pitch p 62

Poynter's 50 writing tips

http://tinyurl.com/4o8wqwe

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How does it work?

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• Short pieces of 600-800 words for a non-academic audience
• Providing insight, analysis, or comment on stories in the news
• Report and explain new research
• Topical in-depth series
• Pitch your ideas!

..newsletter

Online, real-time editor

Creative Commons

Republishers

Open content

Free to read

Free to republish

Pimp your profile

"Academic rigour,

journalistic flair"

Monthlyvisits to

TCUK website: 1m

We have no commercial interests,

and no axes to grind.



We edit your work to help it reach as

widean audience as possible.

But YOU are the author, and if you

don't sign-off the finished piece...

 ...WE CAN'T PUBLISH IT

What's in it for me?

(Mar '16)

• Increase your visibility to the media and other researchers
• Improve impact of your research
• Use our readership statistics to demonstrate your reach
• Improve communication skills

Author dashboard

Join illustrious colleagues!

How are we doing?

TCUK since launch:

Other bonuses include*

243m readers of TCUK content inc republishing

17m unique visitors to theconversation.com/uk

7,600 authors have written 12,500 articles

(May '16)

= readership stats for fun and profit

Get widely read

• Kingston lecturer's article gets 10,000 reads, is promoted to assistant professor
• Salford lecturer invited on frequent radio spots
• Cambridge professor now writes science for BBC
• Leeds researcher's article on front page of Guardian, incorporates responses into research
• BBC made documentary on Derby Professor
• Numerous R4, Today, Women's Hour, Sky, etc

* no guarantee

...worldwide!

The Conversation is a

global network with bureaus in

Australia, UK, US, Africa, France

...with more to come

Thank you!

@conversationUK

www.facebook.com/ConversationUK

theconversation.com/uk/newsletter

Prezi: http://tinyurl.com/h2c8ol9

theconversation.com/uk/team

michael.parker@theconversation.com

Comment/Analysis

Good starting points:

What makes a good Conversation story?

Editorial support

• Explanation of topic in the news
• Comment or analysis of events in the news
• New or recent research
• Answer to an interesting question
• Broad topic with news-peg or list format

• A collaborative effort: your expertise and our journalistic approach
• You bring the facts and the argument, we suggest good angles, emphasise the interesting bits, and give it a polish
• You're in control: we can't publish the article until you've approved it

Republishers

Things we like

Why write?

• New
• Unusual
• Fun
• Surprising
• Universal
• Timely

• Dramatic
• Explainers
• Questions
• Lists
• Stories
• Timeless

• Find wider audiences, and use our statistics to demonstrate reach
• Raise your profile, and that of your dept/institute/research centre/uni
• Increase your research impact
• Improve your skills in communicating to a non-academic audience
• For the enjoyment of it!

Writing for

Example

Try the top-line test:

(and the public in general)

I have interviews from Paris, Berlin and Barcelona where I interviewed digital activists in the last six months. There is a quieter digital activism of building platforms for civic purposes and cultural citizenship. Tech/artists involved in projects for digital inclusion against surveillance etc, which does not involve cyberattacks a la anonymous or just using social media to mobilise protests but builds community and is for public use as digital commons.

Doomsday scenarios surrounding a robot apocalypse abound in popular science fiction, from Battlestar Galactica to Terminator. But working with machine intelligence in the lab is a methodical practise that can uncover innovative designs that can help humanity and enable us to learn how our own intelligence came about. My recent work has included designing a ‘mother’ robot that can manufacture its own ‘children’ without human intervention. In the process it uses principles from nature, including natural selection, to produce incrementally superior generations that improve in performance on a specific task.

- The legends of the Kraken and hystorical mentions.

- The Kraken's origin as sightings of giant squids on the northern seas.

- Biology of the giant squid (genus Architeuthis).

- Kraken in popular culture.

• You know you've got a good story if you can summarise it in one sentence
• To do this you need to work out what the right angle is
• Identify the most important or interesting thing to your readers

How a new wave of digital activists is changing society

The real-life origins of the legendary Kraken

How we built a robot that can evolve - and why it won't take over the world

Avoid:

Explaining terms

Try to:

Simplifying language

Think about your audience

Circadian rhythms

without

Intelligent, educated, curious

can

from circa meaning around and diem meaning day

...but not interested in wading through dense, academic prose

• Jargon, esp. managerese cliches
• Acroynym salad and TUA
• Over-formal or didactic tone
• Falling into academic/essay style
• Rhetorical questions
• 'Initial statement: then a question?'
• Huge sentences, semicolons

• Explain any specialist terms that can't be left out or worded around
• Cut words ruthlessly
• Use active not passive sentences
• Be wary of too many '-ings'
• Reading your piece aloud is a great way to find weak spots

In the absence of =

Has the ability to =

Consequently/therefore/thus =

Located in close proximity to =

However =

so

It's not about 'dumbing down'

Our brains have an inbuilt 24-hour clock that regulates certain daily processes in our body such as sleeping, following patterns known as circadian rhythms

near

...but a generalist reader

doesn'tsee things like a

specialist researcher

but

Comments

George Orwell, Politics and the English Language (1946)

• Welcome dissent and discussion
• Get in early and set the tone - pose questions
• Assume good faith, but don't tolerate abuse
• Humour can puncture (apparent) aggression
• Facts and argument are your best weapons
• Know when to ignore: some topics always attract loons - don't feed the trolls!
• Report problems to moderators

The medical use of charged particles (CPs) such as protons differ from x-rays (which are also perhaps confusingly called photons). CPs deposit energy within peaks along their tracks with no dose beyond the peaks, whereas x-rays release energy more uniformly but inevitably deposit dose in a much wider area of the body when used to treat cancer. The energy density in the CP Bragg peaks exceeds that for x-rays and so greater biological effects occur.

Before:

However, several potential obstacles should be considered on the practicality of using a virtual environment for the assessment and treatment for sex offenders

Before:

A formalised approach to integrating the outcome of prediction models with clearly defined management objectives may help to facilitate an objective discussion of control actions and the information needed to most effectively implement control amid significant logistical constraints.

becomes:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech

which you are used to seeing in print.

2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon

word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything

outright barbarous.

There are several potential obstacles to consider when using virtual environments for assessing and treating for sex offenders

http://www.economist.com/styleguide/introduction

After:

finally:

There are several potential obstacles to consider when using virtual environments to assess and treat sex offenders.

After:

By comparing proposed interventions we can highlight which are expected to save the most lives.

Focus on:

A journalistic approach

Structure

Answer these questions:

• Get to the point, then fill in detail
• Intro and outro are the most important (but hardest to write)
• Ideas needn't be simplified, but language must
• Don't be scared of humour

• What's new? what's the hook?
• Timing is the difference between 1000 and 10,000 reads (or more)
• Don't assume reader's knowledge BUT don't bury them in context
• Feel free to have an opinion - but back it up with facts

WHERE

WHAT

WHY

WHO

WHEN

HOW

Tell us:

A good example:

Not so much:

Thank you!

The pitch

We want to hear about:

@conversationUK

www.facebook.com/ConversationUK

"Using the Higgs boson Nobel recognition as the hook, this article would discuss the current state of fundamental physics. The interesting angle here is that while the Higgs was talked up as the main reason for building the LHC, the reality is that it is part of well-established theory already mostly confirmed by previous experiments. Many saw the discovery as inevitable.

The LHC was really built to answer some other BIG questions that plague basic science, eg. we now know that 95% of the universe is made of something invisible – and we have no idea what this mysterious stuff is! So far, we haven’t had any answers, and physicists are getting increasingly anxious that we may fail to find anything new beyond the Higgs. If that happened it would be a disaster for fundamental physics and would probably herald the end of particle physics as a subject."

• what is it?
• why now?
• what does it relate to?
• why is it important? why should I care?
• in 100-150 words

theconversation.com/uk/newsletter

• Your opinion on something you read or heard in the news, as soon as possible
• New research from you or others
• Ideas for 'big picture' pieces or analysis
• Important research or newsworthy events that are NOT being talked about
• New angles or approaches to stories

"Drawing on research work on peri urban areas we highlight the problem of disintegrated development. We then use the lessons learnt from our interdisciplinary research projects to provide an improved action plan to address this problem. In so doing we address the current impasse and stagnation in many of our town vs countryside debates."

Prezi: http://tinyurl.com/h2c8ol9

theconversation.com/uk/team

michael.parker@theconversation.com