From Oxford University Press to Substack: Translating Academic Writing for a General Audience
By Jillian Hess, Bronx Community College (CUNY)
The Spider and the Bee have fought one another since antiquity. In Aesop’s parable, the two industrious creatures argue over which is the better artist. The Spider, entirely dependent upon itself, spins a web from within. On the other hand, the Bee can do little alone; instead, it searches for pollen while flying among flowers. Afterwards, the Bee combs through its supply and blends the best parts into a honeyed whole. The metaphor of the Spider and the Bee is fundamentally about the act of creation, and, historically, the Bee has emerged victorious. After all, the Spider proves to be a less sympathetic character: it kills with its industry, while the bee nourishes.
The bee, gathering nutrients from various sources, has long symbolized commonplace books. Working as part of a hive, the bee is eminently social. Similarly, the commonplace-book tradition has been a tool for building intellectual community by taking extracts from the living and the dead. Woven together into a single notebook, the commonplace book houses conversations that take place across time and space. In gathering so many voices in our commonplace books, we create an entry point for our own ideas to enter expansive historic conversations.
The commonplace book has always been a tool for creating and fostering community. This is what drew me to the tradition in the first place. When I wrote How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information (OUP 2022), I wanted to highlight moments of social gathering around commonplace books: how Keats’s friends transcribed his poetry, or how Romantics like the Leigh sisters wrote poetry in one another’s commonplace books, or how mourners turned to loved ones’ collections. Even someone like Coleridge, in his isolation, saw his commonplace books as companions.
Shortly after my book’s publication, I wanted to share what I learned with a larger community beyond academia. So, I started Noted, a newsletter on Substack that has attracted over 20,000 subscribers, most of whom are not academics. The best part of writing online for a general audience is the comments section. I love reading peoples’ reactions to my writing. And, I love getting to respond to other writers and engage in conversation. Substack often feels to me like a literal manifestation of how John Hamilton Reynolds described his commonplace book: “I can open its leaves, and see living figures moving therein.”[1] After all, writers are real, living people. On Substack, I can converse with people like Helen Sword, Austin Kleon, Katherine May, Mason Currey, and Sherman Alexie (all of whom have marvelous Substacks).Other authors and everyday readers alike can respond to my posts about the writing and note-taking practices of people like Sylvia Plath, Francis Ford Coppola, Franz Kafka, Jane Goodall, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Kurt Cobain. This is a different, but no less valuable, form of community than I saw in Romantic commonplace books.
A screenshot of Noted’s homepage
Accessibility is one of the most important conversations we are having in the academy. I have found that non-academic readers are hungry for the kind of knowledge work we do—the deep thinking and original research that goes into academic writing. But they are often put-off by our jargon-dense paragraphs. Much of the work I’ve done in translating my work for a general audience involves shortening paragraphs and sentences while also avoiding abstractions. I fill my posts with images that illustrate my main points.
Screenshot from my post on Sylvia Plath
Writing on Substack is akin to creating a PowerPoint presentation for students. I’m always asking myself relatively simple pedagogical questions: “What do they already know? What do they need to see/hear/understand to follow my argument?” For example, when sharing James Baldwin’s notes from his famous Cambridge debate, I inserted clips from the specific sections I referenced.
Once you lean into the multi-media dimension of online writing, it can be a lot of fun! The comment section creates a useful feedback loop. The more I write for a general audience, the more attuned I become to my specific audience’s needs.
Of course, I’m not just concerned with accessible writing—I also care deeply about accessible education. I see a direct line from my job as a community college professor to writing Noted. At its best, community colleges promise a robust, affordable education for anyone who wants it. Community colleges—and public colleges in general—formed because of our shared belief that college is valuable, and that it should be accessible. My work on Noted follows a similar logic. The work we do in the academy is valuable. Those outside the academy agree—they just need us to translate it for them into more accessible language. As the commonplace-book tradition teaches us, knowledge is most sustained when it is shared.
Notes
[1] Reynolds, John Hamilton. “Living Authors.” The Scots Magazine 88 (1820).
About the Author
Jillian Hess is Professor of English at Bronx Community College, CUNY. She is the author of How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information: Commonplace Books, Scrapbooks, and Albums (Oxford University Press, 2022), which received the Honorable Mention certificate for the BARS First Book Prize and was short-listed for the SHARP DeLong Book History Prize. Read Jillian's most recent writing by subscribing to her popular newsletter, Noted.