Speaker: Larry McEnerney (University of Chicago Writing Program)

When graduate students envision themselves working outside academia, they often worry about writing. This is sensible: academics who work outside academia are endlessly criticized for writing "like a professor". Worse, writers who are criticized in this way are often baffled at how to adapt to their new world. Very often, they try to change aspects of their writing that are not troublesome, and they leave in place aspects of their writing that are making their writing less clear, less logical, and less valuable to their readers.

This session will be about a few patterns of writing that are likely to aggravate non-academic readers. We'll focus on patterns that are often difficult for academics to see, but are actually fairly easy to change.