In a piece recently published in Inside Higher Ed, Christopher Schaberg and Ian Bogost discuss their experiences trying to get academics to write for broader audiences and pinpoint ten particular challenges that academics have in reaching wider audiences. They are certainly right that academics have challenges reaching a wider audience. As one who has struggled, with mixed results, to make my own scholarship more accessible, I have long believed that this is a far more significant problem than academics usually admit. The preference that many, probably most, scholars (particularly in the humanities) have for writing for their peers rather than broader audiences has had, to my mind, two rather severe consequences. The first is that it leaves a vacuum for others with far less expert knowledge to fill. There is, for example, a wide audience for writing about religion, even from a non-confessional vantage point. When I refuse to write accessibly about religion because I am afraid of dealing with matters with which I do not have deep expert knowledge (which is necessary in almost all accessible writing) I leave the door open for others, with even less expert knowledge. Someone will write these books and when scholars do […]
↧