 Hello everyone. I am Sam Robbins. I'm going to give a talk on the process of going from academic essays to blog articles This is a talk I originally gave at the SoA summer school earlier this year, but due to some technical difficulties it wasn't recorded so this is a Recording of the presentation. It was originally given on a panel about public scholarship. So that's the theme here so I want to talk about this process of Translating across the genres and I'll talk a little bit more about what I mean by that in a second, but first a little Background to me. I graduated from SoA with a degree in Chinese modern and classical. I was very involved with the Taiwan studies department at that time. I then went to National Taiwan University here in Taiwan to do a masses degree in sociology and have recently graduated and for about a little over a year now I've been an editor at the magazine Taiwan Insight, which is the online magazine for the Taiwan Studies program at the University of Nottingham So throughout that process I've written for Taiwan Insight, but also mostly commissioned pieces, edited pieces and Really just got to read a lot of great articles and a lot of great content about Taiwan. So in that process of editing I've kind of Got a better sense of what I think works in an article and what I think doesn't work So I'd like to share some advice about how to write for a publication like Taiwan Insight or of course for Taiwan Insight If you're interested in writing for us. So I think the biggest mistake that often happens When academics try to write for a broader audience is that they just make very surface level edits And I call this a process of going from thus to therefore So as an editor I can tell pretty much right away when a piece I receive has been very lightly edited from a much longer piece of academic work These pieces usually have a lack of awareness of reader. They're effectively writing for themselves or the academic peers There's language that I don't think really is appropriate to that context It's just a direct copy and miniature of a much longer piece So it ends up reading like an extended abstract or it just speaks to a point that I don't think works outside about very Arcane academic context So what I like to think is much more useful and what I think I've read a lot of pieces that do really great as a process of Translating and I use this term translating to specify against dumbing down It doesn't mean taking academic work and simplifying it, you know for the lay masses But rather it's about taking a piece of work and making it work in another genre And this idea of genre is very is very crucial. So the process of transformation not simplification different genres demand different things and Also different audiences care about different things and I use this concept with genre to refer to academic writing and blog writing Because I think it's important to remember that Valuable aspects of a piece of research can be highlighted in different genres and there are things that blog articles allow you to do that Academic essays actually don't So again, it's the process of taking one piece of work and presenting it in a different way for a different group of people Also, of course blog articles generally have a larger audience than a piece of academic work so not only is it a way to Highlight pieces of your work that you might not otherwise have the chance to so so a chance to get more people to read it I'm very certain that the pieces I've written for town inside based on my Thesis will be read many more times than my actual thesis and that's great. You know, it's I'm just glad that it's getting out there So I think the first step of understanding how to translate across genres is to be able to recognize genres For what they are and think about the conventions They might have so a lot of you listening are probably students or academics or been an academia for a while So you're very familiar with the genre of academic writing But I think there can be a risk of being so familiar that you forget the rules that are implicitly stated when we write in academia So I want to make them really explicit here Help us think about it as a genre So when you're writing academically you're writing for other academics in your field or if you're in a class You're writing for a professor of that class now why that's relevant is that usually means you're gonna assume some type of disciplinary training and you're gonna be able to Use some certain disciplinary specific terms of art now. I'm a sociologist by training. So when I write Research or I write my thesis it was for sociologists and that was you know in my mind when I thought about what I could mention and What was relevant and what people knew? Academic writing also usually has a highly regulated structure. It's gonna be an intro. There's gonna be a literature review There's gonna be data an argument and a conclusion now, especially when we talk about monographs or longer Research articles that implicitly read they're implicitly written not to be read in the consecutive order now You'll see in a lot of monographs that kind of a central idea gets repeated in many chapters or in many times And this isn't a bad thing. It's just taking into account how your readers might engage with a text Which I think is a really great thing to do. Also, these texts are written to be in a sustained dialogue with existing texts Now I also Sorry, I've already mentioned a little bit about assuming disciplinary training Well, this allows us to do is we can assume that our readers have probably read certain texts And we can talk about those texts and think about how they relate to the text that you're writing Now another feature of academic writing is that there's generally an aversion towards speculation and personal reflection I think especially in the social sciences as this idea of reproducibility and I intentionally put this in You know quotation marks this idea that anyone could write this piece or anyone could do this research Therefore, you know, I'm not in the piece. It's objective So that's how I generally think about academic writing as a genre and it's not a criticism or a praise of it I just think that's how it works blog articles on the other hand are a very different genre and I have the very different set of Concerns and constructions that said it's a much looser genre and it's highly dependent on the publication So if you take one thing away from the speech today, it's that if you're writing Whoever you're writing for try to learn about them as a publication, you know Read some pieces they've written maybe contact the editor and learn about what they're interested in and how they work But if I want to talk in general terms about blog articles, we can say they're written for a general audience and that means that you assume less prior knowledge shorter pieces are read are written to be read in a single sitting So you don't have to constantly signpost or constantly return to a central point It's a narrative nonfiction. That means you're developing an account There's a beginning middle and an end instead of an introduction and a conclusion These pieces usually don't end where they started There's a development throughout the piece an argument is developed in that progress rather than stated and articulated throughout the piece Blog articles are also a great place to engage with a perspective a point of view and really bring forward your personal insights So now that we can talk about Academic writing as a genre and we talk about blog articles as a genre How do we move across those two genres because I've seen some great examples of a piece that came from an You know a thesis that was then reworked into a really successful Blog article. So I want to give nine translation tips for how to move that process So the first tips are all about broader framing issues. I think the most important part of this is audience shift So the tip I would give you is to learn how to picture your imagined audience Now the most important question to ask yourself is who are you writing this piece for? So again, I said if you're writing a piece for a class, you're writing it for that professor If you're writing a piece for an academic journal, you're reading it for you're writing it for readers of that journal That question is going to be different for public scholarship And you need to think about who the reader is and why do they care? And what do they already know also crucial is what do you want them to learn and what can you tell them I? Really encourage people to think specifically about this and not to think abstractly about you know groups of readers or cohorts But try to think of someone specifically when you're writing now whenever I write something for talent insight I have been a few names of people I follow on Twitter that I know read my articles and I write for them and think you know Would they like this piece? Would they know this? Would they care about this? And I think you can do that too And if you're not sure exactly who that person may be you can ask your publication and say Who generally reads this who is the audience? Because different audiences things care about different things Now Secondly once we've done this broader shift of moving the audience We really need to reframe the piece and why it's important and why it's new I think we need to move from theoretical importance to empirically importance Now, especially I think in the social sciences We like to think that Our concept or a piece of research is relevant because we can draw Generally articulated principles from them that have a broader application Right, you know when you're researching democracy in Taiwan It can tell us something about East Asian democracies or new democracies or democracies broader But I don't think blog articles have to be framed that way Sometimes a great story is important in and of itself So you should always ask why someone should care about this topic and exactly what's new in your piece But how you answer that question can be very genre specific Some things are empirically interesting even if they are not theoretically important Sometimes a story is good in and of itself Sometimes there doesn't need to be a general principle that can be drawn from it Now I'd like to give two examples of this So the first example I would like to give is from my undergraduate thesis Which is something I turned into an article for Taiwan Insight Now if I had to sum up my undergraduate thesis in a single sentence I would say that transitions in party politics and immediate systems affect how and when safety might become a political issue And who can define what safety means When I came to write this for Taiwan Insight how I framed the piece and why it's important changed a lot Even though it was about the same story So if I had to give a one line summary of that article I would say that the 1990s were a time of great demographic a democratic progress in Taiwan But also a deepening anxieties about crime and safety across the political spectrum So both these quotes are referring to one piece of research But written for very different contexts now sometimes this translation doesn't actually have to be that big So another piece of research I've been working on Is about fun in the government zero community So the academic framing of this is that social movements literature overlooks the political Potentials of positive emotions such as fun Now I think this point actually worked relatively well for a broader audience So when I came to write that for Taiwan Insight My point was that fun can be a motivator of political action But in both cases you can see that exactly what's relevant What's interesting on what's new is framed in a different way Now building on this and broadening out a little bit I think an important translation is also to move from writing for a specific discipline to writing to a region Now I've already mentioned that you know if you're writing for a paper or if you're writing for an article You're usually writing for a specific audience. So, you know, I'm a sociologist by training So when I write things it's for sociology and why it tells us about sociological principles But for Taiwan Insight I'm writing about Taiwan or group or set of people in Taiwan Now this distinction I'll talk about a little bit more But it's important to think about you know why these people interesting regardless of the broader principles and Why this region is interesting and that doesn't mean you have to abandon your training But it's more crucial to think about what can your discipline teach us and why should non-specialists cap So another example I would give of this is a paper written by one of my classmates So the essay was talking about mother-child relationships as a mechanism for the reproduction of social inequality in Taiwan It's a very sociological point that you know was done very well But I didn't think it worked for Taiwan Insight So when we came to rework this piece for Taiwan Insight the piece was about stigma faced by signal mothers in Taiwan Now why this point is interesting is because of the mothers themselves their stories and their life experiences Same piece of research but framed in different ways Now having said all this I think it's really crucial that we can Still work with theory and frame it in a different way I would never suggest you have to abandon theory Or you have to dumb down anything you think might be too complex or too abstract Most theoretical ideas can be useful when worked in a way When presenting them in a way that doesn't assume prior knowledge about the concept So for example, if you use an essay that builds on historical institutionalism Perhaps you write it for a general audience in a way that highlights the way that past experiences shape our system works now So again, I'm still using this theory and using this idea But I'm not assuming any prior knowledge of historical institutionalism and I'm not This specifically speaking to that canon Now another example, perhaps you're discussing the modernization theory of democratization You can still write about that for a general audience But it will become instead thinking about how and whether economic development tends to lead to democratization So again, you don't have to abandon your discipline. You don't have to abandon theory But you have to make it work in a new context so the Next few points are about writing style and prose and narrative rather than overall framing And the crucial thing here is moving from a whole to a part So it really encouraged you not to condense an entire thesis into 1000 words You have to be very length Considerate in whatever context, right? If you're writing a 10,000 word thesis, you can't write 15,000 words Similarly, if you're given 1000 words for a blog article, you can't write 1500 words So with that in mind, you should never try to do too much I often reach out to people and say, you know, this thesis I saw you work. It's really interesting. Can you write a piece for me? And I just get that whole thing condensed into 1000 words and it just reads like an abstract what I think is much A much more successful strategy is to take one chapter or the most interesting point of your thesis and write a piece on that And the great thing about that is then you can stretch it out into two pieces or three pieces or more, right? I would much rather see one argument explained in full than three things explained poorly Now another way to think about this or another example of this is thinking about how much interview data or how many characters you can Introduce now. I was recently asked whether I have a limit on the amount of characters I allow authors to introduce in an article I don't but I do think it's important to consider how many names and how many people I have to remember So if you're dealing a lot with interview data, I don't want 1000 words of just quotes of six different people because it's hard to It's hard to develop a consistent thread through that So you have to be very considerate of the length you're given Another aspect of this is if you're writing 1000 words or 1500 words You can assume that a piece will be read in one sitting And every word counts a lot more So I really encourage people to move away from signposting now What I mean by signposting is in this essay I will or the next section will show or my argument has three sections or in conclusion I have shown that that's signposting It's telling me where I'm going to go as a reader Because the readers are going to engage with this text in a much more linear and direct way I don't think it needs that Similarly a conclusion doesn't need to be a direct overview of the content If a piece is five it takes five minutes to read I remember what I read five minutes ago That doesn't mean you don't need any conclusion But it can look very different it can move the piece in a new direction It can be forward-looking it can be reflective I think with a shortened piece you don't need to end where you started and you could move and progress The narrative in an interesting way to conclude the piece I think of this as about showing not telling Don't say I'm going to write I'm going to tell you about this Good writing guides its readers through the prose Good writing tells me why we're going by going there And good writing embeds conclusions throughout the text So to every paragraph I know what I'm meant to learn by the end of the paragraph Now a broader point we can draw from this is the idea of moving from argument to narrativity And I really encourage people to embrace narrativity And I've already talked about kind of empirical richness But I really want to stress that empirical detail and story is important in and of itself It doesn't need to serve a single point Story have a writing or story that has a beginning The progress is that tells a dynamic story is very good and successful in in these blog article contexts And it's a great point It's a great way to express a point of view and tell an interesting story So you know sometimes I've had people writing about You know certain government reforms, but it's not it doesn't have to be about the government reforms Themself in their effect, but just kind of a historical story and what did it look like before And what did it look like afterwards? So you don't need to have a central point and articulate that point You can do something that progresses This might be a bit more abstract, but I think this context of narrativity and kind of Writing in a way that isn't about an argument per se is really crucial if it can be done well Now another way to think about this is moving from objectivity to speculation And I put objectivity and quotes because you know I don't personally think that objectivity is ever fully possible And I also don't think that you know blind speculation is good But I think the blog articles can be a really great way to you know express a point of view So I talked a little bit about academic writing as a genre One thing that's really clear is that academic writing doesn't like Forward-facing speculation So you know we write about what's happened and what we know Know what we think might happen two years from now Blog articles can be a really great place But if you've got all this data and you really know this topic To talk about what you think might happen or to express your point of view Or just generally put yourself into the piece in some ways In a blog article context, a view from somewhere is always better than a view from nowhere And you can weave in personal experiences in a way that doesn't underwrite your context Or underwrite your argument or your account But rather builds on it and makes a piece more unique and interesting to readers So finally, I think this is one of the more complex points And it's something that I'm actually not that good at and I'm still learning to do well But it's this point of giving context where relevant So again, if you have 1000 words, you can't spend too much of it explaining key terms Or giving all the historical context, you can only give context where relevant So you have to learn how to explain a term in no more words than is necessary At the same time, people won't follow an argument if they don't know the moving pieces So we do have to explain things but do it shortly So an example is that I write about the government zero community in my thesis Now, whenever I write about this in my thesis, you know, I've got pages about their history And what they stand for and I could write a long piece about this In 1000 words, what you're going to get is something like government zero As a decentralized civic tech community that advocates transparency Open source technology and civic participation Another example, you know, if you're writing about Lee Dong-hui, you could write A whole biography of him, you could write a whole book about him But on first mention, you should say something like Taiwan's first democratically elected president It's simple and it tells me what I need to know without giving me too much detail Of course, exactly what is relevant will depend on the piece So this is just something to keep in mind and think about What do I need to say and what can I leave out Now, I started this piece talking about writing Taiwan for a general audience And I work at Taiwan Insight and my background is Taiwan Studies So I'd like to give a little bit of advice specifically for writing Taiwan and how to think about this Now, the first point I would make is that it's the exactly how to write Taiwan Or what's interesting about Taiwan is going to be very dependent on the publication So you have to think about who you're writing for So for example, Taiwan Insight is written for people who care about Taiwan Who are interested in Taiwan and already have some prior knowledge Now, if you're writing for something which has a broader East Asian perspective Or a regional perspective, you're going to assume a little less knowledge If you're writing for something that isn't interested in Taiwan at all Then of course, you're going to assume even less background knowledge And you'll have to think about why Taiwan is interesting So it's not really important that you're just generally following English language coverage of Taiwan And you generally know what are the narratives What's fresh, what's already been said Of course, you don't need to read everything But when you're writing about Taiwan in the English language You're part of an English language conversation about Taiwan That's true about academic pieces But it's also true about the news and blog articles So support and learn from existing publications Now I mentioned this point earlier But I think it's really important to think about whether you're writing about Taiwan A group of people in Taiwan Because sometimes people say to me You know, I want to make Taiwan more visible Or I care a lot about Taiwan How do I get people to know about Taiwan? You know, that's a great goal But sometimes it's just more important to tell stories of people in Taiwan And you know, for me, for example, Government Zero is interesting as an activist community In and of itself Not because it's in Taiwan And I can tell a story about Government Zero That isn't a story about Taiwan Now, of course, I have to talk about Taiwan to explain Government Zero But the focus is on the community and these people I think once you frame it that way Not only is it a great way to get into the narrative But it allows you not to have to explain everything about Taiwan It avoids you having to get the cliches of, you know A move likely to anger China or whatever If it's about the people or if it's about a specific group Then how that story works Or what is a Taiwan story can be framed differently Now, a final point I want to make And I say this is a Taiwan-specific point But it's not, of course, it's relevant for wherever you're writing about But I'm talking about Taiwan So I'll put it in the Taiwan context But when you're writing for a broader audience Or in an academic context I think it's really important to try to support local voices It, wherever you can And in your blog article or in the piece, you know Try to find out what's been written in Taiwan about this Highlight those voices and engage with those voices And if you have the skills to do it Translating is a really great way of doing public scholarship There are a lot of great blogs here in Taiwan That do these type of articles And have published successful pieces That would get a broader audience if you public If you translate them into English And it's also a good way to learn what makes a piece work So this is something I personally try to do when I advocate And I'm not saying don't write your own pieces Or, you know, don't get your research out there But I'm saying you can do both And there are multiple ways to do public scholarship Okay, so this is a broad summary of what I've talked about I know I've briefly, I know I talked about before About against conclusions But I think in the genre of PowerPoint presentation conclusions are still good So recognize genres, consider your readership Reframe a topic and think about what's interesting About the topic and embrace narrativity So that's everything I have today Thank you so much for listening Please don't hesitate to get in touch If you're interested about this process Or talking about the PowerPoint Or if you're interested in writing for Talent Insight I'm very happy to talk about that Please check out Talent Insight I think we do a pretty good job Of putting out interesting content on Taiwan Feel free to check out my Twitter Some of it's Talent related, some of it's not But yeah, it would be great to hear from people And yeah, thank you for listening