Over the summer, I taught a couple of workshops on writing to my colleagues (communicators in a science agency). These workshops are the major, most tangible reason I am in this program. I want to help scientists and communicators write better about science. One of the constant struggles of the communications people is battling the poor souls who have heard what Laura heard and bought into the notion that “you compromise your career if you write in ways that nonacademics [or in this case nonscientists] can understand” (Graff 115). They fret that to write more simply is to “dumb it down.” I hate that description with a passion.

In one of my sessions, the question came up on how to show scientists the value of dumbing it down. In that moment, I had an unusual clarity of how to explain to scientists that it’s not dumbing it down in a way that might reach them. I remember the epiphany feeling. The “Ah, ha! That’s it!” And I saw from their faces, that they felt the same way. But as is often the case when I speak in front of people, I couldn’t remember anything I had actually said after I had finished. A couple of students asked me at lunch a few days later how I had described it. I gave them my normal answers. They said, “No, what was it you said in class?” I couldn’t remember. I still can’t.

I’m glad that, as Graff affirms in Chapter 6, that things are changing in the academic world, that the “pretentious style” is being traded for a “more colloquial academic idiom” (124), but my colleagues and I need a better argument to fight those still entrenched in believing that “reaching a wider audience means dumbing yourself down and compromising your intellectual standards” (129).

So how do you respond? (And that’s not a rhetorical question.)

Graff says

• “As I see it, having to explain myself to freshmen or high school students forces me not to dumb my ideas down, but to formulate them more pointedly than I do when I address only my colleagues and graduate students” (10).
• “general accessibility is fully compatible with intellectual integrity. As I see it, the better I get at addressing nonacademics the better I become as an academic writer” (129).

But I’m still looking for my “elevator speech” on why IT’S NOT DUMBING IT DOWN (sorry to shout, but I needed to vent). I need that nugget that will resonate with the stodgiest of the stodgy.

My general arguments are

It’s not dumbing it down; it’s

• being clear and concise
• putting your ideas in language that makes it easier and faster for your stressed, harried, impatient audience (people who in our case are often making very important potentially life-saving or planet-dooming decisions) to process those ideas

It’s

• not that people can’t understand what you wrote (if the ideas are at least in there)—it’s that they won’t take the time to
• not that the ideas themselves need to be reduced or simplified—they just need to be stated more simply
• not about intelligence—it’s about style

Oh, and by the way, people don’t think you’re smart—

• they think you’re not smart enough (or don’t understand it well enough) to put it in their language; or
• they think you’re too arrogant or too lazy to put it in their language—and if you don’t respect their time, why should they respect what you have to say?