All my adult life I have written both for academic journals and for more popular outlets like newspapers and magazines. Generally speaking the former do not pay, the latter do. I started with the British Journal of Political Science in 1971 and received my first cheque from The Countryman in 1972. Academic writing meant to me a sense of solidity of achievement and professional status while the more popular media meant a broader audience but also money. For the record I was paid £20 for my first article which translates to £200 now. I doubt if a young academic would have quite the same incentive to write in a popular style as I had even if he or she thought it was compatible with their efforts directed at research assessment: in the current decade the most I have ever been paid for an article is £700 whereas in the 1980s I received £750 and $1000 at best, in current values more than three times as much. Of course the internet is to blame.
The interesting questions are about how the two kinds of writing differ. I should specify that I was not one of those academics whose paid writing was completely separate from their academic work like Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) or G.D.H.Cole. I wrote about the same things in both contexts – politics, sport, the environment and education being the principal topics. I was always unwilling to call myself a “writer”: nearly everybody writes something, I didn’t make a living out of it and if you said you were a writer many people would assume fiction – or that they should have heard of you. Instead I have said I am an “essayist”. It was the relatively short writings of the likes of David Hume and George Orwell that made me think, “I want to do that”. And most of the great essayists had day jobs.
The question of how the two kinds of writing differ can be divided into two parts – how the writing is done and how it is processed. And although some basic techniques such as choosing vocabulary and constructing paragraphs are superficially similar I would argue that in many respects the two kinds of writing are opposites as techniques. In writing a marketable essay your first objective is to attract attention. In practice that means a subject, an approach and probably an opening that a specific editor believes will secure the attention of his or her readership as they envisage them. That’s partly about the editor – who may be wrong about his audience or trying to change them – and only partly about the audience. Thus a change of editor could be most important: a magazine I wrote regularly for changed editors and the new man told me, “I’m not remotely interested in sport or what goes on in the North of England”. The message was pretty clear. But it is also clear that in commercial writing you have to aim at a specific target; it would rarely work that you write an article thinking that it might do for the Daily Globe or the London Magazine or whatever.
The target you have in mind when writing academically is your “peers”, a limited number of people writing about the same or similar subjects who have to read what you write. Whereas commercial writing is an attack – you are seeking to grab attention – academic writing has a huge defensive dimension. We do, after all, actually talk traditionally about “defending” a thesis and part of one’s thinking must be along the lines of “Can I actually reference that? . . . Have I shown sufficient awareness of all the aspects and arguments involved?”
To illustrate this I set myself the task of picking a passage from one of the dozen or so books in my study which have been recently received for review or comment. I allowed myself five minutes but the task took thirty seconds as I opened an edited book and read:
While social class, income, nationality and race are important factors influencing the experience of mountaineering and ability to travel to high-altitude mountains, gender has persisted as a key category of identity, difference and inequality within climbing and mountaineering cultures.
The subject (different perceptions of Mt. Everest) is interesting. But there are here upwards of a dozen abstract nouns in a single three line sentence which expresses an observation which, to put it politely, is far from surprising and might have been said very simply. It’s as if the author is saying, “I’m aware of all aspects so don’t mark me down on that score”.
And it is a sentence completely innocent of any jargon in the sense of terminology which only a specialist would understand. I remember my father looking at my first book and remarking that it was full of jargon. He was an educated man, but his education was entirely in the humanities whereas mine was in philosophy and the social sciences so I had to acknowledge that he was right. It is jargon that most often distances academic writing from writing for a broad market. The distance is vast in much of natural science and social studies and even vaster sometimes in forms of cultural and literary theory. Traditional big event historians seem the most immune. Of course jargon can become part of the common language as successful academic inventions like “sub-culture” or “supply and demand” or “QUANGO” achieve common currency. But a great deal of academic discourse remains obscure and, worse, is part of a temporary fashion. When I studied politics, for example, in the early 1960s “corporatism” and “civil society” were obscure and anachronistic terms, but they were revived with intensely disputed meanings in respectively the 1980s and 1990s.
I was party to an almost experimental relation between academic and normal writing insofar as for many years I wrote for and knew the editor of the social studies weekly magazine New Society. What happened quite often was that researchers would be asked to turn their 10,000 word journal article into a 2500 word piece for a much larger market. This required being briefer (obviously), more assertive and less qualified. Usually it would also require that one should try to open with something that seized the reader’s attention. It was clear that some people took to this like a duck to water with a sense of being unshackled, but it made others very nervous and they found it extremely difficult.
If you have an article you need a title and nothing distinguishes the two kinds of writing quite like the issue of titles. Titles are important whether we talk about books or articles and academic or commercial writing. After all, whatever it is you have written far more people are going to read the title than the text. But in commercial writing if there exists a person – an editor or sub-editor – who regards it as their job to give titles to articles then that is what will happen. They will be entirely convinced that they have the knack of attracting the public’s attention and that you don’t. What is more the method that they seem to think works best is to reference an existing title of a song or novel. Thus in well over half a century of writing for money I have rarely got my own title onto the printed page. I haven’t kept a record, but I can quote some recent examples. During Covid I finally got round to reading the letters my father had sent to my mother during the three and a half years he had been away from her during the war. It turned into an essay about how different the experience of life (and especially of marriage) was for someone born in 1946 as opposed to 1912. Of course, as an “essayist” I would have liked to call it, “On Reading my Father’s Letters to My Mother”, but nobody would allow me to get away with that. I actually called it “A Box of Love Letters”. It appeared as “A Kind of Loving” which is the title of Stan Barstow’s 1960 best-selling novel and the subsequent 1962 film. “Two Kinds of Loving” would have been both more accurate and more original.
At least in academic writing you normally get to use your own title. But is that a good thing? There’s an interesting approach to that question in an LSE blog written in 2014 by Patrick Dunleavy called “Why do academics choose useless titles for articles and chapters? Four steps to getting a better title.” (That, presumably, is a good title? I offer no opinion.) The argument is that academics tend to abuse this freedom by being “cute” or obscure or silly-clever, by implying that their tiny topic is far bigger or more significant than it really is and by stuffing in unnecessary references (typically classical or Shakespearean). It is as if the constrained world of the academic article allows one bizarre shot at self-expression. Do they think they are attracting attention? Or defiantly showing that they don’t care? Again you can pull out literally a million examples instantly so I offer, “A Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose, but Exactly What Is a Gastric Adenocarcinoma?” (Journal of Surgical Oncology, 1998, capitals as in original). For the record my favourite academic title is H.A.Prichard’s “Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?” in Mind 1912.
But a difference between the two genres which is arguably bigger than the title issue is the question of references. I was introduced to university work via the Oxford tutorial system. You read an essay twice a week to a tutor. There were no references whatsoever. You just said things about the appointed topic with a view to keeping the tutor awake, providing some ideas that might be discussed or sounding interesting. People often jest that the system prepares people for Prime Minister’s Question Time or panel shows rather than scholarship, but I submit that it is also a much better training for writing in the broader sense than is what goes on in most universities where you have to hand in written material that demonstrates that you have read the prescribed texts and can quote and reference them.
So I never referenced anything until the time came to publish, but I did learn to like footnoting (or endnoting if you must) because you can bung all sorts of things in there including jokes and anecdotes as well as references. But what I really loathe is the Harvard system of referencing which has become the norm in most academic publishing. From the point of view of a writer it is clumsy and pointless. You are supposed to list sources and then refer to them in brackets in the text. What do you put on the list?: I’ve been reading for well over 70 years and it’s all relevant. What do you mean when you put something on the list? That you are cognisant of it? That you’ve read it? Learned from it? Know what you’re saying only because of it? What is the point of, “The Battle of Hastings was fought in 1066.” (Smith, 2025) – you should reference only when statements are little known or disputed. And when you say, “The Battle of Hastings was the most important battle in English history” (Smith, 2025) do you mean you’re saying that or that Smith is saying that? The whole thing seems fraught with ambiguity and potential deceit quite apart from breaking up prose in an ugly way.
For half a century I played cricket with academic scientists. In most cases they enjoyed their research and found it satisfying, but in many cases they dreaded what they called “writing up”. I, on the other hand, loved language and loved writing, but found academic writing increasingly fraught because it became more and more distant from good writing.
Lincoln Allison February 2025
(An edited version of this article was published by Times Higher Education in March 2025.)