Till now, we have largely focused on the genre of academic writing. However, there is increasing recognition that for our academic insights to be effective, it is important to also be able to communicate in moles which reach larger audiences. This is where writing for popular media comes into the picture. In this video, we will focus on guidelines for writing for popular media as an important way in which informed opinions can be relate to a much wider audience. It is crucial to first understand how writing for popular media is different from academic writing, which we have focused on till now in this course. One of the most defining differences between academic writing and writing in popular media, like newspapers, blogs, and on social media platforms has to do with audience. We have already learned that the audience tends to be specialized in academic writing. That is, we write for those who are already familiar to varying degrees with a specialized field of research in question. Hence, we can assume that the audience might be familiar with certain concepts or contexts in this case. However, when we write on popular media or newspapers, this audience is broadened in qualitative base. Our audience technically could be anyone, a student, a lay person, an elderly person, an academic, a teenager, a college dropout. The list is unending. This implies that our audience will not be familiar at all with any specialized or even basic knowledge about the topic in question. We might have to give clear information about the topic at hand, as well as familiarize our audience with the context. This difference in audiences is a double-edged sword. While on the one hand, we can reach a much larger and diverse audience, we will also have to work harder to get across to an audience who will have very little or no specialized knowledge of our topic. If the audiences are radically different, then the way we communicate our insights will also have to defer corresponding to these altered audiences. Specialized language or jargon is the second important axis of difference between academic writing and writing for popular media. Given the specialized audience's familiarity with theoretical concepts and context of a specific area of research in academic writing, academic scholars have a much larger leeway to use discipline-specific language or refer to specialized concepts. For instance, the term soft power or hegemony carry a specific meaning in international relations theory. An academic specialists will understand the broad context within which these terms are used. However, the same words might not be familiar too, and my tends confuse a non-specialist audience if used in writing for popular media. Another important way in which communicating to an academic audience differs from communicating to a layer or general audience is the length of our writing. We have seen that academic papers or dissertations range between 10,000-20,000 words. However, when we have to write for a general non-specialist audience, this length reduces drastically. This isn't the interests of catching our reader's attention and conveying our point in the shortest duration possible. An editorial does not go beyond 750-800 words, while a blog post ranges from anywhere between 500 words to 2,500 words. That is comparatively tight. Last, the objectives for writing in the academic genre and in popular media might also differ. While in both cases we write in order to persuade our respective audience about our viewpoint, the need for persuasion might be more immediate while writing in popular media, since we tend to write about topical issues or issues which are relevant to the general public. But let's not forget some fundamental ways in which writing in both these genres share certain characteristics. What doesn't change, even as we move from academic writing to writing for popular media is the presence of a strong clear argument. Especially in an editorial or a blog post, it needs to revolve around the single well-articulated point or argument to be considered as a well-written essay. Just as an academic writing, our argument and an editorial essay or a blog post has to be well-researched and based upon credible verifiable evidence. Last an editorial or a blog post, just like an academic paper, is not merely reporting of evidence, but has to embody strongly the author's voice, their unique style and rhetoric in persuading the readers of their argument. Of course, the style and degree of rhetoric used in academic writing is far more restrained and formal as compared to writing an editorial or blog post, given the difference in the audiences. In this video, we focused on the convergences and divergences between writing in the academic genre and writing for popular media, including writing editorials or blogs. We saw that writing for popular media differs from academic writing in some respects. But certain other aspects like having a central point and an evidence-based argument stays common between both these forms of writing. Thank you.
