Writing for Research

Writing for Research

Writing for media has its own conventions. You put the conclusion at the start, not the
end. It helps if you address a theme the media are already excited about. It’s a good
idea to work with media professionals, to get the hang of it.

Outreach writing is now being re-shaped by the Web. Hyperlinks give a way of including
serious research documentation, almost impossible in older media. The proliferation of
blogs makes it easy to put messages out, but also means they usually get lost in the
babel. So curated outreach websites like The Conversation are useful, though they limit
word-length and style.

Increasingly, simple text is supplemented, even replaced, by visuals and audio. It
becomes more time-consuming and expensive to produce high-quality online material
about research. My blog is definitely at the low-tech end. But the potential reach gets
steadily bigger.

Interactive writing

Your research’s contribution to the making and circulating of knowledge does not even
end with outreach writing. If you have done a competent job on an interesting problem,
there is a good chance other researchers will pay attention to your work, will use it and
respond to it. In fact, the collective knowledge project depends on this happening.
Knowledge develops in skeins of discussion, application, testing and revision that
evolve over time.

The right attitude for responding to criticism (Image: Flickr , lily-padded pond near Angkor Wat, by Tajai)