Guest lecturing copywriting students on academic publishing

I gave a guest lecture to a group of copywriting students last week on academic publishing, and it was such a great feeling to stand in front of a room of students again, something I don’t get to do very often anymore.

I opened with my own story — how both my Masters papers and my PhD work ended up published, and how in every single case it started with a conference, not the writing itself. I didn’t expect that to be the part they latched onto most. They kept asking practical stuff: what’s it actually like presenting to a room of academics, how do you even find the right conference, what happens in that weird gap between presenting and actually seeing something in print.

Then came the bit that always gets a reaction from people outside academia: you don’t get paid. Not for the article, not usually for peer review either. That opened up a proper debate. A few of them were pretty annoyed on my behalf, actually — all that work for no money seemed absurd to them, and I get it. But it turned into a good conversation about why people still do it. Reputation, mostly. Wanting to add something real to a field. The fact that this is just how academic knowledge gets checked and built, slowly, by people doing it for reasons other than a paycheck.

I’d planned to spend the second hour running them through writing an academic abstract from scratch, but the conversation took its own turn and we ended up talking about the abstracts they’re writing for their exegesis projects instead. Honestly, that was the better outcome. Their questions were specific in a way that told me they were actually stuck on it — how do you say everything that needs saying in 150 to 200 words, and what do you do when your topic doesn’t have much written about it yet.

What I liked most was realising how much of this translates. Copywriting and academic writing seem like completely different worlds, but underneath it’s the same job — argue clearly, back it up with something solid, get it in front of the right people.

Went in thinking I was there to lecture. Left having picked up a decent sense of what these students are actually wrestling with.