New online class: Academic Writing for the Public
Also a new short essay on battling successive infestations in a new home.
Two months ago, Texas froze. Because our power infrastructure here wasn’t prepared for the single-digit temperatures, much of the state — including my house — lost power for several days when we needed it most.
To make sense of what was going on, I looked for authoritative voices on Twitter who could explain why the system failed and when it might recover. One voice cut through the usual social-media nonsense: Princeton engineering professor Jesse Jenkins.
In his tweets, Jenkins, an energy expert, showed where politicians’ accounts of the disaster were wrong. He shared charts and graphs of the dip in megawatt production as the temperature dropped. He explained weird acronyms. By the end of that frigid week, he had published an op-ed in the New York Times that made a case for how to prevent similar blackouts in the future. Jenkins had helped me and many others understand our lives and world.
Jenkins’s article was a perfect example of how academic expertise can serve the public. Through years of research, a typical academic builds up knowledge that few have but many need. And often, the public needs that knowledge on short notice. But the writing habits that academics use while building up that knowledge are not always well-suited to communicating with the general public in a timely manner.
To help academics build the habits they will need to bring their ideas to a larger audience, I am offering a class that starts next month on Academic Writing for the Public. It is based on my experience of having to learn new skills and habits of mind so I could shift from writing mainly for academic journals to writing for outlets like The New Republic, New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, America, Commonweal, The Hedgehog Review, The Point, and elsewhere.
The class begins on May 24th and will run for five weeks. It will be conducted entirely online and asynchronously. Each week, students will read a craft essay by me on an aspect of academic writing for the public, read and discuss examples of the skill the craft essay highlights, practice those skills with writing exercises, and receive feedback from me. They will also workshop one short op-ed and one longer essay, with feedback from me and other participants. By the end of the class, each student will have two potential articles and a pitch they can send to editors.
The class will cost $295. As a newsletter subscriber, you can receive a 15% discount by using the promo code NEWSLETTER. This code will be valid only through April 18, so please register soon if you’re interested! There are also a limited number of 50% discounts available to part-time faculty, adjuncts, and grad students; that promo code is FIFTY.
You can learn more about the class here, and if you’re ready to sign up, click this button:
If you have questions, just reply to this email. I hope to work with some of you in this class! And if you know of academics who might be interested in the class, please share this message with them.
I am also once again offering my Spiritual Nonfiction writing class through Writing Workshops. That one begins June 28th, running for eight weeks. I am always so impressed by the work students produce in this class. One student has an essay coming out soon, and I can’t wait to share it with you!
Sign up for Writing Workshops’ newsletter, and you’ll get promo codes you can use to get a discount on registration for my class and others’. Not only am I a Writing Workshops instructor, I’m also a student.
I have a new short essay in Notre Dame Magazine about a succession of infestations that my wife and I endured after we bought our house a year ago. I won’t spoil the grossness by telling you what the infestations were. The essay is also about how life and death are tethered and chase each other around, sometimes in our crawl spaces, and always, whether we know it or not, in our own bodies. You can read “Space Invaders” here.
This issue of Notre Dame Magazine also features an essay, really a litany, on goodness by one of my writing mentors, Michael McGregor. Notre Dame is an excellent (and free!) magazine that has won numerous awards. You don’t need to have gone to Notre Dame to read it; I didn’t go there, and yet they are kind enough to let me write for it. It’s always a pleasure to appear in their pages.
Thank you for reading!
Jon