The Many Tracks of Scholarship in Action

I want to make more room for the different kinds of writing scholars do. A local newspaper essay, a para-academic blog post, and a journal article can grow from the same research. Each asks something different of the writer. Each deserves to be judged by what it does for its readers. The size of the audience and the prestige of the publication only tell us so much.

David M. Perry's excellent The Public Scholar: A Practical Handbook gives us a practical place to begin. He explains how to pitch, build an argument, select evidence, and work with editors. His understanding of academic expertise includes sustained learning outside faculty employment, too.^[1] What I appreciate is his willingness to teach the work. Drawing on Perry, I want to look at five parts of scholarship in action, concentrating on writing and publishing. Teaching, organizing, museum work, and community partnerships deserve their own discussion.

1. Op-eds, editorials, and critical interventions #

A school-board dispute or a proposed budget gives scholars a reason to write for a local newspaper. An online news magazine might offer space to challenge a claim about religious freedom while people are still arguing about it. You need a claim, evidence, and a reason for readers to care now. There is a distinction within opinion writing worth keeping: an editorial usually expresses the publication's position. A contributed op-ed makes the writer's case.

Perry starts with reading the publication you want to write for. Notice what its readers already know and how its writers explain things. His chapter on the essay separates the opening that catches a reader's attention from the news hook that explains why the piece belongs in this moment. Then he asks you to state your argument early. A credential gives readers a reason to listen. You still have to make the case.^[2]

I find his comparison with teaching especially useful. Teachers select examples and decide how much background a class needs. Public writers do that work, too. An essay has limited space. You choose the evidence that supports the argument and give readers a way to follow it back to its sources.

Perry's attention to local publication deserves emphasis. He suggests making the loss of research grants concrete through the institutions affected nearby. Readers can see what a national pattern means where they live.^[3] That gives the scholar a specific job: explain the connection. People who share a place may have reasons to act on that explanation.

2. Para-academic blogs #

By para-academic blogs, I mean writing alongside academic institutions and journals, with more scholarly detail than much general-interest commentary and a more deliberately cultivated audience. A post can work through a difficult book, collect sources, or develop a methodological disagreement. It can give a critical intervention more room than an op-ed allows. Specialists, students, independent researchers, and other interested readers gather around those questions.

Perry describes his blog as a place to follow themes, try arguments, collect material, and publish pieces he couldn't place elsewhere. Writing regularly helped him develop clarity and fluency. But his advice comes with a condition I appreciate: the writing itself has to be worthwhile. A substantial audience may never arrive.^[4]

Think about a blog with fifty attentive readers. An annotated reading note might help one of them teach a text. A source collection might help another develop an argument. Those are possible uses worth writing for. I don't think a post has to become a magazine essay to earn its place.

That freedom requires care. If you're trying out an interpretation, say so. Link the evidence and make corrections visible. Some collective blogs have editors, while an individual blog may have none. Readers should be able to tell what kind of scrutiny the work has received. Cultivating an audience also means earning its trust.

3. Academic journals and access #

Journals give scholars room to engage sources at length and submit their arguments to formal peer review. They also preserve work for later criticism and reuse. But a question follows the article out of the editorial process: who can get a copy?

A subscription journal may reach you through your university library. Without that access, you may meet a paywall. Open access removes that barrier, although an article's language and assumptions can still make it difficult to read. Publishing the research openly and explaining it for another audience are both useful work.

The colors describe different publishing arrangements:

• Diamond open access: neither authors nor readers pay publication or access fees. Institutions, funders, or other supporting arrangements sustain the work. The 2022 Action Plan for Diamond Open Access emphasizes community-led publishing and the need to support its capacity and sustainability.^[5]
• Gold open access: the final published version is openly available from the publisher immediately. Some journals charge article processing fees. Others do not. Gold does not inherently mean author-pays, and fee-free gold publishing overlaps with diamond.
• Green open access: an author makes a version available through a repository. This is often the accepted manuscript, after peer review but before publisher typesetting. Permitted versions and embargoes vary. Repository access can accompany publication in a subscription journal.^[6]

Editorial quality needs its own assessment, whatever the funding arrangement. Diamond publishing matters to me because it addresses the reader's ability to obtain scholarship and the writer's ability to publish it. The labor still needs support. Someone has to edit the articles and maintain the publication. Free access requires a commitment to paying for that work or sustaining the people who do it.

4. Reach and impact #

Perry warns against carrying the academic prestige economy into public writing. A famous outlet offers the possibility of many readers. A smaller regional or subject-specific publication may put an argument in front of people who can use it.^[3:1] I want that distinction to carry more weight when we talk about whether public scholarship succeeds.

Reach tells us something about circulation: readers, views, downloads. Impact asks what happened next. A teacher might revise a lesson, a journalist might find a better source, or a community organization might gain an explanation it can use. Those outcomes need evidence of their own. A thousand views cannot tell us whether a thousand people read carefully or whether anyone changed their mind.

Perry asks writers to give an essay a manageable purpose. You might provide evidence to people who already agree with you, introduce an unfamiliar issue, or begin to shift someone's perspective. He treats those gains as partial. Expecting one essay to accomplish too much makes the writing harder and the argument less clear.^[7]

This matters for tenure and promotion, too. Perry discusses assessing public work through the demands of its genre as well as its scholarly rigor.^[8] I would start with what the piece tried to do, whether its evidence supports the argument, and how well it served its readers. A download count is one piece of information. It cannot answer all three questions.

5. Slow thinking, fast thinking, short reads, long reads #

Perry's first practical lesson is to move quickly when your expertise becomes relevant to the news. His account of writing about papal resignation shows how a narrow historical specialization can suddenly become useful to a broad readership.^[9] The opening for publication may last a short time. The preparation has taken years.

That is why I hesitate to equate a short read with fast thinking. Reading, writing, and learning run on different schedules. An 800-word intervention may depend on a decade of study. A long article may still rush past the assumption that most needs attention. Length tells you how much there is to read. It tells you much less about the care behind it.

The claim should help determine the pace. An urgent essay can challenge a misleading comparison while leaving the longer history for another piece. A blog can preserve the sources and questions that need attention. A journal article can develop the extended argument. Perry's experience with blogging also offers a way to think about sustained work: short pieces can build on one another over time.^[4:1]

The lesson I take from Perry is to learn what each kind of writing asks of you. Questions from public readers can reshape a research project, and a journal article can give you the evidence for a local intervention. You can move between these forms as the work requires. I'd like to hear where that happens in your own writing, especially when a small publication turns out to be the right place for an argument.

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1. David M. Perry, The Public Scholar: A Practical Handbook (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026), introduction. Consulted in the local OKF's full-text copy under Digital Humanities/public scholar. ↩︎

2. Perry, Public Scholar, chap. 3, “Audience,” “Lede and Hook,” “Argument,” and “Evidence.” ↩︎

3. Perry, Public Scholar, chap. 2, “Where When and How to Pitch.” ↩︎ ↩︎

4. Perry, Public Scholar, chap. 5, “Blogging and Newsletters.” The definition of para-academic blogging above is my framing. ↩︎ ↩︎

5. Zoé Ancion et al., Action Plan for Diamond Open Access (March 2022), 3–6. ↩︎

6. Open University Library Research Support, “How to Publish Open Access”, sections on green, gold, and diamond access. ↩︎

7. Perry, Public Scholar, chap. 3, “Evidence.” ↩︎

8. Perry, Public Scholar, chap. 6, discussion of public scholarship in tenure and promotion, especially the American Sociological Association's assessment guidance. ↩︎

9. Perry, Public Scholar, chap. 1, “Move Fast.” ↩︎