Writing for General Audiences: A 3-Week Workshop Series for Academics

Hey, scholar! Do you wish more people could access and act on your research findings? Does your institution expect evidence of community-engaged scholarship in your tenure or promotion portfolio? This is the workshop for you.

Translating your own and others' research for a general audience is a useful skill for academics -- and it can be really fun and fulfilling, too.

Join us on three consecutive Mondays in November.

Session 1: Monday, November 3

Session 2: Monday, November 10

Session 3: Monday, November 17

All sessions are 90 minutes: 11am Pacific / 2pm Eastern / 7pm GMT on Zoom

Note: Eventbrite displays only the first of these dates. However, the Zoom link you receive when you register will work for all three sessions.

✅ ONE TICKET = ALL THREE SESSIONS

What You’ll Learn

• Why writing for general audiences is fun and liberating and can support both your research writing and your tenure & promotion portfolio.
• How to select and focus topics that are targeted to broad or specific readerships
• How to use stories — from research, the arts, and daily life — to bring your ideas to life
• How to adjust diction and tone to make your writing more accessible (this is a great skill when writing for scholarly audiences, too)
• How to share and engagingly explain images, graphics, and data displays
• How to honor your sources and intellectual lineage without a reference list or bibliographic footnotes
• How to get out of your lane and write more widely about topics that interest you
• Ideas for building your own newsletter, pitching your ideas to media outlets, collaborating with people you admire on public-facing writing projects, and generally putting yourself out there

AND

• Dear lord, how to find the time

Your Instructor

I’m Lisa Sibbett, a former education researcher and teacher educator who pivoted, in 2024, to building a newsletter on Substack. Over the past year, I’ve built The Auntie Bulletin from an audience of my mom and a few of my friends to over 6000 weekly readers, and along the way I’ve learned a ton about writing for general audiences

I’m still part of a couple of academic research teams, but while my scholarly writing may garner 2,000 downloads in a decade, my newsletter racks up close to 50,000 views a month. I don’t know about you, but for me a research paper in a peer-reviewed journal may take a year or two to come to press; at my newsletter, I put out two posts a week.

What I’m saying is, whether you’re looking to pivot to public scholarship as a major component of your livelihood or you just want to get your research findings and ideas in front of more people, I can help.