Overview

You’ve been working at Perspex, an online magazine with a self-consciously intellectual and cultural viewpoint (more popular examples of this genre would be The New Yorker, The Atlantic, or Slate). You like working for Perspex because you generally get to pick your own projects. You’ve had the most luck in “translating” existing work, often collaborating with an academic researcher to remake a specialized or highly technical article he or she has written into a more accessible and entertaining form.

You’ve just published a string of articles on topics ranging from the acoustics of the Metropolitan Opera House to the science of creating compelling television commercials. After a couple of days off, you’re ready to head into a new project. You begin by going to an academic library site and browsing recent academic journal issues to find an article that you can translate into something a wider audience would find entertaining. You’ll need to take the original (very specialized) content from the article and rewrite it in a style and structure that will be interesting to a nonspecialist audience.

You’ll produce a short (around 1,500-word) article or essay for a general, educated audience. The language should be simple and accessible but not oversimplified. You may want to review articles at some of the publications mentioned earlier and think about them in comparison to both specialized academic papers as well as informational news articles. Your article or essay will be somewhere between the two.

Because this genre is also visual, you’ll need to locate three to five images to illustrate key points or even just emotions connected to your topic. Because your budget for images is pretty low (actually, it’s $0), you’ll want to locate Creative Commons or similar images that you can use both legally and for free.

A note on copyright and plagiarism: Copyright law allows limited use of works in the classroom, so you’re within your rights to create a text based on an academic article provided you do not publish it (in print, on the web, and so forth) and share it only in the classroom. Although it should be obvious to your instructor that you created your new text based on someone else’s existing text, you should add a note to your draft that lists the author and source of the original text. (Who knows? Ten years from now when you’re a wealthy CEO or politician, some journalist may dig through your discarded hard drive, find this essay, and declare that you plagiarized this text. Scandalous! Better safe than sorry.)