These resources are made available for The Conversation's member universities, providing guides for academics interested in writing for The Conversation, and guides to working with The Conversation for university professional staff.
For access to the downloads below, contact your university press office, or email the membership team.
New in autumn 2023, The Conversation has launched four online training courses for academics, which cover how to write in a journalistic way for non-specialist audiences, how to pitch ideas to editors, and how to write for Insights, our stream of long form articles.
These free online training courses are a member-only benefit to academics affiliated with The Conversation's member institutions. However an introductory course explaining how The Conversation works is available to all.
To access the online training, go to https://theconversationuktraining.teachable.com, or click the image above.
You will need to register for an account on the training site and use this to enroll on courses (this is separate to any account registered on theconversation.com).
The Conversation's training for academics through live workshops and online courses has been mapped by Vitae to its Researcher Development Framework. The RDF describes the competencies of effective researchers, as identified by the higher education sector, and provides an internationally recognised route map for their professional development, helping to identify existing skills and new skills to be learned. This approach is embedded in more than 140 institutions in the UK, and Vitae works with around 200 educational institutions worldwide.
Our workshops and courses were identified as mapping to the RDF's Domain A (knowledge and intellectual abilities), Domain B (Personal effectiveness) and Domain D (Engagement, influence and impact) – see graphic above (click to enlarge).
For the RDF mapping of our live workshops, see the following graphic (click to enlarge):
For the online courses, see the course outline page for each course for a detailed breakdown:
Our editors provide training workshops for academics to help them understand how to approach writing for non-specialist audiences. These are the slides used in the sessions, where the different versions contain examples relevant to each field, but are otherwise the same.
The handout is recommended reading for all, offering further advice about writing and pitching.
(version 2025.2)
These short guides are for communications teams or other professional staff at universities that work directly with The Conversation.
If you are wondering how to use the analytics dashboards, what to do with the expert request, what our media training involves
or other membership benefits, the following guides will answer your questions. If there's anything not covered here or if you've any other
query, please get in touch.
(version 2024.10)