This piece was written by David Tuller in the opinion section of the NY Times. He is a writer and academic coordinator at UC: Berkeley in their joint masters program in public health and journalism. He wrote this particular article with the purpose of helping the reader move away from academic writing so they can address a larger audience.
He started thinking about this while in grad school after he submitted an article he thought was very good to his editor. The comments he received were that it was extremely dull and there was nothing she could do to fix it. He realized he had put too much jargon in it and there was no way regular people would be able to follow it and understand his points. Once he became an instructor he wanted to help students with the transition between academic writing and writing for everyday people.
His first rule for doing this is to forget formal references, which means no footnotes or bibliography. This is because most readers will not care which journal published what or the exact specifics from the article. You can use the general ideas from the sources, just do not specifically cite them. His second rule is no acronyms. This can be confusing for a reader who is not familiar with certain acronyms academics have come up with. They can also have multiple meaning sometimes, which can also be confusing. He has found that people who use these techniques actually feel freed in their writing and are able to get their ideas across better.
He also shares his basic rules, which are as follows:
- Share the most important thing first, then tell the rest of the story
- Keep it simple
- Use the active voice
- Be specific
- Take things piece by piece