How successful academics write - Helen Sword 2017

8. Writing with others
Part three. Social habits

The academic universe can be divided into two types of writers: those who write and publish with other people and those who write alone. Scientists are mostly collaborative writers; humanities scholars are mostly loners; and social scientists tend to be either one or the other, depending on their discipline and disposition.

Except, of course, that things are rarely that simple. Scientists may end up doing most of their writing and editing while seated in front of a computer screen alone. Humanists may write and publish with other people in a variety of situations and genres. Social scientists may find themselves inhabiting a range of different roles across an academic career: solo author, lead author, contributing author, supervisor, editor, mentor. And academics in any field may cross and confound disciplinary norms: for example, distinguished scientists such as Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, and Stephen Jay Gould have forged powerful authorial identities as humanities-style single authors, while philosophers, literary scholars, and historians such as Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, and Tony Grafton and Joanne Weinberg have ventured beyond the familiar confines of single authorship.

Even academics who publish and theorize on collaborative writing often struggle to define it.1 Writing and publishing with others is a complex and highly nuanced activity that can take on many different forms, from coattribution (whereby multiple researchers’ names appear on a single publication, whether or not they have all actually been involved in the writing process) to coauthorship (whereby two or more authors contribute to the writing and editing of a single piece) to cowriting (whereby two or more people literally sit down and compose sentences together). My interview subjects noted the collaborative dimensions of other scholarly practices as well—for example, editing:

It’s important to make it clear that this is a collaboration and that you as an editor are trying to be a surrogate reader and trying to identify the places where a reader might be confused or lose a thread or feel bored or puzzled, and help the author past those things. (Tim Appenzeller, former Chief Magazine Editor, Nature)

Or human-subject research:

I’ve been adopting a very formal method of collaboration with the people I’m interviewing: after the interview, I write down their stories and send them the text, and they can leave in or out whatever they want. So the research is really cocreated. (Mindy Fullilove, Clinical Psychiatry, Columbia University)

Or even peer review:

People don’t like a critic much. But I try to be extremely courteous as I raise questions about issues and to make sure that it’s not personal and to have a collaborative style of writing, like “We want to get to the bottom of this. Maybe something that we’ve overlooked so far is …” (Cecilia Heyes, Psychology, University of Oxford)

In fact, it would be virtually impossible to find a piece of published scholarly writing that has involved the intellectual input of only one person.

However we define “writing with others,” most academics would agree that it requires mastery of a range of interpersonal skills: how to communicate with other people across conceptual, linguistic, and disciplinary boundaries; how to negotiate authorship and attribution; how to respond to situations of power imbalance; how to get along. Like so many of the other core capabilities on which academics’ career success depends, however, collaboration is seldom taught or even explicitly discussed as part of most academics’ professional formation. Undergraduates in preprofessional fields such as engineering, business, and law are increasingly required to undertake group projects that simulate the kinds of collaborative problem-solving situations they may face after they graduate; doctoral education, by contrast, remains stubbornly focused on individual achievement. At most universities worldwide, the single-authored entity known as the PhD dissertation bears at best a tenuous resemblance to any genre of writing that the apprentice academic will be expected to produce later in his or her academic career.

“A very different side of my brain”

Shanthi Ameratunga

School of Population Health, University of Auckland (New Zealand)

Epidemiologist Shanthi Ameratunga practiced as a hospital pediatrician for many years before becoming a research scholar and teacher: “I wrote notes in medical charts but did very little academic writing.” Then she enrolled in an intensive master of public health program—“It was baptism by fire”—and later a PhD:

My supervisor was very good at providing constructive feedback. He writes in a style that’s actually quite similar to mine—or vice versa?—so we’ve learned off each other; he comes to me often with his own writing. He has a way of making things quite succinct but colorful.

Now, as a senior academic, Ameratunga spends most of her research time mentoring emerging scientists and “living vicariously” through their publications:

I’ve got ten PhD students at the moment, and lot of other quite junior colleagues that I work with in Fiji, Sri Lanka, and New Zealand—all of whom I encourage to write. So that means I’ve become much more an editor and a reviewer of other people’s work rather than having the time to really indulge in my own writing.

Typically she spends several hours a day reading, commenting, and providing feedback for others:

Last year, I was an author on forty peer-reviewed scientific journal articles, but only one of them was a bespoke first-author paper; that was a major review I was commissioned to write. All of the others were first-author papers led by my students or junior colleagues working on projects I lead. I absolutely adore and am proud of this role. The excitement of emerging researchers with their first-author papers is infectious. But supporting them, asking them to do iterative pieces, getting all those into publication takes a lot of time.

Ameratunga admits to sometimes feeling “disappointment, sadness, and frustration” about how much of her time is given over to collaborative writing:

It has a very different flavor to it academically, and I have to draw on a very different side of my brain to find the enjoyment for it. I would love to be able to write stories and poems and things, and I would like to do much more writing for a general audience. I need to give myself the license to write by myself again.

And yet there is so much to learn. The academics I interviewed described an array of collaborative challenges that they have faced in their work as writers. There are language issues:

I’ve got German and Israeli collaborators I recently wrote with. My goodness me, that was just a nightmare. They’re molecular biologists, so they wanted everything supertechnical. I think I removed probably half the acronyms, but the end result was still pretty inaccessible. (Russell Gray, Director, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History)

And disciplinary issues:

When I was writing about neoliberalism in politics, I invited an economist to join our research group. He said to me, “What do you know about economics and politics? You’re in higher education,” and he declined to be in the group. (Tony Harland, Higher Education, University of Otago)

And gender issues:

I think on average the men in economics don’t have the same facility with language as the women. Of course, many men are brilliant writers; but some make errors and are apt to use words in not quite the right way. So I usually end up doing the writing. But my male coauthors would probably hate that I said this! (Janet Currie, Economics and Public Affairs, Princeton University)

And conceptual issues:

There are a few articles where I’m not happy with the way certain things were explained—but you wouldn’t say “Take my name off!” just because you don’t like the way your coauthors wrote a couple of sentences. (Robert Poulin, Zoology, University of Otago)

And hierarchical issues:

One time I was trying to build up some early-career people and get them a chance to be profiled, but they hung back and waited for me to lead. In the end, I wrote most of the paper, and they insisted I should be named as the first author; so my efforts to be a sponsor and a minor contributor didn’t come together quite so well. (Shelda Debowski, academic leadership consultant, Australia)

And power issues:

I’ve been accused of being very controlling because I tend to write the framework of a grant proposal myself and then send it out without giving my coauthors as much time to respond as they would like. But recently I was involved with a proposal team where the principal investigator farmed out all the sections for everyone to write, and then we all got very frustrated because we just kept getting asked for different things. (Patricia Culligan, Engineering, Columbia University)

And stylistic issues:

Collaboration is good for science, but it can be bad for the quality of the writing. It’s very, very hard to have five people doing drafts and end up with something that’s good. So I’ll say to my collaborators, “Just send me bullet points or notes so that I don’t have to redo someone else’s writing,” and then I write it the way I want it. (Alison Gopnik, Psychology, University of California at Berkeley)

Despite these challenges and caveats—and the occasional horror story of coauthoring relationships gone awry—most of the academics I spoke to emphasized the positive aspects of collaborative writing. When two or more people work together to produce a single piece of writing, core assumptions get clarified:

Collaboration helps us justify our writing and to present our claims in a clearer way. (Mei Fung Yong, Applied Linguistics, Universiti Putra Malaysia)

Mental blocks get smashed:

When you get stuck, then you don’t have to wrestle your way through it. You can pass it over to someone else. (Jennifer Meta Robinson, Anthropology, Indiana University)

“A win-win all round”

Sarah Maddison

School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne (Australia)

Political scientist Sarah Maddison considers herself to be “a bit of a bower bird” when it comes to what interests her, ranging across research areas including gender politics, public policy, and indigenous political culture without feeling constrained to adopt “any one disciplinary set of tools.” She has published three single-authored books as well as a number of collaborative works: “coedited collections, a textbook, book chapters, articles, special issues.” One of her earliest coauthoring ventures proved so painful that she still ranks it among “the most traumatic experiences” of her life:

It was truly awful. By the time we had finished, if I hadn’t already been committed to another couple of collaborations, I don’t think I would have ever collaborated again.

However, the experience taught her some useful lessons:

I learned that you do need to be careful. The next time I found myself in a collaborative project where I felt the workload wasn’t evenly shared, I negotiated a bigger chunk of the royalties, which kept me from feeling bitter about doing more than 50 percent of the work.

Having started university as a twenty-five-year-old single mother, Maddison understands the benefits of collaboration for those who are seeking to climb the academic ladder quickly. She actively seeks out opportunities to mentor PhD students and early-career colleagues:

For example, if you’re invited to write a book chapter or journal article, most editors are quite open to you saying, “Yes, I would like to do that, but could I bring a PhD student of mine in to collaborate with me?” So I’ve done that a couple of times, and that’s been really nice—a win-win all round.

She has also worked to facilitate fruitful collaborations between academic and nonacademic writers:

For a book I coedited called Unsettling the Settler State, we asked indigenous governance practitioners who were not experienced writers to partner with a nonindigenous collaborator to produce a chapter. That was quite challenging at times. But at the book launch, an indigenous writer in the audience said she felt we had provided a template or model for ways in which indigenous voices could access mainstream academic publishing. I’m very proud of that.

Conceptual gaps get plugged:

The collaborative process is essential for good writing; it brings together different perspectives and allows identification of holes that should be filled before submission. The outcome is a better product than if I wrote in a vacuum. (Kurt Albertine, Pediatrics, University of Utah)

Collegial relationships get strengthened:

Collaborating on a grant proposal helps to create a good bond between the people who collaborate, which has value even if you don’t get the grant. (Wim Vanderbauwhede, Computer Science, University of Glasgow)

Stylistic horizons get expanded:

I co-authored a long paper with a brilliant linguist named Alan Prince. He was a colorful, almost outrageously flamboyant writer. Just by mixing my prose with his, I learned a lot. (Steven Pinker, Psychology, Harvard University)

And sentences get polished to a high gleam:

There were four of us writing the article together. We’d go to one of the group member’s houses, project it on the wall, and literally go over every line, discussing, arguing. Eventually we won an award for the article; we were told that there was a universal sense of how well written it was. (David Pace, History, Indiana University)

In a best-case scenario, collaboration enables researchers to tightrope-walk into unfamiliar territory even while providing a safety net of peer encouragement and support. Mathematician Keith Devlin was drawn into the “soft, soft” science of ethnomethodology by a social scientist colleague who helped him break out of his “hard science” shell:

It was such an interesting process. We ended up writing what is probably the book I’m most pleased with from an academic perspective, because we took risks; we didn’t follow a well-trod map. (Keith Devlin, Human Sciences and Technologies, Stanford University)

Similarly, literary scholar Margery Fee discovered a whole new research area when she accepted a colleague’s invitation to work on a collaborative project about food:

I decided to write about a scientific theory called the “thrifty gene hypothesis.” I read a huge number of scientific papers and analyzed them for assumptions about racial difference and whether this hypothesis actually panned out, which it didn’t. That felt very risky, because science studies was not my original field at all. Now I’m teaching it! (Margery Fee, English, University of British Columbia)

For historian Tony Grafton, writing with others always entails an element of intellectual and emotional risk, “because you have to be willing to chasten your own style and accept other people’s criticism at a very intimate level.” Yet the risk, he says, is worth taking:

Recently I wrote a book with a dear friend, a very different kind of scholar from me. We didn’t know if the project would work at all, yet we had the most amazing time doing it. And we’ve had some book reviews that really indicated that the reviewers saw the joy and the exuberance of the enterprise. (Anthony Grafton, History, Princeton University)

Grafton’s account of the collaborative process as a perilous yet joyful process echoes the language of challenge and delight that I heard from many other successful academics. Writing studies scholar Andrea Lunsford, who has copublished extensively with her colleague Lisa Ede, noted that collaborative scholarship “is still a kind of anathema” in the humanities:

Many people told us we would not succeed professionally if we persisted in this perverse practice of writing collaboratively. When Lisa came up for tenure, her chair wrote to me and said, “I want you to write a letter, and you have to say how many lines you wrote and how many lines Lisa wrote,” which was impossible. (Andrea Lunsford, English, Stanford University)

Despite such frustrations and challenges, Lunsford’s accounts of her scholarly collaborations are peppered with the vocabulary of pleasure: “It’s very pleasurable because it’s social” (on writing with Ede); “It was sheer fun” (on writing with John Ruszkiewicz); “We were a little giddy; we just got carried away with ourselves” (on writing with Bob Connors).

“Two people, two pencils, and two pads”

Susan Gubar

Department of English, Indiana University (USA)

In the late 1970s, Susan Gubar and her colleague Sandra Gilbert decided to write a book together, because the topic they were tackling seemed both too immense and too revolutionary for one author alone:

We were aware of working on something that was very new. Books on women’s literature and women’s literary history were just starting to come out while we were in the process of composition. It seemed like such a huge undertaking, vaguely unprecedented and unnervingly fearful—that was one of the reasons we felt always that we needed to hold each other’s hands.

The Madwoman in the Attic went on to become a classic work of feminist literary criticism, and the duo henceforth known as “Gilbert and Gubar” not only continued to coauthor books but also coedited the monumental Norton Anthology of Women’s Literature:

But we never got a grant for that first book. I think one of the main reasons was that funding agencies in the humanities were not used to funding collaborative work.

Gubar’s “holding hands” metaphor invokes the comforts of the collaborative process, which provides solace and support for adventurous scholars who would otherwise be left to explore new territory on their own. Because joint authorship is so rare in literary studies, she and Gilbert were keenly aware that their nontraditional approach would likely be considered suspect by colleagues:

So if we published something separately, it would be under Sandra’s name or under my name. And at the beginning of the book, we make a very clear distinction over who had drafted which chapters and which had been written together so that when I came up for tenure, nobody could say, “Well, she [Sandra] wrote the whole book.”

The first three chapters of Madwoman, Gubar notes, “were written in the same room with two people, two pencils, and two pads”:

There were differences of opinion. Sandra liked the word “moreover” much more than I did. There were differences of opinion, but for the most part, they could be ironed out.

Literary scholar Margaret Breen compares collaborative scholarship to a festive gathering:

My aunt and uncle always threw wonderful parties. They would invite a variety of people. They had incredibly good food. Everyone felt welcomed and at home and at ease. What I realized a few years ago was that in terms of editing books—bringing together lots of different people and perspectives in a collection of scholarly essays—I’m like Tante Margit and Uncle Irwin. (Margaret Breen, English, University of Connecticut)

Like a great party, a successful collaboration repays all the planning, effort, and diplomacy that go into making it work. When two or more people “click” over a piece of writing, their ideas are amplified, their pleasure is increased, and the intellectual impact of their thinking becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

Things to try

Compare your BASE assumptions

When you write collaboratively with other people—whatever your definition of “collaboration” may be—it’s important to establish early and often that you and your coauthors are all on the same page, so to speak. Books on the logistics of collaborative writing and publication can guide you through standard issues of attribution and authorship and help you draw up an advance contract to be agreed on and signed by all. But what about all those other, less easily defined, questions that coauthors must grapple with? For example, what are your daily or weekly work patterns? Are you willing to take stylistic risks? What methods of giving and receiving feedback do you find most effective (or least stressful)? A premeeting at which you and your coauthors talk through your BASE assumptions about writing—in all its complex behavioral, artisanal, social, and emotional dimensions—may be one of the best investments in time that you will ever make.

Colocate

If you’ve never done it before, try cowriting a short piece with a colleague: that is, literally writing and editing every sentence while sitting in the same room together. Even if you decide never to repeat the experience, the process will teach you a good deal about each other’s thought processes and artisanal habits. And if your styles and personalities turn out to be compatible, you may discover an unexpected new joy in collaboration.

Throw a party

Editing a multiauthored book or a special issue of a journal can be a frustrating chore akin to the proverbial herding of cats. But if you reconceive the task as throwing a party, the whole concept becomes more fun. Who’s in charge of the hors d’oeuvres? Who will provide the disco lights and streamers? If you can bring your coauthors together physically and throw a few real parties along the way, all the better.

Read a book

Fittingly, books on collaborative scholarship are almost always the products of scholarly collaboration. In some cases, the editors have decided to “throw a party” by bringing together individual essays that discuss the theoretical implications and practical challenges of collaborative writing: see, for example, James S. Leonard, Christine E. Wharton, Robert Murray, and Jeanette Harris’s Author-ity and Textuality: Current Views of Collaborative Writing, Jane Speedy and Jonathan Wyatt’s Collaborative Writing as Inquiry, and Bruce Speck, Teresa R. Johnson, Catherine P. Dice, and Leon B. Heaton’s Collaborative Writing, a comprehensive annotated bibliography of research articles on collaborative writing published between 1970 and 1997. In other cases, such as Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford’s career-spanning Singular Texts / Plural Authors (1990) and Writing Together (2011), two or more coauthors enact the collaborative processes that they narrate and theorize. (On the title page of Singular Texts / Plural Authors, the authors’ names have been printed twice: once as AndreaLunsfordLisaEde and once as LisaEdeAndreaLunsford.) Often the very titles of collaborative books invoke a sense of shared adventure, as in Ernest Lockridge and Laurel Richardson’s Travels with Ernest: Crossing the Literary / Sociological Divide (a genre-busting blend of scholarly prose and creative nonfiction) or Ken Gale and Jonathan Wyatt’s Between the Two: A Nomadic Inquiry into Collaborative Writing and Subjectivity (an extended exploration of intersubjectivity that draws heavily on the works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, another famous coauthoring pair). Books about scholarly collaboration may also inspire you to read some works of collaborative scholarship, such as Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett’s The Mind’s I, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic, or Anthony Grafton and Joanne Weinberg’s “I Have Always Loved the Holy Tongue.”2