I was invited to "translate" one of my articles into a Communication Currents column. Communication Currents is the National Communication Association's version of Psychology Today, except online. The editor, currently Joann Keyton, invites people who have recently published in a NCA journal to "translate" their scholarly article into something more accessible to a person outside of the discipline, a layperson.
My piece, "Smashing Stereotypes? Communicating Disability in Wheelchair Rugby," will up for a couple of months. You can find it here.
This idea appealed to me because like so many of the communication scholars I admire, Bud Goodall, Nick Trujillo, Amira DelaGarza, and Patricia Geist-Martin, I'm interested in the ways communication scholarship can be translated into books one might find on the shelves of Borders and Barnes and Noble.
The experience was a bit difficult, though, as I'm used to speaking in this language called "academia." Disciplinary territoriality, building walls around one's department for fear of invaders and intruders claiming to study the same thing the same way, has no doubt contributed to this ossification of our lingua franca here in the academy (see, I'm doing it again: "ossification," "lingua franca," good grief!). We don't get credit for learning the other, more widely spoken language of the popular press (at least not in communication). That leaves me tongue-tied.
