Is academic writing really fun? Honestly? Well, sometimes it can be, but – as with every academic issue – it depends what you mean, what you mean by fun. Academic writing can be a very serious business, and it is evaluated as such – in examinations, in peer review of articles and books, in assessments for promotions, and so on. Sometimes, we need an attitude of ‘I’ll just have some fun with this piece of writing’ in order to disrupt or undermine or mitigate that very seriousness. Undermining over-seriousness, certainly, while treating the activity with the right amount of seriousness of course.
But the fun in writing also depends on how seriously we take ourselves. Some academics think of themselves as so wonderful, that their writing sinks under the authors’ weighty self-regard. We need to allow our academic writing to voice other people, and not just our own wise and magnificent statements. Some authors quote other people, but you get the feeling they are only quoting the other person to make themselves look better. Such authors use other people like glove puppets – you know that the puppeteer is the real speaker, but the glove puppet is used to make it look like there’s someone else speaking. Instead, we should allow the people we quote – the other authors, the interviewees, the survey respondents – to speak for themselves. The literary critic Bakhtin said that a single novelist would put many different voices into a novel. He called this heteroglossia – being many-voice, or dialogic. If a novelist can do this with fictional characters, surely academic writers can also exhibit heteroglossia when they do their writing. And that can be fun, not least because all those voices rarely agree – with each other, or with you. That’s risky, but fun. Enjoy.
","author_name":"Julian Stern"}