Triple writing, an idea from academia
As a result, the bandwidth that academics are expected to span in their writing has widened far beyond the traditional narrow focus on writing for other academics. And yet – and this is the key argument of this article – achieving bandwidth does not demand that academics necessarily work harder. But it does demand that they work smarter. The idea that any one piece of writing should be written for one specific audience should be jettisoned in favour of a more efficient and multi-phase approach. This is the art of triple writing. Put very simply, this approach adopts a “triple dipping” of research that allows the piece of work to be framed and disseminated to three main audiences.
First and foremost, as academic researchers, it is absolutely right that our primary output should be a peer-reviewed paper of some form. This is what I refer to as “phase 1” and is focused on the foundations of traditional academic writing. (The great problem of academia in the past is that many scholars have not been supported or incentivised to progress their writing beyond phase 1.)
Phase 2, however, sees me rewrite the main scientific paper as a much shorter article that is pitched to a practitioner audience. A research article on, for example, veto points in bureaucratic networks might form the basis of a submission of evidence to a parliamentary select committee that is looking into what effective policymaking looks like. An 8,000-word journal article with a lengthy bibliography would, through this process, be translated into 1,200 words of accessible text with a light sprinkling of references.
Phase 3 then sees the phase 2 draft reduced even further into a very short and engaging newspaper article or blog of between 500 and 600 words that is aimed at a wider public audience. The submission of evidence might, through this approach, be upcycled into a piece for The Conversation or any other mass-access online platform.
From a marketing perspective, repurposing content to all the platforms is nothing new, nor is tailoring it to the audience, but I liked the term “Triple Writing.”
But it doesn’t quite fit, considering all the different places a post might go.
So how about Octuple Writing?