The Tricks of Writing for a General Audience

Yesterday I mentioned how hard it is for academics to learn how to write for a general audience.   In graduate school we are trained to write for fellow scholars – learning the jargon and mastering the background knowledge that everyone in the field shares.  That’s because scholarly writing is a kind of short hand for insiders.  If you had to explain every term, every concept, every assumption then what you could say in an article for insiders would literally require a book.

And so you learn...