Writing about your research for non-academic audiences

This one day workshop is organised by the  Education, Childhood and Youth (ECY) Pathway and is open to all ESRC and non-ESRC funded PhD and MA Social Research students within the WRDTP’s seven partner universities. Whilst this workshop is aimed at ECY Pathway students, PGRs from all seven interdisciplinary Pathways are welcome to attend.

Academics no longer write simply for other academics; increasingly there is an expectation that we share our research findings beyond the academy, repackaging our research for a lay audience. For example, blogs constitute a potentially powerful bridge between your doctoral research and the wider public. However, blog writing is not simply a matter of writing about your research in less academic and more simple terms; your specialised, research-derived knowledge needs to be recontextualised so that your blog audience can “interpret and integrate it into their existing knowledge and feel involved” (Luzon, 2013, p.249). Drawing on theories of genre and transfer, this workshop aims to be your gateway to writing for non-academic audiences, supporting you to write a blog post based on your doctoral research.

Students will learn to:

• Analyse texts to identify linguistic and rhetorical aspects of writing that characterise academic versus popular genres;
• Employ linguistic and rhetorical aspects of writing to produce a text that is effective for an ‘outreach’ audience.