I spent over 10 years in academia and during my PhD I noticed 2 things that shocked me:

1. PhD students have coffee running through their veins instead of blood. That was definitely the case for me, and I’m gonna go out on a limb and say it’s pretty common.

2. Most academics are brilliant minds with terrible communication skills.

For 1: It is what it is, am I right? 🤷🏾‍♂️

For 2, the reason is simple: academia teaches us how to talk to other academics, but not how to talk to people outside academia. Academic jargon is a language 99 % of the world doesn’t speak. The consequence? Great ideas get ignored by the public. The solution is simple — but not easy: just as you’d translate a text from French to English, you need to translate academic jargon to human.

I gained 25k+ followers in 3 months on Threads and 3K+ followers in 6 weeks on Medium by breaking all the rules of academic writing and focusing on how to simplify scientific texts without losing context.

In the last couple of newsletters I gave some specific tips on how to do that. Today, I’m gonna show you how to apply those tips with a practical example. I grabbed an excerpt from the abstract of a peer-reviewed paper, and I’m gonna walk through it step by step, translating it into conversational language.

The title of the paper is: Resetting the late timing of 'night owls' has a positive impact on mental health and performance. So, the paper basically says that night owls benefit from going to bed earlier because it makes them happier and boosts both mental and physical performance. Here’s a part of the abstract (aka summary):

Now, let’s break it down step by step:

Background

First off, the sentence is too long. Sometimes long sentences are fine, but you’ve got to add a visual pattern-breaker to make them easier on the eyes. Eg a dash (—) instead of the comma after “environment”.

Now, we have to replace every word that sounds academic:

• endogenous biological rhythms: what the hell is endogenous and what is biological rhythm?

• external environment: even though it might be understandable it still screams “academic content”

• with disruptions resulting in negative consequences to health and performance: No one talks like that. Write like you’d talk to a friend.

Also, you need to speak directly to the reader. Here’s the refined version of that sentence.

Your outside world makes it hard to stay in sync with your body clock — and disrupting it leads to health and performance risks.

Now, let’s look at the next sentence:

By the time you’ve read this sentence, I’ll have gone to the gym, climbed a mountain, and slayed that dragon from Game of Thrones. In this case, there’s an easy fix: everything after “night owls” is unnecessary. Everyone knows what a night owl is — an owl on the Night’s Watch.

(Kidding) 

It’s an everyday word, so you don’t need to explain it outside a scientific setting.

“This is often documented in shift work” is a phrase you’d never use in conversational language. So, instead, you could phrase it like this (taking the context of the first sentence into account):

That’s often the case for shift workers and jetlagged people because of societal norms, such as typical working hours.

The last sentence:

is quite alright already, but I’d replace “associated” and “disturbances”:

Night owls have also been linked with health issues, mood swings, poorer performance and increased mortality.

Methods

Knock Knock!

Who’s there?

Broken.

Broken who?

Broken record. This sentence is too long!

Let’s trim it: In academic papers, it’s super important to say when a study’s a randomized controlled trial. But most non-scientists don’t really know what that means, and explaining it doesn’t add much to the point you’re making. So in conversational writing you can skip that part — just keep it in the back of your mind in case someone asks.

“(phase advance)” can be removed, too. It doesn’t add any value for the reader knowing what this concept is called.

“interventions” sounds way too academic. So let’s replace it. Here’s the refined sentence:

This study aimed to help night-owls start sleeping earlier without meds - using practical lifestyle shifts.

And lastly:

These different methods are perfect for a listicle:

These shifts include:
- targeted light exposure (through earlier wake up/sleep times)
- fixed meal times
- caffeine intake
- exercise

You could also reverse the order of the bullet points. Just make sure it’s a slant. Makes it much easier on the reader’s eyes.

Let’s look at the final product

Much easier to read, isn’t it? The academic and translated versions say the exact same thing. But one speaks to 1 % of the world — the other speaks to everyone.

That’s it for now. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out on Instagram @husseinnaji_ or email — my door (aka inbox) is always open. Just reply to this mail☺️

Much love,

Your kiwi-with-the-skin-on-eating friend

Hussein

PS: If you found this useful, check out my other channels:

• Threads

• Medium

• Bluesky

• LinkedIn