Ep. 67 - Three Reasons You Need to Write More Simply

In this episode, I dive into why writing in plain language is a game-changer for academics. Instead of feeling pressured to use fancy jargon, imagine connecting with readers by simply saying what you mean. I share a client’s story that shows how clear writing can make research more engaging and powerful. You'll also get  tips on figuring out who your audience is, avoiding the trap of assuming everyone knows what you know, and why simplicity is actually the harder (yet more effective) option. The big takeaway? Writing in plain language doesn’t mean dumbing things down—it’s actually a way to make your work more impactful and accessible to everyone.

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Transcript

YWU Podcast Episode 67 Transcript

 “The Power of Plain Language”

Hey there writers! Today I felt inspired to publish an episode about utilizing plain language in your scholarly writing.

Lately I've been listening to a range of podcasts and reading books that discuss more holistic ways of approaching work and life.

One idea that keeps popping up is that in modern capitalistic society, we are always striving to be extraordinary.

This means that being "ordinary" or "commonplace" in any way is seen as a flaw, as something to be staunchly avoided.

Which is rather ridiculous when the vast majority of what we do in our lives, for even the most extraordinary people, involves ordinary stuff.

You still have to brush your teeth every day and respond to emails and pay your taxes and buy groceries, etc., etc.

Does that regularity take away from our lives? I think we just accept it for the most part.

But it has gotten me thinking about how this striving for extraordinariness extends into academia and the realm of scholarly writing in particular.

And here, I'm not just talking about output and maintaining a high level of externally measurable productivity, although of course that matters a lot.

This need to be different also shows up in how people push themselves (and are pushed by their fields) to use certain types of language that distinguish you from the crowd.

It starts in grad school. Students try to emulate the styles of the books and articles they read.

Often consciously, they try hard to adopt a more formal tone that makes their work legible to other experts while moving it further and further away from what "regular" people (as in, the general public) can understand, relate to, and apply to their own lives.

There is pressure to use fanciful jargon that signals to others in your field that you, too, are a serious scholar.

I've joked before about my dislike of the word "interpellate." I still hate that word, but there's tons more terms on my list. 

Another one is "interlocuters." Am I saying that right? 

I mean, I know there are very specific reasons people use that term, and I'm showing my ignorance in not knowing what those are. But I just don't get why we don't just say, "people I talked to" or “people I interviewed”?

But let me get back to what I was saying before.

To get established in their fields and add new lines to their CVs, most people publish journal articles first. 

Due to the vastly limited audience, these papers necessarily utilize a lot of specialized language and a more objective tone in which the author as a human being, as a real person, usually completely disappears.

This writing style gets rewarded in the form of publications.

Then, a few years later, a lot of folks try to use this style when writing their books and it just doesn’t work well.

People often start to question the overall purpose of their research or its relevance to the world at large.

So often I hear academics complain about the Ivory Tower and ideas and information not being made accessible to the general public.

But too often, scholars don't see how the language they're using is itself exclusionary to most other people on this planet.

The choice of words either invites people in or keeps them out. The problem with keeping people out is that the potential impact of your ideas becomes very limited.

So in this episode, I want to propose something that’s potentially kind of revolutionary.

And that is, to subvert power dynamics in the academy, we need to say what we actually mean in extraordinarily clear and simple language.

In short, there's power in plainness.

You can find the transcript of this episode at Yourwordsunleashed.com/67.

 What Inspired this Episode

So let me talk first about what inspired this episode.

A little while ago, I received an update from one of my earliest book coaching clients--someone I'll refer to as May.

She's a non-native English-speaking junior faculty member at a top research institution.

Because books take such a long time to write and to go through the review and publication process, I often lose track of what’s happening with my clients' books.

But I love to stay in touch, and I was thrilled when May shared the full reviews she received about her manuscript after having been reviewed by a top press. 

First, I'll say that this client was amazingly focused and productive during our 8 months of work together. 

She wrote two new book chapters and planned another couple of journal articles from her dissertation data. 

She created an interesting and useful theoretical framework that goes far beyond her specific case.

I also helped her figure out a distinct book writing voice--which she wanted to make engaging and accessible.

By the time we finished our work, she was about to submit a proposal and several chapters to her top book press.

At the end of our sessions, May gave me the following feedback: “Coaching has been a great experience and very helpful in pushing me to think clearly about my ideas and tell my stories in a way that makes sense to my readers. I am confident that my book will be making great contributions to my fields!"   

She wrote this feedback long before she finished her full manuscript.

But that confidence and clarity was one of the main things that reviewers commented on.

They were convinced that the book’s theoretical contribution would make it an award-contender, which was so exciting for me to hear.

But one person also complimented the book’s storytelling style. They wrote something that I've never seen before, which was,

Quote "Although the author is a non-native English speaker, she nonetheless writes in an unusually clear way – clearer than many of her academic colleagues for whom English is a first language. 

She avoids trendy buzz words and jargon and simply says what she means in a straightforward fashion. 

This makes for very compelling reading... This is the academic equivalent of a page turner." Unquote

This reviewer was so impressed by the fact that May was using plain language to express sophisticated ideas.

Oftentimes, we think of theory and general understandability as being fundamentally opposites, when they can actually go hand-in-hand.

But it takes having really great ideas plus real dedication to simplicity, which is hard for a few different reasons.

Speaking Plainly as a Way to Take Up More Space

I'm so proud of May because she is an immigrant woman of color who could even more easily have chosen to write a high-brow monograph that would be legible only to experts in her field.

I believe it's much harder for folks from marginalized backgrounds to allow themselves to use plain language for fear of not being taken seriously.

This includes, but is not limited to, people of color, first generation college students, women, differently-abled folks, non-binary people and non-native English speakers.

I think that this conditioning starts early.

I first noticed this in myself as an undergrad. 

I would never ask a question unless I thought it was incredibly insightful or thought-provoking or something that I felt like others in the class would benefit from.

It was a lot of mental gymnastics and self-judgment just to get to a place where I felt comfortable raising my hand.

The result was that I never received answers to most of my questions because I shut myself down.

This tendency to need to prove myself as being extraordinarily insightful or intelligent stayed with me, and got much more pervasive, during grad school.

I suffered from immense imposter syndrome and marveled at classmates who could seemingly just come up with genius-level thoughts on the cuff.

I would write questions down in my notebook and edit them for half an hour before asking, internally hoping that somebody else would ask first so I didn't have to.

And this extended into my writing habits as well.

I tried to write in academic-ese, which is not natural to literally anyone. It caused my brain to hurt and intensified the feeling of being an imposter.

Luckily, I had mentors who were ethnographers and encouraged me to write my dissertation in a story-telling style. 

That didn't make the process of writing any easier, but it did give me permission to paint pictures with words and to evoke the senses and emotions of my readers.

And when I did that, I necessarily wrote the theoretical sections of my dissertation and later, my first book, more simply and accessibly.

Point 1: Who’s Your Audience?

So let’s say you want to write more inclusively but you’re not sure how. I’m going to give a few points to help you get there.

First, you need to start by asking, Who’s my audience? Once in awhile it will only be for a handful of specialists in your field, so therefore it will make sense to use all the jargon and technical terms. 

But what about everyone else? 

Rarely do my clients say they only want to reach other experts.

They want to write for their students, policy makers, journalists, and/or the general public. 

A lot of folks want their book to be understood and appreciated by their moms or grandparents who may not have had the same access to education.  

Depending on how you write it, anyone could benefit from your research. 

But if you use only insider language, you will probably alienate most people.

Here’s a thought exercise: imagine that a smart, curious non-academic friend who knows very little about your work asks about your research at a dinner party. How would you explain it to them? 

In my view, that’s the vibe you want to be going for when you write. You’re not dumbing anything down—you’re actually opening it up for more people to think about and use.

I personally have always believed in making academic research available to the general public.
 
 I mean, why do years and years of intensive research and writing, only for it to be kept behind prohibitively expensive paywalls?
 
 I was an early adopter of Academia.edu and put all of my published work there for public consumption (and no lawyers have come after me yet!)
 
Since leaving the academy, I forgot about my profile. I decided to check it again and noticed something really interesting.

My most professionally well-regarded article appeared in a top journal in my field over a decade ago and it has only ever been downloaded 134 times. 

This was a publication that someone called a “career maker,” mind you.

That article was SO difficult to write and get published because I was required to create an innovative theoretical framework. I managed to do it but it felt very forced. 

Part of it was because I thought the biggest contribution was of my work was in the stories I was telling.
 
 Meanwhile, a small study I co-authored with a friend that we published in a small, specialized subfield journal only a couple of years before the other one has been downloaded nearly 14,000 times!

That article was written in the plainest language possible.
 
 And the difference between them was intent: I wrote the first article to impress my colleagues and solidify my own professional trajectory, while the latter was always meant to HELP adoptees and adoptive families.
 
 Although it was published in 2010, I still receive very gratifying messages of thanks from readers.
 
 I'm relieved to be out of a system that ranks scholarly contributions by impact factor.
 
 Consider how much more academics could contribute to the well-being of individuals and society if public engagement was rewarded.

Point 2: Don’t Fall Prey to the Curse of Knowledge

My second point is about a concept I recently learned about called the curse of knowledge, which seems to be used more often in the business world. 

But basically, it’s the idea that once you know something, it’s hard to imagine not knowing it. And then you too easily assume that other people know it too.

There’s a Harvard Business Review article that cites this one psychology study that really illustrates this concept.

In it, one person was assigned to pick a well-known song, such as “Happy Birthday,” and tap out the rhythm on a table.

Then there was another person whose job was to listen and guess what the song was.

Beforehand, the tappers were asked to predict the probability that the listener would guess the right song. And they estimated a 50% chance.

So in the actual experiment, out of 120 songs, listeners were only able to identify three correctly—a success rate of only 2.5%. 

Obviously, the tapper just assumed that what was in their mind would naturally translate to a stranger.

Let me give you another example. For some reason that I can’t figure out, I’m still on the mailing list for the American Journal of Sociology, one of the flagship journals of the discipline.

High impact factor, incredibly low acceptance rate, razor-sharp review, you know the deal.

I got an email about just-accepted publications, and one of the titles stood out to me. It was: “Gradationalism Revisited: Intergenerational Occupational Mobility Along Axes of Occupational Characteristics.” 

Excuse me?

My brain literally got tripped up on every word of that title because it feels like I have heard all of these words before, but put together in this way I have no idea what they mean.

What is gradationalism and why does it need to be revisited? What’s occupational mobility and occupational characteristics, and what’s the difference between them?

On a broader level, it has me thinking: who is this paper written for and who is it meant to help? 

This is not to say that all of this journal’s articles have convoluted titles like this by any means. 

But when they do, at best it demonstrates the curse of knowledge and at worse it’s professional gatekeeping.

When you’re deep into your field, it’s easy to forget how foreign these terms sound to other people. That’s the sneakiness of jargon. 

You might not even realize you’re doing it because to you, those words are like second nature. 

But to others, they’re like a secret code they don’t have the tools to crack.

The goal is to break this curse. 

You want to help people understand better, not confuse them. 

Plain language cuts through the noise and invites readers into your world, rather than keeps them on the outside.

Again, I think you have much more opportunity to do this when writing a book than an article.

Point 3: Simplicity is the Harder Option

So my third point is that simplicity is actually harder to achieve because there’s nothing to hide behind. 

There’s this myth in academia that if your writing is too simple, people won’t respect you or your work. 

Simplicity is not a weakness—it’s a strength. 

When you write clearly, you show that you really understand the topic. If you can explain a complex idea plainly and without embellishment, it means you’ve truly mastered it.

That’s why teaching always helped me understand difficult concepts better. 

When I was a grad student, I was a TA for a year-long social theory class at UC Berkeley taught by the brilliant Michael Burawoy. 

And what I will always remember and appreciate about him is that he was able to take Marx, Weber, and Durkheim’s theories about the division of labor in society and break them down into understandable pieces.

Not only that, but he made these old ideas deeply relevant to the world today. 

He did it by using plain language, storytelling, and stick figure diagrams he would draw on the chalkboard that presented theoretical ideas visually.

Now, if you can do this sort of thing in the classroom, you can do it in your writing as well. 

Breathe life into your topic. Make it three-dimensional. Allow yourself to be seen. Make people feel something, not just think something.

Another thing about simplicity is that it is often far more accurate.

I read a lot of writing that can only be called overstuffed. And by that, I mean there are entire paragraph-long sentences that are stuffed with way too much info.

They often include many lists of numerous things in a row, each of which should probably be explained in its own sentence. 

There are often caveats in parentheses that show the author’s fear of Reviewer #2. 

There’s a lot of “not only…but also” clauses, which I believe should be used sparingly.

And at the end of it, I’m not entirely sure which specific point I’m supposed to be taking away. I also have no idea what the author thinks either.

So if someone has to re-read your sentence five times to figure out what you’re saying, ask yourself, is it helping them?

Remember, the goal of writing is communication. It’s relationship-building.

If people aren’t getting what you’re saying, then you’re missing an opportunity for connection.

Summing Everything Up

So let’s sum everything up! I’ve tried to persuade you to use more plain language in your writing.

I made three points about this:

First, define your audience or else you will default to writing for your critics. And these critics are experts in your field.

However, when you make your work accessible and legible to non-experts, it widens the potential impact of your ideas.

Second, if we don’t check ourselves, it’s easy to fall prey to the curse of knowledge. Remember that very few people in the world know or care much about most topics that academics study.

You need to be the one to translate it to them. 

So when you’re writing, think about how you might teach your work to a class and make it relevant to their lives.

And third, simplicity is powerful because there is nothing to hide behind. The ability to express complex ideas across in plain language shows incredible mastery of your subject matter.

Of course, I’m not saying that every single one of your publications needs to be written in ordinary language.

There’s a time and place for it. I get that there are different audiences and different aims. 

But, pretty much all scholars I know want their work to make a difference in the world and not just in their fields. 

And that means unlearning and decolonizing our minds around this issue. We need to stop looking down our noses on writing that uses words most people can understand.

If you want to prioritize connection and communication over signaling and striving, this is the truly extraordinary way to go. 

Reach out to me if you need any help doing it! Good luck.