1) Making this more palatable and readable by a general audience. What type of publication is this meant to be? Start there, and revise as a result.2) This means making the beginning more engaging. How can you “hook” the reader? 3) I would also shorten and/or break up the paragraphs. For popular writing, you have to write with shorter, “punchier” sentences. This feels more like something you’re trying to explain in order to educate a textbook reader, rather than explain, inform, and engage, which is more in line with popular science writing.Original Assignment prompt:Background:As we’ve talked about at the start of this quarter, one difficult aspect of academic research is communicating the results of that research to a non-specialized audience. Mass media publications, from newspapers and magazines to technology blogs and online publishing platforms like Medium (Links to an external site.) often feature descriptions of research, whether by academic researchers themselves or journalists that have interviewed them. The New York Times Science Section (Links to an external site.) and The Washington Post’s Science Section (Links to an external site.) are good examples of major newspaper coverage of scientific research. Techcrunch (Links to an external site.) and Ars Technica (Links to an external site.) are good examples of online technology publications. For the humanities and social sciences publications may range from the Los Angeles Review of Books (Links to an external site.) to Vox (Links to an external site.), Vice (Links to an external site.), and Politico (Links to an external site.).Purpose:In this assignment, you’ll practice writing about your research question in a way that is easily “consumed” by the broader public. This will utilize your skills in summary, sentence-level writing, editing, and research in what I hope is a fun and engaging way. It’s also a nice bridge into the literature review, as it will force you “translate” high-level concepts for a general audience.Task:Choose a target publication (see list above) and a specific source from the annotations you’ve done so far and write an account of your research for a general audience in a style and tone that you think would be appropriate for that publication.
