How successful academics write - Helen Sword 2017

12. Metaphors to write by
Part four. Emotional habits

Metaphors render abstract ideas concrete and memorable; in Shakespeare’s words, they give “to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name.”1 Many of the academics I interviewed—scientists and social scientists as well as humanities scholars—wield metaphorical language deliberately and strategically:

Even in technical scientific writing, elegant and minimal and powerful use of metaphor is really effective. (Russell Gray, Director, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History)

Metaphorical language is more than merely another tool in the artisanal writer’s toolbox, an artistic flourish applied to embellish otherwise plain prose. In their classic book Metaphors We Live By, philosophers George Lakoff and Mark Johnson show how metaphorical concepts such as “argument is war” and “time is money” exercise a powerful “feedback effect” on our psyches, shaping how we think and act: “In all aspects of life … we define our reality in terms of metaphors and then proceed to act on the basis of the metaphors.”2 Indeed, this paragraph contains not only conspicuous metaphors such as toolbox, artistic flourish, and embellish but also not-so-obvious ones such as show, exercise, feedback, shape, define, and contain. Many of these belong to one of the most commonly occurring metaphorical gestalts identified by Lakoff and Johnson: “Meanings are objects; linguistic expressions are containers.”3 So accustomed are we to conceptualizing ideas as objects that we no longer even register such constructs as metaphors.

Unsurprisingly, the authors of popular how-to books and articles on academic writing tend to favor active, energetic metaphors of transformation, fulfillment, and progress when describing the writing process: for example, military metaphors (boot camps and battles), metaphors of religious devotion (congregations, missionaries, conversion narratives), food metaphors (snacking, bingeing, feasting), and transportation metaphors (“turbocharge your writing,” “fly in your writercopter”).4 By contrast, struggling writers gravitate toward metaphors that emphasize the difficulties and frustrations they encounter when writing. Remember those Danish doctoral students who compared writing in English to walking in wobbly stiletto heels, riding a rusty bicycle, or having a bad hair day? Higher-education researchers Barbara Kamler and Pat Thomson asked PhD students to identify an image or metaphor that describes for them the task of writing a literature review; the results included “a myriad of ways in which the doctoral researcher is represented as being lost, drowning and confused,” including one student who likened the task to “eating a live elephant” and another to “persuading an octopus into a jar.”5 Similarly, a doctoral student once told me, in a tone of frustration mixed with humor, that writing his dissertation feels “like trying to peel an onion layer by layer while it’s rolling around on the floor and then reconstructing it layer by layer and then offering it to people and saying, ’Here, take a bite.’ ”

My interviews with successful academic writers yielded a wide and nuanced array of images that were neither relentlessly productivity-punching (like turbocharged engines and military boot camps) nor redolent of anxiety and loss of control (like a squirming octopus or a slippery onion). There were architectural and spatial metaphors: academic writing is like a home (Breen), a threshold (Elmgren), a cocoon (Hayot), an echo chamber (Ross), a bank with marble pillars or a ramshackle trailer on the edge of town (Pinker). There were travel metaphors: writing is like experiencing a sandstorm in the desert (Fullilove), going on a journey (Garraway), climbing a mountain (Reilly), parachuting into new territory (Grafton), wading through a valley of shit (Mewburn). There were artisanal metaphors: writing is like cutting wood or metal (Jenstad), throwing a pot (Jordanova), building a theater set (Grafton), painting a room (Heilbron), wearing a Madame Grès dress (Gopnik). There were sports and fitness metaphors: writing is like playing golf or tennis (Appiah), diving into the water (Lamont), getting back on a horse (Heyes), bungee jumping or tightrope walking (Grafton), cross-training (Rotella), heavy lifting (Miles), learning to play cricket (Gray). There were performance metaphors: writing is like watching a circus (Boyd), producing a screenplay (Shapiro), doing stage magic (Pinker). There were gambling metaphors: sending papers out is like buying lottery tickets (Gray); getting a grant is like winning the lottery (Padgett). There were engineering metaphors: constructing an argument is like putting together Lego (Barr); communicating across disciplines is like building bridges (Piekkari, Gray); writing for different audiences is like switching gears (Kwok). There were cooking metaphors: a research project resembles a restaurant kitchen (Vanderbauwhede); “cookie-cutter” articles all sound the same (Surridge); writing projects can sit on either the front burner (Devlin) or the back burner (Ameratunga). There were aquatic metaphors: writing for popular audiences is like swimming from salt water to fresh water (Shapiro); reading jargon-filled prose is like drowning “in a porridge of abstractions” (Boyd). There were musical metaphors: writing across genres is like playing in different styles (Rotella); bringing collaborators together is like conducting an orchestra (Breen); editing one’s own prose is like producing a remix tape (Devlin). There were relationship metaphors: writing is like a conversation (Mewburn); a work in progress is a like a friend (Kaple); an early-career academic is like the institution’s taken-for-granted wife (Asencio). There were metaphors of parenthood: letting go of a manuscript is like sending a child off to college (Devlin); being asked to identify your favorite piece of writing is like being asked to name your favorite child (Shulman, Reilly); producing a book late in life is like giving birth to an overdue baby (Fullilove). And there were some fanciful animal metaphors: collaborative writing is like herding cats (Piekkari); a tough supervisor is a dragon (Hunia); academe is full of taniwha, mythical creatures that require propitiation and are often associated with danger (Reilly); a scholar with wide-ranging interests is a bower bird (Maddison); being asked to make multiple revisions is like being “nibbled to death by ducks” (Lunsford).

“Playing around with language”

Bill Barton

Department of Mathematics, University of Auckland (New Zealand)

When Bill Barton became a mathematics education researcher after years as a high school teacher, he learned to write in his new academic discipline mainly by imitating others: “For the first five to eight years of my academic life, I don’t think I ever used I, just because I thought you didn’t.” But Barton admits that conformity “has never been a strong point” for him:

So eventually I started really intellectualizing my writing and thinking about what it was that I wanted to do, rather than just flying by the seat of my pants.

Bit by bit, he began to question and challenge disciplinary conventions:

I have a reasonably good bullshit detector, and I have a low tolerance for people carving themselves off into niches that other people can’t access. Jargon is a way of doing that, so I have a low tolerance for jargon.

He also acquired the confidence to speak his mind:

Now that I’m a senior academic and I do a lot of reviews, when I think someone is just writing garbage—or writing in a way that will not be understandable by the audience they’re writing for—I will say that clearly and forcefully. And I’ve had editors come back and say, “Thank you, that needed to be said.”

Having grown up in a family that relished language and wordplay, Barton eventually started “playing around with language” in his academic articles and presentations: “I found that often people respond to metaphor and wordplay in positive ways.” Once, at a disciplinary conference in Poland, he gave a presentation that used a metaphor drawn from his love of gardening (“a good frame produces better tomatoes”) to illustrate the challenges of undergraduate mathematics education:

Afterwards I was sitting with the editors of the conference proceedings, and they said, “Oh, that talk was fantastic. We really liked your tomato metaphor.” I said, “Hang on, I got told to tone it down and take it out for the published proceedings.” They all turned to the editor who had made that recommendation; there was a discussion, and in the end, the one person who had rejected the metaphor got overruled. That was quite fun. I quite enjoyed that.

Most of these metaphors are neither Pollyanna-ishly positive nor Eeyore-ishly negative; instead, they fall into an in-between zone of conceptual complexity and emotional ambivalence, showing both a sunny face and what educator Parker Palmer calls a “shadow side”: that is, a negative aspect that deepens and illuminates the metaphor’s positive dimension. In his book The Courage to Teach, Palmer invokes the metaphor of a sheepdog—“not the large, shaggy, loveable kind, but the all-business Border collies one sees working the flocks in sheep country”—to demonstrate how generative metaphors can reveal complex truths about a teacher’s practice. He begins by elucidating the positive side of his metaphor: like a good teacher, Palmer explains, a sheepdog takes the sheep to a place where they can graze, protects them from predators, brings back strays, and moves the flock along to greener pastures when food gets scarce. Next, he addresses its shadow side:

The shadow suggested by my metaphor seems obvious: I have a tendency to see my students as “sheep” in the invidious way that word can imply. I sometimes get angry about my students’ apparent docility or mindlessness or the way they hang their heads down.6

Finally, he offers a personal case study—a meditation on how the sheepdog metaphor eventually led him to new insights about his handling of a difficult classroom situation—to show how generative metaphors can help us through “the hard times in our teaching” and remind us of our own core values. His image of himself as a nurturing-but-bossy sheepdog, Palmer writes, “returns me in imagination to the inner landscape of identity and integrity where my deepest guidance is to be found.”7

Academics’ metaphorical accounts of their writing process can be unpacked in a similar fashion. For example, two of my interviewees employed the metaphor of “playing chicken”—the dangerous game of driving at full speed toward an oncoming car or immobile obstacle and daring yourself not to swerve—to describe their habit of putting off work till the last minute:

I used to have rather a traumatic experience with writer’s block in college and graduate school. I would play chicken with myself. Part of me would keep me from sitting down and writing. Then just at the point when it was almost too late, I’d stay up all night finishing it. (David Pace, History, Indiana University)

I play chicken with my classes—because it’s easy to let your research go during term time, but you know you won’t walk into a class unprepared. (Lisa Surridge, English, University of Victoria)

“A chef mastering a recipe”

John Dumay

Department of Accounting and Corporate Governance, Macquarie University (Australia)

When accounting lecturer John Dumay enrolled in a course on higher-education pedagogy, he and his colleagues were encouraged to become more self-reflective teachers: “We had to look at what we were doing as teachers, question why we were doing it, and ask ourselves, How can I change and improve it?” He decided to apply a similar mindset to his research writing:

I had heard from reviewers that my writing tended to be very abstract, so I tried to change the style and write this really dynamic, personal, me-from-the-first-person kind of narrative.

His first journal article in the new style received an enthusiastic response—“the reviewers thought it was fantastic”—but then he hit a stumbling block:

It was all ready to get published, and the editor came back to me and said, “Oh, you’re writing in the first person. We only publish in the third person. You have to change this.” I thought, “Are you kidding me?” It took me half a day to go back through it, making sure it was in the present tense and writing everything in the third person. Instead of “we,” I would write “the researchers.” But I didn’t like that. I thought it constrained what I did.

The next time he submitted a paper to the same journal, he used personal pronouns again: “Again the paper got accepted, and this time, the editor didn’t say boo. So maybe I pushed his buttons a little bit.” Dumay compares academic writing to cooking and likens a scholar learning the craft to “a chef mastering a recipe”:

You can get the structure right, you can get the ingredients right, but it’s actually how you combine those ingredients and the quality of those ingredients—the quality of the analysis, the quality of the data—that take it to the next level. We can all bake a chocolate cake if we have the right recipe, but only a few of us can bake an absolutely superb chocolate cake.

As a writer, Dumay now feels that he has now passed his apprenticeship but still has a lot to learn:

Can I cook that pièce de résistance that’s going to be a hit in the finest restaurant? I don’t think I’m there yet, but I’m certainly working on it.

Note the key difference between these two stories: while the first emphasizes a student’s anxiety (“Will I finish this assignment in time?”), the second demonstrates a teacher’s professional self-confidence (“I prioritize my writing time, because I know I will pull off my class preparation no matter what”). For the insecure student, playing chicken with writing is a nerve-wracking avoidance ploy; for the experienced academic, on the other hand, playing chicken with teaching is a canny and considered strategy for prioritizing writing. Together, the two sides of the metaphor offer a balanced view of the pros and cons of last-minute, deadline-driven behavior.

Literary scholar Mary Elizabeth Leighton (the writing partner of chicken-playing Lisa Surridge) offered a very different kind of metaphor when she emailed me a progress report several months after our interview:

Our new metaphor is Spanxing, as in those undergarments that squeeze you into a desired shape. We now talk about Spanxing our prose so that it’s leaner, tighter, better and so that it doesn’t wander into interesting analysis unrelated to our argument; we say things like, “OK, let’s go get tea, then come back and Spanx this paragraph” and “Ugh, this paragraph we wrote yesterday really needs Spanxing.” (Mary Elizabeth Leighton, English, University of Victoria)

Here, Surridge and Leighton have taken a potentially negative metaphor—the punishing diet, the pinching corset—and turned it into something playful. Without altogether denying its shadow side (scholarly sadomasochism, anyone?), they imbue the sometimes painful act of editing with a spirit of challenge and fun.

Anthropologist Daromir Rudnyckyj ran through a whole sequence of metaphors as he struggled to describe the process of writing his first book:

Once you figure out what the map is, then it becomes easy.… The narrative arc became clear.… It’s like filling in the pieces of a puzzle.… One editor told me to look for the “red thread.” Once you find the red thread, you’re figuring the way out of the maze. (Daromir Rudnyckyj, Anthropology, University of Victoria)

Each of these metaphors imposes a sense of order, direction, and inevitability on an initially confusing and chaotic enterprise: the map shows the way; the arc connects the beginning of the story to the end; the puzzle pieces need only to be fitted into their ordained places. Most evocative of all is the image of the red thread, which invokes the clew of red yarn gifted by Ariadne to Theseus in Greek mythology to help him navigate his escape from the Minotaur’s maze. (Other cultural references include the invisible red string that binds future lovers together in Chinese and Japanese mythology; the crimson thread that runs through the ropes on a British navy ship, first used figuratively by Wolfgang von Goethe in his 1809 book Elective Affinities; the red string worn by kabbalists to ward off the evil eye; and the “scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life” in Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet).8 Although the red thread in Rudnyckyj’s account is clearly intended as a redemptive metaphor, I was reminded of another trope that occurred frequently in my interviews:

She just put red ink all over it and handed it to me across her desk. I swear it was just a sea of red. (Tony Harland, Higher Education, University of Otago)

It looked like he had bled all over it. (Elizabeth Rose, Management Studies, Aalto University)

Like red ink trailing across a white page, the “red thread” in Rudnyckyj’s metaphor hints that coherence and completion can be achieved only through struggle: false leads, dead ends, bloody traces. Without that initial sense of disorientation and confusion—“How do I get out of here?”—there would be no labyrinth to navigate, no Minotaur to slay, no hero to emerge victorious from the maze.

But what about metaphors that are all shadow, no light? In among the colorful metaphorical mélange of my interview transcripts—playing chicken, Spanxing, the red thread—there were disturbing images of physical abuse and humiliation that appear at first glance to elude redemption. Receiving a negative peer review, I was told, is like being wounded (Reilly), stung (Duffy, Albert, Surridge), thrashed (Gilardi), burned (Morelli), shocked (Corballis), beaten up (Grafton, Gopnik), crushed (Jones), whacked (Rewi), gutted (Poulin), knocked back (Boyd), trampled (Fee), and pissed on from a great height (Maddison). Not a single one of my hundred interview subjects used the optimistic phrase “bounce back” to describe how they respond to harsh criticism. On the other hand, at least half a dozen respondents invoked images of thick, thin, bruised, or irritated skin:

It can be so bruising to ask people to read your stuff. (Marjorie Howes, English, Boston College)

You begin to develop a bit of a thicker skin; it’s the school of hard knocks. (Michael Wride, Zoology, Trinity College Dublin)

While the “the school of hard knocks” metaphor suggests that struggle and setbacks can lead to new learning, its accompanying image of “thicker skin” merely promises a dulling of pain. Becoming thick-skinned is at best a survival strategy, and its shadow side offers a warning: as our skin thickens, will our hearts harden as well?

In The Redemptive Self, a study of redemption narratives in American culture, psychologist Daniel McAdams reviews the research literature on the positive effects of “benefit-finding,” a strategy deployed by psychologists to help patients move from a condition of posttraumatic stress to a paradigm of posttraumatic growth. McAdams analyzed the personal narratives of nearly two hundred midlife adults and college students and discovered that “the more redemptive the life story, the better a person’s overall psychological well-being”:

Redemption stories are not simply happy stories; rather, they are stories of suffering and negativity that turn positive in the end. Without the negative emotions, there can be no redemption.9

“A snowfall of words”

Elizabeth Knoll

Former Senior Editor at Large, Harvard University Press (USA)

As a PhD student in the history of science, Elizabeth Knoll found part-time work in the editorial office of a medical journal: “I got a view over the railings of disciplines other than my own.” Later she became an acquisitions editor at Harvard University Press, where she developed a keen eye for “the big picture” of scholarly research:

I look for work that is interesting, stimulating, original, provocative without just being crackpot, thoughtful without being solemn or unreadably earnest, ambitious without being grandiose, and most of all—and this is really important to me—sounding like it was written by an actual human being and not cranked out by some kind of machine for emitting academic prose.

Knoll’s own use of language is refreshingly human—and chock full of metaphor. Academic writing, she says, is “a letter, not a diary: you’re trying to say something to someone else, not just recording something for the sake of your own self.” She prefers authors who are “trying hard to get the ball over the net” to those who are merely “in a performance of themselves.” Many social scientists, she believes, “still feel in the presence of the natural scientists like the newly arrived middle class in the presence of the aristocracy in a nineteenth-century English novel”:

They feel that they themselves are not quite the real thing, and that’s why they write like this. It’s like with the Veneerings in Dickens’s novel Our Mutual Friend: everything has to be superficially shiny, and there has to be too much of it.

Knoll is in favor of academic risk taking, so long as authors are “clear-eyed” about what the risks are: “There’s a Spanish proverb that I just love, which goes, ’God says take what you want—and pay for it.’ ” Many academics, she believes, suffer not from overambition but from a crippling anxiety:

They are overcautious. They take too long to get to the point, and they don’t quite get to the point. They overexplain. They use too many examples. They repeat themselves. They are a little circuitous, and even if they have piled up an awful lot of evidence to make a point strongly—as strongly as they could—they muffle themselves with too many words. It’s like the snowfall that obliterates all the features of the landscape. A snowfall of words that just cuts out any sound.

McAdams’s research helps to explain the recuperative process whereby resilient writers transform painful experiences of frustration, anxiety, humiliation, and anger into stories not merely of survival but of growth. Many of the academics I interviewed told me that the trauma of a harsh critique has helped them become more empathetic reviewers:

When I write peer reviews, I always try to start out saying something nice about the paper, like it’s a good idea, or something positive. When you get one of these reports that doesn’t say anything nice, then you don’t even want to get out of bed in the morning. (Janet Currie, Economics and Public Affairs, Princeton University)

Perhaps our bleakest metaphors are the ones that lead us to our most important insights: the darker the shadow, the brighter the light. When successful senior colleagues talk about feeling beaten up, battered, bruised, and “pissed on from a great height”—images of helplessness and alienation in the face of malign thuggery—we as a profession need to sit up and pay attention. Can we redeem those metaphors by acknowledging and learning from their shadow side even while refusing to succumb to darkness? Humiliation, after all, is not the only route to kindness:

When I was a young twerp just starting out, I wrote a savage review of a big guy who was a Cambridge classicist in my field. My book was published by Oxford, and the Times Literary Supplement gave it to that classicist to review. He wrote a first-page review in the TLS which was thoroughly laudatory. That may be why I lost all interest in polemics, because it was an act of such humaneness and generosity. (Anthony Grafton, History, Princeton University)

Writing this chapter has sent me back to look at my own use of figurative language in this book. Attending to the metaphorical “feedback effect” noted by Lakoff and Johnson, I have weeded out some of my more negative images and planted more positive ones in their place. For example, an early reader of the introduction to part 2 (“Artisanal Habits”) pointed out that, within the space of just a few paragraphs, I had used the words finicky, fuss, fiddle, tweak, fiddly, pathetically slow, and snail-paced to describe my own compositional style. “But surely the way you work is also your strength,” my reader gently reminded me; “Those of us who are true believers in slow writing would appreciate a more affirmative presentation of this way of working!” As a consequence of her intervention, I resolved to depict “fiddly” writing not as a nervous disease but as a worthy artisanal imperative. That decision in turn led me to replace many negatively inflected words with constructive verbs such as adjust, tinker, and polish.

I also took a fresh look at my positive metaphors to see what I might learn from their shadow side: for example, at the end Chapter 11, I supplemented a cheery image of “bouncing back” with a cautionary image of shattered crystal. A participant at a writing workshop once told me that she labels her folder of rejected sentences and paragraphs “I Still Love You,” acknowledging the loss and guilt that authors can feel when they usher their fondest creations off the dance floor—all that care and attention we lavished on their ball gowns and tuxedoes!—even while refusing to buy into Arthur Quiller-Couch’s macabre imagery of murdered darlings. Likewise, I have seeded this book with metaphors that foreground the creative aspects of the writer’s craft: W. B. Yeats’s image of the poet “stitching and unstitching” his verses until they come right; Ted Hughes’s description of Sylvia Plath building tables and chairs and toys from discarded lines. Just as traumatized patients can learn to restore a strong sense of self by “re-storying” their lives, academic writers can rescue themselves from the quicksand of criticism and self-doubt by grabbing onto a lifeline of playfulness and pleasure.10 Metaphors, after all, are the stories that we tell ourselves about our relationship to the world. By changing our metaphors, we can change our stories.

Things to try

Re-story your metaphors

Generate some metaphors of challenge, frustration, and anxiety by completing the following sentences (or concoct your own variations):

Getting started with a new writing project is like …

Getting stuck is like …

Working with an uncooperative or lazy collaborator is like …

Sending off a paper for peer review is like …

Receiving a negative review is like …

Now see if you can transform those negative metaphors into narratives of learning and development. A blocked writer could reimagine a conceptual barrier as a door gradually opening or a wall to fly over; a flattening review could become a springboard to new ideas.

Take a walk on the shadow side

Alternatively, try generating some positive writing metaphors and then putting them through Parker Palmer’s “shadow side” process. First, unfold the positive aspects of the metaphor in as much detail as you can. (For example, you might picture your research as a garden and yourself as the gardener: planning, planting, sowing, tending, watering, weeding, fertilizing, and transplanting to ensure that every plant thrives.) Next, delve into the metaphor’s shadow side. (A gardener often has to cut plants back in order to make them bloom; some die no matter where you put them; there’s always another gardener in the neighborhood who has a bigger or better garden than yours; some days it feels as though you’re doing nothing but pulling out weeds.) Finally, consider what the fully rounded, light-and-shadow metaphor can teach you about your own practice. Even a “shitty first draft” (in Anne Lamott’s famous formulation) can eventually become a fertile field of ideas—or at least a wheelbarrow full of nutrient-rich compost.11

Get concrete

For a permanent exhibit at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm, former Nobel Prize recipients have donated personal objects that speak to their own scientific or humanitarian work. Some have presented items linked to a specific moment in their careers, such as geneticist Randy Shekman’s first real microscope, purchased with his own savings at the age of twelve. Others have chosen objects with a more symbolic import, such as chemist Peter Agres’s cross-country racing skis, which represent the challenges of scientific research and the role of physical activity in his intellectual growth. And many have donated objects with both metonymic and metaphorical qualities, such as the pink headscarf that youth activist Malala Yousafzai wore while addressing the United Nations General Assembly on her sixteenth birthday (a powerful symbol of one girl’s courage in the face of religious oppression) or the bicycle that transported economist Amartya Sen around the Indian countryside to weigh babies for his research (a practical object with many symbolic resonances: economic inequality, social and intellectual mobility, scholarly persistence). What object would you choose to represent your research, and why?12

Read a book

If reading a book is like opening a door into another world, then reading a book about metaphor is like opening a door and discovering not just another world but a whole new galaxy. You can find metaphor books with a philosophical bent (such as Denis Donoghue’s Metaphor) or a linguistic bent (such as Andrew Goatly’s The Language of Metaphors) or a scientific bent (such as Alan Wall’s Myth, Metaphor, and Science) or a pedagogical bent (Rick Wormeli’s Metaphors & Analogies: Power Tools for Teaching Any Subject). You can find comprehensive single-authored tomes (such as L. David Ritchie’s Metaphor) and multiauthored scholarly compendia (such as Raymond Gibbs’s The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought). You can find books for beginners (such as Murray Knowles and Rosamund Moon’s Introducing Metaphor) and books for discipline-based specialists (such as J. Berenike Herrmann and Tony Berber Sardinha’s Metaphor in Specialist Discourse). You can find books about why we use metaphor (such as Timothy Giles’s Motives for Metaphor in Scientific and Technical Communication) and how we use metaphor (such as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By) and even when to avoid using certain metaphors (such as Lakoff’s Women, Fire and Dangerous Things). One way or another, all of these books explore the expressive power of figurative language—a universe of almost infinite possibilities.13