Next year marks the 25th anniversary of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, her best-selling account of attempting to survive on low-wage jobs. Writerly experiments in playing at poverty have always been controversial yet, without question, have produced powerful books that have illuminated life on society’s margins. Two key decisions Ehrenreich made in constructing her book offer lessons for academic writers seeking to expand the audience for their research.
Producing a bestseller that’s as successful as Nickel and Dimed might seem like too big of a reach. But as an academic with aspirations to write for the public, you can broaden your readership by following a principle I am presenting in a three-part series: Write like you teach. In Part 1, I described how to draw from an overlooked feature of the college syllabus — the learning objectives — to shape your writing in ways that will attract a larger pool of readers.
Here in Part 2, I turn to two key features of books like Nickel and Dimed — an experimental structure and a broad definition of evidence — that also happen to be characteristic of good teaching. Both features deserve more attention from academic writers.
Play with narrative structure. In the years after the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, many people were entering or re-entering the work force and trying to make a living on minimum-wage jobs, often while managing health and addiction crises and facing barriers because of race or gender. In the opening pages of her book, Ehrenreich describes a conversation with an editor in which she wondered: “How does anyone live on the wages available to the unskilled?”
Thus was born Nickel and Dimed, and from it we can see one alternative to the information-dump approach of most academic books and essays. It’s a narrative structure known as “the quest.”
Ehrenreich could easily have conducted her life experiments in poverty, supplemented them with traditional research on economics and politics, and then produced a typical lecture in print, with one big idea or argument and many supporting examples. Instead, she invites the reader to peer over her shoulder as she seeks answers to the book’s driving question. By doing so, she presents herself as a curious person — a learner — rather than as an expert armed with all of the answers.
Good teachers present themselves the same way in the classroom. You certainly want students to know that you have developed expertise through long study, but you also want them to know that you don’t know everything, are still curious, and want to learn more. To that end, you experiment with teaching strategies, travel to conferences, and learn from how students respond to your courses.
Those activities are ongoing in your writing, too. But in documenting their scholarly quest, academics tend to share the results, not the journey. Making the choice to relive your scholarly quest in prose — to invite your readers along as you learn, as Ehrenreich did — will have more appeal than just drafting a long scholarly monologue on your findings.
Comb through some of your favorite nonfiction books, and you might discover they are powered by a quest structure. If you are a fan of the great work of Helen Sword, for example, you’ll see quest language in the opening pages of her book on scholarly writing, Air & Light & Time & Space: “When I first set out to write a book about the writing habits of successful academics, I had no real idea what I would find — or even what I was trying to find out.”
Most academic writing follows one of two narrative models: argument-based or information presentation. I’m not suggesting that you should always avoid those two structures, as they may well suit the audience and topic of a particular writing project. But if you are seeking to draw more readers to your academic research, it’s worth experimenting with other models. In addition to the quest structure, you might:
- Organize your book as a series of letters, like the ones that Maryanne Wolf writes to her readers in Reader Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World, or the ones that Kiese Laymon writes to his mother in Heavy: An American Memoir.
- Create a narrative bound by a specific span of time, whether it’s a year, a season, or even just a few days. John Lukacs took that approach in his World-War-II-era history book, Five Days in London, May 1940. In a very different genre, I used that model in my own book, On Course: A Week-by-Week Guide to Your First Semester of College Teaching.
- Try a braided account that weaves together two different strands of a topic or a story. A good example is The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson’s historical-nonfiction account of a serial killer and the 1893 World’s Fair. In My Stroke of Insight, Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist, paired the story of her stroke with academic research on the brain.
Will editors be open to your narrative experiments? Many will. But it’s worth noting that, as you move further and further afield from typical structures, some skeptical editors might encourage you to rein it in. Their wisdom is always worth heeding. The effort is not wasted: Experimenting with narrative models can spur creative thinking about the shape of your writing project, even if the final form morphs back into a conventional structure.
Expand your definition of “evidence.” The faculty tendency to get locked into traditional modes of academic writing often carries over to the types of evidence we’re willing to use to support our ideas. Every discipline has evidentiary traditions that inform how Ph.D.s present ideas to one another. Sticking to those traditions makes sense when you are speaking to people within your disciplinary orbit, but moving beyond it to attract more readers requires a broader evidentiary palette.
You do that already in the classroom if your lectures and presentations include a mix of words, audio, video, and graphics. The text you put on a slide or a handout is the most typical form of evidence and might reach the most students, but for others, the key that unlocks their understanding could be a photo, a video, a graph, or a table.
It’s not a big leap to adapt that pedagogical strategy to your writing, and some academics have expanded the reach of their scholarship by offering readers a broader mix of evidence.
Eve L. Ewing, an associate professor and sociologist at the University of Chicago, adeptly offered multiple forms of evidence in her 2018 book, Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side. The unrehearsed statements of a citizen fighting for the future of the city’s children matter as much to her argument as the statistical tables or the official proclamations of the Chicago Public Schools.
In the book, Ewing explained why she had filled out her traditional academic evidence with personal stories: “The experiential knowledge of people of color not only is a legitimate source of evidence, but is in fact critical to understanding the function of racism as a fundamental American social structure. So I cannot and do not aspire to tell you an objective story; rather I offer a story that is revelatory based on the experience of my own life and the lives of community members living in the shadow of history.”
Likewise in Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich fleshes out her historical, political, and economic research with the narratives of her own experiment, including many conversations with her co-workers at various jobs.
Such books demonstrate what effective teachers already know: Good research comes to life through stories, scenes, and conversations. Readers might forget the key statistic on page 53, but they’ll remember a compelling story that illuminated the point.
Drawing new readers to your scholarship, then, and convincing more people that your ideas matter, means pushing yourself outside of your traditional evidence boundaries. In writing workshops with faculty members, I try to lead them gently along this path. I usually present a long list of potential sources of evidence across many disciplines, including:
- Personal anecdotes
- Real-life examples from current events
- Hypothetical scenarios
- Case studies and biographies
- Quotations from works of literature
- Art works, images, photographs
- Statistical tables, graphs, and charts
- Outcomes from research experiments
- Formal and informal survey results
- Casual observations of events and people
- Field notes (your own or from others)
- Research and ideas from authorities in your discipline
- Citations from academic research
- Interviews with experts
- Interviews with relevant subjects
If faculty members seem overwhelmed by the variety here, I ask them to select just one category and challenge them to incorporate that form of evidence into their current project. What would it look like to take field notes in a work of literary scholarship? To include personal perspectives from research subjects in a study of brain imaging from stroke victims? What kinds of readers would respond to those techniques? How might they reshape your thinking about the project?
Expanding your readership usually means expanding yourself as a writer, and that includes playing with both structure and evidence. You don’t have to write experimental novels about your scholarship or abandon traditional forms of evidence in your discipline. Just approach the work of writing as you approach your teaching: with a willingness to experiment, learn, and grow in the service of your learners.
