Writing for peer reviewers from outside your field: lessons from non-fiction

Question:

I study video games in the humanities, which means I’m an academic misfit. People in my department consider my area unconventional; most in my faculty would describe my methodological approach as unorthodox at best. The result is that I’m much more comfortable in niche specialist conferences than I am in the big annual conference in my field, the Modern Language Association. I constantly have to convince “peers” who know nothing about my field that my work is valid, rigorous, fundable. Do you have any recommendations for a researcher like me?

 

– Anonymous, English Literature (but only by department name)

Answer:

It’s challenging to work at the margins of any field, but that’s even more the case when you work in a contemporary, popular medium that lacks the markers of so-called highbrow art forms – markers like exclusivity, cultural capital, and the endorsement of long-established cultural institutions.

And while it’s fine, even fun, to stay in niche, specialist conversations, you’re right that you’ll need to also write for broader audiences, notably in high-stakes genres like the book proposal, promotion and tenure dossier, and SSHRC or NFRF applications.

Of course, there are some tried-and-true strategies that you should practice, dear letter-writer: get feedback from peers and senior colleagues who you trust; draft early and revise often; don’t write when you’re hungry (I know I can’t). But I suspect you didn’t write to me to be told the same thing that any colleague could tell you.

In thinking about your question, my mind turned to the best book I’ve read thus far this year: John Vaillant’s Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, which I picked up after hearing the author speak at this year’s Hay Festival in Wales. Fire Weather has nothing to do with video games. Vaillant’s topic is the 2016 Fort McMurray fire, but his subjects are also climate change, wildfires, and our human inability to comprehend things we’ve not previously encountered.

Vailiant repeatedly returns to the Lucretius problem as he explains both the slow responses of people in Fort Mac to the approaching fire, and, in parallel, humanity’s slow response to the approaching climate catastrophe. The Lucretius problem is a cognitive bias that describes our tendency to underestimate potential future events based on our limited past experiences. Described by Nassim Nicholas Taleb 10 years ago in Antifragile, Vaillant calls the Lucretius problem a “blinkered perspective,” and its pervasiveness gives him a challenging task as a writer of popular non-fiction: to enable the reader to see the severity of 21st-century wildfires, Vaillant needs to widen our perspective, but he has to achieve that goal using our existing, limited frames of understanding. It’s a paradox: if the Lucretius problem means that people repeatedly misunderstand unprecedented things, how can you use what is precedented to bring about understanding?

Vaillant uses a few different strategies, some of which you might recognize from any familiarity you have with the canon of your department: the Lucretius problem acts as a leitmotif; wildfires are repeatedly personified and then made monstrous. I imagine it might be a little hard to apply those techniques in your work (though I suspect some characters in video games may be personified too and then made monstrous). So, here are two strategies that Vaillant repeatedly deploys to familiarize the strange, which may be of value in your work as you write for peers outside your area of expertise:

1. Contextualize big numbers

Every time Vaillant provides a large number, he also provides a frame of reference to help the reader understand its size and scale. The boreal forest is “more than 6 million square miles – larger than all 50 U.S. states.” When a tree in that forest burns, its “hundred-foot pillar of flame” is “Godzilla-sized and -shaped.” Describing a 2001 wildfire in Chisholm, Alta.: “The energy released during the fire’s peak, seven-hour run was calculated to be that of seventeen one-megaton hydrogen bombs, or about four Hiroshima bombs per minute.” Every big number comes with a point of comparison to enable the reader to understand precisely how big it is.

When Vaillant is dealing with unimaginably large numbers, he multiplies and extends the context he provides. Describing the number of sparks and combustions an individual person makes in a day, he hones in on cars:

“a single four-cylinder car engine turning at an average of 2,400 rpm – driving-to-work speed – will generate around 10,000 combustions per minute – more than half a million per hour. […] Were you to run the world’s engines for just one day, the number of individual combustions would elicit an error message from your calculator. Were you to transpose this impossible number to stars, these man-made bursts of heat and light would comprise hundreds, perhaps thousands, of galaxies – every day.”

If you use big numbers to describe any aspect of your work, frame those numbers in a context that your readers can understand. If you were a geographer working on the 4,000-kilometre Brahmaputra River, you’d be right to say that it originates from the Angsi glacier near Mount Kailash in the northern Himalayas and empties into the Bay of Bengal – but there’s no guarantee that your readers will be able to mentally grasp that context if they aren’t familiar with the region. Since your readers are in Canada, though, you could say that the length of that 4,000-kilometre river would stretch from Victoria, B.C., to Fredericton, N.B. It’s safe to assume that readers in Canada will understand from that description that 4,000 kilometres is indeed quite far.

If you were a health science researcher describing an intervention that targets people with asthma in B.C. – a disease that affects around 636,000 British Columbians – you might note that that’s more asthmatics than there are citizens of Surrey, B.C., the 12th-largest city in the country.

You don’t need to have these stats at the top of your mind, either: I grabbed both these details by asking perplexity.ai, respectively, “What two Canadian cities are around 4,000 kilometres apart?” and, “What cities in Canada have around 630,000 people?” We all know that AI tools can be unreliable, but perplexity.ai’s advantage is that it cites its sources, allowing you to fact-check its claims.

I don’t know if you need to cite a lot of numbers in video game research, even though I am on level 3597 of “Bird Sort,” but since you describe your methodology as unorthodox in the humanities, I thought you might get a bit quanty. If it’s not big numbers you’re sharing, though, Vaillant still has a useful model for you.

2. Use sensory metaphors

When you’re introducing unfamiliar concepts that can’t be quantified, dear letter-writer, then provide your reader with descriptions that appeal to their senses of sight, touch, and sound (which are often more easily described than smell or taste).

Again, Vaillant is exemplary here. “At room temperature, bitumen pours about as well as Nutella,” he tells us. The landscape of a bitumen mine is linked “by circuit board mazes of dirt roads and piping.” In the days before the wildfire reached Fort McMurray, its smoke could be seen “on the horizon, a windswept cauliflower of billowing grays and browns.”

Vaillant uses striking comparisons to well-known features of well-known objects – the thick viscosity of chocolate hazelnut spread; the complex, artificial patterns of pieces of electronics; the ballooning voluminousness of that pricey white brassica. By metaphorically connecting bitumen and mines and wildfire smoke to everyday material objects, it’s as if Vaillant is helping us to physically encounter these unfamiliar objects and spaces.

He doesn’t just make comparisons – he provides comparisons that help his readers to imagine sensing the unfamiliar.

Similarly, academic writing that includes multiple instances of abstract terms regularly becomes difficult to read, imagine, and follow. Often, but not always, these abstract terms are dismissed as academic jargon. Jargon isn’t necessarily a problem, as I’ve argued previously. But abstract language can be a problem, especially when abstraction is piled upon abstraction.

Language that is concrete – almost tangible – is much easier to follow, because it can be pictured in the mind’s eye. And when you make your writing easier to understand, easier to mentally process, you also make your writing more persuasive, as Alter and Oppenheimer (2009) have shown.

Does that mean you should tell your readers that smoke is a cauliflower? Honestly, I’d rather see you craft a compelling, original sensory metaphor than see your writing descend into abstractions that your reader can’t picture or follow.

At its least literal, dear letter-writer, my advice this month is that, if you’re struggling to communicate the significance of your work to a skeptical audience, then consider learning from popular science and non-fiction writers, especially those working in disciplines currently treated skeptically: public health, vaccine research, or – like Vaillant – climate science. Find a popular non-fiction book in one of those fields, or listen to an author talk, and notice the strategies they use to make their work understandable. Chances are, those are strategies you can pick up, adapt, and iteratively develop in your own work.