How successful academics write - Helen Sword 2017
4. Learning to write
Part two. Artisanal habits
A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought
Our stitching and unstitching has been nought.
—WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, “Adam’s Curse”
False start #1
I learned to write in much the same way that I learned to make jewelry or mosaics, two of my favorite hobbies: by instinct and imitation, by trial and error, with occasional recourse to workshops, books, and expert teachers.
[I could go on here to discuss the intensely tactile and inexact experience of taking things apart and putting them together again: moving beads around, smashing up ceramic tiles, arranging and rearranging and reshaping the fragments until I can no longer find a better way. But are these examples too gendered? Too specific to my own experience? Maybe I should write about Yeats’s “stitching and unstitching” metaphor instead?]
False start #2
Academic writers are makers and shapers of language, in much the same way that weavers are makers and shapers of textiles. The very word text comes from the Latin word textus, meaning something woven, tactile. So it makes sense to think of words as we might think of threads on a loom or beads on a necklace or glass tesserae in an intricate mosaic: infinitely varied forms that can be woven or strung or pieced together in a dazzling array of patterns.
[Unfocused, fragmentary. Needs to be punchier, more consistent. Find a story or anecdote to open with?]
False start #3
Many years after the death of poet Sylvia Plath, her former husband, Ted Hughes, published a vivid [find a better adjective?] account of his wife’s creative process: “Her attitude to her verse was artisan-like; if she couldn’t get a table out of the material, she was quite happy to get a chair, or even a toy.”1
[I love the fact that Hughes uses the word “artisan-like” to describe Plath’s way of working, and the carpentry image fits nicely with my “house of writing” metaphor. But Plath was a poet, not a professional scholar, so this example may not particularly resonate with academics—and in fact confuses the artist / artisan distinction that I’m trying to make. Also, I’d quite like to save this quote for the “Metaphors to Write By” chapter, where I could contrast the writer-as-artisan metaphor with more violent and destructive descriptions of the writing process: smashing down bearing walls, murdering your darlings.]
False start #4
artist, n. A person skilled in one of the creative or fine arts.
artisan, n. A worker in a skilled trade, a craftsperson; esp. one utilizing traditional or non-mechanized methods. (Oxford English Dictionary)
If poets and novelists are artists in the medium of language, then academic writers are artisans: skilled craftspeople who work in a nonmechanized trade in which quality matters more than quantity [OR: skilled craftspeople who fashion high-quality, distinctive products by hand, usually after years of apprenticeship and training]. In contrast to the suffering genius celebrated in the Charles Bukowski poem with which I opened this book—the inspired artist who continues to create even when “blind / crippled / demented”—academics must sell their wares in a competitive marketplace and respond to mercantile demands. But unlike skilled artisans in most other trades (carpenters, weavers, jewelry makers, mosaicists), few academics have ever been formally trained in their craft.
[Good to get these definitions out on the table straight away and to make a distinction between creative writers as artists and academic writers as artisans. However, this opening paragraph still feels a bit bland and abstract, even though I’ve already spent at least an hour shaping and honing it. Also, given that I’m planning to start each of the other three BASE sections with a personal anecdote, shouldn’t I do the same here?]
False start #5
I chose the word artisanal [pronounced ar-TIS-an-al] for the title of this chapter not just because I needed a vowel for my BASE [too glib?] but because several of the people I interviewed [well, only two actually] used the word artisanal to describe their own writing process.
[Boring!!]
False start #6
Whether you’re a “blgggh writer” or someone who lays down only exquisitely jeweled sentences that you have already sweated over while producing them, chances are you really care about the craft of writing.
[No no no, this isn’t working at all. “Lays down,” “exquisitely jeweled,” “sweated over”—mixed metaphors jumbled into a single baggy sentence. And what happened to my resolve to start with a personal anecdote?]
Start #7 (the “real” one)
The sequence of false starts with which this section begins may appear unordered and chaotic, but in fact these opening pages have been just as carefully crafted as any other chunk of this book (and took me at least as long to write). I started out curious to see what would happen if I pounded out one potential opening sentence after another without worrying too much about coherence or sequencing or argument. However, I found that I could seldom even get to the end of a sentence without retracing my steps to make some small change along the way—in this one, for example, I’ve just gone back to replace “before retracing my steps” with “without retracing my steps”; and after that I went back to replace “this sentence” with “this one”; and then I replaced “and then” with “after that”—and now I’m reluctant to come to the end of (no, better to say, “I’m reluctant to place the final period at the end of”) this sentence because I promised myself that I wouldn’t tinker with it any more after—oh no, now I’ve just realized that “the final period” would work better as the final thump, so I’d better try again: and now I’m reluctant to come to the end of this sentence because I promised myself that I wouldn’t tinker with it any more after placing the final period.2
But I probably will anyway. Despite every attempt I have ever made to become a faster and less finicky writer—to forge relentlessly forward, laying down a thousand new words per hour as Rowena Murray suggests that any writer can learn to do—I seem to be constitutionally incapable of drafting even a single sentence without doubling back on it at least a few times to adjust various details.3 Then, over the next few days or weeks or months, I will return again and again to polish and tweak some more: shifting things around, adding, revising, recasting, deleting. Many of my favorite sentences and paragraphs eventually get binned because I can’t find a way to fit them in. For every chapter or article I write, I have a file labeled “junk” crammed with all the rejected bits and pieces—multiple versions, deleted phrasing, unused examples—that will never get made, à la Sylvia Plath, into tables or chairs or even toys.
While I may be a slower writer than some, I suspect that I’m nowhere near the end of the bell curve. Like Yeats, who could spend hours “stitching and unstitching” a single line of poetry, or Ernest Hemingway, who drafted forty-seven different endings to his novel A Farewell to Arms, many of the writers I interviewed devote enormous amounts of time and attention to the unseen labor of getting their words exactly right.4 For some, the hard work falls mostly at the front end of the writing process (thinking, planning, drafting); for others, it takes place mostly at the back end (editing, polishing, revising). And for those who work as I do—writing, deleting, tinkering, and rewriting in seemingly endless iterative loops—it begins the moment they dream up a new project and doesn’t end until the final proofs go to press.
Only when I started talking with other academics about their writing processes did I become fully cognizant of the quirks and idiosyncrasies of my own—not to mention my own lack of formal training as a writer, beyond the content-based feedback that I received from my PhD supervisors. The first chapter in this section focuses on “Learning to Write” in all its messiness and complexity. Next, “The Craft of Writing” offers a behind-the-scenes look at the sometimes obsessive level of craft and care that even the most prolific writers typically bring to their work. (I say “typically” because, as with every other aspect of the writing process, artisanal habits vary widely among individuals.) Finally, “The Other Tongue” addresses a topic that I have come to regard as crucially important for anyone who cares about improving the institutional culture of academic writing: the particular challenges faced by L2 English speakers who write and publish in English.5 I hope that L1 readers will not skip over this chapter, assuming that it has nothing to do with them. Rare indeed is the L1 academic today who has no L2 colleagues, students, or friends who could benefit from their understanding and support—not to mention their admiration and respect. And rarer still is the monolingual English-speaking scholar who will find nothing to learn from the remarkable multilingual writers profiled in this chapter. Their artisanship extends beyond academic writing and into the realm of language itself.
4. Learning to write
“How, where, and when did you learn to write in your discipline?” Many of the successful academics I interviewed admitted up front—whether proudly, defiantly, or regretfully—that they have never received any formal training whatsoever in this most crucial of academic skills:
I’ve never been to a formal workshop on how to write. I’m not even sure I’ve been offered one. (Miles Padgett, Physics, University of Glasgow)
I’m not sure how I learned to write. I was never taught it. (Thomas Aastrup Rømer, Education, Aarhus University)
I never did learn to write. I just wrote. (Donald A. Barr, Human Biology, Stanford University)
The faculty, postdocs, and graduate students who filled out my data questionnaire responded with similar formulations:
I had no formal training, which is ironic because I now teach academic writing in a research skills class for MA students. (Associate professor of English, Canada)
No formal training, except one two-hour class in grant writing. (Assistant professor and cancer researcher, United States)
Thrown in at the deep end. (Research fellow in environmental health, New Zealand)
Overall, nearly half of the respondents in my two survey groups (47 percent) reported that they had learned to write more or less under their own steam, whether through trial and error, by drawing on past experience, or on the basis of advice and feedback from other people—processes that I will refer to throughout this chapter as “informal learning.” More than a third (38 percent) said that, in addition to learning informally, they had also read books on academic writing or participated in occasional one-off events such as writing workshops, mentoring programs, or facilitated writing retreats (“semiformal learning.”) Only 15 percent—about one out of every six respondents—have been educated as academic writers via an accredited course or its equivalent (“formal learning”). (See Figure 4.)
Figure 4. Types of learning reported in interviews and questionnaires in response to the question “How did you learn to write in your discipline?” (n = 1,323). Semiformal may include some informal learning; formal may include both informal and semiformal learning (see pages 215—216).
Let’s take a moment to ponder the paradoxes of this situation. All academics, by definition, are deeply invested in higher education: they hold advanced degrees from and are employed by tertiary institutions such as universities, colleges, and research centers. Those institutions, in turn, operate according to the premise that students learn most effectively and efficiently when guided through a formal learning program built on educational units called “courses.” (Local terminology may vary.) A course is iterative (the students and instructors meet more than once), cohort based (the participants learn with and from a group of peers), expert facilitated (the course is designed and led by acknowledged authorities who have studied the subject in depth), research informed (students are exposed to the latest findings in the field, not just to anecdotal knowledge), and complemented by a range of learning activities intended to deepen and accelerate both in-class and out-of-class learning: for example, readings, discussions, field trips, research and writing assignments, and group projects. Students receive formative feedback about their learning, and they demonstrate their mastery through summative assessments such as quizzes, tests, examinations, essays, projects, or presentations. In return, their achievements are recognized through some kind of certification, such as a letter of completion or a formal accreditation.
As cultural evolutionists Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd remind us, the default mode of learning in most human societies is to “imitate the common type”; we acquire new skills mainly by observing those around us and doing as they do.1 A well-designed course moves students beyond the default by equipping them with the confidence and skills that they need to challenge preconceptions, try out new approaches, and create new knowledge. Yet many academics remain remarkably resistant to the notion that they, like their students, might benefit from expert-facilitated courses in writing, teaching, or other essential academic skills—an attitude that contrasts starkly with the disposition of their colleagues in fields such as medicine, law, or engineering, for whom ongoing professional development is not only expected but required.
“Polishing a gem that’s already there”
Keith Devlin
Human Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research Institute, Stanford University (USA)
Mathematician Keith Devlin believes that successful writers are born, not made:
If you find you’ve got a flair or a skill, you can refine and reflect and get better at it, but I’m not sure it can be taught. Writing is a mixture of a whole bunch of things including the desire and the pleasure in doing it. It’s polishing a gem that’s already there. I mean, anyone can play golf, but if you’re Tiger Woods, you’ve got to be born Tiger Woods.
Yet Devlin’s own success as a writer is clearly due to his thirst for learning as well as his innate ability. He honed his craft as a science writer by reflecting on other authors’ writing and attending the occasional conference workshop, which, he says, “was as close as I ever got to sort of taking formal lessons or instruction in writing.” Now he is often invited to run science-writing workshops for others:
But quite frankly I learn at least as much as the so-called students in those classes. Thinking about their work, talking about what I see in their writing, seeing if I make the same mistakes myself—I’m constantly trying to improve, and arguably I am improving.
A prolific writer who once drafted a full-length book in just three weeks, Devlin typically begins with a mental map of the project—“calling it an outline is probably overstating it”—and starts writing as soon as he has a general sense of what he wants to say:
I structure the earlier parts so that they build to the later parts, and most of that preparation is largely subconscious, just something floating in my brain.
He allows his ideas to marinate during hundred-mile bicycle rides:
While I’m riding, the writing is sort of going on in my mind, semiconscious. It comes in and out of consciousness, but I’m sure that in those long periods of four, five, six hours on my own, the book is essentially writing itself.
Later, when he sits down to do the actual writing, “it just flows out. It’s all somehow queued up in the brain and just pours out.”
To be a successful academic, it is not enough merely to have mastered the craft of writing intelligibly. You must also be creative enough to produce original research, persuasive enough to convey the significance of your findings to others, prolific enough to feed the tenure and promotion machine, confident enough to withstand the slings and arrows of peer review, strategic enough to pick your way safely through the treacherous terrain of academic politics, well organized enough to juggle multiple roles and commitments, and persistent enough to keep on writing and publishing no matter what. So how do academics gain this formidable set of skills, if not through formal training? For many of the colleagues I talked to, the process of learning to write started in early childhood:
How did I learn to write? That’s a puzzling question to me, because it’s a bit like asking, “How did you learn to talk?” The answer is, “God, I don’t remember ever not being able to talk!” (Lee Shulman, Education, Stanford University)
Some picked up ideas and interests from their parents:
My father was an English teacher, and my family always played word games, did crosswords, liked poems—we played around with language, always had an interest in language, and that found its way into my writing. (Bill Barton, Mathematics Education, University of Auckland)
Or from their teachers:
I had a terrific teaching assistant in an undergraduate history course. I still remember her grading one of my papers and saying, “In German, you can have a sentence that goes round and round until it lies down like a dog making a bed. But in English, you don’t do that. You go from the beginning to the end.” (Janet Currie, Economics and Public Affairs, Princeton University)
Or from their partners:
My husband is a brilliant man but not an academic. He has six different trade tickets: machinery millwright, welder, pipefitter, steam engineer. He’s a bright man and a curious man and will poke holes in my argument faster and sooner than any of my colleagues. (Janelle Jenstad, English, University of Victoria)
Or even from their grown-up children:
My daughter has a master’s in journalism. We worked on an article together, and she helped me manage the edits. Then at the end she said, sort of like a mother, “Wasn’t it good that we made the article stronger?” (Mindy Fullilove, Clinical Psychiatry, Columbia University)
Others have learned to write by transferring skills acquired in other jobs or careers, such as serving in the army:
I was taught to prepare written orders and commands or tactics in a very clear, concise way. (Stephen Rowland, Higher Education, University College London)
Or working as a tour guide:
The art of good storytelling and being able to keep people’s interest has been very helpful. (Lena Roos, Religious Studies, Uppsala University)
Or volunteering in the community:
For years, I worked for the nuclear-freeze movement. Writing press releases and stuff like that, you had to use words that everybody would understand, and you had to get your point across in very few words. (David Pace, History, Indiana University)
Some academic writers have drawn on their experiences of writing in other genres, such as fiction:
I got an MFA in fiction writing, and the techniques I learned there have just been golden for me. It was the first time I ever got to focus on writing and be with people who really cared about every word, what the cadence was and characterization and how to tell stories and make them interesting. (Deborah Kaple, Sociology, Princeton University)
Or poetry:
My early explorations of nonsense poetry were very central to how I now see language and communication. (Douglas Hofstadter, Cognitive Science, Indiana University)
Or technical writing:
Before I moved into accounting, I was trained in engineering, where we learned to put together a manual or a description of something, which is really an organization of facts in a very specific order so that you can have clarity and understanding—which kind of parallels the kind of story line or structure that an academic paper demands. (John Dumay, Accounting, Macquarie University)
“Like a spontaneous voice talking to you”
Alison Gopnik
Department of Psychology, University of California Berkeley (USA)
Psychologist Alison Gopnik grew up in a family of readers and writers. Her father was an English professor, and her earliest experiences of writing and reading were literary:
I was always writing in the literary-essayistic tradition, and as a young woman, I was a completely omnivorous reader, a sort of insane reader. I think that reading informs the way you write probably more than anything else you do.
As an undergraduate philosophy major and later a graduate student in psychology, she was exposed to a wide range of critical styles:
In philosophy—a discipline that really values writing—there’s this sort of analytic tradition that emphasizes clarity; the structure of what you’re arguing has to be made clear in the writing. Then there’s also this belletrist tradition, where you’re allowed to use metaphors and figures of speech and do things that are more like literary writing. Scientific writing was a relatively late form of writing for me, and I always hated it—like beating my head against the wall.
Eventually she discovered that “it’s not actually that hard to describe a scientific experiment in a fairly engaging way as a narrative.” Now, in her scientific papers as well as in books and articles aimed at wider audiences, Gopnik strives for what she calls “a sort of American plain style, like the New Yorker style from the thirties.” She has developed her writing style through email correspondence with colleagues (“Writing to somebody else is a very good way of learning your craft”), through conversations with family members (“I have two brothers who are professional writers”), through careful attention to audience and tone (“in The Scientist in the Crib, I wanted to avoid the kind of polemical, edgy, sarcastic voice that is common in popular books, so I went through and took out every single bit of snark and aggression”), and above all through sheer hard work:
People often say to me, “Oh, I love your writing because it’s just like you talking. It must be so easy.” I feel like saying, “You have no idea!” If you looked at the first draft, you would see something that reads like a developmental psychology article. It’s only after the hundredth draft that it sounds like a spontaneous voice talking to you.
Or journalism:
I learned that the perfectionist voice has to be stifled really quickly, because you realize you have to hand the thing in. (Lisa Surridge, English, University of Victoria)
Some have learned from writing in other languages:
My doctoral thesis was written all in Māori, so that sort of gave me that stylistic expression and that language. But then writing the book in English meant I had to reorganize my structure and restructure the work. (Poia Rewi, Māori, Pacific, and Indigenous Studies, University of Otago)
Or from learning other languages:
We did a lot of grammar at school, as well as deconstructing sentences: indirect objects and direct objects and all that. (Wim Vanderbauwhede, Computing Science, University of Glasgow)
Or from translating other languages:
I had a really good Latin and Greek teacher who would insist that when we did a translation from Plato or Thucydides, we also had to communicate their tone. So I learned how to emphasize and deemphasize things without explicitly saying, “Now, this is important. This is not important.” (Massimo Morelli, Political Science and Economics, Columbia University)
Some have learned to write from reading well-written academic books and articles:
I was very interested in how people expressed their ideas—not just the content but the writing itself and how people were persuasive and so on. I still have a file somewhere up there full of those articles. (Tony Harland, Higher Education, University of Otago)
Or from reading badly written academic books and articles:
I learned to write by reading other anthropologists and ethnographers. But I often felt that the writing was very distant, sometimes boring, and sometimes very abstract. (Ruth Behar, Anthropology, University of Michigan)
Or from reading journalistic prose:
I learned from reading really good journalism and observing the tricks they use to ties things together neatly. (Stefan Svallfors, Sociology, Umeå University)
Or from reading fiction:
I read a lot of fiction, so sometimes I borrow techniques from fiction writers: varying paragraph structure or using a variety of sentence lengths for emphasis. (Kalervo Gulson, Education, University of New South Wales)
Or from reading poetry:
I went through a William Blake phase as a graduate student, and I like to think that my writing at least makes gestures to—well, beauty is such a big word—a grace that is not just academic, a gracefulness that is not just academic. (Enda Duffy, English, University of California Santa Barbara)
Finally, some academics have learned to write by teaching others:
Together with some colleagues, I run courses for PhD students on how to write a good dissertation. They could be training to be physicists, engineers, lawyers, legal researchers, etcetera. That has actually helped me to be a better writer myself. (Agnes Lam, Applied English Studies, University of Hong Kong)
Or by editing others:
Coediting a scholarly journal has really expanded my vocabulary for talking about other people’s writing and my own writing (Mary Elizabeth Leighton, English, University of Victoria)
Or by writing with others:
Writing together forces you to make explicit the kinds of conversations and ideas that you only have internally or implicitly when you’re writing by yourself. (Eric Hayot, Comparative Literature, Pennsylvania State University)
If they are very fortunate, they may have learned from a conscientious peer reviewer:
It was the review process that helped shape my writing. I’ve kept that in mind when I’m writing a review for somebody else’s work. (Julie Stout, Psychology, Monash University)
Or a meticulous editor:
I learned a great deal from a copyeditor who would flag things and said to me, “Are you aware of the fact that you tend to use a gerund at the beginning of your sentences over and over again? Don’t you think that is going to bore people to tears if every sentence has the same syntactic structure?” A lightbulb went on over my head: “Oh, these sentences should be varied in syntactic structure!” (Susan Gubar, English, Indiana University)
Or a generous mentor:
When I was a beginning assistant professor, an older colleague offered to read my book manuscript. She read a few chapters and really looked at the style and said, “Think about what you’re saying here. Think about how you are writing this.” It was really helpful. (Marjorie Howes, English, Boston College)
A few of the academics I interviewed mentioned that they had learned to write from their doctoral supervisors. These, however, represented the exception, not the rule. Most focused on learning experiences that occurred outside their formal education, whether before, during, or after the PhD.
The benefits of informal learning processes such as constructivism (building on previous knowledge and experience), situated learning (acquiring new skills on the job and through professional communities of practice), and reflective practice (learning through trial, error, and self-reflection) have been well documented in the research literature on adult and higher education, and there is no doubt that such experiences can be highly beneficial to academic writers at any stage of their career.2 The problem with informal learning, however, is that it tends to be ad hoc, sporadic, and serendipitous, which means that many people miss out. What if your parents weren’t college professors or professional journalists but Latino immigrants to New York who never finished primary school?
“From salt water into fresh water”
James Shapiro
Department of English, Columbia University (USA)
As an undergraduate, Shakespearean scholar Jim Shapiro recalls,
I loved to write, but I was a very bad writer. It took me a long time to become a good writer, by which I mean someone who understands when writing is good and when it isn’t. I think many academics confuse good thinking with good writing.
He learned to write from an array of sources: from the undergraduate teacher who failed his first few essay assignments (“He set me on the path to much more rigorous writing”); from his journalist brother (“He said, ’Right now, there are too many characters in this book, so choose six’ ”); from trusted friends and colleagues (“I have six readers who have read drafts of everything I’ve written since 1980, and they’re brutal and direct with me”); from other writers (“I urge my graduate students to subscribe to the London Review of Books and the TLS and to read these cover to cover”); and from “being in conversation with really smart people who understand writing in ways that I don’t.”
Shapiro’s first book was a standard academic monograph, written, he says, “according to the formulas of the scholarship that I had read: four or five chapters, each thirty pages long, covering one or two works of literature.” With his second book, he began “crossing over from salt water into fresh water,” consciously pitching his prose to a general audience. In his third book, he adopted a more conversational voice. But only with his fourth book did he finally succeed in producing the kind of writing that he “had always aspired to”:
The manuscript was 130,000 words, and I did not submit it until I had trimmed it to 105,000. Sometimes you’re cutting fat; sometimes you’re cutting bone. But you have to cut.
Shapiro explains why he does most of his writing at work: “My energy while I’m writing is something no one else should have to experience: I walk, I make noises.” Upon leaving campus, he shifts gears to focus on family:
When my son was six, he asked me, “Dad, can you not write any more books? I can tell when you’re talking to me but thinking about your book.” I couldn’t fool a six-year-old.
Times change, of course. “Now that my son is older,” Shapiro sighs, “he just wants me to go away and write books.”
In small spaces, people who can’t read books may see them as a lot of clutter and dirt. They’re dust collectors. So even keeping a few books in my room, that was a big deal for my mom. Put them in the closet, keep them out of sight. We’re poor, but we’re not dirty. (Marysol Asencio, Sociology, University of Connecticut)
What if your high school teachers actively discouraged you from writing?
My professional formation as a writer began with a comment from a respected eleventh-grade English teacher: “Carl, you’ll never be a writer.” As a working-class kid, I respected my teachers, and so when they told me things like that, I believed them. (Carl Leggo, Education, University of British Columbia)
What if your thesis adviser provided only negative feedback?
When I submitted the first draft of my thesis, my supervisor threw it back to me and said, “This is not a kids’ book you’re writing.” He didn’t tell me how to write, though. (Kristina Lejon, Clinical Microbiology, Umeå University)
What if the peer-review process, rather than inspiring you to become a better writer, left you feeling battered and risk averse?
Early in my career, I sent a couple of papers to a plant ecology journal and got a couple of thumbs-down rejections. I can see now that the reviewers must have been in a bad mood; their arguments weren’t very strong. But my reaction was to kill those papers. They are still in a drawer somewhere. (Christer Nilsson, Ecology, Umeå University)
Not all aspiring academics have been lucky enough to meet that thoughtful coauthor, that sympathetic mentor, that meticulous editor who was willing to offer constructive yet supportive advice on a manuscript draft.
Another risk of informal or semiformal learning is that it can lack rigor and range. If you learned to write from your PhD supervisor, chances are you were taught to write like your supervisor, rather than being exposed to a wide variety of disciplinary styles and techniques. If you learned to write through self-directed reading and reflection, you probably missed out on the kind of developmental feedback offered by supportive peers with your best interests at heart. And if you learned to write by trawling productivity websites or attending workshops on academic writing, the advice you received may have been based on anecdotal evidence and personal experience rather than empirical research. Successful academics who have never been formally trained as writers themselves are often eager to relay the “tricks of the trade” to younger colleagues, without realizing that what worked for them might not necessarily work for everyone.
How can we break the cycle? Ideally, all universities would provide their PhD students and faculty with access to iterative, cohort-based, expert-facilitated, research-based writing courses on topics ranging from grammar and style to academic productivity, publication strategies, and emotional resilience. But even in the absence of such formal learning opportunities, individual writers can advance their own sophistication and skill in a variety of ways. Self-improvement guru Stephen Covey tells the story of a man who is trying to cut down a tree with a very dull saw: “Why don’t you sharpen the saw?” asks a passerby; “Because I don’t have time,” comes the reply. Covey recommends that you spend at least a few hours every week engaging in activities that will stretch and strengthen your mind, body, and spirit: read a challenging novel, sign up for a dance class, start learning a new language, engage a friend in conversation about a topic you don’t know much about.3 Similarly, there are many ways to “sharpen the saw” of your academic writing—starting with reading the next chapter of this book.
Things to try
Reflect
How, where, when, and from whom did you learn to write in your discipline? How, where, when, and from whom might you learn more? Start by listing your own main sources of formal, semiformal, and informal learning: the people, books, courses, workshops, and other experiences that have contributed to your professional formation as a writer thus far. Next, identify the strengths and gaps in your education. In what areas have you engaged in a self-reflective process of questioning, challenge, and change, and where have you learned mainly through trial and error or by unconsciously imitating others? What steps might you take to hone the blades of your saw?
Emulate
In The Sense of Style: A Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the Twenty-First Century, Steven Pinker advises writers to find examples of prose that they especially admire and then to reverse engineer them, identifying the authors’ specific techniques and making them their own.4 This approach can be expanded beyond artisanal habits to the behavioral, social, and emotional domains of writing. Do you have colleagues who publish more prolifically than most or who engage in fruitful collaborations or who seem more optimistic and enthusiastic about their academic work than others around them? Invite them out for a coffee and ask them how they do it.
Learn by teaching
One of the best ways to learn any new skill is by teaching it to others. You will be obliged to slow down and devote time to researching, analyzing, and reflecting on how to explain the principles and practices involved, and your own mastery will increase as a result. For example, instead of enrolling in a generic workshop on how to give better feedback on student essays, you could work with a colleague from your university’s writing center to develop a seminar series for your whole department—thereby helping to sharpen other people’s saws as well as your own.
Read a book
Books can support either your informal learning, your semiformal learning, or your formal learning as a writer, depending on which books you choose and how you make use of them. For informal learners, “Read a book!” could mean “Read a great academic book and pay attention to what’s good about the writing” or “Read a terrible academic book and pay attention to what’s bad about the writing” or even “Read a book of poetry or fiction and let the rhythms of the language seep into your unconscious.” For semiformal learners, it could mean “Read a book that will teach you to write more productively” (such as the books listed at the end of Chapter 1) or “Read a book that will teach you to write more stylishly” (such as the books listed at the end of Chapter 6) or “Read a book that will teach you to write more collaboratively” (such as the books listed at the end of Chapter 9) or “Read a book that will teach you to write more confidently” (such as Roy Peter Clark’s Writing Tools or Patricia Goodson’s Becoming an Academic Writer or Peter Elbow’s Writing with Power or Ralph Keyes’s The Courage to Write). At the formal-learning end of the scale, it might mean “Read a book that will help you support your colleagues’ academic writing” (such as Anne Ellen Geller and Michele Eodice’s Working with Faculty Writers) or “Read a book that will help you support your PhD students’ writing” (such as Barbara Kamler and Pat Thomson’s Helping Doctoral Students Write or Susan Carter and Deborah Laurs’s Giving Feedback on Research Writing) or “Read a book that will help support your undergraduate students’ writing” (such as Barbara Walvoord’s Helping Students Write Well). It may even mean “Read a book about how writing supports learning” (such as William Zinsser’s Writing to Learn) or, more broadly, “Read a book about the cultural evolution of learning” (such as Kim Sterelny’s The Evolved Apprentice), which will give you new insight into the nuances and complexities of learning to write.5