If you have a PhD, you spent somewhere between three and seven years learning to write for an audience of about twelve people. Your supervisor, your examiners, and the five or six researchers in the world who work on exactly the same niche problem. You learned to write with precision, caution, and rigour. You learned to qualify every claim, cite every source, and never — under any circumstances — say anything that could not be defended in a seminar room.
These are essential skills for a working academic. They are catastrophic habits for anyone trying to communicate with the public.
Here are five things your academic training taught you that you need to unlearn — and what to do instead.
Lesson 1: Start With the Background
What academia teaches you: Every journal article begins with a literature review. Before you can say anything new, you must demonstrate that you understand everything that came before. You situate your work in the existing scholarship, acknowledge the intellectual tradition, and only then — after several pages of context — do you state your contribution.
Why it fails in public communication: The general reader does not care what the existing scholarship says. They do not need to know that your work builds on the tradition of X and extends the findings of Y. They need to know, within the first thirty seconds, what you found and why it matters. If you make them read three paragraphs of context first, they will not reach paragraph four.
What to do instead: Lead with the most interesting thing — the finding, the implication, the human story. Context comes later, if it is needed at all. The reader who is interested enough to keep reading will absorb your context naturally. The reader who is not interested enough will leave before your context even starts.
Lesson 2: Qualify Everything
What academia teaches you: Hedge every claim. "These findings suggest." "The results may indicate." "Further research is needed." Hedging is a survival skill in academia. It protects you from criticism, acknowledges the limits of your work, and signals that you are a careful, responsible scholar. A strong, unqualified claim is a target — and someone will take aim at it.
Why it fails in public communication: A paragraph full of hedges communicates nothing. "The results of this study may tentatively suggest the possibility that the intervention could potentially lead to improved outcomes in some circumstances" — this is not communication. It is throat-clearing dressed up as rigour. The reader finishes the sentence with no idea what was actually found.
What to do instead: Be clear about what you know and what you do not know. You can say "We found that X causes Y" without adding fifteen qualifiers. If there are genuine limitations — small sample size, short time frame, specific population — state them plainly. "The study was small — just 80 patients — so the findings need to be confirmed in a larger trial." This is honest, and it is still clear.
Lesson 3: Write for Your Peers
What academia teaches you: Your audience knows the field. They speak the same language. They share your references. You can use terms like "epistemological," "neoliberal," "poststructuralist," "spin-orbit coupling," or "confounding variable" without definition, because they are part of the shared vocabulary of your discipline. Defining them would waste everyone's time and make you look like you do not trust your reader's intelligence.
Why it fails in public communication: The public does not speak your language. A term like "epigenetic modification" is a locked door. The reader hits it, stops, and either skips past (losing the thread) or gives up entirely. Every piece of jargon is a reason to stop reading. Enough of them, and the reader will stop.
What to do instead: Assume your reader is intelligent but has no background in your field. Define every technical term on first use — briefly, in plain English, without condescension. "The researchers studied epigenetics — changes in how genes are expressed, rather than changes to the genes themselves." One short sentence and the door is open. The reader can keep going.
Lesson 4: Prioritise Completeness Over Interest
What academia teaches you: A journal article must be complete. You cannot just report the interesting finding. You must also describe the methodology, acknowledge the limitations, discuss the implications for theory, and suggest directions for future research. Leaving something out is a weakness — a sign that the work is not fully thought through.
Why it fails in public communication: Completeness is the enemy of readability. A magazine article that tries to communicate everything about a piece of research will communicate nothing, because the reader will not finish it. The most interesting finding will be buried under a mountain of detail. The reader does not need to know your sample size, your statistical method, or your theoretical framework. They need to know what you found and why it matters.
What to do instead: Choose. You cannot tell the whole story, so tell the best part of it. Pick the most interesting finding, the most compelling angle, the most surprising implication. Lead with that. Develop it. Let the rest go. If someone wants the full picture, the journal article is waiting for them. Your job is not to replicate the paper. Your job is to make someone want to know more.
Lesson 5: Avoid Personality
What academia teaches you: Academic writing is impersonal. The author disappears behind the passive voice. "The experiment was conducted." "The data were analysed." "It was observed that..." The first person is rarely used, and when it is, it is the collective first person — "we" — which means the research team, not an individual human being with a personality and a point of view. Academic writing is writing without an author. It is supposed to be universal, not personal.
Why it fails in public communication: Readers connect with people, not with institutions. A paragraph that begins "The University of X is pleased to announce..." tells the reader nothing about who did the work, why they did it, or what it was like to be part of it. It reads like a form letter. A paragraph that begins "Dr Sarah Chen has been chasing this question for fifteen years..." tells the reader there is a human being at the centre of this story — someone worth paying attention to.
What to do instead: Put the researcher in the story. Use their name. Use their quotes. Use details that reveal character — the way they describe their work, the things that surprised them, the moments that made them think they were wrong. Personality is not a distraction from the research. It is the reason anyone reads about research at all.
The Hardest Lesson
Unlearning academic writing habits is not easy, because those habits served you well for years. They got you through a PhD. They got your papers published. They are part of your professional identity.
But they are not serving you now — not when you are trying to reach an audience that does not share your training, your vocabulary, or your incentives. That audience needs clarity, not qualification. Story, not comprehensiveness. Personality, not impersonality.
If you are a researcher trying to write for the public — or a comms professional trying to help researchers do it — the single most useful thing you can do is recognise that academic writing and public writing are different skills. Being good at one does not make you good at the other. And the way to get better at public writing is not to do more of what you were trained to do. It is to do the opposite.
At Stokel Publishing, we specialise in bridging this gap. We interview researchers — in their own language, on their own terms — and translate what they tell us into stories that non-specialists can understand and enjoy. The researcher does not have to unlearn anything. We do the translation. If your institution produces research that deserves a wider audience, we can help.