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Just Writing
Climate Vanes
Season 3, Ep. 11
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Anne Carson, the Canadian writer, has written an article about writing, since she developed Parkinson’s Disease. Embarrassed by how her handwriting has got so much worse, the title of her article, quoting Confucius, apparently, was ‘Beware the Man Whose Handwriting Sways Like a Reed in the Wind’. We may be embarrassed by our handwriting because we’re embarrassed by our actual personalities. And typing has a ‘handwriting’, just like pen and paper. Lesley Smith’s 2023 book ‘Handwritten: Remarkable People on the Page’, gives us a chance to look at the handwriting of some famous figures. Is it unfair to judge their personalities from their handwriting?
Is this an issue worth exploring for academic writers, embarrassed by ‘revealing’ their own personalities through their writing? Or should we ignore it, as one of the most trusted professions – doctors – seem to have terrible handwriting?
What we say and how we say it may of course tell two stories rather than one. Rom Harré noted how a handwritten sign may seem to mean the same as a printed one, but a handwritten sign saying ‘warning – nuclear power station’ would be worrying, wouldn’t it?
Handwriting that ‘sways in the wind’ might represent a person who sways in the wind too. The politician Tony Benn said there were two kinds of politician: signposts (who always pointed in one direction or another) and weather vanes (who swayed with the wind). As academics, we shouldn’t sway too much, but then again, as the climate changes, shouldn’t we be prepared to change? Perhaps we should be climate vanes?
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4. Honey at the Core
38:01||Season 4, Ep. 4We want to talk about writing in other languages. The majority of journal articles in the journals we’re involved with, and two of the books we’ve edited, have had the majority of chapters written by authors for whom English is an additional language. Julian’s own father was German, who wrote his doctorate in his fourth language (French) and then worked and published in his fifth language, English. Some of the greatest writers in English have been writing in an additional language: Joseph Conrad, who was Polish and born in Ukraine, is an excellent example. So we don’t get all high and mighty when it comes to writers in languages other than their mother tongues. In a previous podcast, we talked about how ‘academic’ is itself an additional language, so all writers, whatever their home language is, will have to learn to write ‘academic’. AI does a good job of converting text (from any language, including non-academic English) into ‘academic English’, but it is a very bland style. We prefer the character in writing by real people, with the distinctive features of their own culture, including their other languages. As readers, that is, we are interested in the core of the work, and the surface features just give it more character and more authenticity. We have to remember this, when marking student work or reviewing professional academic work. There is honey at the core.3. A Licence to Disagree
28:27||Season 4, Ep. 3We want to talk about civil disagreement. We don’t always agree, and we need to know how to disagree well, in academic writing. (If we all agreed, there would be no need to write anything more.) Being disagreeable is a skill, perhaps an art, and it is better to have a creative disagreement than to have a feud. What about starting and ending disagreements? To start a disagreement, we first need to understand, to be receptive to, to appreciate, the view that we will be disagreeing with. That gives us a licence to disagree. Like James Bond has a licence to kill: that sort of licence. And how do we end a disagreement (in a piece of academic writing)? We can either end it with a resolution. That is like the dialectics of the Ancient Greeks, or the 19th century Germans, where every thesis has an antithesis, ending in a synthesis. If that’s possible, that’s fine. But the more common way to end a disagreement is to leave room for it to continue, even if that is a little uncomfortable. That is an example of dialogue or conversation: deciding that we’ve tried to understand and appreciate the other point of view, and saying there’s more to be said. As there usually is, if we keep on thinking.2. After-times
22:55||Season 4, Ep. 2Researching with young people, Julian found how valuable ‘after-times’ are. The day after a birthday, the time after a big sporting event, the day after Christmas or another public festival. Adults talk about the time after their children leave home, after weddings, and so on. What about the time after a piece of academic writing is complete, a paper or book manuscript or thesis submitted to a journal, publisher, or examiners? What does that feel like? We discuss the mixture of feelings such as euphoria, relief, idleness, and hope – amongst others – and what this tells us about writing, and moving from uncertainty to certainty, from being ‘trapped’ by a writing task to being ‘liberated’ from it. There are also the after-after times, the often depressing ‘so, is that is?’ times – interrupted, perhaps, by the next task, the next article, the next book. And so we move on.1. Research is the salt of academic life
25:38||Season 4, Ep. 1We are changing gear, as Summer turns to Autumn. Academic writing seems to have seasons, but we’re not sure. All academics say they will work through the Summer holiday, but September is the month of regrets. ‘Holidays are time for blocks of writing’, we say. But they are not. Other things spill over – loose ends at the start of the Summer, preparation at the end, if we’re lucky enough to have no Summer-time teaching. Universities refer to ‘research leave’ (when you research) but don’t refer to ‘teaching leave’ as the time we do teaching. So research is intentionally described as ‘leave’, as a ‘holiday’. This is not good. Let’s forget about seasons, and think instead about seasoning. The writer May Sarton said that ‘solitude is the salt of personhood’ as ‘it brings out the authentic flavour of every experience’. We think research is the salt of academic life: it brings out the flavour of all our work. It keeps us curious, nosey (perhaps knowsy). Sheine and Julian may just be the seasoning we need, the Salt-N-Pepa of academic writing.15. I Never Knew!
23:56||Season 3, Ep. 15We’ve just been to a university research conference, where academics and doctoral students from all disciplines get together for a couple of days and present papers on their current research. People asked each other what they thought of the conference. The most common response was, ‘I never knew!’ People were astonished at all the fascinating work, how it echoed with their own work even if it was from another discipline, and how there was so much enthusiasm for this aspect of the job. Why didn’t people know this already? Well, the value of conferences is precisely that it allows us to pause – pause from researching and pause from teaching and all the other jobs academics have – and to listen. This is a podcast about academic writing, but academic listening is crucial to the process of writing. Without that curious, enthusiastic listening, it will be all the harder for each of us to write, in turn, with enthusiasm and a sense of what future conference audiences will want to hear from us. Boredom is a deadly sin, for academics. Boring writing is like boring talking, it is writing that keeps going long after people have stopped reading, talking that keeps going long after people have stopped listening. So practicing listening is a way of enlivening our own work and becoming more aware of the need to hold our own audiences. Conferences work like this, especially if – as with the conference we have just been at – they are not competitive and hierarchical. Research doesn’t have to be boring. I never knew that!14. In Praise of Old Wives
25:07||Season 3, Ep. 14‘Old wives tales’, such as ‘eat fish, it’s brain food’, tend to include knowledge gained through quiet observation over many years, perhaps several generations, and are spread quietly through informal social networks. How can we recognise and capture them in research? Much research is ‘hit and run’ research, where the author benefits and the people whose ideas and information are taken are ignored. This is not good, and recognising different voices, including those of old wives, is a matter of respect. With practice, we can find that the insights gained from articles and books are matched by the insights gained from those living respondents often anonymised or completely ignored by researchers. As academic writers, we can bridge the ‘official’ writings of other academics and the knowledge and understanding of those not yet present in the literature. (And old literature currently ignored in books and articles.) Old wives need praising.13. Stating the Bleeding Obvious
38:41||Season 3, Ep. 13Our title, of ‘stating the bleeding obvious’ comes to us from the comedy Fawlty Towers, when Basil Fawlty, in response to something his wife said, announced the next contestant on Mastermind: Mrs Sybil Fawlty from Torquay, specialist subject, the bleeding obvious. What counts as ‘obvious’ in academic writing depends on context of course. And even if it is, in context, ‘bleeding obvious’, there may be good reasons to say it anyway. In anglophone academic writing, for example, having an introduction that explains what is to be said, and a conclusion that repeats what has been said, may seem repetitive and obvious. It is seen as such by German and French scholars. But English-language articles expect such obviousness. We give quite a few examples of ‘good’ obvious things to say. There are other times when stating the obvious should be avoided. We give plenty of examples of those, too. And sometimes, if our conclusions seem to be obvious, it may be valuable to say what the opposite conclusions would be – as they are often just as obvious. Rutter et al use that technique in their book Fifteen Thousand Hours (1979). Clever.12. The Right to Write
30:29||Season 3, Ep. 12Who gets the right to speak? Or to write? It can be difficult joining a conversation when the conversation is already happening, especially if that conversation is being dominated by largely white men. Some academics lean into their exclusion from the conversation, but it is mean to say this is a case of self-sabotage. It is a matter of how we work to get the right to write, and how those already within the conversation invite others to join them. Academic writing shouldn’t involve too much ‘masking’, to imitate those already there, but a certain amount of this may be used, as described in The Emperor of Gladness, by Ocean Vuong: masking to be heard. Where teaching or administration takes up most of an academic’s time, seeming to push research to the margins, there is always SoTL: the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. That means, writing about the teaching and learning that dominates the job. Or we can (and should) write textbooks for students. (Universities have become sniffy about academics writing textbooks, but they are useful, important, and, in contrast to research monographs, they may even make money!) Teaching should bleed into research and research should bleed into teaching, and both should bleed into administration and back again from bleeding administration to teaching and to research.