Writing for a “different” audience

Written communication is a critical part of scholarship. However, scholarly writing is often incomprehensible to a broad audience, though we know that broader communication has great value in helping non-experts understand and support science. To bring acoustics to a larger audience, ASA publishes Acoustics Today (AT) to communicate the breadth of the field to members and to the public. To be successful, AT articles must be written so that they are scholarly, but also readable, understandable, and engaging to a college freshman, a newspaper reporter, a regulator, a funder, or one’s bosses. Thus, a challenge for those of us working on AT is to help authors understand how to mold their ideas and material to our audience. Most authors find writing for AT a challenge since it is so different from their normal writing. As a result, we may go through many iterations of an article to help authors reach our audience. However, the reward is not only a well-written article that authors can share with colleagues in other disciplines, their bosses, and their parents, but many report that they have a new understanding of communicating with a wider audience.