Description

Purpose of this workshop is to offer practical tools to write your own popular scientific blog, press release, opinion article, magazine article, leaflet, mail or other text. The workshop is also useful if you want to contribute to texts by press officers or (science) journalists.

Writing for non-specialists or for news is an interesting challenge. If you stick to an academic writing style and only translate the jargon and give extra background, people will not read your text. But you do not want to be too simplistic either, so what to do?

This workshop starts from examples and your own text-to-be. It is hands-on: you will define a key message customized to your own audience, think about a suitable text structure, discuss texts, give and receive feedback on text outlines of fellow participants.

We start from with some important tasks beforehand:

• Defining your audience and your own purpose

• Choosing an appropriate and sharp key message

• Finding ways to attract your reader

After that we design an appropriate text structure, and find how it differs from the structure of an academic publication. We look at ways to deal with jargon and how to write in an appealing and concrete writing style.