Peering over my laptop, I see a few dozen nonfiction books lining the edge of my desk. Disparate in quality and content, they all have one thing in common: They want me to learn something. As an English professor, I still believe that reading works of literature (like the ones that line the bookshelves behind me) can offer deep insights into the human condition. But the unstated premise of nonfiction is that readers will walk away with new knowledge, skills, or wisdom.
The powerful role that nonfiction writing plays in human learning thus represents an incredible opportunity for faculty members to educate beyond our classrooms.
For years now, professors have heard more and more calls to write for the public, communicate more accessibly, tackle relevant topics. As academics with deep expertise in a subject, we typically write for our colleagues, and understandably so: Together we are building a shared field of knowledge. But as the political attacks mount on higher education — not to mention the attacks on democratic ideals and practices that undergird our profession — the public needs to hear our voices.
Public writing, however, continues to intimidate a lot of faculty members. And it shouldn’t — because we are teachers. In writing nonfiction, you are creating learning experiences for readers. You can get better at it by following a simple principle: Write like you teach.
Simple in conception, that is — not so much in execution. Every time I have used the phrase “write like you teach” with a group of faculty members, they quickly grasp the premise. Although they’ve spent their lives helping people learn, they largely think of that work in connection to a classroom. So when I propose viewing readers as learners, teachers immediately begin to see possibilities. The hard part is shifting from premise to practice. Most academics have never had any training in how to write for the public — indeed, many of us never really received formal training in any kind of writing since we were undergraduates.
In this three-part series, I hope to bridge the divide and spell out practical techniques on how your teaching skills can be adapted to writing projects and, in particular, to writing for bigger and broader audiences than the ones in your classroom, department, or field. The series will roughly follow the same path that we use in designing and teaching a new course. Not every aspect of teaching a college course translates into writing an essay or book, but I hope you’ll be surprised at how many of them do.
In this first column, I’ll tackle the big questions and learning objectives of a writing project. Next month, we’ll consider the use of evidence and structure in more public-facing writing. In the final column, we’ll dig into the prose itself. By that point I hope to have shown you that any academic writer, whether or not you are a trained wordsmith, can learn to create inviting prose for nonexperts.
What will you write about? Start with a driving question. Both in teaching and in writing, we often barge into the room with our expertise on display: I know stuff, and I’m here to teach it to you! But in both contexts, we sometimes forget that it’s the learners’ own questions that prompt them to seek answers from us, the experts. While the structures of higher education dictate that students sometimes have to take courses that don’t match their most-pressing questions, learners in the big world outside of higher education are driven to read things that satisfy their curiosity about particular questions or problems. To expand your audience, you have to identify the driving questions that could lead a reader into your prose.
The power of questions to drive book projects is clear in the titles of best sellers such as Beverly Daniel Tatum’s Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? or Robert M. Sapolsky’s Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers (the question here is implied: Why don’t zebras get ulcers?). You will find a similar question-oriented approach in many media articles, my favorite example of which can be found in the health and wellness section of The New York Times, which has a question-based series of essays with titles like “Should Dinner Be the Smallest Meal of the Day?” and “Are Dental X-Rays Safe?”
Clearly not all nonfiction books and essays need to have questions in their titles. But dig into them, and you’ll usually find a question driving the writer. No explicit question appears in the title of Robin Wall Kimmerer‘s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Within the book’s first pages, however, Kimmerer describes a classroom incident in which she asked students to identify both positive and negative relationships between humans and the natural world. The students were eloquent on the negative, but silent on the positives. She writes:
I was stunned. How is it possible that in twenty years of education, they cannot think of any beneficial relationships between people and their environment? Perhaps the negative examples they see every day — brownfields, factory farms, suburban sprawl — truncated their ability to see some good between humans and earth. As the land becomes impoverished, so does the scope of their vision. When we talked about this after class, I realized that they could not even imagine what beneficial relations between their species and others might look like. How can we begin to move toward ecological and cultural sustainability if we cannot even imagine what the path feels like?
Her effort to answer that question became a best-selling book about how indigenous and scientific ways of knowing can complement one another.
Identifying the questions that underpin your ideas can prove challenging because most academics begin writing projects with very specific, discipline-grounded questions in mind, which have to be expanded in scope to appeal to most nonexperts. When I started writing a book about distraction in the classroom, it emerged from a single question that was baffling me: Why do students look at their phones in my class instead of paying attention? But that question led to others: Why do humans seem so easily distractible? And have we always been this way? Have smartphones destroyed our attention span? Each of those questions, which pushed me far afield from my classroom, had the potential to draw in new readers.
Robin Kimmerer recounts a story from her classroom, and a single classroom incident likewise first promoted my curiosity about distraction. Those examples can provide a possible model for how to identify ideas for public-facing writing projects: Which questions are your students raising? Which ones have baffled you in the classroom?
Once surfaced, those questions can be used to build a narrative or to craft a title or subtitle for your writing project. Present them to readers and answer (or complicate) them in your writing.
Draft your writing project’s “learning objectives.” If you’re like most faculty members, the act of writing learning objectives for your courses doesn’t set your hair on fire. It can feel like a pro forma obligation done to appease accreditors. But done well, they can capture your deepest hopes for your teaching: How will the students who sit with you for 15 weeks be changed by the course?
It might not seem like an intuitive move, but you will also benefit from drafting learning objectives for your writing project. Imagine a reader who has just finished your lovingly crafted book (or essay). What do you want to happen next? Do you hope the reader will immediately jump right into their next task? Take a walk and reconsider some long-settled opinion? Seek out something else to read on the subject? Make a commitment to change their life in some way? Form a new habit or stop an old one? Decide to take a trip somewhere?
In her book Write No Matter What: Advice for Academics, Joli Jensen argues that writers can benefit from drafting a mission statement for any piece of writing. She recommends drafting a concise statement that fits on an index card, and can be kept in view as you write. While I was working on my new book, I had its mission statement written on the whiteboard in my home office. Whenever I felt my focus drifting, I could glance at the board and remind myself what I was all about.
You can inform and enhance the learning objectives for a piece of writing with two additional considerations:
Audience. Your ability to influence someone’s thinking depends upon how well you understand who they are in the first place. You probably take that ability for granted in your courses. Most professors walk into every classroom with some level of awareness of the context, including the potential reasons for students being there and their background knowledge, all of which shapes the course. For instance, even if I’m teaching two courses on the same subject, I wouldn’t teach them in the same way if one is a senior seminar for majors and the other is a general-education course for first-years.
Similarly, audience is a vital consideration in any writing project. You will always benefit from some basic research and reflection on potential readers, especially their reasons for reading and their background knowledge on the subject matter. Ask yourself the question that teachers always ask when they begin designing a new course: How much do the learners already know about my subject?
I had been writing about teaching for The Chronicle for a half-dozen years when I was invited to contribute an essay to a major U.S. newspaper defending tenure. When I sent the first draft to the editor, I received my first lesson in the importance of audience awareness in public writing. Before I started making arguments about tenure, he said, I had to explain what it was. Not all readers will know.
Timeliness. There’s an easy prompt to guide in considering the currency of a writing project. Before you embark on your writing project, force yourself to answer this question: Why do my readers need my argument or idea right now? Even if your courses are perennial offerings (i.e., a general-chemistry class or a British-literature survey), you probably look for ways to link the content to some current issue. You bring in contemporary examples or point to the ways in which the content will shape students’ lives or careers.
Likewise, I promise you, the question of timeliness will always rise to the surface of an editor’s mind when you submit a manuscript proposal or pitch an article. Editors, whether at book publishers or media outlets, always receive more submissions than they accept. When they have to choose, they are likely to choose the one that speaks to what might be pressing on the minds of the most potential readers.
But keep in mind that “timeliness” can have a capacious definition. A writing project doesn’t have to speak to the exact week, month, year, or even decade we are living in. Our society and our lives transform quickly, but some features of the human condition remain stable. We are always searching for meaning, happiness, health, relationships, and more. Nonetheless, if you do decide to take a broad approach to timeliness in your project, be prepared to make the case for its connection to our present moment, both to your potential editor and the reader.
In the next two columns, we’ll shift from the major conceptual moves you should make at the start of a writing project to its shape on the page. Before we get there, I hope the notion of writing like you teach has started the wheels churning in your brain. Get into the habit of considering the connections between your teaching and your writing. As you reflect upon the courses you have just finished, or the ones that will start again soon (all too soon), remind yourself of what you do best as a teacher. What are the hallmarks of your classroom — and how would those practices translate to the readers that your prose is aiming to teach?
