I sit here shaking my head, wondering about academics and their frustrating inability to make what they write riveting.

 

It’s no secret to me why the lay public pooh-poohs higher levels of learning: the higher academics go, the less they seem able to communicate what they know in ways that make most readers feel they’re co-equal partners as they struggle to accompany them on their academic adventures.

 

I was given some crucial advice from an academic when I was in college. It has made all the difference in my ability to make a living as a writer. (I’ve written about this before; please forgive me if you’re a frequent visitor to this blog!).

 

Here it is:

 

“You have an amazing vocabulary and excellent comprehension skills. But unless you want to write only to other academics, don’t use a ten dollar word where a two-dollar word will work. And don’t write sentences or paragraphs that take up acres of real estate. You leave too many readers behind when you do that–and what you have to say should be reaching millions of people. It’s that valuable!”

 

In  a nutshell, what my professor was saying was, “Write to express, not to impress.”

 

Fortunately, lately academics seem to be reaching this conclusion themselves.

 

In the past month, I’ve received invitations from two academics who want me to “dumb down” their findings so mass audiences can more easily benefit from what they’ve learned. They want to become as well-regarded and sought out on Huffington Post and USA Today as they are in academic journals.

 

(An aside here: “Dumb down” is an unfortunate, shorthand, cruel-sounding writer’s term for making an article accessible to more people by making it easier to digest and enjoy. But as an editor, I always keep in mind that whatever I’m tackling is for intelligent, inquisitive readers who don’t  want to have to carry a dictionary in one hand or reduce sentences to their essences so they can understand them. Editors have to recognize and embrace the reality that not everyone who wants to learn has had the privilege of attending college–and that millions of adults never graduated from high school–and that many millions more are immigrants who are still struggling to learn our confounding English language. Every time we leave any of these readers out of the equation by writing above their comprehension levels, we marginalize them further, and excluding them from the conversation affects everyone, not just the individuals who are left flailing for insights and a way forward that will put them on an even keel with middle class Americans.)

 

I welcome the challenge. I’m super grateful that I have the education and vocabulary necessary to take an academic article or book and reduce it to its essence in ways that make it easy to understand and implement or gain some other valuable insights from.

 

Although I don’t tackle every topic under the sun that comes to me from academics (no way will I ever tackle mathematics, science and other chiefly left-brained disciplines because I’m mostly right-brained–intuitive and creative), anything I can read and understand, I can make enjoyable and sufficiently riveting by transforming it into something that Average (but-inquisitive-and-extraordinary-in-their-own-ways!) Joe’s and Josephine’s can use to enhance their worlds.

 

And that’s a win-win for everybody!