How to Write for a General Audience: A Guide for Academics Who Want to Share Their Knowledge with the World and Have Fun Doing It (review)

Yet another self-help book for the academic author? How many of these books do we need? Ask any editor and he or she will probably say there aren't enough, or, at least, that the authors who need to read such books aren't doing so. Yet How to Write for a General Audience (HWGA) isn't quite the same as many of the others, in that it encourages academic authors to spread their wings and write for a broader audience, rather than the handful of experts in the field who usually read their papers. Nevertheless, HWGA includes many suggestions that are more generally applicable.

But surely academics are paid a salary to enable them, at least for part of the time, to write for other academics; why write for anyone else? That is, most academics write for an informed, albeit limited, circle of scholarly specialists. HWGA encourages the academic to write for an interested, larger, and wider audience. How is writing for many different from writing for a select group? Certainly, the element of debate with a small circle of like-minded experts is removed; although a general audience may still be disputatious, it is also more likely to regard Professor A or Dr B as carrying tablets of stone. Yet a more general audience can be broad, but still informed; in my own field, magazines such as Geology Today are popular with amateurs, students, and professionals alike.

Kathleen Kendall-Tackett has written a book of many parts. Some of her ideas were already well known to me, while other suggestions were new, but all are interesting and well presented; as a member of a general audience (a geologist), the author (a health psychologist) kept me enthralled. Her style is both informative and persuasive, not least where examples and quotations provide support for her key ideas and recommendations. The first eight chapters deal with general themes that apply equally to writing articles and writing books. Kendall-Tackett's approach is instructive, informative, and full of ideas on good presentation of academic concepts. There follow five chapters on book proposals, contracts, and marketing, perhaps not so broadly relevant but a useful primer for anyone writing or editing a first book.

Chapter 2, 'Finding Time to Write: Time Management for Writers,' has something for all of us. The wall between productive writing and procrastination is thin;¹ writing takes time, so any writer must make time to write.² I also support the idea (18) that a productive author reads widely.³ This is something that I do naturally, and it has dawned on me only recently that my habit of reading at least a book per week feeds back into my writing in many ways, from improving my vocabulary to highlighting ideas in other fields that are applicable to my own. One of my own ways of encouraging progress when writing is to count the number of words after every writing session and record the latest figure at the end of the text, along with the date and time. This indicates my progress (or otherwise) every time I sit down to write. Even on days when writing is almost crowded out of my schedule, grabbing fifteen minutes to tidy a paragraph of a paper in preparation (as I'm doing right now) enables me to progress on that project, however minimally. Kendall-Tackett includes a section in this chapter on writing as a parent. At least three times per week I get up at least two hours before the children do; this works for me, but it is good to see other potential solutions mentioned.

Chapter 3, 'Why We...