How successful academics write - Helen Sword 2017

Conclusion: Raising the Roof

By now you have probably started drafting architectural plans for your remodeled house of writing. Maybe you have already poured a new foundation and framed in the walls and windows. However, if we really want to change the culture of academic writing in a lasting and meaningful way, we must “raise the roof” not only on our individual habits but on our institutional habitus as well: that is, on the unexamined norms and attitudes that shape our personal and professional lives.1 Whether in our own writing practice, in our interactions with students and colleagues, or in our roles as academic leaders, administrators, and gatekeepers, each of us has the capacity to bring a little more “air and light and time and space” into the writing lives of those around us.

Open the curtains

Successful academics who make their own vulnerabilities visible to others—for example, by showing their “shitty first drafts” to their students—help create a culture of transparency in which conversations about writing become a normal part of academic life rather than a rare occurrence. For graduate students and early-career academics, in particular, it can be comforting to learn that our teachers and mentors are as susceptible as we are to the demons of self-doubt, the perils of peer review, and the humiliation of rejection. Economist Janet Currie recounts the first time she received a negative referee report:

I showed it to one of my supervisors and told him I was very upset. He didn’t say anything but just walked over to a file drawer and pulled out a report on one of his papers that was absolutely scathing; it was this horrible ad hominem attack that said something like, “Not only is this paper awful, but this person clearly doesn’t know anything and has never known anything in any of his papers.” (Janet Currie, Economics and Public Affairs, Princeton University)

Her supervisor offered some sage advice that Currie now passes on to her own students: “He said, don’t bother sending the paper back to the same journal, but do send a letter to the editor saying, ’This and this and this that the referee says is wrong; you did not get a good-quality referee.’ ” By sharing her story with her graduate students and postdocs just as her supervisor shared his with her, Currie demystifies the peer-review process and helps prepare the academics of tomorrow to face their own future challenges as writers.

Widen the eaves

Sometimes just a small act of courage or dissent can make a big difference to others. Every time we push back against an editorial decision (“I’d like to retain the personal pronouns in my article rather than convert all my sentences to the passive voice, and here’s why”) or push forward a new idea (“I propose to organize a plenary conference session addressing this controversial new research area”), we not only expand the footprint of our own house of writing but also help reshape the contours of the field in which we work. Historian David Pace (Indiana University) recalls attending a summer program at the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), where the participants were encouraged to think of “one particular thing you could do in the next year to help the field of SoTL along.” Pace arranged a lunch meeting with the editor of the American Historical Review “to sort of grease the skids: to let him know this is a legitimate field, so that if somebody were to submit an article in this area, he might consider publishing it.” By the time the lunch was over, the editor had invited Pace to write a peer-reviewed article explaining the importance of SoTL to historians; that article, in turn, paved the way for others to submit articles in this emerging field. What started out as a modest gesture by a single scholar helped expand the discipline and provide a sheltering space for new forms of research.

Hand over the toolbox

It’s one thing to allow your junior colleagues to shelter under the capacious roof of your own successful academic career; it’s another to empower them to construct new dwellings of their own. Physicist Eric Mazur (Harvard University) grew tired of spending all his time editing and correcting other people’s writing and helping them respond to negative peer reviews. Consequently, he developed a ten-page document for his research group that lays out parameters and protocols for every step of the publication process, from proposing a topic (“The prospective authors have to be able to convey the overall message of the paper in no more than a few sentences”) to attributing authorship (“Every named author takes full and complete responsibility for everything that’s in the paper”) to providing high-quality feedback (“We typically assign two people—a more experienced person and one of the new people in the group—to critique the paper at various stages, because this is a great way to transfer knowledge”). The papers produced by Mazur’s research group generally sail through the peer-review process, having already undergone rigorous internal vetting. And by the time his graduate students and postdocs depart for academic positions elsewhere, they have all been meticulously trained in how to plan, pitch, structure, write, edit, critique, and revise a successful research paper.

Plant shade trees

According to an ancient Greek proverb, “A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.” Likewise, an academic culture grows great when senior scholars perform acts of generosity for junior academics who may never know their names. Literary scholar and poet Lesley Wheeler (Washington and Lee University) remains “endlessly grateful” to the two anonymous readers whose thoughtful responses to her first book manuscript set her on the path to becoming a successful scholar: “They told me bluntly what was wrong with the book, but they also found the time to praise it; and that was enough encouragement.” Having benefited from the welcoming shelter of shade trees planted by others, Wheeler has little patience for “cranky” referees who poison the air with mean-spirited reviews. She takes care to ensure that her own feedback to colleagues and students is always gracious and constructive: “The conscientiousness and generosity that I’ve seen directed at my work is something that I want to pay back.”

Sow seeds

The phrase “Let a thousand flowers bloom” recalls the sinister legacy of Chairman Mao, whose policy of “letting a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend” later resulted in a crackdown on artists and scientists whose schools of thought differed from his own.2 Perhaps it’s time to recuperate Mao’s motto, seeding innovation across our academic communities and providing the kind of nurturing professional environment where good ideas can take root and flourish. When researchers at the University of Massachusetts tried out several different mentoring programs aimed at boosting the productivity of early-career researchers, they found that some of the most cost-effective interventions were self-determined, individualistic, and targeted to the applicants’ needs rather than top-down, homogeneous, and one-size-fits-all.3 Similarly, a 2013 analysis of Canadian science-funding programs showed that, dollar for dollar, small-scale researchers published more papers and had higher citation rates than large grant holders did.4 Even modestly funded initiatives, it turns out, can have a measurable impact on research productivity. Equally importantly, they enrich and enliven the habitus of academic writing, giving rise to a more colorful and diverse landscape of ideas.

Invite the neighbors over

Individual initiatives can take on a life of their own when they become community events. When religious studies scholar Lena Roos read Paul Silvia’s book How to Write a Lot, she was inspired to reform her writing habits and start writing a little bit every day. Soon she started talking about her efforts during coffee breaks at work, and several of her colleagues decided to develop daily writing plans of their own:

Gradually we found ourselves talking more and more about writing, until people started referring to us as skrivarsekten (the writers’ sect), which also became our official name when we constituted ourselves on Facebook. We are now in the process of forming interdisciplinary “cells” of four to five people which will meet approximately once a month for coffee or lunch, so that you can get feedback from people that you don’t usually talk to. (Lena Roos, Religious Studies, Uppsala University)

Figure 8. Skrivarsekten snail-fountain-pen logo “Cochlea vincit omnes” (The snail conquers all); courtesy of Annika Sjöberg.

The group even has its own logo, designed by one of the participants: a snail-cum-fountain-pen carrying its own house of writing on its back and adorned with the motto “cochlea vincent omnes” (The snail conquers all; see Figure 8). When I checked in again with Roos two years after our interview, she reported that the skrivarsekten Facebook page was still going strong: “People post their writing achievements—sometimes an article being finished, sometimes just having written half a page that day—and we talk about obstacles, strategies, writing plans, and so forth.” Writers dip in and out of the online group, and the face-to-face “cells” flourish, fade, and get resurrected again—the usual ebb and flow of interest and commitment that mark any healthy writing community.

Start a school

As I traveled from one university to another while researching this book, I began to notice a curious phenomenon. At the writing workshops that I offered for faculty and graduate students in English-speaking countries, few if any participants raised their hands when I asked how many of them had been formally trained to write and publish in their discipline (“formal training” having been defined as completion of an iterative, cohort based, expert facilitated course focused mainly on research writing and publication). In non-English speaking countries, by contrast, hands went up all over the room. I learned that doctoral students in countries such as Germany, Switzerland, and Sweden typically enroll in mandatory academic English courses, which in turn may address other writing-related issues such as work habits, variations in disciplinary styles, social networking, and peer review. What would it take for universities in English-speaking countries to follow the lead of their L2 counterparts and start systematically teaching their graduate students how to become successful academic writers? And how might we extend such formal learning opportunities to faculty, replacing the current “sink or swim” approach with the kind of ongoing on-the-job support and training that professionals in other fields regard as a normal and natural part of their career progression?

Build parks and playgrounds

A functioning community requires a well-developed infrastructure to link its inhabitants together and keep them safe: roads and bridges, streetlights and sewers, power stations and water-treatment plants. A flourishing community supplements the necessities of modern life with amenities designed to lift the spirit and feed the soul: parks and playgrounds, walkways and footbridges, street art and skateboard ramps, fountains and follies. Have you ever noticed how universities often respond to fiscal pressures by cutting down on departmental catering budgets first, as though breaking bread together were a frivolous perquisite of academic life rather than an essential human activity? Informal social gatherings need not cost a fortune; nor do the kinds of congenial physical surroundings designed to house them. Rather than blowing the budget on state-of-the-art institutional furniture, the Queensland University of Technology kitted out its slick new Science and Engineering Centre with vintage sofas and retro décor sourced from thrift shops and antique stores. The result? Cozy, character-filled seating clusters that invite students and faculty to sit down, start a conversation, and stay a while.

Dwell poetically

In his 1951 essay “Building Dwelling Thinking,” philosopher Martin Heidegger reflects on the difference between building and dwelling:

We attain to dwelling [wohnen] … only by means of building [bauen]. The latter, building, has the former, dwelling, as its goal. Still, not every building is a dwelling.5

In German as in English, humans inhabit (bewohnen) the habitual (Gewohnte)—a condition that we can escape, Heidegger suggests, only by reconceptualizing boundaries as horizons:

A space [Raum] is something that has been made room for, something that is cleared and free, namely within a boundary, Greek peras. A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing. [T]he concept is that of horismos, that is, the horizon, the boundary.6

In another essay from the same year, Heidegger brings these ideas together in the notion of “dwelling poetically”:

Making is, in Greek, poiesis.… Poetry, as the authentic gauging of the dimension of dwelling, is the primal form of building.7

For the eighteenth-century poet Friedrich von Hölderlin, “dwelling poetically” (dichterisch wohnen) meant inhabiting an imaginative space beyond human convention. For the nineteenth-century poet Emily Dickinson, it meant replacing boundaries with horizons: “I Dwell in Possibility—/ A fairer House than Prose.”8 For twenty-first-century poet and educator Carl Leggo, it means merging the critical gaze of the scholar-teacher with the creative sensibilities of the artist:

Living poetically for me is about living as a critical pedagogue, living as a creative pedagogue. It’s living with the balance of poetry, with the rhythms of poetry. (Carl Leggo, Education, University of British Columbia)

For the rest of us—members of that peculiar, prosaic species classified by Pierre Bourdieu as homo academicus9—dwelling poetically could mean gauging the dimensions of our own habits and mindfully inhabiting the rhythms of our writing lives: taking pride in a beautifully crafted sentence, lingering in the hallway for a friendly chat with a colleague, and working with our neighbors to rebuild our academic habitus into a place of possibilities.