Afterword: Beyond the house of writing

How successful academics write - Helen Sword 2017


Afterword: Beyond the house of writing

Enlarge the place of your tent,

stretch your tent curtains wide,

do not hold back;

lengthen your cords,

strengthen your stakes.

—Isaiah 54:2

I worked on several chapters of this book while living not in a conventional house but in a bus. Toward the end of my six-month sabbatical—the push-comes-to-shove, get-that-manuscript-out-the-door month—I left my home in New Zealand for the foggy coast of Northern California, where a yoga instructor named Blake rented me her hippie house-bus, which contained (among many other colorful and fascinating items) a big bed covered with bright cushions, a small kitchen, a comfortable sofa, a large collection of scented candles, a shelf full of New Age books, and a tiny wood-burning stove. The toilet and outdoor shower were located a short distance from the bus, and I was granted the run of Blake’s organic vegetable garden, which as far as I could see did not harbor any of the medicinal plants for which this region of California (sometimes called the “Weed Coast”) is best known. I set up my standing desk at the back of the bus so that I could look down its entire length toward the driver’s seat, which had been converted into a cozy, fake-fur-covered reading chair. The vehicle’s elaborately decorated exterior resembled a field of green and golden bamboo topped by a lavender-blue sky, and above the big windows at the front of the bus, Blake had painted in huge cloud-like letters its metaphysical destination: OMWORD.

My three weeks on the bus—along with other experiences of place and displacement during my research leave—alerted me to the inadequacies of the “house of writing” metaphor on whose square, solid BASE I have erected this book. My architectural imagery, I realized, needs to be expanded to accommodate a much-wider range of real and imagined dwellings: not just conventional single-family houses but also tents, cottages, cabins, studios, garrets, caravans, towers, bungalows, whares, fales, buses, igloos, yurts, town houses, tree houses, lighthouses, penthouses, houseboats, motel rooms, hotel suites, caves, cloud-castles, and any other kind of abode that a fertile imagination can build. But are our disciplinary communities ready to tolerate such architectural variety, such a range of alternative lifestyle choices? In the Malvina Reynolds song “Little Boxes,” made popular by Pete Seeger in the 1960s, the function of universities is to deposit their graduates into cookie-cutter houses and jobs: “little boxes made of ticky tacky” that “all look just the same.”1 How much has really changed in our professional neighborhoods since then?

On the shadow side of the house metaphor, we all know how many things can go wrong with even the most modest of domestic dreams: drains can block, roofs can leak, rents can rise, noisy neighbors can move in next door. Most insidious of all are the shadowy poltergeists that wreak secret havoc deep inside our most private spaces: doubt about our abilities and potential as writers (that’s our old friend, Imposter Syndrome, taunting us from the rafters); envy of colleagues whose houses appear so much bigger, cleaner, and more perfect than our own (how often did that green-eyed monster blow your fuses while you were reading about the successful academic writers profiled in this book?); guilt that our own less-than-perfect habitations have dirty dishes piling up in the sink and dust bunnies breeding under the beds (even though our rational selves know that the perfection we perceive in other people’s lives is often illusory—and would we really want to live in a show home anyway?). Even the four solid cornerstones of the BASE throw long shadows of their own: behavioral habits too finely tuned to productivity can throw our personal relationships out of key; artisanal habits of craft and care can lead to a crippling perfectionism; social habits of generosity can slow the upward trajectory of our careers; and emotional habits of pleasure and passion can bring the homeowners’ association to our front door, delivering the news that fuchsia and chartreuse are not on the neighborhood’s list of acceptable paint colors.

The light-and-shadow-play of the house metaphor throws into relief the paradox at the heart of this book. Building a productive writing practice can be hard, slow, frustrating work—yet successful academics find satisfaction and joy in that labor, nourished by the pleasures of the process and made stronger by its challenges. What does it matter that the task will never be finished or that our next-door neighbors have just installed a new hot tub that looks bigger than our own living room? In the end, the size, splendor, and exterior trappings of our individual homes matter less than the sense of well-being we feel when we are inside them. The grandest mansion can be cold and sterile; the smallest cottage can be intimate and inspiring; even a makeshift tent can house a party.

My own house of writing has changed a good deal in the five years since I first started working on this book. Aside from a semester of dedicated research leave, I had to fit most of my data collection and writing time around the everyday demands of an administrative and teaching workload that sometimes threatened to suck all the oxygen out of my writing practice. Along the way, like so many other academics I know, I developed chronic neck and shoulder pain from hunching over a keyboard for too many hours a day, either chipping away at my manuscript or, more often, zapping the endless barrage of emails that swarmed into my inbox. And then there were the other foundation-shaking events—the death of a family member, the sale of a beloved house, a skirmish with breast cancer—that sent cracks through my BASE and left me temporarily floored.

Yet now, as I write these final paragraphs, I am dancing—literally. Yes, it’s true: I have developed a stand-up keyboarding technique that involves shimmying, twisting, and kick-stepping while I write, which in turn prevents me from locking my back and shoulders into a single fixed position. Looks silly (I don’t do it in public), but the benefits have flowed through my body to my mind and back again, and my writing sessions have become active and energizing rather than physically painful. Would I have been inspired to try out such an unconventional writing method if I hadn’t been writing a book about inspiring academic writers? Possibly not. Certainly I would not have had the confidence to confess my eccentricities in print. But why shouldn’t academics dance while they write? Perhaps by admitting more freedom of movement into our own writing habits—“air and light and time and space” and a bit of pleasure and playfulness besides—we can transform the habitus of scholarly labor into a dynamic habitat where all writers can flourish.

Appendix

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Index

Appendix

All statistics, graphics, and author quotations in this book are based on ethics-approved research undertaken in fifteen countries (Australia, Canada, Denmark, England, Finland, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Scotland, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, and the United States) between 2011 and 2015. During that period, I conducted in-depth interviews with 100 academic writers and editors and gathered anonymous questionnaire data from 1,223 more: a mix of academic faculty, research fellows, PhD students, and other writers employed in an academic context. The interviews and questionnaires were transcribed and coded by Louisa Shen, a research assistant working under my supervision, and were cross-checked for accuracy by a second research assistant, Sophie Van Waardenberg.

INTERVIEWS

• Just over half of my interview subjects (55 percent) were recommended to me by discipline-based colleagues as “exemplary academic writers” who met at least one of the following criteria:

• Publishes writing of an exceptionally high quality, as evidenced by markers of peer esteem such as book prizes, research awards, and collegial recommendations.

• Publishes prolifically, at a substantially higher rate than most other researchers in the field.

• Subverts or challenges disciplinary conventions; takes risks as a writer.

• Publishes innovative prose that takes academic writing in new directions.

• Engages effectively with audiences both within and beyond academe.

• Writes confidently and contently, without the agony, angst, and uncertainty that characterize the writing lives of so many academics.

• Actively mentors colleagues and graduate students to become better writers.

I particularly sought out academics from the following cohorts: self-perceived “academic outsiders” (for example, researchers from cultural, ethnic, and / or gender groups underrepresented within their own disciplines); academics who publish in English although it is not their first language; early- to midcareer faculty who gracefully balance their workloads with significant caring responsibilities; and scholars who have followed nontraditional career paths into or through academe.

The remainder of the interviews (45 percent) took place with people whom I approached directly. Most of these were successful academics with whom I was already acquainted, either personally or by reputation: for example, writers whose exemplary prose had featured in my previous books; colleagues at my home university who work in academic disciplines other than my own; and scholars from my home discipline (modernist literature) who have won accolades for their work. There were also some opportunistic, spur-of-the-moment interviews, thanks to the digital “smart pen” recorder that I carried with me at all times during my travels: the conference delegate I met on a long taxi ride in Bangkok who had interesting things to say about academic writing and publication in his home country; the famous figure I approached after a keynote address for an on-the-spot interview in a corner of the conference hotel lobby; the visiting overseas scholar who dropped by my office to introduce herself and ended up staying for an hour-long interview; the three early-career researchers with whom I had just shared a lively lunch at a write-on-site session in a Wellington café.

My ambition was to interview roughly equal numbers of men and women drawn from across the widest possible range of disciplines. The latter, however, turned out to be something of a challenge, thanks to the siloed nature of academic life. Most of my on-the-ground institutional contacts—the people I relied on to help me set up interviews and workshops at their home universities—were social scientists or humanities scholars whom I knew through my own academic networks in educational development and literary studies, respectively. The academic developers were generally able to recommend a few scientists whom they knew through their teaching networks; however, the literary scholars often struggled to name even a single colleague outside the humanities. Also, they did not always follow directions. One generous host, upon being asked to line up interviews with a few exemplary scientists and social scientists at his university, instead sent an email around his own department announcing that he was hosting a visiting researcher who was conducting research on scholarly writing, and would anyone like to be interviewed? Half a dozen or so of his closest colleagues put their hands up; not wanting to seem rude, I interviewed them all—and was glad I did, although my interview cohort was already overstocked with humanists.

At the time of the interviews, ninety-six of my interview subjects were either employed in or recently retired from academic positions in higher education, three were full-time academic editors, two were graduate students, and one was a postdoctoral fellow. (Educational developers with PhDs were classified in the interview cohort as academics, even if they were not employed on faculty contracts.) Most of the interviews lasted between sixty and ninety minutes and covered some or all of the following questions:

Briefly describe your academic background, current position, and primary research area(s). Who are the main audiences for whom you write? Have these audiences changed over time?

Describe your professional formation as a writer. How, when, and from whom did you learn to write in your discipline? Have you ever undertaken any formal learning in academic writing (e.g., books, workshops, courses), either pre- or post-PhD?

Describe your academic work habits. How, when, and where do you make time for your writing? How have these habits changed or developed over time? How do you maintain “work-life balance”?

What are the main emotions that you associate with your academic writing? How have these emotions changed or developed over time?

(If applicable) Describe one or more risks, innovations, or unconventional moves that you have undertaken as an academic writer. What were the consequences? Did you take such risks early in your career or only after you became established as an academic?

Describe a piece of writing of which you are especially proud. What are its defining characteristics? Is there a piece of writing of which you are not so proud?

Describe a situation in which you received a particularly negative response or rejection as a writer. How did you react? How about examples of positive responses?

(If applicable) Please talk a little bit about your experiences as a non-native-English speaker writing in English. What barriers have you faced? What particular strategies have you employed to overcome those barriers?

What advice would you give to an early-career academic on how to become a more engaging, confident, and / or prolific writer?

All one hundred interviewees agreed to be interviewed “on the record”; in return for their trust, I have made sure that every single one of them is quoted by name somewhere in the book. The disciplinary affiliations listed after their names reflect either their academic appointment at the time of the interview or their current appointment at the time of publication, depending on their own preference.

QUESTIONNAIRES

In contrast to the interviews, which took place by invitation only and generally unfolded at a leisurely pace, most of the 1,223 data questionnaires were completed in under ten minutes by anonymous volunteers taking part in writing-development workshops that I offered at their home universities or at discipline-based conferences. Three of the same questions that I asked in the interviews—on learning to write, daily writing habits, and writing-related emotions—also appeared, in slightly modified form, as questionnaire prompts. About halfway through the data-collection process, I added a fourth prompt: a self-diagnostic BASE exercise similar to the one that appears on page 9. The results of that survey are not discussed in this book, except very briefly in the Introduction.

DEMOGRAPHICS

Nearly half of the interview subjects (47 percent) and around a quarter of the questionnaire respondents (26 percent) identified themselves as residents of North America, whereas nearly half of the questionnaire respondents (49 percent) and around a quarter of the interview subjects (25 percent) lived in Australia or New Zealand (see Table 1). This demographic disparity occurred due to circumstances rather than design: I conducted most of the interviews during research trips to North America, Europe, and Asia in 2011 through 2013; later in the data-gathering process, when my interview roster was nearly full, I was invited to run a number of well-attended writing workshops at universities in Australasia.

Initially, I intended to focus the data collection on faculty writers only. However, the colleagues at my host institutions frequently asked me to open up my writing workshops to graduate students and postdoctoral researchers as well, and before long, I discovered that other writers were also sneaking through the door: departmental administrators, research coordinators, laboratory assistants. The questionnaire respondents thus ended up representing a far more eclectic mix of academic writers than the interview group did: not just tenured or tenure-track faculty (53 percent) but also PhD students (25 percent), postdoctoral researchers (15 percent), and “other writers” employed in a variety of academic contexts (7 percent).

Despite notable differences in selection criteria and venue, the two survey cohorts came out looking remarkably similar in two key respects: namely, their ratio of L1 to L2 English speakers and their disciplinary balance. Only 17 percent of the interviewees and 16 percent of the questionnaire respondents reported that they reside in non-English-speaking countries, yet L2 speakers made up between a quarter and a third of all respondents (25 percent interviews, 32 percent questionnaires), a salient reminder of the dominance of English in international academe. (At a large writing workshop that I ran for early-career academics at Oxford University, more than half of the participants came from non-English-speaking backgrounds.) Likewise, the distribution of social scientists, humanists, and scientists in the two groups varied by only a few percentage points (interviews 33 / 36 / 31, questionnaires 39 / 35 / 26). Apparently, no single disciplinary group holds a monopoly on writing confidence or competence.

The most striking demographic difference between the two survey groups emerged in the category of gender. Whereas the interview cohort consisted, by design, of almost exactly equal proportions of women and men (49 / 51), the ratio of female to male workshop participants came out at more than two to one (69 / 31). This “two-to-one rule” held fast across countries, disciplines, and academic ranks; I can now walk into a writing workshop at just about any academic institution in Europe, North America, or Australasia and confidently predict that approximately two-thirds of the participants will be female. (The only exception that I noted during the data collection occurred at a research conference where my presentation was billed as a “keynote address” rather than a writing workshop; there, the men outnumbered the women.) Similarly lopsided gender imbalances have been anecdotally reported elsewhere in the academic-development literature but have never before, to my knowledge, been documented on such a wide scale. Are female academics significantly less confident about their writing than their male counterparts are? Significantly more confident about seeking professional development? Perhaps some combination of the two?

Data coding

Responses to the three questionnaire prompts, along with corresponding data from the interviews, went through several iterations of refinement and coding.

1. Learning to write

Respondents in both groups were asked to describe their “professional formation” as writers: “How, when, and from whom did you learn to write in your discipline? Have you ever undertaken any formal learning in academic writing (e.g., books, workshops, courses), either pre- or post-PhD?” We identified three categories of respondents (see Figure 4 on page 64):

• Formal learning. Researchers who have undergone systematic, sustained training in graduate- or postgraduate-level research writing and publication, such as accredited writing courses or institutionally sponsored mentoring programs.

• Semiformal learning. Researchers who have experienced no “formal learning” but have taken advantage of other opportunities to develop their academic writing knowledge and skills: for example, by reading books on academic writing or by attending occasional academic-development workshops (not counting the workshop at which they filled out the questionnaires).

• Informal learning. Researchers whose learning has occurred entirely through ad hoc, opportunistic, noninstitutionalized processes such as informal mentoring, feedback from peer reviewers, self-reflection, and that old favorite of the sink-or-swim academic, trial and error.

Each respondent was assigned to just one category, with each category subsuming the one(s) below it. Hence, an academic who learned about writing from a family member, has read a number of books on scholarly writing, and recently completed an accredited academic writing course would be categorized under “formal learning,” despite having also undergone informal and semiformal learning experiences.

2. Writing habits

In contrast to the previous question, which elicited fairly straightforward answers, this prompt—“Briefly describe your academic writing habits. Where, when, and how often do you write?”—yielded responses so slippery and varied that they proved almost impossible to code. “How Academics Write,” the original title of my research project, turns out to be a phrase that can mean very different things to different people. Even a prompt as explicit as “where, when, and how often do you write?” provoked responses that often raised new questions or answered questions that had not been asked:

Frequently. Intermittently. But not daily. [How often is “frequently”? What does “intermittently” mean?]

When I get stuck, I prefer to write with pen and paper, sitting on the grass outside. [Here a comment about process—“getting stuck”—morphs into a description of writing tools and venues.]

I work on sections of writing in papers; start with skeleton / map of a paper then flesh each section out. [This respondent has interpreted a question about behavioral habits as a question about craft.]

Although respondents were explicitly asked to exclude any non-research-related writing tasks such as email correspondence and administrative documentation, some persisted in recording such tasks anyway—a symptom of the messiness, complexity, and unbounded nature of academic research. Who is to say that our email correspondence about a forthcoming conference “doesn’t count” as research writing or that the new undergraduate course we are teaching this semester will not feed the academic publication machine somewhere down the line?

3. Writing-related emotions

The third prompt for both groups was deliberately open-ended: “Briefly describe the main emotions that you associate with your academic writing.” Despite the differing formats of the two sets of responses—the interviewees spoke at length about their emotions and often mentioned emotional affect in other parts of their interviews as well, whereas the questionnaire respondents had just two or three minutes to jot down a few words or phrases—this item proved relatively straightforward to code, as most emotion words can be readily classified as either negative or positive. There were, to be sure, some challenging exceptions: for example, the word challenging can be interpreted as negative, positive, or emotionally ambivalent, depending on context. Respondents also recorded a number of words and phrases that do not actually describe emotions but are often charged with emotion, such as procrastination (coded as negative) and flow (coded as positive).

The word-frequency diagrams on pages 155 and 156 (Figures 6 and 7) were generated using Wordle (www.wordle.net). Because respondents often described the same emotion using different forms of the same word (for example, frustrating, frustrated, frustration), all variant words were consolidated into a single form on the basis of frequency of occurrence, favoring noun forms where possible. Similar words with semantic differences, such as joy and enjoy, were not consolidated. Emotions that were described using a phrase—not enough time, not good enough—were replaced with an equivalent term such as time or inadequate.

Demographic coding

• Country of residence. This indicates the country where the respondent worked or studied at the time of the data collection, not necessarily where the data collection took place. For example, a French PhD student studying in Scotland would be classified under “UK / Ireland”; a South African academic interviewed in Thailand would be classified under “Asia / Africa / South America.” In cases in which a questionnaire respondent wrote down two countries (e.g., “Finland / New Zealand”), the current workplace trumped the other country listed, when such information was available.

• Academic role. “Faculty / academic staff” applies to part-time, full-time, and retired academics, including adjunct faculty and full-time administrators in senior academic roles. “Research fellow / postdoc” designates post-PhD academics in research-only positions. “MA / PhD student” indicates students currently enrolled in graduate study. “Other” includes undergraduates, academic support staff, full-time editors, and anyone else who did not fit into one of the preceding categories. Each category is trumped by the one above: hence, a PhD student who holds a faculty appointment is counted as “Faculty / academic staff.”

• First language. “English” denotes both English-only speakers and multilingual respondents who identified English as their first language (L1); “Other language(s)” designates speakers of English as an additional or secondary language (L2). In the interview cohort, bilingual speakers of English and another language were designated as L1 or L2 depending on whether they spent their early years in an English-speaking home environment, where such information was available. Twenty questionnaire respondents out of 1,223 (1.6 percent) listed two languages in response to the question, “What is your first language?” These were classified as L2.

• Discipline. Nearly one-quarter of the questionnaire respondents identified themselves as cross-disciplinary researchers. However, we ended up categorizing all respondents according to just one disciplinary category each—social science, arts / humanities, or science—even with the knowledge that many interdisciplinary scholars (myself included) would be appalled by such taxonomic shoe-horning. Our classification rubric was based on participants’ home departments, which in turn were coded according to the disciplinary affiliations of equivalent departments at the University of Auckland. Thus, for example, nursing scholars and psychologists were all classified under science (as Nursing is situated in the Faculty of Medicine and Psychology in the Faculty of Science), whatever their highest degree or preferred research methodology.

• Gender. All respondents classified themselves as either male or female.