Becoming a stylish writer - Afterword

Stylish Academic Writing - Helen Sword 2012

Becoming a stylish writer
Afterword

Disciplinary styles constantly shift and evolve: half a century from now, perhaps historians will have embraced personal pronouns and evolutionary biologists will have rejected them, rather than vice versa. Yet some principles of good writing remain timeless. In the preface, I note that all stylish academic writers hold three ideals in common: communication, craft, and creativity. Communication implies respect for one’s audience; craft, respect for language; creativity, respect for academic endeavor. In closing, I would like to add three further Cs: concreteness, choice, and courage. Concreteness is a verbal technique; choice, an intellectual right; courage, a frame of mind. Together, these principles offer a flexible framework on which writers from different disciplines can drape a rich variety of words and texts.

Concrete language is the stylish writer’s magic bullet, a verbal strategy so simple and powerful that I am amazed it is so seldom mentioned in academic writing handbooks. (Only 27 percent of the advanced guides in my one hundred—book sample even mention concrete language as a stylistic principle.) Whether in the title, summary statement, opening paragraph, or anywhere else in an academic article or book, just a few visual images or concrete examples—words that engage the senses and anchor your ideas in physical space—can combat the numbing sense of disorientation that most readers feel when confronted with too much abstraction. All of the stylish academic writers quoted in this book make liberal use of concrete language, whether to hook their readers’ attention, to tell a story, or to explain theoretical concepts.

The principle of choice, however, means that you don’t have to use concrete language if you don’t want to. Throughout this book, I present stylish writing as a series of considered decisions: no choice is intrinsically “right” or “wrong,” but each decision you make will trigger different consequences and invite different responses from readers. For example, your choice to employ technical jargon may earn you kudos from peers within your own subdiscipline but could endanger your chances of winning a research grant awarded by a university-wide committee or multidisciplinary organization. Which matters to you more? Can you tailor two different pieces of writing to suit the two different audiences? Even more ambitiously, can you develop a writing style calculated to please and impress both groups? Stylish academic writers constantly engage in what educational researcher Donald Schön calls “reflective practice”; that is, they self-consciously monitor their own methods, principles, and choices, adjusting their way of working based on experience, feedback, and other forms of learning.1

Of course, making the choice to change one’s writing style requires courage, especially for academics whose research careers are not yet well established. “My dissertation advisor wouldn’t possibly allow me to use personal pronouns or metaphors,” I have heard PhD students lament. A junior colleague recently confessed to me, “I’d like to try a more experimental structure for my next article, but until I get tenure, I can’t afford to take the chance.” But why always assume the worst rather than aim for the best? How will you know you are doomed to failure unless you give something a try? Virtually every successful academic researcher I know can tell stories both of rejection (“The referees hated it!”) and eventual success (“so I sent it to a different journal, and it ended up winning a prize for the best article of the year”). Moreover, even PhD students are not always quite as powerless as they believe. “Here’s an article by so-and-so, an eminent researcher in my field; I admire the way she structures her article, and I would like to try something similar with my literature review—what do you think?” Only an unusually close-minded and authoritarian supervisor (unfortunately, they do exist!) would refuse to even consider the question.

And so I end this book with the following exhortation to new and experienced academics alike: stretch your mind by stretching your writing; don’t be afraid to try new things; and keep in mind that even a few small changes can make a big difference. Analyze the writing of colleagues you admire and identify just one or two new stylistic techniques to try. How do they capture and hold your attention, structure a sentence or a paragraph, explain a difficult concept, tell the story of their research, or acknowledge their colleagues? In his influential book Scholarship Reconsidered, educational researcher Ernest Boyer notes that “the work of the professor becomes consequential only as it is understood by others.”2 If you resolve to model your own scholarship on work that you find consequential—writing that engages, impresses, and inspires—you will already be well on your way to becoming a more stylish writer.