Hello, you may have heard the phrase ivory tower before. You may not have, but the ivory tower, in part, refers to the idea that scholarly writing, scholarly ideas, research, scholarship in general. Exists within kind of an inaccessible ivory tower that's positioned way above and beyond what actually happens in the rest of life. Public scholarship is a way of countering that idea. It's actually not set up to counter that idea, but it works against that idea. Because it reveals that scholarship really does happen in public forums, as well as within what might be constituted as an ivory tower kind of setting. So, I wanted to think with you today about forms of public scholarship, why it's important, what it looks like, and how you might move your scholarship to more public settings. Making academic writing public is one of the key aims of the work that we do at Duke in first year writing and in writing across undergraduate curriculum. Because we really do think that it's important that scholarly ideas have a life beyond just the academy. To have a life within the academy is important, but we want to make sure that those ideas get to be used, and thought, and reshaped and responded to by people outside of the academy. So the purpose for making academic writing public differs depending on the context, sometimes it can be to reach a wider audience with a particular argument. Other times it can be to gain response from a wider public. So the purpose kind of varies, but we do want you to think about how you can make your scholarly writing public. The form of scholarly writing that's made more public does change to a certain extent. Sometimes the research ends up becoming more in the form of paraphrase or summary rather than extensive, long explication of a research. And that's because that often when you're ready for the public, you want to communicate more efficiently, I guess? And and you want to make sure you're as inclusive as possible to as wide a number of people as possible. Making your writing public offer several challenges. One is kind of changing gears from writing for a more academic audience to a more public audience. Because you want to be as inclusive as possible, you might want to choose language and approach and tone and style of citation and how much research you draw in and what kinds of research you draw on. All of that kind of shifts when you're trying to reach a larger more public audience, so that can present a challenge. Especially, if you're already happy with the way that you've made an argument in a more scholarly academic setting. And then you want to translate it for a more public setting, you have to make a whole series of different choices. Here are some examples of scholarly writing. Blogs are one of the most common ones. They're a number of blogs now in operation by scholars, writing about their ideas in more public forums. Op-eds, you're going to be writing one of those. This stands for opposite the editorial page. This is often op-eds and letters to the editor, are key ways of making scholarship more public. Pamphlets, brochures, websites, educational literature. The literature you get at your physician's office on diabetes or on cholesterol rate, that's a form of making scholarship public. And then there's also a whole range within in each discipline, of what I would just call, under the umbrella term, public scholarship. So, books and articles that appear in spaces and publications where the public has access to them. So, if you go to the bookstore and you see books about history, right? Often, not always, but often, those are kind of public scholarly forms of history, right? Where a writer could've chosen to write in a more academic way. Philosophy is another example of this, where there are more public forms of philosophy and more scholarly forms of philosophy, both are scholarship. And then also, finally public speaking is another key way that we make scholarship public. There are often events at museums or public spaces where scholars will come and share their ideas with a broader public. So, there are many different forms and ways to make your scholarship public. I think the key point that I'd like to emphasize for this course is that scholarships, I don't want to say should. One might argue [LAUGH] that much scholarship would do well to be made public in some form or other at some point. And so I'd like you to be thinking about how, and where, and why you might do that with your scholarly writing.
