Stylish Academic Writing - Helen Sword 2012

The creative touch
The elements of stylishness

Take a gamine teenager, dress her in a sheath frock and elbow-length gloves, thrust a cigarette holder into her hand, and still she will not look like Audrey Hepburn. Some elements of stylishness defy definition or imitation, no matter how hard we try. As novelist Willa Cather puts it:

The qualities of a first-rate writer cannot be defined, but only experienced. It is just the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate. One can catalogue all the qualities that he shares with other writers, but the thing that is his very own, his timbre, this cannot be defined any more than the quality of a beautiful speaking voice can be.¹

Nonetheless, this chapter investigates that elusive je ne sais quoi of stylish writing: the cluster of special qualities that make certain writers stand out from the crowd. These include passion, commitment, pleasure, playfulness, humor, elegance, lyricism, originality, imagination, creativity, and “undisciplined thinking”—attributes that are easy enough to recognize (perhaps because they occur so rarely in academic writing) but difficult to define or emulate.

Passion and commitment are stylistic qualities that academic writers often praise in other people’s writing but suppress in their own. Most academics would describe themselves as passionate, committed researchers; they love what they do and undertake their work with a strong sense of personal engagement. Many actively desire to make a difference in the world, whether by finding a cure for a deadly disease, by enlarging our understanding of natural and cultural phenomena, or by changing the way people think. Yet these same researchers have typically been trained, either implicitly or explicitly, to strip all emotion from their academic writing. What would happen if they allowed even a modicum of the passion they feel to color their prose?

SPOTLIGHT ON STYLE

CHRISTOPHER GREY AND AMANDA SINCLAIR

The speaker begins. His topic is “managerial regimes of truth,” a subject I am very interested in. We are five minutes in and I’m beginning to feel dizzy.… Foucault and Derrida have been dismissed as old hat, Zizek as a suspect popularist, Deleuze—no I haven’t been paying attention, I am not sure whether he is in favour or out. Hardt and Negri show promise but have essentialist “tendencies.” It’s rather like a show trial in those more literal regimes of truth, where the accused have been drugged and the witnesses given a script to follow.… The words are coming more quickly now, as the Chair has indicated that time is short and I notice that the speaker is only on his first slide and has—can it be eight?—eight more to get through. What is the point of this, I wonder, what are you really trying to say? And then I realize what the speaker is saying. He is saying that he has read a great deal more than anyone else.

In a withering, often hilarious critique of the “pompous, impenetrable” prose that dominates their discipline, Christopher Grey (professor of organizational theory at Cambridge University) and Amanda Sinclair (professor of management at Melbourne Business School) call for their colleagues in critical management studies to imagine writing differently. What’s more, they demonstrate how it can be done. Through an artful blend of satire, polemic, personal reflection, and fantasy, their article “Writing Differently” expresses their aesthetic, moral, and political concerns about “pretentious, obscurantist” writing. Both authors acknowledge the risks involved in writing differently, especially for academics “in more marginalized positions or at the start of their careers.” But they insist on the importance of trying:

We want writing to be taken seriously, as powerful and evocative performance, able to change people’s experiences of the world, rather than as a shriven, cowed and cowering path towards routinized, professionalized “publication.”

Openly impassioned writing is most frequently found in disciplines that favor a personal voice and a partisan viewpoint: for example, in fields where queer, feminist, and postcolonial perspectives (among others) have encouraged academics to integrate identity politics into their scholarship. In an article on indigenous epistemologies in the Pacific Islands, anthropologist David Gegeo candidly confesses to have been “taken somewhat off-guard” by the comments of a reviewer who perceived Gegeo’s anticolonialist scholarship as intellectually passé:

The individualistic, careerist approach of Anglo-European scholarship means that after publishing a few articles or maybe a book on the topic, the scholar moves on to something else.… The perspective of a growing number of us Pacific Islands scholars, however, is to approach research from a communitarian perspective: that is, research that is not only applied (targeted to making positive changes) but is firmly anchored in Indigenous or Native epistemologies and methodologies.²

In a similar vein, Bronwyn Davies, a feminist educational scholar, offers a personal anecdote to frame her critical analysis of neoliberal discourse in contemporary academic institutions:

At the beginning of my academic life my Head of Department prevaricated about promoting me from tutor to temporary lecturer. After weeks of waiting I asked him had he made up his mind, and he told me it was a difficult decision to make, since in his view women should remain in service positions.… My point here is not to sneer at his old fashioned narrow mindedness, but to comprehend how it is that discourses colonize us—gifting us with our existence and shaping our desires, our beliefs in what is right—the things we are prepared to die for.³

These scholars are frankly passionate about their work, but not in a sloppily emotive way. Quite the opposite; the intensity of their emotions motivates them to theorize, criticize, and methodically subvert the epistemological paradigms within which their research operates.

Passionate prose is, however, by no means exclusively the purview of politically engaged humanists and social sciences who write in the first person. Academics in any field can express passion for their subject matter, drawing on a range of rhetorical techniques that need not necessarily include a personal voice. In a heartfelt plea for their colleagues in the health sector to resist “magical thinking” about the benefits of computerization, information technologists Carol Diamond and Clay Shirky build up emotional intensity through repetition (“Success is”), alliteration (“days instead of decades”), and metaphors (tool, goal):

IT [information technology] is a tool, not a goal. Success should not be measured by the number of hospitals with computerized order entry systems or patients with electronic personal health records. Success is when clinical outcomes improve. Success is when everyone can learn which methods and treatments work, and which don’t, in days instead of decades.⁴

Similarly, in a 2002 article written entirely in the third person and filled with typically academic hedging words (may, seem), cognitive biologist Ladislav Kováč injects a strong sense of personal engagement into his analysis of the scientific aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001:

Does the terrorism of the twenty-first century have common roots with the totalitarism of the twentieth century? Is not one of the reasons of its upsurge the fact that humankind has not achieved a proper understanding of the very nature of Nazism and Communism and has not drawn consequential conclusions? Should not science, the paragon of rationality, take up this state of the world affairs as a warning and as a challenge?⁵

Through a series of rhetorical questions that gradually increase in interrogative force (from does and is to should), Kováč conveys his passionate conviction that the science community has not responded appropriately to the threat of global terrorism.

Passion’s partner is pleasure: the sense of pure enjoyment that a researcher feels upon making a new discovery; that a writer feels upon producing a well-turned phrase; and that a reader feels upon encountering an innovative idea, a perfect sentence, or, ideally, the former couched within the latter. As Roland Barthes observes in The Pleasure of the Text, “If I read this sentence, this story, or this word with pleasure, it is because they were written in pleasure.”⁶ Some stylish academics—Barthes himself is a prime example—communicate such an intense, almost giddy pleasure in and through their writing that only the most curmudgeonly of readers could fail to be carried along by it. Cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach, expresses his “enthusiasm and reverence for certain ideas” in language suffused with intellectual delight, even awe:

One of the most remarkable and difficult-to-describe qualities of consciousness is visual imagery. How do we create a visual image out of our living room? Of a roaring mountain brook? Of an orange? Even more mysterious, how do we manufacture images unconsciously, images which guide our thoughts, giving them power and color and depth? From what store are they fetched? What magic allows us to mesh two or three images, hardly giving a thought as to how we should do it?⁷

Likewise, mathematician Martin Gardner opens his book The Ambidextrous Universe by inviting readers to see the world through the eyes of an innocent:

There is no better way to begin this book than by trying to see your image in the mirror with something like the wonder and curiosity of a chimpanzee.⁸

SPOTLIGHT ON STYLE

DOUGLAS HOFSTADTER

Only at [the typesetting] stage did the book’s unusual stylistic hallmarks really emerge—the sometimes-silly playing with words, the concocting of novel verbal structures that imitate musical forms, the wallowing in analogies of every sort, the spinning of stories whose very structures exemplify the points they are talking about, the mixing of oddball personalities in fantastic scenarios. As I was writing, I certainly knew that my book would be quite different from other books on related topics, and that I was violating quite a number of conventions. Nonetheless I blithely continued, because I felt confident that what I was doing simply had to be done, and that it had an intrinsic rightness to it.

In 1973, as a twenty-eight-year-old PhD student in physics, Douglas Hofstadter started writing the manuscript that would eventually become Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Published in 1979, Hofstadter’s 777-page treatise on “fugues and canons, logic and truth, geometry, recursion, syntactic structures, the nature of meaning, Zen Buddhism, paradoxes, brain and mind, reductionism and holism, ant colonies, concepts and mental representations, translation, computers and their languages, DNA, proteins, the genetic code, artificial intelligence, creativity, consciousness and free will [and] sometimes even art and music” won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and has since been translated into numerous languages. Hofstadter typeset the entire volume himself, cramming it full of examples, anecdotes, visual images, theorems, proofs, jokes, puns, and “strange loops” of various kinds. From its highly inventive chapter and section titles (“BlooP and FlooP and GlooP,” “Birthday Cantatatata”) and its unusual structure (a counterpoint between Dialogues and Chapters), right down to its wry acknowledgments (“Thanks to Marsha Meredith for being the meta-author of a droll kōan”), the entire book—like Hofstadter’s subsequent research on artificial intelligence, translation, recursive language, and other topics—is an exercise in creative thinking and academic nonconformity.

Not everyone will be charmed by such flights of enthusiasm; some academics might even feel condescended to by a writer who asks them to think like a monkey. All the same, for most readers, there is something appealingly engaging about an academic writer who unabashedly seeks to give and receive pleasure through language and ideas.

That pleasure might or might not manifest itself through humor—amusing anecdotes, clever puns—and other forms of verbal playfulness (dare I say fun?). Stylish writers who spice up their work with humor generally do so with a light touch; any good teacher knows how efficiently humor can energize a classroom but also how easily a half-cocked joke can misfire. At its best, humor engages our bodies in the robustly physical ceremony of laughter. At its worst, a poorly executed witticism exposes the author’s own folly. The safest forms of academic humor (examples of which can be found in many of the “Spotlight on Style” callouts scattered throughout this book) are also the most subtle: the wry aside, the satirical riff, the unexpected turn of phrase.

And then there is elegance, a stylistic attribute that can coexist with passion and humor or flourish on its own. In the world of fashion and design, elegance suggests a “refined grace of form and movement, tastefulness of adornment, refined luxury.” In science, elegance aligns with precision, concision, and “ingenious simplicity”: an elegant solution is the one that maps the most efficient route through complex terrain. Humanities scholars often use the word “elegant” as an ill-defined synonym for “well written.” More helpfully, the Oxford English Dictionary defines literary elegance as “tasteful correctness, harmonious simplicity, in the choice and arrangement of words.”⁹ An elegant writer, then, is one who makes us feel that every word has been perfectly chosen, as when James D. Watson and Francis Crick first described the double-helical structure of DNA:

We wish to put forward a radically different structure for the salt of dioxyribose nucleic acid. This structure has two helical chains each coiled round the same axis (see diagram).… The two chains (but not their bases) are related by a dyad perpendicular to the fibre axis. Both chains follow right-handed helixes, but owing to the dyad the sequences of the atoms in the two chains run in opposite directions.

Toward the end of their famously economical 985-word paper in the journal Nature, Watson and Crick drily note: “It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.”¹⁰ Rather than crowing about having cracked the code of life, they opt for the rhetorical trope of litotes, or elegant understatement.

In some cases, elegance manifests itself through clarity and concision; in others, it is achieved through lyricism, an author’s use of unabashedly expressive language to build up the kind of emotional intensity and semantic density more commonly associated with poetry than with academic prose. Lyricism flowers most freely in the work of academics who are themselves poets, such as literary scholar Selina Tusitala Marsh or educational researcher Cynthia Dillard, both of whom strategically incorporate their own poetry into their scholarly writing: “Beginning with my own voice has become a political act,” declares Marsh, “as I straddle the border between theory and creativity.”¹¹ However, poetic interludes can be found in the research publications of nearly every academic discipline, as when biologist Julian Vincent, in an otherwise highly technical article on phenolic tanning, waxes eloquent about the fossilized forewings of beetles—“Bits of beetle elytron can be found, pristine, in drift deposits of a million or more years old”—or when historian of science John Heilbron layers a thick slathering of purple prose onto his otherwise restrained description of solar observatories in medieval churches:¹²

The lighting up of a special place by a flash from heaven at a preset time can make an impression even on ordinary minds. The tourists who happen to be in San Petronio when the sun plays like a searchlight across the rosy pavement tarry for longer than the five minutes they had allotted to the cathedral to watch a display of whose purpose and author they have not an inkling.¹³

Heilbron’s uncharacteristically extravagant language—the heaven-sent flash of light, the sun playing like a searchlight, the rosy pavement, the tarrying tourists—communicates not only his own passion for his subject but also his desire to instill a similar sense of joy and wonder in his readers. Every word has been carefully chosen, like the words of a poem, for its weight, sound, and resonance.

Stylish authors such as Vincent and Heilbron borrow many verbal techniques—assonance, alliteration, onomatopoeia—from the literary mode we label “creative writing.” And why shouldn’t they? Few academics would disagree that innovative research requires creativity, originality, and imagination as well as hard work and skill: “one per cent inspiration, ninety-nine per cent perspiration,” to borrow Thomas Edison’s famous description of genius.¹⁴ Yet academics in most disciplines have been trained to be critical rather than creative thinkers, with little opportunity for merging the two modes. Fortunately, numerous resources and strategies are available—some playful and unconventional, others rational and self-reflexive—for writers who want to shift outside their comfort zone and develop the creative side of their intellect.¹⁵

“Be creative!” is not, to be sure, an easy command to obey at will. It is made even more challenging when the words “Be disciplined!” are expelled in the very same breath. Interdisciplinarity—or what we might call “undisciplined thinking”—turns out to be the surprise ingredient in the stylish writer’s repertoire: a trait I was not looking for when I started researching this book but have noticed over again in the work of academic authors whose writing is praised by their peers. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins opens his book Climbing Mount Impossible with an account of a literary lecture on figs; psychologist Robert Sternberg opens Cupid’s Arrow: The Course of Love through Time with a Greek myth; cultural theorist Marjorie Garber opens Academic Instincts with an anecdote about the election of Jesse “The Body” Ventura as governor of Minnesota; psycholinguist Michael Corballis opens Hand to Mouth: The Origins of Language with a Dennis Glover poem about magpies; anthropologist Ruth Behar opens The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart with a meditation on a short story by Isabel Allende.¹⁶ These stylish academics read widely across disciplinary lines, and it shows. Equally important, they also think across disciplinary lines, as evidenced in the wide-ranging nature of their work. Chicken and egg are difficult to distinguish here: do these authors read widely because they are inherently interested in a variety of disciplines, or do they think across disciplines because they read so widely? Either way, their stylistic and conceptual elasticity is evident everywhere in their scholarly prose.

SPOTLIGHT ON STYLE

DANIEL DENNETT

Cognitive scientists themselves are often just as much in the grip of the sorts of misapprehensions and confusions as outsiders succumb to.… All of these experiments rely on subjects making a most unnatural judgment of simultaneity the import of which is not carefully analyzed, because of the presumption that the right question to ask is, When does the subject become aware of the intention to act?… This creates the illusion of an ominous temporal bottleneck, with the Conscious Agent impatiently waiting (in the Cartesian Theater) for news from the rest of the brain about what projects are underway. I must add that the literature on the topic by philosophers includes some that is equally ill considered. However, since better work is on the way, there is no need to dwell on past confusions.

In an interdisciplinary article titled “The Part of Cognitive Science That Is Philosophy,” philosopher Daniel Dennett dives headfirst into the conceptual chasm that divides the sciences and the humanities. Arguing that “there is much good work for philosophers to do in cognitive science if they adopt the constructive attitude that prevails in science,” he strokes the egos of his audience (mainly cognitive scientists) before going on to critique their “misapprehensions and confusions” about the relationship between conscious intentionality and action. Like many philosophers, Dennett writes in a first-person, informal voice, using rhetorical questions, conversational asides, and concrete imagery (“temporal bottleneck,” “Cartesian Theater”) to keep his readers on track. Sometimes, to be sure, his mixed metaphors get out of hand:

I once dismissed any theory that “replaced the little man in the brain with a committee” as conceptually bankrupt—until I realized that this was indeed a path, perhaps the royal road, to getting rid of the little man altogether. So live by the sword, die by the sword.

But perhaps it is better to die by the sword, a little man bankrupt on the royal road to excess, than to fade away from stylistic boredom.

Stylish academics do not write “outside the box” merely for the sake of showing off their intellectual audacity and skill. Their aim is to communicate ideas and arguments to readers in the most effective and engaging way possible—even when doing so means defying disciplinary norms. Numerous studies have documented the crucial role of lateral thinking in the creative process: that is, the ability of pathbreaking researchers to “think sideways” rather than always plodding forward in a straight conceptual trajectory.¹⁷ Academics who rigidly adhere to disciplinary conventions, never glancing to the right or left, risk repeating the fate of Dr. Seuss’s North-Going Zax and South-Going Zax, who refused to move either a step to the east or a step to the west when they met, so that the two of them ended up stubbornly facing each other for years, unbudging, while cities and motorways sprang up around them and the rest of history moved forward.¹⁸

Things to try

• “Read like a butterfly, write like a bee.”¹⁹ Novelist Philip Pullman exhorts writers to read widely and voraciously, without necessarily worrying about whether a given book or article will be useful to their current research. Later, you can make a conscious effort to integrate ideas drawn from your outside reading into your academic writing.

• Freewriting is a generative technique advocated by Peter Elbow and others as a quick and easy way to get your creative juices flowing:²⁰

• Grab a pen and paper (I favor high-quality fountain pens and attractively bound notebooks, but many writers are not so fussy), settle yourself someplace where you will not be disturbed (a park bench or café would be ideal, but an office with the door closed works just fine too), and resolve to write without interruption for a predetermined amount of time.

• As you write, don’t allow your pen to leave the paper for more than a few seconds at a time. Your goal is to keep writing continuously until your time is up, without stopping to correct errors, read over what you have just written, or polish your prose.

• You may feel emotional barriers rising or falling and unexpected thoughts surging through your head. Whatever happens, keep writing. Afterward, you can shape your words into something more coherent—or not. The process, not the product, is the point of the exercise.

Free drawing, mind mapping, and verbal brainstorming (for example, talking into a voice recorder) offer visual and oral alternatives to freewriting.

• Other suggestions for generating new ideas and perspectives.

• Make a list of all the ways your research arouses your passion, stokes your commitments, and gives you pleasure.

• Write about the funny side, the absurd side, or even the dark side of your research project.

• Write a poem about your research—anything from a confessional poem about your own scholarly struggles to a series of haiku about your research subject.

• Choose a text, picture, or news item from outside your discipline—for example, a literary quotation, historical vignette, cartoon, scientific phenomenon, or movie plot—and freewrite for ten minutes about how you could incorporate that item into a presentation or publication about your research. What connections, however tenuous, can you draw?

• Ask a friend, relative, or small child to write down the name of a randomly chosen object—something specific enough that you can actually picture it: a fat dachshund, a red tulip. Freewrite for ten minutes about all the ways that object resembles your research project.

• Draw a picture of your research.

• Make a mind map of your research, starting with your central thesis or research question and working outward from there. (For more detailed instructions on mind mapping, see Tony Buzan’s Mind Map Book or any of the many computer programs that include mind-mapping software).²¹

• Color code your research: for example, by using colored highlighters to signal connections between themes or ideas.

• For a new perspective on your research, try looking at your work while wearing each of Edward de Bono’s six “thinking hats”: the white hat (facts and figures), the red hat (emotions and feelings), the black hat (cautious and careful), the yellow hat (speculative-positive), the green hat (creative thinking), and the blue hat (control of thinking).²²

• Ask colleagues from other disciplines to recommend work by the best and most accessible writers in their field. As you read, consider form as well as content: What strategies do these authors use to engage and inform their readers? Are those strategies different from the ones commonly used in your discipline? Can you spot any new techniques worth borrowing?