Writing and Disseminating Grey Literature

Hi, we are glad you’ve joined this course on writing and disseminating grey literature! There are nine modules, with six core modules and an assignment module, that have been designed to help you finish this course in six to eight weeks. In each of these modules, you will discover how you can draw from your research or practice/industry work to write public-facing content such as op-eds, data stories, photo narratives, and infographics. You will learn useful skills to help you develop your writing and editing skills, pitch your ideas successfully to media outlets, and use social media to disseminate your work better. This first introductory module serves as an orientation to what you can expect from this course and how you can best approach it. Take a few moments to meet the course instructors, your peers, and also to introduce yourself.

This first module will give you an overview of what constitutes grey literature and introduce the different types of public pieces you could produce from your research. We will then take you through how you could go about structuring and outlining your arguments before you craft a public piece, and what you need to keep in mind when you pitch your work to a publication.

This module will focus on writing opinion pieces or op-eds – one type of public writing we had introduced in Week 1. We will first explain what an op-ed is and how it can be a useful resource for researchers and practitioners to communicate their work to a larger audience. We will then, in detail, cover how you can structure an op-ed and pitch it successfully, and how it varies from a piece of grey literature you may be more used to writing.

This module delves into another popular form of public writing – data stories. Discover what data stories are and how to build compelling narratives, choose relevant information and adapt your writing to suit this style. This module ends with an overview on how to create infographics to present data from your research.