finished our work, she was about to submit a proposal and several chapters to her top book press.
At the end of our sessions, May gave me the following feedback:
“Coaching has been a great experience and very helpful in pushing me to think clearly about my ideas and tell my stories in a way that makes sense to my readers. I am confident that my book will be making great contributions to my fields!”
And she wrote this feedback long before she finished her full manuscript.
But that confidence and clarity was one of the main things that reviewers picked up on.
They were convinced that the book’s theoretical contribution would make it an award-contender, which was so exciting for me to hear.
But one also complimented its clear storytelling style. They wrote something that I’ve never seen before, which was,
“Although the author is a non-native English speaker, she nonetheless writes in an unusually clear way – clearer than many of her academic colleagues for whom English is a first language. She avoids trendy buzz words and jargon and simply says what she means in a straightforward fashion. This makes for very compelling reading… This is the academic equivalent of a page turner.”
Wow, right? This reviewer was so impressed by was the fact that May was able to express sophisticated ideas using plain language.
Often we think of theory and general understandability as being fundamental opposites, when they can actually go hand-in-hand.
But it takes having really great ideas plus dedication to simplicity.
The Challenges of Writing Plainly
So part of the reason I’m so proud of May is that she is an immigrant woman of color who could even more easily have chosen to try to write a high-brow monograph that would be legible only experts in her field.
It’s so much harder for folks from marginalized backgrounds to allow themselves to use plain language for fear of not being taken seriously.
And here I’m including people of color, first-generation college students, women, differently-abled folks, non-binary people and non-native English speakers.
I first noticed this in myself when I was an undergrad.
I would never ask a question unless I thought it was incredibly insightful or thought-provoking or something that I felt like others in the class would benefit from.
It was a lot of mental gymnastics and self-judgment just to get to a place where I felt comfortable raising my hand.
The result was that I never received answers to most of my questions because I shut myself down.
This tendency to want to prove myself as being extraordinarily insightful or extraordinarily intelligent stayed with me, and got much more pervasive, during grad school.
I suffered from immense imposter syndrome and marveled at classmates who could seemingly just come up with genius-level thoughts on the cuff.
I would jot questions down in my notebook and edit them for half an hour before asking, internally hoping that somebody else would ask first so I didn’t have to.
And this extended into my writing habits as well.
I tried to write in academic-ese, which is not natural to literally anyone. It caused my brain to hurt and intensified the feeling of being an imposter.
Luckily, I had mentors who were ethnographers and encouraged me to write my dissertation in a story-telling style.
That didn’t make the process of writing any easier for me, but it did give me permission to paint pictures with words and to evoke the senses and emotions of my readers.
And when I did that, I necessarily wrote the theoretical sections of my dissertation and later, first book, more simply and accessibly.
#1: Figure Out Who You’re Writing For
Let’s start by asking, Who’s my audience? If you’re only writing for a handful of specialists in your field, sure, they’ll understand all the jargon and technical terms.
But what about everyone else?
Rarely do my clients say they only want to write for other experts in their field, which is only like 10 people, right?
They want to write for their students, policy makers, journalists, or the general public who might benefit from your research?
If your writing is full of insider language, you will probably alienate most people.
Here’s a mental exercise:
Imagine that a smart, non-academic friend who knows very little about your work asks you to explain your research to them at a dinner party. How would you talk to them?
In my view, that’s the vibe you want to be going for when you write. You’re not dumbing anything down—you’re actually opening it up for more people to think about and use.
I’ve always believed in making academic research available to the general public.
I mean, why do years and years of intensive research and writing, only for it to be kept behind prohibitively expensive paywalls?
I was an early adopter of Academia.edu and put all of my published work out there for public consumption. (And no lawyers have come after me yet!)
Since leaving the academy, I totally forgot about my profile. I decided to check it again and noticed something fascinating.
My most professionally well-regarded article appeared in a top journal in my field over a decade ago. And it has only ever been downloaded 134 times.
This was a publication that someone I really respected called a “career maker,” mind you.
That article was SO difficult to publish because I was required to create an innovative theoretical framework. I managed to do it, but it felt very forced partly because I felt the major contribution of my work was in the stories I was telling.
Meanwhile, a small study I co-authored with a friend that we published in a specialized subfield journal has been downloaded nearly 14,000 times!
And that article was written in the plainest language possible.
The difference between them was intent: I wrote the first article to solidify my own professional trajectory, while the latter was always meant to HELP other people, specifically adoptees and adoptive families.
Although it was published in 2010, I still receive very gratifying messages of thanks from readers (and these readers are NOT academics).
I’m relieved to be out of a system that ranks scholarly contributions by impact factor.
Consider how much more academics could contribute to the well-being of individuals and society if public engagement was rewarded.
#2: Don’t Fall Prey to the Curse of Knowledge
I recently learned about a concept called the curse of knowledge, which seems to be used more often in the business world.
But basically, it’s the idea that once you know something, it’s hard to imagine NOT knowing it. And then you too easily assume that other people know it too.
There’s a Harvard Business Review article that cites this one psychology study that really illustrates this concept.
In it, one person was assigned to pick a well-known song, like “Happy Birthday,” and tap out the rhythm on a table.
Then there was another person there whose job was to listen and guess what the song was.
Beforehand, the tappers were asked to predict the probability that the listener would guess the right song. And they estimated a 50% chance.
In the actual experiment, out of 120 songs, listeners were only able to identify three correctly—a success rate of only 2.5%.
Let me give you another example.
For some reason that I can’t figure out, I’m still on the mailing list for the American Journal of Sociology, one of the flagship journals of the discipline.
High impact factor, incredibly low acceptance rate, razor-sharp reviews, you know the deal.
I got an email about just-accepted publications, and one of the titles stood out to me.
Excuse me?
My brain literally stopped on every word of that title because it feels like I have heard all of these words before, but put together in this way I have no idea what they mean.
What is gradationalism and why does it need to be revisited? What’s occupational mobility and occupational characteristics? What’s the difference between them?
On a broader level, it makes me think, who is this paper written for and who is it meant to help?
And this is not to say that all of this journal’s articles have titles like this by any means.
But when they do, at best it demonstrates the curse of knowledge and at worse it’s professional gatekeeping.
When you’re deep into your field, it’s easy to forget how foreign these terms sound to other people. That’s the sneakiness of jargon.
You might not even realize you’re doing it because to you, these words are second nature. But to others, they’re like a secret code they don’t have the tools to crack.
The goal is to break this curse. You want to help people understand better, not confuse them.
Plain language cuts through the noise and invites readers into your world, rather than keeps them on the outside.
And again, I think you have much more opportunity to do this when writing a book than an article.
#3: Simplicity is the Harder Option
So my third point is that simplicity is actually the harder option because there’s nothing to hide behind.
There’s this myth in academia that if your writing is too simple, people won’t respect you or your work.
When simplicity is a strength.
When you write clearly, you show that you really understand your topic. If you can explain a complex idea plainly and without embellishment, it means you’ve truly mastered it.
That’s why the act of teaching always helped me understand difficult concepts better.
When I was a grad student, I was a TA for a year-long social theory class at UC Berkeley taught by the brilliant Michael Burawoy.
And what I will always remember and appreciate about him is that he was able to take Marx, Weber, and Durkheim’s theories about the division of labor in society and break them down into digestible, understandable pieces.
Not only that, but he made these older ideas deeply relevant to the world today.
He did it by using plain language, storytelling, and stick-figure diagrams he would draw on the chalkboard that presented theoretical ideas in a visual way.
Now, if you can do this sort of thing in the classroom, you can do it in your writing as well.
So breathe life into your topic. Make it three-dimensional. Allow yourself to be seen. Make people to feel something, not just think something.
Another thing about simplicity is that it is often far more accurate.
A lot of times I read writing that is overstuffed. And by that, I mean there are entire paragraph-long sentences that are stuffed with way too much info.
They often include many lists of numerous things in a row, each of which should probably be explained in its own sentence.
There are often caveats in parentheses that show the author’s fear of Reviewer #2.
There’s a lot of “not only…but also” clauses, which I believe should be used sparingly.
And at the end of it, I’m not entirely sure which specific point I’m supposed to be taking away. I also have no idea what the author thinks either.
So if someone has to re-read your sentence five times to figure out what you’re saying, ask yourself, is it helping them?
Remember, the goal of writing is communication. It’s relationship-building. If people aren’t getting what you’re saying, then you’re missing an opportunity for connection.
Summing Everything Up
So let’s sum everything up! I’ve tried to persuade you to use more plain language in your writing.
I made three points about this:
#1: First, define your audience or else you will default to writing for your critics. And these critics are experts in your field.
When your work is accessible and legible to non-experts, it widens the potential impact of your research.
#2: If we don’t check ourselves, it’s easy to fall prey to the curse of knowledge.
Remember that for most academics, very few people in the world know your topic or care much about it.
YOU need to be the one to translate it to them and convince them to care!
So when you’re writing, think about how you might teach your work to a class and make it relevant to their lives.
#3: Simplicity is the harder option.
It’s powerful because it leaves nothing to hide behind.
The ability to express complex ideas across in plain language shows incredible mastery of your subject matter.
Obviously, I’m not saying that every single one of your publications needs to be written in ordinary language.
There’s a time and place for it. I get that there are different audiences and different aims.
But, pretty much all scholars I know want to make a difference in the world and not just on their field.
And that means unlearning and decolonizing our minds. We need to stop looking down on writing that uses words most people can understand.
So if you want to prioritize connection and communication over signaling and striving, this is the truly extraordinary way to go.
Reach out to me if you need any help doing it! Good luck.
