How academics should write

It's personal

In early May, I hosted a workshop on disseminating economic history. This post is the second of a three-part series inspired by this workshop. Read the first post here.

Imagine you’re a scribe in ancient Mesopotamia. You spend hours preparing your tablet, mixing and smoothing your clay until it is finally ready to receive a methodically inscribed character. You carefully carve one letter at a time. Writing is laborious, and durable information is scarce.

Today, we face the opposite problem. Writing is easier than ever; indeed, we have entered an age of information pollution. But this ease of production brings with it a new challenge: what to write? And what to read? These, economic historian Brad DeLong noted at a conference we held in Stellenbosch during early May, are the questions academics need to grapple with today.

Academics are writers by trade, and have been for a long time. For generations, we were trained to write in a manner that was formal, impersonal, and as detached as possible from the author’s own experience. This pursuit of objectivity was supposed to elevate clarity and precision, yet the result has often been prose that leaves outsiders baffled or disinterested. It is hardly surprising that ‘tortuous linguistic absurdities’ have become a byword for much of what emerges from the ivory tower.

Academic writing, research shows, has become less accessible over time. An analysis of more than 700,000 scientific papers published from the 1880s to 2015 revealed a steady increase in technical jargon, with over a fifth of abstracts now written at a level that would challenge even the most diligent university graduate.¹ Experiments have shown that when researchers rewrite their work in a more engaging and accessible style – or have AI do it – comprehension, confidence, and even enjoyment all improve significantly.² Students benefit, too.³ Dense and impersonal writing is not just an aesthetic issue but it fundamentally limits who can engage with research.

This realisation is prompting many to ask, as we did at a recent workshop in Stellenbosch, how we might reach people outside academia in a way that feels both relevant and engaging. Historian Bronwen Everill, of the Princeton Writing Program, offered a useful framework that resonated with those in the room. Every research piece, she suggested, should satisfy four levels of motive: What drew you to the project in the first place? What empirical phenomenon compelled you to seek an explanation? What gap in the existing literature or theory are you addressing? And, crucially, why should anyone beyond your field care about your findings? The first answer, the personal motive, is often the one most neglected in academic writing. Yet reconnecting with the human story behind the research is what forges a link to a wider audience.

Knowing your audience – really knowing who you are speaking to – emerged as a recurring theme throughout our discussions. Anneli Groenewald, a science journalist, put it simply: ‘The most important thing is to communicate in a way that is relatable to people, to know who you are communicating with, and what matters to them.’ The literature on science communication supports this. Studies repeatedly find that if you assume too much background knowledge, or use the wrong tone, readers will tune out long before your message lands.⁴ By contrast, when academics frame their writing around what personally motivated them, and make clear why the work matters beyond the confines of a discipline, it opens the door for the reader to find their own connection to the story.

This shift to the first person, the willingness to share what sparked your curiosity or what you struggled with along the way, can make scholarly work feel less like a sterile report and more like a journey. Even in fields such as economics, which have long prized abstract formalism, there are signs of change. Nobel laureate Robert Shiller has argued that ‘narrative economics’, the study of how popular stories shape economic behaviour, offers insights that formal models cannot.⁵ People, he reminds us, respond to stories, whether they come from the world of finance or from the physical sciences. Human interest is a powerful lever.

Of course, some wonder whether a more personal and engaging writing style will actually find its audience in today’s fragmented media landscape. Audiences are scattered across countless platforms and formats, and the competition for attention has never been fiercer. Nick Hedley, a writer and columnist who has witnessed the shift firsthand, notes that anyone can now be a journalist, and that attention has shifted from long-form reading to quick sound bites. We live in the age of TikTok, X, and thirty-second news flashes. It is tempting to believe that nobody has time for detail or story anymore.

Yet the evidence paints a more hopeful picture. Giulietta Talevi, founder of Currency News, is skeptical that long-form writing is dead. She insists there is still a real appetite for well-crafted, substantial pieces. The data bears her out. A Pew Research analysis found that long news stories attract just as many readers on mobile devices as shorter ones, and those readers spend twice as long with the content.⁶ Compelling work, in other words, still commands attention. The proliferation of platforms such as Substack suggests a genuine demand for thoughtful, in-depth writing. As Scott Peter Smith, founder of Johannesburg-based digital media company Submedia, puts it: platforms themselves are neutral. What matters is the credibility of the individual. Audiences, increasingly fragmented by interest, will seek out specific writers or experts who speak to them with authenticity and insight.

The rise of newsletters, podcasts, and independent blogs has taught us that people are not only consuming information, but also building relationships with the person telling the story. When researchers step out from behind the curtain and show some personality, readers respond. New publishing platforms have made this dynamic even more explicit. Subscribers no longer follow an impersonal journal; they subscribe to economic historian Brad Delong’s blog posts or comparative politics scholar Ken Opalo’s essays. Personal credibility and academic ‘brands’ have become more important than ever. This is both an opportunity and a responsibility. When academics open up about the challenges, surprises, or inspirations behind their work, they humanise themselves and build trust with their audience.

Anja Smith, economist and founder of storytelling company Beam, recently experimented by posting stories on LinkedIn about the ‘missing middle’ in South African higher education funding. Instead of a technical breakdown of the numbers, she shared candid accounts of her encounters with the issue. The result was immediate. ‘People enjoy it far more than the actual research’, she reported. Readers connected with the person behind the analysis. Studies in science communication confirm this effect. One decade-old review paper found that narrative communication, especially from a first-person point of view, is more appealing and effective than a dry, third-person exposition.⁷ A new study by Janet Yang and colleagues also found that first-person narratives are also more likely to highlight scientists’ altruistic and benevolent motivations. These motivations significantly enhanced readers’ trust in scientists and made them more likely to adopt story-consistent beliefs and behaviours regarding novel scientific technologies, such as AI medical diagnostics.⁸

There are, of course, some anxieties about informality. Academics may worry that being too personal or conversational could undermine perceptions of their competence. Yet meta-analyses of self-disclosure in science communication suggest that these fears are overstated. While a warm, personable style does make a communicator seem more relatable, it does not meaningfully reduce trust in their research findings. The gain in approachability often outweighs any slight loss in aloof expertise, especially since too much distance can itself erode public trust. As Scott Smith noted at our workshop, it is the individual and their authenticity that matter most.

The impact of the first-person perspective is not just theoretical. Science storytelling initiatives such as The Story Collider have demonstrated how personal stories of scientific struggle and discovery can break down stereotypes and make science feel accessible to anyone. When scientists share their journeys of failure, triumph, and curiosity, audiences begin to see researchers as people like themselves, and science as something they, too, might engage with. Identity, emotion, and experience become powerful tools for understanding, not distractions from the facts.

Incorporating these lessons does not come at the expense of rigour. The consensus among communicators and researchers alike is that combining narrative and evidence is more effective than relying on either alone. A compelling narrative can draw readers in, provide a scaffold for new information, and even reduce the instinct to resist unfamiliar ideas. Audiences consistently report that they find narratives easier to comprehend and more engaging than lists of facts. Even economists are beginning to understand that stories matter.⁹ Indeed, across fields the evidence is clear: just as patients are more likely to follow medical advice delivered as a story, so too are audiences more receptive to environmental messages and public policy recommendations conveyed through compelling narratives.¹⁰

For academics looking to broaden their impact, several strategies emerge. Use clear, accessible language and avoid jargon wherever possible. Insert narrative elements – anecdotes, examples, or the story behind a question – into even formal research. Do not be afraid of a well-placed ‘I’ or ‘we’ when describing the motivation or process behind a project. For example, in Chapter 14 of Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom (CUP), I describe how I arrived at the research question in my PhD::

And so, when I was a graduate student in the late 2000s, I came across an obscure paper from 1987 that piqued my interest. In it, the historians Robert Ross and Pieter van Duin, after assembling a lot of statistics concerning eighteenth-century Cape agricultural output, remarked: ‘While signs of dynamism in the nineteenth century Cape have been recognised by those few authors who have worked on the period, the backwardness of the colony at the end of the eighteenth century has yet to be fully challenged, or indeed fully investigated.’ Here was a challenge for an eager student. And I accepted it.

My PhD dissertation, completed in 2012, asks the simple question: how affluent were these settler farmers? It turns out that the Cape settlers were some of the wealthiest humans on the planet at the time. How do I know this? …

My objective was to connect my findings to questions that intrigued me. When readers see why something matters in human terms, they are more likely to care.

All of this requires rethinking how we train academic writers. As Everill observed, many students arrive at university already knowing how to tell stories, only to be trained out of it by the conventions of scholarly writing. The challenge is not to discard the rigour of academic prose, but to add new tools for public communication. Some institutions are starting to incorporate science communication training into graduate programmes, with promising results. Young researchers report greater confidence and skill at reaching non-specialists, and an ability to move fluidly between academic and popular registers.

The shift to a first-person, narrative approach is not a passing trend. It is a response to real changes in how people find and trust information, supported by a growing body of research and a clear shift in public preference. The library of Ashurbanipal – a vast collection of ancient texts in Mesopotamian Nineveh, as DeLong explains – now lives in our pocket, and it is constantly updating. We are awash with content. Now more than ever, it is authenticity and relatability that cut through the noise. The individual voice of the researcher is becoming an instrument for change. By grounding writing in personal motive, embracing narrative and focusing on what matters to the audience, academics can help bridge the gap between scholarship and society. Science communication is discovering the power of the first person, and in doing so, making knowledge more accessible, memorable, and, at last, a little more human.

‘How academics should write’ was first published on Our Long Walk. Thank you for supporting my writing. The images were created with Midjourney v7.

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