How successful academics write - Helen Sword 2017

5. The craft of writing
Part two. Artisanal habits

A PhD student approached me after a writing workshop to recount his tale of woe. “I write these messy, incoherent first drafts,” he lamented. “They’re absolutely awful! Then I have to work on them for hours and hours to bash them into shape. It’s such a frustrating process, and so discouraging. My PhD adviser is a really good writer; she makes it all look so easy. I wish I were more like her.” I didn’t get a chance to interview the student’s supervisor; but if I had, I can guess what she might have told me. Probably something like this: “I write these messy, incoherent first drafts—they’re absolutely awful! Then I have to work on them for hours and hours to bash them into shape. Writing can be a hard and frustrating process, but for the most part, I really enjoy the challenge of honing and polishing my sentences until I get them just right.” Same story, different spin.

Of all the myths surrounding academic writing, the fallacy of effortless productivity is among the most persistent. Many of the academics I interviewed told me that they find the craft of writing to be fascinating, pleasurable, even exhilarating:

I see writing as an artisanal activity, like being a potter or a woodworker. The craft of putting words together—you do a whole range of things simultaneously—just strikes me as so interesting. (Ludmilla Jordanova, History, Durham University)

There’s a deep craft satisfaction in writing that comes before everything except family. (Carlo Rotella, English, Boston College)

Only a rare few, however, said that they “find writing easy”—and even then, mostly in the context that they “find writing easy” compared to other aspects of the process, such as the research, planning, and editing:

When I’m really going, I just fly. It’s what they call “flow.” I love it. But I know that I’m going to have to go back later and take a third of the prose out. (Stephen Ross, English, Victoria University)

Others describe the writing process itself as extraordinarily taxing:

It’s mostly pain, let’s be honest about it. It’s grueling. Torture is too strong a word. But it’s hard. It’s draining. (James Shapiro, English, Columbia University)

The bottom line is that it takes most academics a long time—whether at the front end of the writing process, at the back end, or both—to produce high-quality work. Apprentice academics may regard the enormous effort involved as a symptom of their own inadequacy, especially if they have been led to believe that writing is supposed to be easy:

When I first started on my PhD, I wrote a lot of stuff, because the books all say you should produce x amount of words a day. So I sat down every day and said, “Right, I’m going to write two thousand words today.” And I did that for three or four months and ended up with thousands and thousands of words. But they weren’t connected, they weren’t going anywhere. Afterwards I had to go back and spend months organizing what I’d written: cutting it down, creating coherent chapters. (Ewan Pohe, Māori Studies, Victoria University of Wellington)

Experienced writers, on the other hand, understand that messiness and frustration come with the territory:

It doesn’t come out right the first time. You work it over and over—many drafts. That’s the really discouraging, scary part of the process. It feels like it will never come together—and then it does. Just hanging in there through that development phase, that messy phase, is so important. (Jennifer Meta Robinson, Anthropology, Indiana University)

The PhD student at my workshop hadn’t yet learned any of that. But what if his supervisor had told him about her own background and processes as an academic writer: her sources of learning, her struggles to improve, her day-to-day schedule, her history of rejections, her pleasure in the craft? Perhaps then he would have been able to see his own frustrations as normal and even necessary speed bumps on the road to successful writing.

“This zigzag writing”

Marialuisa Aliotta

School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Edinburgh (UK)

As a PhD student in Italy, nuclear astrophysicist Marialuisa Aliotta had a dissertation adviser “who was extremely meticulous about writing”:

I remember after handing in my first draft of my first chapter, I was looking forward to meeting with him and thinking he was going to say, “Well done,” because I was kind of proud of it. It was a disaster! It was all marked in red pen, all crossed. But now with hindsight, I see that the guidance he offered was extremely valuable—he really taught me to write.

Later, as a full-time academic, she noticed that many of the graduate students in her program struggled with their writing, but they had no place to go for help:

At this university, supervisors are supposed to not interfere in students’ writing, because their thesis is supposed to be their own work. I thought, “How are these students supposed to learn? Just picking these things up by osmosis?”

She started a doctoral blog “as a way of giving some guidance to students” and eventually developed a three-day residential course that is now attended by postgraduate physics students from all over Scotland: “I take them through the process of writing something from scratch, going through the very basic steps.” Her own articles, unsurprisingly, are carefully crafted from start to finish. She begins by gathering together all the relevant research publications:

Sometimes I read through them chronologically because I like to see how ideas and things have progressed; other times I start from the latest paper to get an overall picture first. I underline or highlight key points using a paper annotation tool, which is a one-page double-sided document containing specific questions, like “What was the method used? What was the purpose of this study? What was the key finding?”

Next she prepares the structure of her paper, “because if you break the writing down into small chunks, it becomes a lot more manageable.” Then, at last, she starts drafting:

That’s when things get difficult. I’m a bit of a perfectionist—maybe without the “bit”—so very often I find myself writing a sentence, rereading it, and saying, “Oh no, I’m deleting it,” and then rewriting it. So it’s this zigzag writing: I can spend hours polishing a sentence.

When I asked the writers I interviewed to describe their daily writing habits—where, when, and how they write—many quickly tilted the conversation toward craft: that is, “how they write” in the sense of how they shape the words on the page, rather than “how they write” in the sense of how those words got there in the first place. From the cadence of a paragraph to the structure of a book, I learned, stylish academic writers sweat the details. They think about elegance:

The ability to write elegantly in the style appropriate for a specific journal is essential in science. We spend ages crafting even very short articles before we send them off to journals like Science or Nature. (Russell Gray, Director, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History)

They think about concision:

The quality I try for most in my writing is succinctness—some people waffle on so much—but it’s bloody hard. I think it’s one of the hardest forms of writing. (Michael Corballis, Psychology, University of Auckland)

They think about structure:

I’m very much a structural thinker, so when I go for a run and think about my writing, I’m already hearing the shape of the essay. As I write, that doesn’t usually change much at all: when I’m working on a section, I know that this is going to be the midsection or the second paragraph in. (Margaret Breen, English, University of Connecticut)

They think about voice:

I think my writing is less often affected by other people’s style than it used to be, and I’ve found a voice. It’s not an easy voice. It’s a voice that takes a lot of pruning and editing, of course. Nothing you write is ever a first draft. (Trudy Rudge, Nursing, University of Sydney)

They think about identity:

The question I ask my students is, “How do you write your research up in First Nation studies in ways that don’t reproduce those ’othering’ discourses that have plagued anthropology or sociology or other disciplines for so long?” (Dory Nason, First Nations Studies, University of British Columbia)

They think about clarity:

In science, sentences should be logical and unambiguous. You’re not writing literature, where ambiguity might be a good thing. There you might want two possible meanings on purpose. But in a scientific paper, you don’t want that. You want a very clear meaning. (Wim Vanderbauwhede, Computing Science, University of Glasgow)

They think about accessibility:

I try to model my work after the very accessible style of writers such as Lionel Trilling and William Empson; it has a strong colloquial aspect to it, where they’re not afraid to use the full resources of the language, and they don’t try to write like some sort of neutered computer. (Robert Miles, English, University of Victoria)

They think about vocabulary:

In history, your audience often includes ordinary people who have a curiosity or passion for the past, which marks it out from academic disciplines where the more polysyllabic words and the more theoreticians you invoke in one sentence, the more illustrious you are, even if no one has any idea what the words mean. (Michael Reilly, Māori, Pacific, and Indigenous Studies, University of Otago)

They think about syntax:

I learned quite a lot from one of my coauthors. I would start off a sentence with “This shows that,” and he would say, “Well, Miles, what shows that? What does the this refer to?” Now I find myself saying the same to all my PhD students, with great relish, when they start a sentence with “this.” (Miles Padgett, Physics, University of Glasgow)

“The smell of newly sawn wood”

Anthony Grafton

Department of History, Princeton University (USA)

Historian Tony Grafton credits several people with having taught him the craft of writing. One was his high school English teacher, “a very courtly, well-educated southern gentleman who had a passion for the English language”:

He would start each term with an announcement like, “Gentlemen, this term you will learn to write without the verb to be.” Or “Gentlemen, this term you may use the verb to be but not the passive voice.”

Another influential figure was his father, a professional journalist who could turn any piece of writing into “something half as long and twice as good”:

He used to say, “Are you a professor or a writer?” Professors hate being edited, and writers love it. I always really enjoyed it when Leon Wieseltier, the legendary editor of the New Republic, would read a draft of my work and go, “Well, this is great. You just need a new beginning and a new ending, and you have to do something about the middle.”

Undergraduates today, Grafton notes, often lack “the grasp of the mechanics of grammar and syntax that used to be a standard possession of those in the college track”:

I’ve had so many bright students who weren’t conscious of writing as an art or a craft. A lot of people—not just the young—write as if everyone in their readership is going to know exactly what they are working on.

A famously prolific writer himself—“If I’m on leave, I write in the morning from about eight to twelve thirty, and I try to hit thirty-three hundred to thirty-five hundred words or somewhere in that area”—he nonetheless finds writing to be an “infinitely postponable” activity: “The computer gives one endless things to fiddle with, and I’m always willing to pick up my Mavis Gallant and read a short story before I start writing.” But once he gets started, he enjoys the process:

I have the sense of doing a piece of work almost artisanally. I used to be a theater technician, so I feel as though I’m sawing and fitting and nailing and screwing and gluing so that things are neat and shipshape. The kind of pleasure that goes with that craftsmanship—if you only had the smell of newly sawn wood, it would be all there.

They think about agency:

I always use “I,” because it’s always my own views. I never write “one,” and I don’t let my students write like that. I want to see the agency. I don’t allow the passive voice because it excludes agency. (Martin Fellenz, Business, Trinity College Dublin)

They think about audience:

A colleague of mine read one of my early papers and said, “You know this is very solid research, but it’s boring.” That was a really important experience—I thought academic writing was supposed to go on and on and on: “Now we have Table 24 and Equation 13.” Now I work hard to make it interesting. (Janet Currie, Economics and Public Affairs, Princeton University)

They think about telling a story:

I have learned to work harder at writing stories. Now, I start more broadly, stepping back from the forest to see the trees, so to speak, to provide context and set up impact. (Kurt Albertine, Pediatrics, University of Utah)

They think about “the big picture”:

My job is to tell a story about what’s going on in this particular field, how do we know this, and who has told us what the data are, and I tie all that into the big picture. It’s kind of like putting together Legos into a shape or construction. (Donald A. Barr, Human Biology, Stanford University)

They even think about visual issues such as typography, pagination, and layout:

I seem to have a pretty good eye for layout, which is important when you’re writing your own grant proposals: deciding the font, deciding the headings, deciding the figures and the tables so the page looks pleasing to the eye. (Patricia Culligan, Engineering, Columbia University)

Successful writers also attend closely to the technologies of writing: that is, to the physical and electronic tools they use in their shaping and crafting of language. These days, most academics do the bulk of their writing and editing on a computer:

To me, writing is something you do at a keyboard. I like to fiddle with sentences as I’m writing them; if you do that on a typewriter or with a pen, the result is extremely messy. That gives you negative feedback, and it becomes depressing. On a screen, you can get the latest version and it looks tidy. (Kwame Anthony Appiah, Philosophy, Princeton University)

Some supplement standard word-processing programs with specialized desktop software such as Freemind or Scrivener (for mind mapping and nonlinear drafting, respectively) and online file storage and sharing services such as Google Drive or Dropbox. For many, however—especially those who came to word processing relatively late in their academic careers—there is still nothing quite like the feeling of pen on paper:

For important work, I’ve always enjoyed using foolscap or yellow-lined paper. After I type it up on the computer, I make my changes on a printout of the original draft, and then when it gets too clogged up, I print off another triple-spaced copy and go from there. (Daniel M. Albert, Opthalmology, University of Wisconsin)

In Lines: A Brief History, anthropologist Tim Ingold reflects on how “the practice of inscription” narrows the gap between thought and expression:

In typing and printing the intimate link between the manual gesture and the inscriptive trace is broken. The author conveys feeling by his choice of words, not by the expressiveness of his lines.1

Several of the writers in my interview cohort affirmed the cognitive and artisanal value of writing by hand:

I sometimes like to write longhand if I am thinking about something difficult. I curl up on the bed or couch and then transfer it to the computer later. I find it useful because it slows you down. Sometimes I even copy things over longhand to make myself think about the sense of it. (Marjorie Howes, English, Boston College)

While academics with a natural flair for language may well have a better chance of becoming stylish writers than those who merely put in the hours—in the same way that elite athletes at the pinnacle of their sport draw on innate talent and an appropriate physique as well as intensive training—the fact remains that all successful academics work hard, one way or another, at the craft of writing. What’s more, many of them relish rather than resist the effort and challenge involved:

I hear the sound of the words as I write, and I care about that. I derive pleasure from polishing my work and hearing it; I take pleasure in getting the language right. (Kevin Kenny, History, Boston College)

Perhaps it’s a matter of reframing what we mean by success:

Success is a process, a mindful process. A lot of students make the mistake of comparing their beginning efforts with other people’s final products, which is not a smart thing to do, since rarely do you start with something wonderful. And even if you did, it wouldn’t be any fun. (Ellen Langer, Psychology, Harvard University)

Psychologist Carol Dweck distinguishes between people with “a fixed mindset,” who believe that talent is a finite commodity, and those with a “growth mindset,” who believe that our innate talents can and should be stretched, challenged, and changed. For fixed-mindset people, Dweck explains, “effort is a bad thing. It, like failure, means you’re not smart or talented. If you were, you wouldn’t need effort.” For growth-mindset people, on the other hand, “effort is what makes you smart or talented.”2 Writers with a fixed mindset are likely to resist learning new skills, whereas those with a growth mindset never stop seeking out new ways of developing and testing the limits of their craft.

Things to try

Think like an artisan

Craftspeople respect and cherish the materials and tools that they work with: the stonemason loves the stone and the chisel; the weaver loves the fiber and the loom; the sushi chef loves the raw fish and the knife. To cultivate your identity as an artisan of language, start by writing down all the things you love about writing, from the feeling of words in your mouth to the sound of a tapping keyboard. If your list is a short one, look for ways of expanding it: for example, by reading a book on the pleasures of writing or by talking to colleagues whose writing is a pleasure to read. What is their attitude toward the hard work of writing? How did they learn and develop their craft?

“A deep pleasure”

Steven Pinker

Department of Psychology, Harvard University (USA)

Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker started as a “conventional academic” but always cared “about language, about style.” He learned to write “by savoring examples of good writing and reverse engineering them”:

I was fortunate to be in a field that had at least two gorgeous writers: Roger Brown and George Miller. They were clear. They were witty. They were elegant. They were unpretentious. I pored over their sentences and asked myself, “Why do I enjoy that so much? What’s the trick?”

After Pinker published his first two scholarly books, he was encouraged by an academic editor to write for a popular audience, a challenge that he likens to undergraduate teaching: “in both cases, you’re writing for smart and curious people who just don’t know the topic.” Every book he publishes typically goes through six or seven drafts:

I write a draft of the first chapter and then immediately go back and revise, because the first draft is inevitably messy and flawed. Then I go to the second chapter and do two passes, and so on with the other chapters. Then I send them out to specialists and also to certain readers. For example, I send them to my mother, who is smart, educated, and highly literate—she is my target reader, and she’s willing to do it as I’m her son.

By the time he gets to the final chapter, months have passed since he wrote the first one: “So I can look at it and say, ’Who wrote this crap? Oh yeah, it was me.’ ” He reworks each chapter two more times—“Draft four cleans up draft three in the way that draft two cleaned up draft one”—and then reads the whole book straight through:

So the goal of draft five is to make all the chapters consistent with each other and to make sure the book has a coherent narrative thread. Draft six cleans up whatever mess I’ve left from draft five. Then, of course, it comes back from the copyeditor, so I always put it through another draft then.

Long after publication, Pinker sometimes experiences a “surprising feeling”:

of picking up the book to look for something and then being captivated by my own writing, and reading page after page, and thinking, “Wow, did I write that?” That is a deep pleasure.

Get some new gear

Some academics love high-tech tools such as grunty computers and whizzy new software. Others prefer more old-fashioned pleasures; for example, I still enjoy writing with a fountain pen in a notebook, and whenever I get a new computer, the first thing I do is set up the color scheme and wallpaper. Whatever your favorite writing tools, it’s worth investing in some new ones from time to time—not only for the sake of increasing your writing efficiency and stretching your skills but also because acquiring new gear can be fun. This exercise need not be expensive: paper is cheap; many computer programs and apps can be downloaded for free.

Dare to grow

Take a few minutes to examine your own attitudes and beliefs about writing. Do you have a fixed mindset (“I’ve always been a good writer”; “I’ll never be a good writer”) or a growth mindset (“I like to stretch my writing muscles by trying out new kinds of writing”; “I can get better if I work at it”)? How do you feel about other aspects of academic labor: your intellectual abilities, your teaching skills, your leadership potential? Writers with a fixed mindset tend to avoid risk; they focus mainly on what they already do well. Those with a growth mindset constantly seek out new challenges, not only in the areas where they already feel competent but also wherever they see opportunities for new learning.

Read a book

Every writer, it seems, has a favorite book on the craft of writing. For general advice on writing style, it’s still hard to beat the classics: Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style; Ernest Gowers’s The Complete Plain Words; Joseph Williams’s Style; William Zinsser’s On Writing Well. Alternatively, you can study the nuances of sentence-level writing with Bruce Ross-Larson’s Stunning Sentences, Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence, or Claire Cook’s Line by Line; you can explore the delights of revision with Joseph Harris’s Rewriting, Richard Lanham’s Revising Prose, or Jay Woodruff’s A Piece of Work: Five Writers Discuss Their Revisions; or you can home in on specific disciplinary styles with books such as Eric Hayot’s The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities, Stephen Pyne’s Voice and Vision: A Guide to Writing History, Bryan Garner’s Legal Writing in Plain English, Howard Becker’s Writing for Social Scientists, Michael Billig’s Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed in the Social Sciences, Robert Goldbort’s Writing for Science, Anne Greene’s Writing Science in Plain English, Harold Rabinowitz and Suzanne Vogel’s Manual of Scientific Style, or Joshua Schimel’s Writing Science. For books on the particularities and pleasures of English grammar, syntax, and punctuation, see the “Read a Book” section at the end of Chapter 10. (Yes, believe it or not, grammar books appear in the chapter on pleasure!)3