Academic researches are being wasted if the article is not optimized for online readers

Some comments by participants in my ongoing online course in “Writing for the Web” highlight the necessity for academic researchers to optimize their writings for the web audience.

In Week 2 of this course, based on guidelines in the reading materials, course participants need to critique “readability” of five sample online articles. Few people, if any, managed to read an article, Was antebellum America secular? which is a long, academic style article.

One course participant says,

I didn’t read it. Sorry. That’s huge, maybe suits for books, but not for the web. The language is very complex, scientific, it is not for everyone. No way.

Another participant says he did not read the article either, and continues to point out,

You can tell that there is not much if any engagement at all with the readers of this article because there are zero comments although there are over 200 shares via social media.

Mu Lin, course facilitator, expresses his concerns for promoting academic researches in the digital era:

I’m particularly troubled and worried about academic articles such as this one. If it is published in an academic journal, then whoever gets a copy of that journal would “expect” to read articles written this way. Print journal readers are committed readers: they care more about the contents and ideas, much less about the format.

But online, reader habbits are completely different. If this same article is hosted at a subscription-only website, then again they would have “committed readers” who care more about contents than format. However, this article is open-access, and was being promoted on social media networks, then it’s really a waste of the research in it, as it was not optimized for easy reading on computer screens and most casual online readers won’t bother to read through it.

Keith Perch, course participant and a UK freelance writer, then asks this question: “Who did the author want to read his research?” Keith continues to say,

If the answer is: other experts, then there’s not much of an issue here as they are all committed readers and would probably expect to read the article in this format.
If the author wanted a more generalist audience, then he has almost certainly failed for all the reasons stated elsewhere. Certainly, I didn’t get all the way through it!
The fact that it was widely spread via social media, doesn’t necessarily mean that it was getting a general readership.

To emphasize the importance of “easy reading”, Keith says this is how he would rank order online articles that he wants to read:

1. Interesting, easy to read = 9
2. Interesting, hard to read = 8
3. so-so article, easy to read = 4
4. so-so article, hard to read = 1
5. not interesting, easy to read = 0
6. not interesting, hard to read = 0

I also feel that I would read 1, and probably 2, word for word, while I would be reading bits while scanning 3, and skimming/scanning 4, but finding nothing to pull me in, while 5 and 6 would have lost me, probably through the headline and first paragraph.