: Re: What's the difference between academic and journalistic writing? I'm not talking about "boring" academic papers that are 99% science and 0% interesting. But in comments on a draft of my senior

@Kaufman555

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I don't have any special knowledge of journalism, but I have a fair amount of experience with academic writing as well as giving advice to my grad students. Here's my take, all at the paper level:

You're right about the possibility of sensationalism. I tell some of my students to imagine someone reading their work twenty years from now. Too much enthusiasm about a well-known result--or possibly an overturned result--will seem odd.

Newspaper and magazine articles are written for a much broader audience than academic papers, and they assume a lot less about the reader's background knowledge. It's possible to explain too much or to overwrite in academic writing.

In some long-form magazine articles, we read a story that gradually unfolds. That's less appropriate in academic writing, when you want to tell readers the conclusion up front, and then explain how you got there. Even if some research solved a mystery, it's conventional to present it with the resolution at the beginning.

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