A while ago, I went on this pretty awesome scree about how one word-choice decision can push away a reader and make you look pretentious. I truly believe that scholars should strive to be as clear, accessible, and unpretentious as possible and that clarity doesn’t mean “dumbing down” or “appealing to the lowest common denominator.”

Look, academic types, this is what you’re up against as well as this, this, and this. Oh, and let’s not forget this idiot that just keeps getting major book deals. Inaccessible writing is just making things worse for academia, but writing for a wider audience—wider than your committee, for example—is something all academics should strive for.

One way you can really help your readers understand you is to start at the beginning and guide the reader to more complicated ideas. So, the theme of this post is “first mentions.” Keeping in mind that most people start a book at the beginning, here are a few ways that you can teach people some basic knowledge of your field, even while you expound the specifics of your thesis:

• Full name, first mention: When you introduce a person, use his or her full name. It does not matter how “obvious” you think this information is. Do not presume that your students have any idea who “McNamara” is. (Guess what? They don’t!) You can help them look up basic information by providing a full name the first time you mention him. Subsequent mentions can be shortened to last name only. However, if the person is some obscure 19^th-century Russian philosopher, perhaps you should drop his full name again 50 pages later. Don’t expect your reader to remember who he was an hour later. I know I don’t.
• Don’t use nicknames: Look, I understand, you assign cute nicknames to the people involved in your field just to keep sane. And, yes, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara really is “Bobby MacDaddy” in all of my notes about the Vietnam War, and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy is always “The McG” to me. That’s fine internally, but it’s really not OK to refer to a person by your pet name for them, even if you explain it. You might think it’s clever or cute to reach out to a reader this way, but it smacks of cheesiness and insincerity. If a person is mostly known by his nickname, then you need to introduce him this way: William “Wild Bill” Donovan.
• Titles are how people matter: You see what I did just now? I introduced people with their titles right before their names. If you’re not a scholar of the 20^th century, perhaps you didn’t know that Wild Bill Donovan was head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Were you a little put off by the name dropping without explanation? Well, you should be, and most people are, even the over-educated ones.
• Spell out acronyms: I did another little tricky thing with that last point. I spelled out the organizations and gave you the acronym in parentheses. If I were writing a book, I would provide you with a list of acronyms and abbreviations at the beginning, and throughout the text I would occasionally spell out the acronym again just so the text doesn’t turn into “alphabet soup.” Besides, aren’t you struggling to get to the 80,000-word contractual minimum? Adding a little descriptive phrase—yes, a sound bite—for the reader to take away can make all the difference.
• A little explanation goes a long way: And this equally applies to things like technical jargon and obscure facts. With the hyper-specialization of academic disciplines, you can’t even expect other people in your department to be familiar with what you consider to be the basic facts of your specific field. It’s a sad truth, but it is the truth.
• Repetition is how people learn, eventually: This is something I realized early on in college: That even though professors may explicitly use “big words” to pare down course registrations, the ones that stick it out gain quite a bit from learning through context. I don’t think there’s a single educational consultant that would argue against the value of learning in context. So, sneak in some learnin’ by providing useful context and lots of it. Fool your reader into learning. It worked on me!

Do I expect authors to introduce this kind of basic information in a first draft? Absolutely not. The first draft is all about getting as much down on paper as possible, but hopefully, you will go through many revisions and edits over the course of the manuscript’s life cycle. There are numerous tricks and hacks to Microsoft Word that can help you manage proper nouns and acronyms (future posts, I hope!).

Still, I wish I could say that I haven’t encountered these major failures of basic exposition in the manuscripts that have come across my lap (and some of the published ones, too). I wish I could say that publishers actually chose subject matter experts to edit your books. I wish I could say that publishers actually paid for the level of editing that would fix these problems. And I wish I could say that authors didn’t resist an editor’s attempts at making the book teach more effectively and impart knowledge to a broader audience.