Strategies to reach a wider audience using plain-language summaries
Imagine that your manuscript has been accepted by a prestigious journal after post-review revisions and you are thrilled about it. Congratulations! However, who else other than the readers of that journal will read, let alone understand, your paper? And yet your findings are of practical importance, and many more stand to benefit from your research. Journalists too will be happy to write about your work—once they understand what it is all about. A plain-language summary of your paper is the right channel to reach those readers and to boost your Altmetrics score in the bargain.
Plain-language summaries: what and why
An abstract of your paper helps its readers decide whether they should look up the full paper. This means the abstract is meant for the same people who may choose to read the full paper and saves their time: a plain-language summary of your paper, on the other hand, is meant for those who are not specialists in the topic of your paper—who may not even be academics—and helps them understand what the paper is about and why it matters. Perhaps the only thing an abstract and a plain-language summary have in common is their length, which is typically about 300 words, but the choice and arrangement of those words require a skill quite different from that required to write the abstract. Different, not difficult, and here are some tips on writing plain-language summaries.
Remove roadblocks
A piece of writing may be difficult to understand because of several reasons: unfamiliar abbreviations, unfamiliar words, abstract concepts, and even the length of a sentence. Even familiar words may have unfamiliar meanings, each restricted to a given field (take the word “field” itself, which can be found in papers on physics, word processing, sports, and agriculture, for example; the word means something different in each of these “fields”). Effective plain-language summaries avoid these roadblocks. For experts, a major difficulty is what Steven Pinker refers to as the “curse of knowledge”: once you know something, it is virtually impossible to “unknow” it; that knowledge prevents you from looking at the topic from the perspective of those who do not know, who include most readers of such summaries. I still remember the blank face of a chemical engineer, who, upon asking an agricultural scientist what tuber crops are, was told, “Oh, tuber crops are crops in which the polarity of growth is reversed.”
Write effective explanatory prose
To my mind, the skill to explain science to non-scientists is to be acquired not so much by reading books and articles on plain language (including this one!) or on how to write as by reading the prose of those who have mastered the craft: Richard Dawkins and Philip Ball are two names that readily come to mind, but there are many others, including the winners of the book prize awarded annually by the Royal Society: each year, a “panel of expert judges, comprising eminent scientists, authors, journalists and broadcasters, choose the book that they believe makes popular science writing compelling and accessible to the public.” Here are some strategies often adopted by these writers.
1. Establish context and importance
For experts, new findings are sufficient because they know the context and can assess the significance of the findings; for non-experts, that context must be supplied. You may have found a way of precipitating all dissolved salts in seawater, but a plain-language summary should explain that the method has the potential to convert seawater into potable water cheaply and quickly.
2. Give examples
We construct concepts from examples, or understand what is abstract from a number of concrete examples. To explain to a gardener that a plant grown from seed is unlikely to have the exact same characters as those of the plant from which the seed was obtained, you may point out that children are not exact copies of their parents, whereas a plant grown from a cutting of the “mother” plant is identical to it.
3. Use analogies
Analogies are based on a simple principle of teaching, namely, “go from known to the unknown.” Analogies also make something that is abstract into something that is concrete and therefore are easily visualized and understood. In explaining the long-term injuries from prolonged exposure to high-decibel noise, one writer compared the fine hair that line the cochlea with grass that is trampled upon repeatedly: instead of springing back to being erect again, the blades of grass—and the “stereocilia,” as the cochlear hair are known—stay crumpled, representing permanent damage.
Practice explanatory writing
If you wish to try your hand at writing simply, try the Up-Goer Five text editor, which challenges you to explain a concept or an idea using only the one thousand most frequently used words. Among a couple of tips the website offers is to enclose the difficult words within quotes and to turn inanimate entities into people by giving them titles (Mr. Hydrogen for hydrogen, for example).
The crux of effective plain-language summaries is that people with no specialist knowledge should be able to understand the summaries. Therefore, you would do well to test the summary you have written by asking a few people to read it and checking how well they understand the text. You also need to keep in mind the requirements, in terms of style and length, of the journal for which the summary is being prepared. It may be hard work, but remember the reward—a much greater reach for your work.
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