From Jargon to Impact: How to Teach Undergrads to Communicate Publicly

Students can demonstrate mastery of a theory in class and still lose a general audience within the first minute of explaining it. An October 2026 piece in The Conversation argues that teaching public communication to undergraduates in bachelor's in communication programs closes exactly this gap.

That piece describes a real editorial workflow: pitch, draft, revise, support claims with evidence. But The Conversation does not accept undergraduate pitches, so the exercise is a simulation, not a submission. The techniques, assignments, rubric criteria, online adaptations, and career payoff show how to make that simulation rigorous.

Effective classrooms treat explanation as a performance for a specific audience, not a summary of course content.

Why Jargon Undermines Public Communication (And What Public Communication Actually Is)

Higher education is under pressure to show that its knowledge matters beyond the campus gate, and the way students write and speak about that knowledge is where the case is won or lost. A recent Conversation article on teaching undergraduates public communication by three university faculty members frames public-facing writing as training for "scholar-citizens," a useful lens for any communication instructor.

What public communication is, and what it is not

Public communication is the work of translating expertise for non-specialist audiences. It overlaps with neighboring fields but is not the same as any of them:

• Public speaking: Concerns delivery, such as voice, pacing, and presence.
• Rhetoric: Supplies the theory of how persuasion and argument work.
• Public relations: Persuades audiences on behalf of an organization.

Public communication underlies all three. It asks whether an outsider can understand, and use, what you know.

How jargon gets in the way

Jargon does three things at once. It signals insider status, telling readers they were not the intended audience. It can hide weak reasoning, because a vague abstraction never has to be defended. And it erodes trust, which matters when institutions are being asked to justify their relevance.

Consider an invented example a student might submit:

• Before: "Our study operationalizes community resilience through multi-stakeholder engagement frameworks."
• After: "We asked residents, city staff, and local business owners what helped their neighborhood recover after the flood, and what got in the way."

The second version is longer, yet it is easier to check, easier to quote, and harder to hide behind. Students often discover that the rewrite exposes a claim they had not actually thought through.

The learning goal

The aim is simple: students who can inform, not just impress.

The Classroom-To-Public Pipeline: A Pitch, Draft, Revise Assignment

The classroom-to-public pipeline is an assignment that asks students to turn what they learned in a course into a short explainer a general reader would actually finish. Students reach that point through the same pitch, draft, feedback and revise steps an editor would require of a working writer.

How the Sequence Works

In an October 7, 2026 piece for The Conversation, Seth T. Kannarr (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville), Derek H. Alderman (University of Tennessee) and Katrina Stack (University of South Florida) describe an end-of-semester version of this model.¹ Reframed as a teaching sequence, it looks like this:

• Pick the issue: Students choose a pressing problem that falls within the course's scope, so the subject matter stays anchored in what they've studied.
• Pitch first: Before writing a full draft, they make the case for the idea: why it matters now and who needs to hear it.
• Draft and revise: They write, take feedback, and rework the piece, backing claims with evidence and adjusting to public-writing conventions rather than academic ones.

The order matters. Pitching before drafting forces students to commit to an angle and an audience early, which is exactly where most jargon-heavy writing goes wrong.

Why "Authentic Learning" Fits an Editorial Model

The authors define authentic learning as learning in real-world contexts, where students observe how subject experts apply academic research to social, political and environmental issues.¹ An editorial workflow is a natural home for that idea because the steps aren't invented for the classroom. They mirror how expert-written explainers actually get made.

The same team develops this argument in "Bringing The Conversation into the Geography Classroom: Public Storytelling as Authentic Learning," published in The Professional Geographer in 2026. That study treats the outlet two ways. As class content, students analyze curated articles to see how scholarly knowledge is translated and evidenced for broad audiences, and whose perspectives are included or missing. As a practice space, students simulate the pitch, draft, feedback and revision process themselves. The authors also ask instructors to address the ethics of science communication, including emotional labor and power relations in expert-centered storytelling.

Production-Side Training, Not Just Writing Instruction

For communication faculty, the real value is that this is strategic communication practice disguised as a writing assignment. A pitch is a persuasive message aimed at a gatekeeper. Drafting to a house style is message discipline. Revising under editorial feedback resembles the approval cycles public relations, public affairs and agency professionals navigate every week.

Students who complete the sequence learn to defend news value, name an audience, and support claims under scrutiny. Those are production skills, and they transfer well beyond the essay in front of them.

Classroom Techniques for Teaching Plain-Language Translation

What actually helps students stop writing for their professors and start writing for the public? Four techniques cover most of the ground, and each fits inside a single class period.

Jargon Audit

Have students highlight every term a neighbor wouldn't know in their own draft, then replace or define each one. Pair them up and swap highlighters, because writers rarely see their own insider vocabulary.

Audience Analysis Memo

Before any drafting, students write a half-page profile of the reader: what they already know, what is at stake for them, and what objections they would raise. Require one specific, named reader type, such as a school board member or a local clinic director, rather than "the general public."

Explain-It-Back Peer Feedback

Recruit a non-major (a roommate, a student from another department, a campus staff member) to read the draft and paraphrase it aloud without looking. Wherever the paraphrase drifts, the draft has a gap. The author revises only those passages and reports what changed.

Managing Speaking Anxiety

Plain-language speaking is hard to practice when speech anxiety in the classroom freezes students. Build in low-stakes repetitions, such as 60-second ungraded explanations to a partner, then widen the audience to a small group and finally the full room. Teach reappraisal explicitly: students relabel nerves as readiness before they speak and note what happened afterward.

The evidence for this kind of course design is encouraging but uneven in communication education research. One introductory speech course saw its PRCA-24 mean fall from 66.07 to 62.72, about 5.1 percent.¹ A Tennessee Tech program assessment reported a 7.23-point drop in total communication apprehension with a medium effect size (d = .57), though that is an institutional report rather than peer-reviewed work.² A separate course-based study recorded composite apprehension falling from 81.0 to 67.7 (d = .69),³ and a systematic review of anxiety interventions found large effects above .80, though those interventions were not all standard public-speaking courses.⁴

Treat these as directional, not as a promise. The studies use different instruments, samples, and formats, so no single reduction figure applies to every classroom. Collect your own pre and post numbers, and let your students' results guide the next semester's design.

Assignments That Build Audience Awareness, From Pre-Speech Exercises to Podcasts

The hardest tradeoff in a public communication course is time: every minute spent teaching audience awareness is a minute not spent on content depth. The good news is that audience work scales from five-minute warm-ups to full semester projects, so you can layer it in without surrendering rigor. The sequence moves students from quick diagnostic exercises to published-feeling formats, each forcing a sharper read of who is listening.

Pre-Speech Exercises That Diagnose Jargon

Start small, before any drafting begins. These low-stakes reps surface the gap between what students know and what an audience can absorb.

• The one-sentence takeaway: Students compress their entire topic into a single sentence a stranger would repeat accurately. Success criterion: no technical term that a non-expert would have to look up.
• The 12-year-old and the city council member: Students explain the same finding twice, once to a curious kid, once to a time-pressed official weighing a decision. Success criterion: the two versions differ in vocabulary and framing, not just length.
• Audience-persona cards: Each student writes a card describing a real reader (their job, their stake in the issue, what they already believe). Success criterion: the card names a specific objection the audience would raise.

Short Formats That Reward Structure

Once students can name their audience, assign formats that each demand a different build. The op-ed leads with a claim and argues. The explainer answers questions in order of urgency. The audio script has to work without visual cues, so it front-loads the hook and repeats the key point.

• Op-ed: 650 words. Success criterion: the reader knows what you want them to think or do by the end of the first paragraph.
• Explainer: 500 words. Success criterion: it answers the question a confused reader would actually type into a search bar.
• Three-minute podcast or audio script: roughly 450 spoken words, the kind of piece produced in podcasting assignments for communication classes. Success criterion: a listener who misses the first ten seconds can still follow along.

Teaching Distribution Through Open Licenses

Finally, treat distribution as part of the craft. Have students choose a Creative Commons license for a piece and write a short note explaining who might reuse it and how. Open-license publishing is how outlets like The Conversation reach wide audiences, and a single article can be picked up by republishers such as Actively Learn, a McGraw Hill platform serving K-12 classrooms. Writing for reuse teaches students to strip assumptions a new audience would not share, which is the whole point of public communication and the foundation of building trust in communication.

How Should a Semester of Public Communication Assignments Build, Step by Step?

Each assignment below builds on the one before it. Students start by defining who they are talking to and finish with something that audience would actually read. Order matters: a pitch written before a jargon audit tends to carry the same insider language it should have dropped.

Related Articles

Public Communication Course Learning Outcomes and Rubric Criteria

The criteria below link five qualities that public communication courses commonly grade (clarity, evidence, audience adaptation, ethics, and delivery) to two published frameworks: the NCA Competent Speaker form, which rates eight competencies as excellent, satisfactory, or unsatisfactory, and the AAC&U VALUE Oral Communication rubric, which scores five areas at four levels of achievement. To run a pre/post measure, assign the same public-facing prompt in week 1 and week 14, remove names and dates from the recordings or drafts, and have raters score both rounds blind with this identical rubric, so any gain reflects student growth rather than grader expectations. For op-eds, explainers, or podcasts, keep the content rows as they are and replace the delivery cues with format equivalents: for writing, use readability, headline and lede strength, and layout; for audio, use pacing, vocal variety, and sound quality.

Simulation vs. Submission: What Undergraduates Can and Can't Publish

The Conversation does not accept pitches or drafts from undergraduate students or community partners, which means the assignment sequence described by Kannarr, Alderman, and Stack is a simulation of an editorial workflow, not a pathway to publication. Say this to your students on day one. An instructor who implies that strong work might run on a major outlet sets up a disappointment that undercuts everything the exercise teaches about professional realism.

Why the licensing model still matters

The reason instructors keep circling back to The Conversation is its distribution model: articles are short, open access, and republishable under a Creative Commons license, which is how they travel to classrooms and newsrooms that never commissioned them. The authors point to Actively Learn, a McGraw Hill platform serving K-12 educators, as a prominent republisher, though you should verify current partner lists and submission rules on The Conversation's own pitching and republishing pages before describing them to a class, since policies shift.

The licensing itself is worth a short lecture because your PR and strategic communication students will manage communication licensure and media ethics professionally. A CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license permits sharing and adaptation with attribution, bars commercial reuse, and requires adaptations to carry the same license.¹ CC BY 4.0 is broader: commercial use is permitted, attribution is still mandatory, and no additional restrictions may be layered on.² All Creative Commons licenses require attribution³, are irrevocable once granted³, and can only be applied by someone who owns or controls the copyright⁴. Privacy, publicity, and moral rights can still limit what a reuser does.⁵

Real outlets your students can actually reach

• Campus outlets: Student newspapers, alumni magazines, and research office blogs accept undergraduate bylines and run on genuine deadlines.
• Community partner newsletters: A nonprofit or local agency the course already works with often needs plain-language explainers and will give candid feedback.
• A class blog or open-license repository: Publishing the semester's work under a clearly chosen license lets students practice attribution decisions firsthand.

Keeping the editorial pressure real

Simulation does not mean low stakes. Assign rotating mock editor roles so students practice effective business communication techniques while rejecting and sharpening each other's pitches. Hold a firm pitch deadline weeks before the draft is due. Require a short revision memo in which the writer explains what the editor asked for, what changed, and what they pushed back on and why. That memo is the artifact hiring managers would recognize.

Adapting for Online Courses, Accessibility, and Diverse Speakers

Teaching public communication online does not mean giving up the audience. Build digital communication skills through asynchronous moments that create real receivers for student messages. In asynchronous online courses, have students record short video speeches and post them for time-stamped peer review on a discussion board. Then add live breakout rehearsals where small groups respond with one retweetable line and one clarifying question. This keeps feedback specific instead of generic "nice job."

Accessible Delivery From the Start

Captions, transcripts, and alt text are not compliance afterthoughts. They let students with hearing, vision, or processing differences, including autism communication challenges, participate fully. Offer flexible delivery options: a student can submit a prerecorded voiceover with slides, a podcast-style interview, or a live conversation with you instead of a standing speech. For students with severe anxiety or disabilities that make in-person speaking impossible, these alternatives assess the same core skill: adapting a message for a public audience. If a student chooses prerecorded delivery, still require them to respond to audience questions in writing so the exchange remains public and interactive.

Accent, Culture, and Rhetorical Style

Clarity and adaptation matter more than accent. Some students come from intercultural communication traditions that use circular storytelling, communal framing, or indirect persuasion. Do not mark those as disorganized or off-topic. Ask instead whether the speaker made deliberate choices that fit the intended audience and whether plain-language translation is visible. A strong accent can be fully clear, so evaluate comprehension and audience-aware choices rather than pronunciation against a single standard. Rewarding clear, audience-aware choices helps multilingual speakers without penalizing their voice.

Three Rubric Tweaks That Keep Standards

• Engagement: Replace "maintains eye contact" with "sustains audience engagement in person, on camera, or through voice."
• Delivery: Replace "fluent speech without filler words" with "uses pauses and pacing that support comprehension for listeners from varied language backgrounds."
• Style: Replace "standard American academic tone" with "adapts register and vocabulary to the target public audience, including deliberate plain-language choices."

These tweaks hold students to high standards while removing hidden penalties for difference. The goal is not a single standard path to a speech but a common benchmark for public impact.

How These Skills Translate to PR, Strategic Communication, and Public Affairs Careers

The tension students face is familiar: the craft they practice in a public communication course can feel academic until they see it priced in a job listing. The gap closes fast once you map each assignment to a task a PR or public affairs team actually performs, and once you put real labor-market numbers next to the work.

What Employers Pay and What They Want

Communication consistently ranks among the soft skills for jobs employers rate highest for entry-level hires. A secondary report citing the National Association of Colleges and Employers' 2026 Job Outlook Spring Update puts verbal communication at 78% and written communication at 72% in employer ratings, though NACE's own published excerpts do not confirm whether those figures measure importance, proficiency, or another dimension.⁴ Treat the exact percentages with caution; the directional signal, that employers want graduates who can communicate clearly, is well established.

The pay follows the skill. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that public relations specialists earned a median of $74,750 per year ($35.94 per hour) in May 2025, with projected growth of 2% from 2025 to 2035, slightly below the 3% projected across all occupations, yet still generating roughly 23,000 openings a year.¹ Move up to public relations and fundraising managers and the combined median rises to $136,470, with 6% projected growth. Within that category, PR managers alone post a median of $146,910.²

Mapping Assignments to Workplace Tasks

Each piece of the pitch-draft-revise sequence has a direct professional analog:

• Pitch to media pitch: The one-paragraph pitch you wrote to sell an article is the same document a PR specialist sends an editor or producer. Angle, relevance, and hook all transfer.
• Jargon audit to message testing: Flagging and translating specialized terms is how strategic communicators test whether a message lands with a non-expert audience before it goes public.
• Revision memo to stakeholder review: Documenting what you changed and why mirrors the stakeholder sign-off loop where legal, leadership, and clients weigh in before release.

Building a Portfolio

Don't file these assignments away. Present the pitch, the draft, and the revision memo together as a case study that shows your process, not just a finished product. Employers across strategic communication careers and public affairs want evidence you can adapt a message under constraint. A short reflection explaining your audience analysis and your editing choices turns a class project into portfolio proof. For deeper role-by-role detail, see the Careers With a Master's in Communication guide on mastersincommunications.org.