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Notes From a Writer's Desk: An Academic in the Newsroom

As a PhD student, I dipped my toe into science journalism. From completing a science journalism fellowship to then freelancing for news outlets, I was tasked with telling a broad readership about the latest advances in science. Let me tell you, there were growing pains from writing in a style so different from academia.

News stories’ strict word limits tormented me the most. There was no room for superfluous prose or stray information barely related to the storyline. Once I felt like I had created the most streamlined narrative I could, I’d often still need to cut a couple hundred words.

That rigid conciseness pushed me to think about writing differently. Over time, a central question persisted in my mind as I wrote every sentence of a news story:

Can I cut this part out?

I wish I had more often questioned my academic writing like this. Journal articles usually don’t have as stringent a word limit as news stories. Still, we’ve all seen academic papers that extend pages past their point of usefulness. Excessively long papers don’t just tire readers: Readers can also get lost by the lack of focus, distracted by tangential trajectories that lead us away from the main point.

Despite its need both in journalism and academia, judiciously cutting information and insights from our writing is tough. I did all of that reading, all of that thinking—I want people to know it! But writing shouldn’t just show off the repository of all the information I learned (despite how much time I spent learning it!). I should write to inform others and help them clearly understand what important insights I’ve gleaned.

Yes, it can be disappointing to remove highly refined prose from a piece. But we must accept that removing stuff from our writing can be as crucial as adding it. After all, academics don’t have the luxury of a news editor who cuts away at our hard work until what we’re left with is clean and concise. We must learn to edit it down ourselves.

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