I set out to write The Public Scholar for the same reason I started doing workshops on public writing – I felt a lot of people were speaking passionately about why academics should produce more public-facing work, and I agreed with most of it. But what I needed when I started was the “how.” I made a lot of guesses. I talked to a lot of people. I made a lot of mistakes. In this book, I try to share what I’ve learned, but always prioritizing the practical.
This excerpt below is taken from a chapter on the essay itself. I move through the traditional elements of the classic op-ed (lede, hook, argument, evidence, pre-rebuttal, kicker), but contextualize my description of those elements with ways for academics to rethink their writing to better suit the genre.
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Audience
You cannot start writing until you understand your audience, which will differ wildly by outlet. This is another reason that it’s more efficient to pitch first and then write a draft. I can make the same argument about special education in my local paper, CNN, and The Hechinger Report (an education magazine). I can even use the same evidence, but how I’ll write will vary. When I write for The Minnesota Star Tribune, ideally I need to make my piece at least partially about Minnesota. If I write for The New York Times, I need to remember that most of my readers don’t care about Minnesota and either try to make them care or find a different example. Pay attention to language use and structure (long or short sentences, long or short paragraphs), and try to mimic those patterns. Understand that The Chronicle of Higher Education’s audience will know, or at least will pretend to know, what “orientalism” means, but Vice’s audience won’t. I once referred to Edward Said and orientalism in a Vice article, but I spent 400 words building up to the reference.
Think about audience as you start to draft. If you don’t sell a piece and have to rewrite it, considering the new audience can help you make a new pass through the prose. You want to meet your audience where they are.
Evidence
If you are writing an op-ed based on your academic research, it’s likely you have a mountain of evidence, because building such mountains is what academics do. But this is one of those moments when short-form public writing clashes most directly with academic norms.
Academic writing aspires to be authoritative, to be the final word on a topic or at least make a generationally significant statement with which all must reckon. An essay is incremental; it has as its goal to advance conversation, iteratively but only fractionally. Essays can do all kinds of important work but usually only one piece of work per essay, and usually only part of that work. Before I start selecting evidence, I try to decide what my goal is. For example, sometimes I am trying to provide evidence and ways of making arguments to people who already agree with me. In other essays, I hope to begin to shift the perspective of someone who has never thought about an issue, to raise awareness. Awareness isn’t change, but it’s often a precursor of change. When I’m feeling super ambitious, I hope to start the process of turning opposition into cooperation. But all gains are partial. Loading a single essay with too much hope is always a mistake, not just because such an ambition is likely to fail, but because it turns the writing cloudy.
Above, I started out trying to identify my audience. Here, mid-essay, I pause to make sure I know my goal. Then I’m ready to select the most useful pieces of evidence given those two factors. Despite all my academic instincts, I often have to let lots of good examples go unwritten. But one advantage of nonacademic writing is that it is possible to simply state that you have more evidence, if you do, and provide links to sources. Indicate where the evidence can be found. Use hyperlinks to direct readers to resources. You can gesture at a broader world of knowledge in a way totally foreign to aca-demic writing (or at least requiring a massive footnote). Describe the whole evidence base very briefly if you can, then plunge into the specific cases or arguments that work best.
If this sounds easy, then great. But it wasn’t easy for me, given my years of training to try to be complete rather than partial in any piece of scholarly writing. So instead of my academic writing, I drew lessons from the classroom. My contention now is that if you know how to teach, you know how to do this type of selection.
A classroom, like an op-ed, is highly constrained in terms of audience, interest, preexisting knowledge, and the amount of time you have to share your ideas. I have always found that the teaching voice, rather than the scholarship voice, is the best analogy to public writing. And that’s not about dumbing down or saying things that aren’t true; it’s about having a highly developed sense of audience and context. We all teach differently, of course, but every time we step in a classroom at 8:30 in the morning, wondering how to ex-plain something really complicated, something we’ve spent decades thinking about, to a group of at best semi-interested freshmen who haven’t had their coffee yet, we have to do a lot of selection and framing work! That’s true for an op-ed, too. Just as in effective teaching, we must meet our audience where they are, we have to do so with love and understanding, and hopefully we can move them a little bit toward us or toward whatever argument we’re trying to make.
And so it’s critical to consider audience, just as you would in a classroom. Think about how you might teach the same material in an intro course, an upper-division seminar, or a graduate class; each requires distinct levels of preparation, argumentation, and detail. The same is true for outlets. When you write for The Chronicle of Higher Education, your audience is, naturally enough, people engaged in some aspect of the business of higher ed. With that comes a certain baseline of shared vocabulary and understanding about the world in which we live. When you write for CNN, you’re writing for everybody, and you have to do different kinds of explanatory work. Both can be wildly rewarding, but the task is different.
Excerpt from the book The Public Scholar: A Practical Handbook by David M. Perry copyright © 2026 Johns Hopkins University Press. Reproduced by permission.
