For almost all of my life, I have written formally for an academic paper. The only times this would be twisted would be when we were going through the creative writing unit in high school English or when I had to write my college essay. But none of that compares to writing for a conversational podcast.
When writing for a formal paper, you are able to give in-depth explanations and tons of cited evidence to support your claims. Also, you can go on about any one topic for as long as you want. The only real limit is that it needs to keep the reader’s attention and that it has to be written in a certain format. Your audience for an academic paper always feels like it’s for a scholar or someone well educated, and that audience forces you to present yourself as someone who is also educated and smart.
When writing for the looser podcast paper, I really struggled to separate that border between formal and conversational and ended up throwing away all of the formatting styles of an academic paper in favor of a more abstract setup. This lets me be more spontaneous with what I am saying, and that spontaneity (hopefully) translated into a more conversational piece for the podcast. So while writing for a conversation is a lot looser with the exact guidelines and formatting, it can also be tricky because it’s hard to know what is important and what to keep in. You are also heavily reminded of the audience, which is typically the regular person for a podcast, and it feels like you need to repeat certain aspects various times so that they can keep track of everything you are saying.
Overall, writing for an academic paper felt easier, even with all its formatting restrictions and requirements. This is probably because I’m so used to writing in this style, but still.
