Adapting Your Research for Other Spaces
Another way of promoting your work is learning how to speak about it to different types of audiences in order to broaden your reach and impact outside of your scholarly sphere.
Kiese Laymon and Tressie McMillan Cottom discuss how to revise your work for broader audience in an episode of The Ezra Klein Show. After your work becomes published, how can it continue to be revised for other audiences? To address this question, it is important to think deeply about the distinctions of a “wider” audience. In Course 4, Lesson 1: What and Where to Publish, you learned about the various publication styles and the support that each offers. Each type of publication also may have their own assumed and “wider” audiences. This is especially important as an academic librarian, where jargon is assumed, and the audience is both specific and generalized at the same time. What kind of language changes could make your work more approachable to different audiences? What connections could you make to something else going on in the world or another conversation happening in a different discipline?
Writing about your research for a more general audience outside of researcher-practitioners that share the same spaces as you, is called public writing. Turning your article or project into a blog post, an op-ed, or a video series that is discoverable by anyone outside academia can be a very beneficial way to reach new audiences, refresh your work, and expand the conversation about your research topic.
You’ve worked long and hard on your research — why consider adapting it to public writing? In an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education Irina Dumitrescu (2020) explains: “There are strategic reasons, such as raising your visibility or showing the relevance of your research. It is also satisfying to reach readers who are curious about your field but do not have the training necessary to appreciate your scholarship. As a public scholar, you have the freedom to write about topics beyond your area of specialization, which in turn can enrich your research and teaching. Finally, many of the qualities that make for good public essays — clarity, conviction, style — can improve your scholarly writing too.”
Traditionally, scholarly impact is based on quantitative metrics, as discussed in the next lesson — Course 5, Lesson 3: Measuring, Evaluating, and Articulating Impact. These are statistics that come from factors like journal prestige and citation numbers. It can seem more difficult to evaluate public writing in this way than it is to count how often a traditional journal article has been cited by other academics. In many research universities, public talks and other community projects are often given less weight when measured against peer-reviewed articles or monographs because people assume it is easier to talk to an audience than it is to write a published piece. In reality, it’s often much harder to talk about one’s research to a general population who is unfamiliar with your topic in an understandable and applicable way! As Bond and Gannon (2019) state, we “should not simply replicate the traditional forms of publication for assessment’s sake, or just because other tenured professors had to jump through those hoops to achieve their own status at a research-focused institution. Instead, we can — and should — look to outreach and open-access writing as engines for change in a society where people are increasingly skeptical about higher education’s worth.”
Activity
Complete the following reflective activity. You will answer a series of questions, and you may choose to write down your answers in your LPOL Workbook or elsewhere.
If you haven’t yet, fill out the 1.3.3: Research Support Ecosystem worksheet from Course 1, Lesson 3: Prioritizing Reflection and Community in your LPOL Workbook. If you have filled this out, review all the people in your orbit who you could talk to about your research in different ways. Then, use the 5.3.2: Adapting Your Research for Other Spaces reflection in your LPOL Workbook or a journal to answer the following prompts:
- How would you talk about your research within your own community of researchers who are interested in similar things?
- How do you talk about your research with LIS An interdisciplinary field that examines how physical and digital information is organized, accessed, collected, managed, disseminated and used, particularly in library settings. researchers who work in a different area?
- How would you talk about your research with scholars from a different but related discipline?
- How would you talk about your research with those outside of academia?utside of academia?
After you’ve created or reevaluated your ecosystem, consider the differences in language that may come with each circle. How is similar language useful for different audiences? For example, perhaps your gym buddy who is a cybersecurity specialist may have never heard of the concept you are describing, but the same language you use for them would be helpful for your friend who is in the nursing profession. This is especially important as an academic librarian, as the librarian is often the central node between various disciplines. How does the way you talk about your research shift among all these different relationships?
Now, perhaps reach out to someone you personally know and explain your research in real time verbally or by sending a quick abstract The concise summary of a research article that provides a broad overview of the research being presented.. In what ways do you shift how you’re communicating your research? How can that expand or shift with different audiences?
Hopefully this helps you think about how your work speaks to people in different ways and how that then impacts its presentation.
Topic 2 References
Agate, N., Kennison, R., Konkiel, S. et al. “The Transformative Power of Values-enacted Scholarship.” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 7, 165 (2020). doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-00647-z.
Bond, Sarah E., and Kevin Gannon. “Public Writing and the Junior Scholar.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. 2019. https://www.chronicle.com/article/public-writing-and-the-junior-scholar/
Dumitrescu, Irina. “What Academics Misunderstand About ‘Public Writing’.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. 2020. https://www.chronicle.com/article/what-academics-misunderstand-about-public-writing
Hattwig, Denise. “Public Writing.” University of Washington Bothell & Cascadia College Campus Library. 2022. https://guides.lib.uw.edu/bothell/publicwriting/publicwriting
Transcript: Tressie McMillan Cottom Interviews Kiese Laymon for
‘The Ezra Klein Show’ – The New York Times The Ezra Klein Show. The New York Times Audio, November 9, 2021.
Adapting Your Research for Other Spaces
Another way of promoting your work is learning how to speak about it to different types of audiences in order to broaden your reach and impact outside of your scholarly sphere.
Kiese Laymon and Tressie McMillan Cottom discuss how to revise your work for broader audience in an episode of The Ezra Klein Show. After your work becomes published, how can it continue to be revised for other audiences? To address this question, it is important to think deeply about the distinctions of a “wider” audience. In Course 4, Lesson 1: What and Where to Publish, you learned about the various publication styles and the support that each offers. Each type of publication also may have their own assumed and “wider” audiences. This is especially important as an academic librarian, where jargon is assumed, and the audience is both specific and generalized at the same time. What kind of language changes could make your work more approachable to different audiences? What connections could you make to something else going on in the world or another conversation happening in a different discipline?
Writing about your research for a more general audience outside of researcher-practitioners that share the same spaces as you, is called public writing. Turning your article or project into a blog post, an op-ed, or a video series that is discoverable by anyone outside academia can be a very beneficial way to reach new audiences, refresh your work, and expand the conversation about your research topic.
You’ve worked long and hard on your research — why consider adapting it to public writing? In an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education Irina Dumitrescu (2020) explains: “There are strategic reasons, such as raising your visibility or showing the relevance of your research. It is also satisfying to reach readers who are curious about your field but do not have the training necessary to appreciate your scholarship. As a public scholar, you have the freedom to write about topics beyond your area of specialization, which in turn can enrich your research and teaching. Finally, many of the qualities that make for good public essays — clarity, conviction, style — can improve your scholarly writing too.”
Traditionally, scholarly impact is based on quantitative metrics, as discussed in the next lesson — Course 5, Lesson 3: Measuring, Evaluating, and Articulating Impact. These are statistics that come from factors like journal prestige and citation numbers. It can seem more difficult to evaluate public writing in this way than it is to count how often a traditional journal article has been cited by other academics. In many research universities, public talks and other community projects are often given less weight when measured against peer-reviewed articles or monographs because people assume it is easier to talk to an audience than it is to write a published piece. In reality, it’s often much harder to talk about one’s research to a general population who is unfamiliar with your topic in an understandable and applicable way! As Bond and Gannon (2019) state, we “should not simply replicate the traditional forms of publication for assessment’s sake, or just because other tenured professors had to jump through those hoops to achieve their own status at a research-focused institution. Instead, we can — and should — look to outreach and open-access writing as engines for change in a society where people are increasingly skeptical about higher education’s worth.”
Activity
Complete the following reflective activity. You will answer a series of questions, and you may choose to write down your answers in your LPOL Workbook or elsewhere.
If you haven’t yet, fill out the 1.3.3: Research Support Ecosystem worksheet from Course 1, Lesson 3: Prioritizing Reflection and Community in your LPOL Workbook. If you have filled this out, review all the people in your orbit who you could talk to about your research in different ways. Then, use the 5.3.2: Adapting Your Research for Other Spaces reflection in your LPOL Workbook or a journal to answer the following prompts:
After you’ve created or reevaluated your ecosystem, consider the differences in language that may come with each circle. How is similar language useful for different audiences? For example, perhaps your gym buddy who is a cybersecurity specialist may have never heard of the concept you are describing, but the same language you use for them would be helpful for your friend who is in the nursing profession. This is especially important as an academic librarian, as the librarian is often the central node between various disciplines. How does the way you talk about your research shift among all these different relationships?
Now, perhaps reach out to someone you personally know and explain your research in real time verbally or by sending a quick abstractAbstract The concise summary of a research article that provides a broad overview of the research being presented.. In what ways do you shift how you’re communicating your research? How can that expand or shift with different audiences?
Hopefully this helps you think about how your work speaks to people in different ways and how that then impacts its presentation.
Topic 2 References
Agate, N., Kennison, R., Konkiel, S. et al. “The Transformative Power of Values-enacted Scholarship.” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 7, 165 (2020). doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-00647-z.
Bond, Sarah E., and Kevin Gannon. “Public Writing and the Junior Scholar.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. 2019. https://www.chronicle.com/article/public-writing-and-the-junior-scholar/
Dumitrescu, Irina. “What Academics Misunderstand About ‘Public Writing’.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. 2020. https://www.chronicle.com/article/what-academics-misunderstand-about-public-writing
Hattwig, Denise. “Public Writing.” University of Washington Bothell & Cascadia College Campus Library. 2022. https://guides.lib.uw.edu/bothell/publicwriting/publicwriting
Transcript: Tressie McMillan Cottom Interviews Kiese Laymon for
‘The Ezra Klein Show’ – The New York Times The Ezra Klein Show. The New York Times Audio, November 9, 2021.