One of the goals of an Advanced Writing (CADW) class is teaching specialized arguments in an area of study. To students, it can feel like a bit of a jump.

We ask them to learn very nuanced writing strategies, where effectiveness is a matter of degree and approach, at the same time as they gradually develop awareness of the context they write within. In the words of one researcher, students must discern “when to tune up or down [their] level of commitment to assertions; whether and how to comment on the significance of evidence; when and how to engage with alternative perspectives; how to construct a text that engages with the imagined reader; and many other interpersonal considerations,” all of which are highly specific to their discipline (273-4).

One approach receiving attention for its potential to help students make this transition from lower to upper division writing is teaching popularized versions of scholarly research. Popularization, the act of transforming expert knowledge for more general audiences, is most often associated with science writing, but can be seen across the academic disciplines. Some common examples are journalism (ranging from trustworthy to more click-bait-ish), TED talks, academic blogs, and arguments informing public debates and policy.

Students report they enjoy reading popularizations. This makes sense, as they are written to be engaging (and tend to be short). Some are great examples of using metaphor, playing with humor, and rendering complex topics in chatty, informal registers. But how could teaching popular writing, with its obvious distinctions from “real” disciplinary writing, help students make progress toward the next step of expertise?

Here are a few ideas:

Teach examples of “good” popularization: Researchers who study popularization contend that these texts don’t just “dumb things down.” Writing them requires the rhetorical skill of recontextualizing knowledge. This means selecting, condensing, emphasizing, and transforming source content. Good popularization accomplishes all this while still retaining values and conventions of the disciplinary context it originated in. In other words, chemists popularize like other chemists, and do so while retaining the accuracy of the original source. What does this look like in your discipline?

Analyze examples of “bad” popularization: Students come to us already familiar with what can happen when new knowledge hits the open internet. Showing examples of “bad” popularization can challenge them to identify what gets “lost in translation” when nuanced scholarly research becomes popularized “news.” They will learn why there is a need for qualification, conditional language, hedging, and other traits that make academic writing more authoritative in an area of study.

Assign a popularization: Asking students to write a popularization challenges them to straddle two worlds at once. They learn to read a scholarly research article (which typically requires some instruction and practice), and then do more than just paraphrase it. Giving them examples of “good” popularization, you can challenge them to transform research findings to accomplish a goal in popular discourse, whether that be to “celebrate” or “promote” research, inform, instruct, or advise an audience, or frame a finding to engage a public debate. Ask them to reflect on what content they select and emphasize, versus what they leave out, and why.