From Academic To Freelance Writing: Coping With The Culture Shock

And how capitalism has corrupted both fields

Arguably, much of higher education has became a racket especially in the US, with college administrators outnumbering teachers, far more graduate degrees being awarded than there are academic jobs available, and students being sent into crushing debt, having obtained a meaningless degree in a frivolous arts program.

Consequently, there’s been an exodus of failed academics from the Ivory Tower to Main Street. There the overeducated individual might ply his or her craft in the gig economy, working perhaps as a freelance writer. This failed academic will likely suffer from culture shock as he or she discovers what passes for communication outside the academy.

Let’s compare, then, the two kinds of writing to see where there should be compromise between the two standards.

The Dryness of Academic Writing

The complaints about academic writing are familiar. To begin with, this kind of writing is virtually unreadable. The academic’s jargon-heavy, convoluted, impersonal writing is hardly even meant to be read since it’s published in rarefied journals that are often now part of the racket. The goal isn’t to disseminate knowledge so much as to perpetrate illusions of utility and progress, and to burnish the author’s reputation.

Of course, academic writers aren’t interested just in entertaining anyone, but neither are they so concerned with getting at the truth. The main goals are to showcase your fealty to a guild, to speak the shibboleths that confirm your membership in an elite tribe, and to succeed in the business of being an academic. Academics aren’t just writers or teachers. They must publish even if they have nothing to say. They’re expected to have a lot to say, though, to profess their mastery of the subject even if the subject has been made up to satisfy politically correct expectations.

In any case, academic writing in the humanities is often dry, abstract, clunky, and long-winded. The author hides behind pretentious jargon, and writes byzantine sentences about inconsequential subjects.

When this highly trained writer leaves the academy and wants to write for a more popular audience, she learns she’ll have to adopt the opposite style. Paragraph, sentence, and word sizes must shrink, and instead of feigning neutrality, the popular writer must write conversationally and even autobiographically as though she were making her personal journal public.

The Tricks of Freelance Writing

Whereas academics have a captive audience to the extent that they have any, the freelance writer sings for her supper, luring in readers who might rather be watching a fun video. The trick, then, is to keep the article breezy, upbeat, and inoffensive. You write not to do justice to English or to The Truth, but to chat awhile with the reader in between more leisurely uses of your free time.

This isn’t to say that academic and popular writing are opposites in every respect. Both are businesses and both reward different forms of fakery. Freelance writers have a much larger potential audience, encompassing all internet users, so they’re competing for people’s fleeting attention.

For example, the art of devising clickbait titles has arisen to fill in for the lack of reliable or all-encompassing curation in the open market. Academic titles are meant to be direct and specific: you just state what your article is about, without resorting to rhetorical tricks. (Mind you, the internet has impacted the academy, as in the growth of online alternatives like the Khan Academy, so perhaps some academics are driven to adopt wittier styles, at least in their titles.)

Nevertheless, outside the academy writing isn’t so narrowly intellectual, so the tricks are fair game. Thus, an academic article on trees might be called, “Botanical Remarks on the Cultivation of Weeping Willows,” while the freelance version would be more nonsensical or tantalizing such as, “I Ate a Weeping Willow and it Made Me Cry” or “10 Jaw-Dropping Facts About Weeping Willows.”

The Common Standards of Capitalism

Before computers and the internet democratized the flow of information, there were gatekeepers that divided the sheep from the goats. Anyone earning money as a writer was judged worthy by the editors first, and the limited number of publications meant the potential readers had few places to go for their daily articles. There was no need to trick the readers or to plead with them to have a look at what you’ve just written, because you’d have already gained entry by getting past the gatekeeper.

With self-publishing, gatekeepers either vanished or lost much of their hallowed status. Elitism and meritocracy themselves were suspect, as we each think we know enough to judge for ourselves what’s worth reading or buying. The “free market” decides what’s best when certain products rise to the top, based on the public’s registered preferences.

This market isn’t, however, entirely fair. Academics often find themselves preoccupied with meaningless administrative duties, whereas they should be focussed on teaching and on furthering human progress. Large companies please their greedy shareholders rather than pursuing long-term goals or ensuring their business is good for society.

And freelance writers are distracted with the rules of our electronic medium, of how to succeed on the internet, which might be contrary to the age-old purposes of writing. Instead of writing to explore our minds and to share knowledge, the digital freelance writer is obliged to conform her writing to the internet’s business model, which means she fights for attention by entertaining and reassuring the audience.

You might have thought that intellectual standards are at their peak in the Ivory Tower. But the sad truth is that capitalism may already have perverted the academy just as it’s distorted the internet. Both were once held up as utopian places of learning and of free expression, far removed from matters of commerce and political compromise. Yet as the internet emerged to compete with universities, which drove much of the academy into a self-destructive racket, and as the internet was monopolized by the likes of Google, Facebook, and Amazon, the socialist dreams of post-capitalism faded, and artists of all stripes find themselves degraded.

To be sure, we have the tools now to produce our art and to sell it on the open market, and as a result there’s likely more art produced now than ever before. Moreover, many of these artists are talented, and at least with the internet you have a chance of finding their work, whereas beforehand these masters might have been showcasing their output only in their garage or in a journal tucked under their mattress.

But this cybermarket isn’t free — and I’m not talking about your cable bills. The greater cost of this ease of entry is that to succeed, you must appeal to the mob. You mustn’t be yourself in so far as you’re a lover of the artistic process and are obsessed with improving your art’s quality.

Just by putting your work out there on the internet, you’re deferring to the capitalist ethos. That which sells the most must be the best, so everyone tries to copy the most popular producers. If clickbait titles and puff pieces work best, if they attract the most eyeballs even if the duped brains attached to those eyes leave unsatisfied, the prudent writer adopts those techniques just as a safe driver follows the rules of the road.

A Double Critique

Where does that leave us? Both academic and freelance writing can be critiqued from the other’s perspective. Again, much academic writing has become a self-parody. The humanities puff themselves up with jargon to feel important and woke, even as the real world runs mainly on improvements in science and technology. And academic science articles are at least as dull, with mind-numbing elaborations on method that few if any specialists read.

By contrast, much freelance writing is like a circus, with flashing lights and in-your-face slogans to distract from the shenanigans. The commercialized internet is designed to addict the user, and if we mean to succeed as freelance writers in cyberspace, we’re likely to be accomplices to that dehumanizing business model.

We’ve got to supply our share of the drug to attract those eyeballs. That means our writing will overpromise and will flatter the readers. At all costs we’ll want to avoid disturbing our readers or inviting them to think hard about a problem. In the case of the self-help industry, for example, the most successful freelance writing is as insubstantial and unhealthy as cotton candy.

What, then, is an ex-academic to do? She seems to be caught between two pitfalls. She shouldn’t write like a pure academic, but neither should she write like a pure freelancer. Both kinds of writing have been debased by the profit motive. Contrary to bogus, neoclassical economics, such selfishness doesn’t generally make everything better. Costs get externalized or left unresolved, as in the devastation of ecosystems by unchecked capitalist enterprise.

In the case of writing, the external, ignored cost is the shame endured by the writer who knows better but who succumbs to the lowering of intellectual standards. When writing is a business rather than an art, we can expect to see the cheapening of the product and the exploitation of the consumer. We’re reduced to being addicts, wards of the monopolists who set the stage for the circus performances.

Likewise, the humanities students in college learn how to party but not to think for themselves as self-sufficient citizens in a sustainable republic. In the racket that much higher learning has become, they’re coddled and conned out of their tuition payments.

The common enemy in these fields seems to be the capitalistic mindset that’s at odds with humanism and artistry. But this defiled environment is as ubiquitous as the air we breathe or the factory-farmed food most of us eat. Perhaps the best we can do, then, if we want to share our writing on the internet is to retain at least a semblance of the academic’s sense of intellectual substance, and some appreciation of the common reader’s need for respite from the daily grind.