Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.

A few years ago, while immersed in graduate studies in public health at the University of California, Berkeley, I wrote an article for a well-known general interest magazine about the H.I.V. epidemic among gay men in developing countries. I’d been a newspaper reporter for 10 years and had already written a couple of pieces for the publication, so I waited for an email gushing with praise for my thorough reporting and nimble prose.

Instead, my editor informed me that what I’d written was awful. Unreadable. Beyond redemption. “It’s dullsville, I’m sorry to say, and there’s just nothing I can think of to fix it,” she emailed. Ouch!

I nursed my wounds, then reviewed what I’d sent her and understood exactly what she meant. My short piece was stuffed so full of cumbersome language, weighty arguments and important data that everything else — like actual people — got squeezed off the page. Thickets of jargon and numbers obscured whatever profound points I thought I was making. In short, it was an excellent public health paper.

I’m no longer a student; I now teach at Berkeley. And I still toggle between the academic and popular modes of writing. I’m not the only one who finds this flip-flopping to be a challenge. Knowledge in fields like public health and medicine develops slowly; most research, in fact, offers only incremental — read: tiny — advances on existing understandings. Scientists who want to pluck out the most important findings from a body of research and contextualize them for a mass audience need to step back from wallowing in minutiae and transform themselves into an outside observer of their own field.

My colleague Rachel Morello-Frosch, a professor of environmental health sciences at Berkeley, says writing opinion pieces aimed at nonprofessionals forces her to sharpen her focus and think hard about what’s most important. “For a popular audience, you have to get to your point quickly,” she told me in an interview. “In academic writing, the ‘so what’ is usually buried under a lot of verbiage.” Researchers familiar with a particular discipline find great value in academic literature because they’re used to the format. But while the rigid structure and formal language of these peer-reviewed journal articles “are useful for the purpose they’re supposed to serve,” Dr. Morello-Frosch added, “that doesn’t make them well written or interesting to read.”

Obviously, some scientists and health experts have successfully crossed over and have reached large audiences. The paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and the astronomer Carl Sagan, for example, knew how to transform their professional expertise into stories sparkling with insights that everyone — not just colleagues who shared an arcane vocabulary — could understand and appreciate. These days, Atul Gawande, a surgeon, and Oliver Sacks, a neurologist, routinely enlarge our awareness of life’s medical complications and contradictions. But such individuals are the exceptions.

So when I teach public health students at Berkeley how to write for a broader range of readers, I empathize with their struggle to unshackle their inner outside observer. To stimulate the process, I gleefully strip them of two key tent poles of academic writing.

First, I admonish them, forget formal references — and that means no footnotes and no bibliography. This diktat can elicit squawks of concern and anxiety. “What? Include information without citing it? How does that work?” It works, I explain, by not making stuff up and being able to prove your claims should someone challenge them.

On the first assignment, at least one persnickety student usually tries to slip in a footnote or two. I squash any further attempts. I make sure to add that “no references” also means not mentioning every specialized publication consulted for the piece. No one cares that a study appeared in the Journal of Human Lactation, the Journal of Intercultural Ethnopharmacology, or the Journal of Invasive Fungal Infections.

Next, I ban the promiscuous use of acronyms. I’m not talking about F.B.I. or UNICEF or ACT- UP — combinations of letters that readers immediately recognize and understand. Academics (and bureaucrats) love to transform every last concept and process and organization into an acronym. Then they deploy the results as aggressively as possible.

After all, isn’t every reader familiar with NACCHO, FIFRA, and MID? (For those out of the loop, that’s the National Association of County and City Health Officials; the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act; and multi-infarct dementia.) Use the full version for the first mention, I tell students, and after that write around these awkward constructions. Instead of most uses of NACCHO, for example, try “the association.” Or “the pesticide act” for most FIFRAs and “the illness” for MID.

Besides their inherent clunkiness, many acronyms have multiple meanings that can confuse readers with different backgrounds. To many journalists, for example, MSM means “mainstream media.” To public health professionals, MSM stands for “men who have sex with men” — a term researchers use instead of “gay men” if they’re focusing on sexual behaviors rather than sexual identity. According to the website Acronym Finder, these are only two of the 92 possible meanings for MSM.

In other contexts, MSM could mean “methylsulfonylmethane,” a naturally occurring chemical compound with reputed health benefits; “Mount St. Mary’s,” a school in India; or — one of my favorites — “mechanically separated meat,” a substance that the United States Department of Agriculture defines as “a pastelike and batterlike meat product produced by forcing bones with attached edible meat under high pressure through a sieve or similar device to separate the bone from the edible meat tissue.”

Going cold turkey on references and acronyms disorients the students and makes them squirm. Bereft of these structural guideposts and crutches, many cope pretty quickly. Some even feel liberated. They learn to dump some of the linguistic dead weight and tighten up their prose.

Before every assignment, I also repeat some basic rules that all journalism instructors know: Tell us the most important thing first, then tell us the rest of the story. Keep it simple. Use the active voice. Be specific. Take things piece by piece — or “bird by bird,” as the novelist and memoirist Anne Lamott advises in her book of the same name, a wise guide to writing that I always recommend to students.

I repeat these basic storytelling lessons to myself as well, whenever I’m making the transition back to popular writing. And it seems to help. That “dullsville” article about H.I.V. among gay men in developing countries? Once my mortification over my editor’s rejection passed, I administered radical surgery and rewrote it from top to bottom, in the process removing the public health jargon, the ponderous turns of phrase, and many uses of the acronym MSM. Another magazine was happy to have it.

David Tuller is a writer and the academic coordinator for the University of California, Berkeley’s joint master’s program in public health and journalism.