T S Eliot described poetry as writing with a lot of silence on the page. How important is silence in academic writing? Academics are often generous with their words, spoken and written. Generous to the point at which people stop listening, stop reading. Often enough, beyond that point. One definition of a bore describes a person as carrying on talking after the other person has stopped listening. Academic writings should not be boring in that sense. We don’t mean that academic writers and writing should always be a laugh a minute, or should be filled with … dramatic pauses. But silence does have a role to play.
We forget that writing itself gives us silences. In ascending order of size, a comma, a semi-colon, a full-stop, a paragraph break, a section break, and a chapter break: these are all silences, pauses, that give readers time to breath and to think. (That’s why a music ‘pause’ symbol is the image for this podcast series.) Bigger silences include the gaps into which we drop those elements of what we know that we decide not to tell. In this podcast, we look at these smaller and bigger silences, along with silences of different kinds – the things we avoid saying, the things that we ‘tidy up’ or that we refrain from saying in order to speak to a wider audience.
","author_name":"Julian Stern"}