Stylish Academic Writing - Helen Sword 2012

The story net
The elements of stylishness

A carefully woven opening paragraph will catch no readers if, on the very next page, you slacken the net and let all the fish go. Stylish writers know the importance of sustaining a compelling story rather than merely sprinkling isolated anecdotes throughout an otherwise sagging narrative. A book or article that supplies no suspense, no narrative arc, and no sense of moving from A to B will not hold the reader’s attention nearly as effectively as an article plotted, even at the most subtle level, like a good thriller (“What will happen next?”) or a mystery novel (“What clues will the intrepid researcher/detective unearth?”) or a bildungsroman (“What lessons will the protagonist learn along the way, and from whom?”).

Literary scholar Brian Boyd has argued that all artistic activity, including our love of storytelling, can be traced to deep-seated evolutionary impulses: since long before the dawn of literacy, human beings have used stories to attract attention, convey information, persuade doubters, solve problems, build communities, and make sense of the world.¹ Researchers vying for prestigious grants are often acutely aware that their success depends on their ability to tell a good story, and scholars in disciplines as diverse as anthropology, sociology, education, law, management, and medicine have advocated and theorized storytelling both as research methodology and professional practice.² Yet relatively few scientists and social scientists have been trained in the art of crafting a compelling narrative, while humanities scholars who work in textually rich fields such as literature, history, or law often bury their own best stories under layers of abstraction and critical theory.

Every research project is made up of stories—the researcher’s story, the research story, the stories of individual subjects and participants, the backstory—each of which contains various plot twists of its own. For stylish academic writers, then, the fundamental question to ask is not “Do I have a story to tell?” but “Which story or stories do I want to tell, and how can I tell them most effectively?” In fiction and drama, a story typically revolves around a protagonist who faces a problem or obstacle of some kind: a lost father, an indifferent beloved, an unsolved mystery, a ring that will cause unspeakable evil unless it is thrown into the heart of a fiery mountain. The researcher’s story, likewise, always involves a character with a problem: that is, a scholar who poses a research question, collects evidence, forms a theory, and sets out to persuade the reader that this theory is correct. In the following examples, randomly selected from my data sample, the research question frames the researcher’s (or researchers’) story:

• Law/Criminology

• Research Question: How does procedural justice influence public perceptions of the police in Australia?

• Researchers’ Story: The researchers analyze data from a large public survey in Australia, compare the results to similar data from the United States, and conclude that “people who believe police use procedural justice when they exercise their authority are more likely to view police as legitimate, and in turn are more satisfied with police services.”

• Evolutionary Biology

• Research Question: Why do birds migrate?

• Researchers’ Story: The research team reviews previous studies of bird migration, discusses their shortcomings, and uses a new approach to test and refine “the evolutionary precursor hypothesis” developed by earlier researchers.

• Literary Studies

• Research Question: How did the popularity of recorded sound devices such as the pianola and gramophone shape early twentieth-century poetry and poetics?

• Researcher’s Story: The researcher reads about the history of the pianola, trawls the literature of the period for references to recorded music, and constructs a series of persuasive close readings mediated by Schopenhauer’s and Helmholtz’s writings on the relationship between music and memory.

SPOTLIGHT ON STYLE

LORD ALFRED DENNING

It happened on 19th April 1964. It was bluebell time in Kent.

With these evocative words, British justice Lord Alfred Denning opened his famous legal judgment Hinz v. Berry, which upheld the award of substantial legal damages to a mother of nine whose husband had been killed during a family picnic by the driver of an out-of-control Jaguar. Lord Denning was a master storyteller who understood the importance of plot, character, and setting. Sometimes he focused on a protagonist’s defining characteristics:

Old Peter Beswick was a coal merchant in Eccles, Lancashire. He had no business premises. All he had was a lorry, scales, and weights.

Sometimes he used literary devices such as assonance and alliteration to color his descriptions:

This is a case of a barmaid who was badly bitten by a big dog.

Sometimes he appealed, directly and shamelessly, to the audience’s emotions:

In summertime village cricket is the delight of everyone. Nearly every village has its own cricket field where the young men play and the old men watch. In the village of Lintz in County Durham they have their own ground, where they have played these last 70 years. They tend it well.… Yet now after these 70 years a judge of the High Court has ordered that they must not play there any more. He has issued an injunction to stop them. He has done it at the instance of a newcomer who is no lover of cricket.

To critics who object to such blatant emotional manipulation, Denning would no doubt have replied that the law exists to regulate human behavior and that all human behavior involves emotion. To deny the power of story is to suppress our own humanity.

Some scholars turn the researcher’s story into a central feature of their work, as when cultural historian Judith Pascoe structures an entire book around her quest for a single unrecoverable piece of knowledge: what did the famous eighteenth-century actress Sarah Siddons really sound like?³ But even when the researcher’s story does not feature directly in a scholarly book or article, there are many other academic venues where it may be told to good effect: for example, in a public lecture, a student seminar, a grant application, a book preface, or the opening chapter of a PhD thesis. Whether as a framing device or as a tale in its own right, the researcher’s story can create a sympathetic bond between the author and the audience by showing the human side of academic endeavor.

The research story, on the other hand, is the story that the researcher uncovers, analyzes, or otherwise recounts but does not participate in directly. Embedded within both the researcher’s story and the research story are the individual stories of research subjects and the backstory of the research. Academics can add drama and interest to the research story by panning to other stories from time to time. For instance, the criminologists could open their article with an anecdote about an innocent citizen unexpectedly caught up in a police search (an individual story that illustrates the relevance and immediacy of their research); the biologists could give a brief account of previous scholarly debates about bird migration (the backstory of the research); and the literary scholar could single out a particular historical event, such as the late nineteenth-century craze for public piano bashing, and analyze its significance within the larger story of modernist cultural production (an individual story that also helps fill in the backstory).

Novelist E. M. Forster famously described a story as “a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence,” whereas a plot “is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality”; thus, according to Forster, “The king died and then the queen died” is a story, whereas “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. A story tells you what happened; a plot tells you why.⁴ Like novelists, stylish academic writers transform stories into plots through careful attention to elements such as character, setting, point of view, and narrative sequence. In the researcher’s story, the potential human characters include the researcher and all the other people he or she encounters along the way: research team members, skeptical colleagues, and previous researchers in the field whose theories are being built upon or overturned. In the research story, the main characters might be humans (for example, police), animals (for example, migratory birds), or even ideas (for example, modernist conceptions of memory). Historian of science Robert Root-Bernstein records numerous examples of famous scientists who have imagined themselves as animals, atoms, or other natural phenomena:

With each animal I studied I became that animal. [Desmond Morris, ethology]

What did the carbon atom want to do? [Peter Debye, chemistry]

[I gained] a feeling of how I would behave if I were a certain alloy. [Cyril Stanley Smith, metallurgy]

Instead of treating hydromagnetic equations I prefer to sit and ride on each electron and ion and try to imagine what the world is like from its point of view. [Hans Alfvin, physics]

I actually felt as if I were right down there and these [chromosomes] were my friends. [Barbara McClintock, cytogenetics]⁵

SPOTLIGHT ON STYLE

SALLY BANES

When I lived in the SoHo area of New York City, working as a dance and performance art critic in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I was a frequent visitor to the Kitchen Center for Music, Video, and Dance. Recently, while in New York to dig through the Kitchen’s archives in preparation for this article, I saw their production of Ann Carlson’s Night Light. This site-specific performance was a social archaeology of a neighborhood in the form of an artful walking tour through the streets of the Chelsea area, between Greenwich Village and midtown, where the Kitchen has been located since 1985, punctuated by a series of frozen tableaux recreating historic photographs of Chelsea incidents. Afterwards, we all reconvened at the Kitchen to drink beer and chat with the tour guides and performers in the downstairs performance space.

Performance scholar Sally Banes imbues her academic writing with a dancer’s physicality and a storyteller’s sense of place. The evocative title of this article, “Choreographing Community: Dancing in the Kitchen,” prepares us for its highly concrete opening paragraph, in which Banes manages to introduce the Kitchen Center in SoHo, describe her own project of “digging through” its archives, take us on a walking tour of the neighborhood, and finally bring us back to the Kitchen for a beer. By the time she moves on to abstract concepts such as the center’s gradual transition from “a constituency of artists to a constituency of audiences,” Banes has made us eager to hear the full story.

Elsewhere, in an article titled “Olfactory Performances,” Banes involves our senses in a very different way, describing recent theatrical productions that incorporate the smell of cooking food:

bread, toast, bacon and eggs, hamburgers, soup, spaghetti sauce, omelettes, popcorn, onions, garlic, artichokes, mushrooms, panela (caramelized cane sugar), hazelnut cookies, risotto, jasmine-scented rice, fish and chips, curry, sausages, sauerkraut and kielbasa, kidneys, boiled beef, Cajun shrimp, and Australian barbequed meats of all kinds.

Hungry yet?

Abstract concepts, likewise, can be conceptualized as characters in a drama, complete with romantic attractions and fatal flaws. What obstacles do they overcome? What transformations do they undergo?

Physical settings seldom figure explicitly in academic writing, especially in disciplines where researchers have been trained to regard their work as the revelation of timeless truths. Yet the stories we remember best are often set in distinctive physical landscapes, whether real or imagined: the fairy-tale castle, the woodcutter’s cottage, the steep road through the mountain pass. The researcher’s story and the research story offer many potential settings, from the laboratory where an important scientific experiment took place to the small island where a rare species of flightless bird evolved. Sometimes a few lines are all it takes to sketch a scene that will linger in the reader’s mind:

1987. New Zealand. A warm, stuffy room in an old school building. A group of mathematics teachers have been working for a week discussing mathematics education for the indigenous Maori people.… They are trying to explain the difference between continuous and discrete data to a Maori elder. Examples are given: heights and shoe sizes; temperatures and football scores; time and money.⁶

The day of dedication, 11 November 1934, was overcast.… The clouds parted as the wreath was laid.… This eerie and sudden appearance of a sunbeam exactly faithful to a time and place distilled the essence of centuries of inspired viewing within the cathedral observatories.⁷

This trouble started when I began searching in earnest for a methodological framework that encouraged me to write richly of my experience.… I found autoethnography late one evening in the quiet of the university library.⁸

Each of these descriptions—by mathematics educator Bill Barton, historian John Heilbron, and academic developer Tai Peseta, respectively—includes evocative concrete details: the stuffy room, the sunbeam piercing the clouds, the quiet library where the researcher experiences an intellectual epiphany.

For writers of fiction, point of view is another essential consideration: through whose eyes do we watch the story unfold? A novel or short story might have a naïve first-person narrator whose innocence shapes our perceptions (as in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn); an omniscient, gently ironic narrator who sees into all the characters’ minds (as in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist); a narrator who tells us he is sane, but whose actions reveal him to be otherwise (as in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Telltale Heart); a series of narrators who present radically different viewpoints (as in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury); or even an unreliable narrator who earns the reader’s trust but turns out to be withholding crucial information (as in Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd).⁹ Academic writers often strive to convey a completely neutral perspective; as merchants of truth rather than fiction, we see it as our job to inform our readers, not to play with their expectations or their minds. Yet that neutrality, when examined closely, turns out to be something of a myth. All academics are partisans, after all, arguing for the validity of our theories, the accuracy of our data, and the strategic importance of our own narrow neck of the research woods. The question “Whose point of view am I really representing here?” can help us keep our biases in check. Other, related questions—“Whose point of view do I want to represent?” “What other points of view am I suppressing or neglecting?”—remind us that our own research stories will be enriched rather than weakened by the inclusion of dissenting voices.

Narrative structure, a consideration that operates within and around other structural elements such as chapters and sections, refers to the order in which a story gets told. In Forster’s example of a plot—“The king died, and then the queen died of grief”—the storyteller could start with the death of the king and move forward from there, or roll back the clock and begin with the backstory of the king and queen’s early courtship, or open the story with the death of the queen and then unspool the narrative through flashbacks that eventually return us to the present moment. Likewise, in an academic article, we could begin with the research question (the researcher’s story) or with a brief historical account of previous research (the backstory) or with an example of how this research has changed lives (an individual story within the larger research story). The trick is to decide which part of the story you want to toss your readers into first, and then guide them forward from there.

SPOTLIGHT ON STYLE

PETER CLOUGH

My problem with Molly is not that he lacks words, but rather that they can spill out of him with a wild, fairground pulse: they are sparklers, he waves them splashing around him. And my other problem with Molly’s words is that many of them are not very nice; they are squibs that make you jump out of the way. For the moment I think that they are my only problems.

With “Molly,” the story of a delinquent child and the teacher who tries in vain to save him, educator Peter Clough offers an emotionally wrenching case study that helps its readers understand how easily the product of a dysfunctional family can slip through the cracks of the British school system. The catch—one that will give many researchers pause—is that Molly is not a real boy. Both he and the narrator are composite fictional characters created by Clough to communicate the “deeper truths” of professional and personal experience. To “tell the truth as one sees it,” Clough believes, sometimes “data may have to be manipulated to serve that larger purpose.”

For some academics, Clough’s defense of data manipulation is indefensible. His whole scholarly project, however, is “to rattle the bars which I see any given social science methods as throwing up around attempts to characterise experience.” Clough’s argument is twofold. First, he encourages researchers to tell stories that hold our attention, help us make sense of the world, and validate the “vitally constitutive role of language” in constructing knowledge. Second, he questions the supremacy of social science methodologies that suppress personal engagement: “Despite the sterility of the instruments, we never come innocent to a research task.” Through the power of fiction, Clough explores “the ethnographer’s dilemma—the conscious theft of glimpses of people’s lives in the interests of research.”

The art of academic storytelling is a complex business, yet it depends on a very simple principle: a good story makes people want to keep reading to find out what happens next. A skillful academic writer can construct a compelling narrative whose main “character” is an institution (How did the University of X respond to the government’s new funding regime?), a methodology (Why are scattergrams more effective than bar graphs in conveying information about cosmic rays?), or a technique (What happens to the quality of undergraduate student essays in a class where peer assessment is introduced as a marking strategy?). However, such narratives become even more powerful and persuasive when they include individual stories about, for example, the employees at the University of X, the researchers who employ the methodology, or the students who wrote the essays. And let’s not forget the readers’ stories: the various interests, experiences, and biases that our audience brings to the party.

Things to try

• Make a list of all the potential characters in your research story, including nonhuman characters such as theories and ideas. For each character, jot down:

• a physical description (in the case of an intangible concept, try imagining how you would represent it as a cartoon character);

• a personality profile (strengths, flaws, motivations);

• an obstacle faced by the character;

• a transformation that the character will undergo.

• Briefly describe the various settings in which your research story takes place, and experiment with ways of invoking those physical details in your writing. For example, you could:

• include an evocative place name in your title;

• use your opening paragraph to set a scene;

• provide a description of the setting in an illustrative anecdote or case study.

• Play around with point of view. What would your research story sound like if it were told by one of your research subjects, or by a rival researcher who disagrees with your theoretical framework, or by a nonhuman character in your story, such as a molecule, a migrating bird, or a theoretical framework? Can you incorporate some or all of these perspectives into your writing?

• Draw a map or blueprint of your narrative structure, and then see if you can come up with at least three alternative ways to tell your story: for example, by starting at the end rather than the beginning, by presenting a series of different points of view, or by withholding crucial details until the final section.

• Just for fun, choose a favorite book or movie, distill its plot into a single sentence, and imagine what would happen if you plotted your research story along the same lines, for example:

• A murder mystery: The researcher/detective searches for clues, follows a few red herrings, and eventually applies his or her superior deductive powers to solve the mystery.

• Hansel and Gretel: The researcher’s bold new theories get trapped in the cottage of an evil witch (a rival academic?) who wants to destroy them. However, they stage a crafty escape and emerge from the woods stronger and wiser than before.

• Pride and Prejudice: Two seemingly incompatible theoretical concepts are brought into a single conceptual space, where they dance, flirt, and argue passionately before eventually marrying and living happily ever after.

• Rocky: Against all odds, a scrappy, unproven methodology dukes it out against more-muscular opponents and eventually prevails, thanks to the unerring devotion of the faithful researcher.

Use insights gleaned from this exercise to breathe life into your own research story.