7. Writing for others - Part three. Social habits

How successful academics write - Helen Sword 2017

7. Writing for others
Part three. Social habits

He aha te mea nui i te ao? He tāngata, he tāngata, he tāngata.

What is the most important thing in the world? People, people, people.

—Māori proverb

I’m writing this paragraph while sitting at an outdoor café table next to my friend and colleague Selina, who is still wearing her exercise clothes after a kickboxing session at the gym. We decided to meet here because I’ve never been to this particular café before; it’s owned by Anna, a friend of Selina’s, who stopped by our table a few minutes ago to set down a platter of bread and a saucer of freshly pressed olive oil from her own orchard. An hour from now, she will bring us lunch. In the meantime, I have set my “pomodoro” timer, which is ticking away silently at the top right-hand corner of my computer screen, gradually changing from green to yellow to red as the end of our writing session approaches. (For more on the pomodoro principle, see Chapter 9, “Writing among Others”). I have adjusted my timer from its default setting—twenty-five minutes followed by a five-minute break—to fifty minutes, to accommodate a longer run of writing followed by a longer break. Before we started writing, Selina and I spent half an hour or so talking about our current writing projects: the structural dilemmas we’re struggling with, the conceptual breakthroughs we’ve made, all our usual mélange of self-doubt, satisfaction, frustration, and delight. After the timer rings, each of us will choose one new sentence to read aloud (and Selina will cackle with laughter when I read her this one). Then we’ll break for a plate of Anna’s homemade meatloaf, a small glass of local rosé—and more conversation about writing.

The concept of writing as a social activity is a relatively new one for me, no doubt because my own habits in this area have been so underdeveloped. Throughout most of my academic career, my BASE has looked more like a triangle than a square: long and strong on the behavioral, artisanal, and emotional axes but alarmingly stunted on the social side. Trained as a literary scholar, I have always been a solo researcher who publishes mostly single-authored books and articles—not because I dislike working with other people (I am a highly collaborative teacher and colleague) but due to a slew of personal, historical, and situational factors: writing on my own suits my temperament and style; I’ve never found a writing partner with whom I’ve truly “clicked”; in the English and Comparative Literature departments where I have studied or taught over the years, most of my colleagues have been just like me, writing behind closed doors, publishing on their own, braving with fierce independence the rigors of peer review and the humiliation of rejection.

Writing this book has challenged me to pull down the “Keep Out” signs I had unconsciously erected around my own writing practice. The writing traditions I know best—poetry, fiction, literary scholarship—fetishize the romantic ideal of the lone author: the poet or novelist scribbling in a garret; the industrious scholar toiling in the bowels of the library. This ideal is largely affirmed rather than challenged by collections such as Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals (a compendium of the daily rituals of 161 authors, composers, painters, choreographers, playwrights, poets, philosophers, sculptors, filmmakers, and scientists from the eighteenth century to the present); Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham’s Critical Intellectuals on Writing (in-depth interviews with twenty-seven eminent scholars); Robert Boynton’s The New New Journalism (extended interviews with leading American long-form reporters); Mark Kramer and Wendy Call’s Telling True Stories (inspirational advice from prominent American nonfiction writers and journalists); Hilton Obenzinger’s How We Write (interviews with Stanford University faculty and other writers about their writing); the famous Paris Review interviews (a still-growing archive of several hundred interviews with famous writers, artists, and intellectuals dating back to 1953); Rachel Toor’s “Scholars Talk Writing” column in the Chronicle of Higher Education; and Noah Carney’s “How I Write” column in The Daily Beast.1 Virtually every profile or interview in these various collections—I counted more than 850 in all—focuses on a single named individual, with an emphasis on that person’s distinctive routines and creative habits and with minimal reference to the other people who have nurtured, enabled, or otherwise contributed to his or her artistic practice.

Most of the interviews that I conducted for this book, likewise, conform to a single-author template. Even on the few occasions when I undertook joint interviews with coauthoring pairs or writing groups, my interview rubric consisted mostly of questions designed to tease out the details of individual writers’ behaviors, skills, and emotions: how they write, how they learned to write, how they feel about their writing. In hindsight, I wish I had more explicitly probed the social dynamics of writing—for example, by asking questions such as “How do other people contribute to your writing practice?” or “Who are some of the people who have most influenced or inspired you?” But in a way I didn’t need to. The writers I interviewed were quick to tell me about the teachers from whom they have learned to write, the audiences for whom they write, the colleagues among whom they write, the students whose writing they nurture, and the coauthors who have driven them to hilarity or despair. Even the habitual solo authors like myself—humanities scholars trained to churn out books and articles in monkish isolation—spoke eloquently of the mentors who have inspired them, the peer reviewers who have riled them, and the loyal friends, family, and colleagues who have read and critiqued their drafts.

In fact, every single interview question that I posed—whether focused on behavior, craft, or emotions—addressed the social dynamics of writing one way or another. Writing for publication is, after all, a deeply human act: we write to communicate our research findings to other people; we learn to write from other people; our writing habits are enabled and inflected by other people. Even risk-taking and resilience become meaningless concepts when considered outside the context of social interaction. Writing is risky only when other people can deride you for what you’ve written; resilience is required only when other people have the power to knock you back.

Each of the three chapters in this section spotlights a differently configured set of social habits. “Writing for Others” focuses on audience response, peer review, and the various ways in which writers learn from their readers. “Writing with Others” explores the complex interpersonal dynamics of coauthorship, cowriting, and other forms of collaborative writing and editing, surveying practices that fall along a continuum ranging from “You write the analysis, and I’ll write the discussion” to “Let’s sit down in front of the computer and write this paragraph together.” Finally, “Writing among Others” attends to writing communities of various shapes, sizes, and functionalities, including writing groups, writing networks, and that peculiar form of intensive short-term community known as the writing retreat.

Fittingly, I drafted parts of this book while on retreat in the company of other writers. There was the weekend I spent at a beach house with a group of early-career academics; I shared meals with them, ran a writing workshop, conducted some interviews, and joined in a vicious late-night game of Boggle in which I, the visiting “writing expert,” was put firmly in my place. There was a week-long retreat with three other academic women at an isolated house on a vineyard in New Zealand’s South Island: having started off as near strangers, by the end of the week we were swapping personal stories, urging each other to physical daredevilry (diving into an icy pool, parasailing above a mountain lake), and making plans for a follow-up weekend a month later. And then there were my occasional writing sessions with my friend Selina, which often took on the character of a miniretreat; we varied our venues frequently and challenged each other to find increasingly exotic or unusual places to write. Selina won the competition on the day she persuaded her kickboxing coach to let us use the thatched wooden pergola that he had built in subtropical marshland behind his gym. We sat and wrote for several hours to a soundtrack of birdsong, falling rain, fingers tapping on keyboards, and occasional bursts of conversation or laughter.

These days I write for, with, and among others far more frequently than I used to. I have become more conscious of my target audiences and more ambitious about expanding my readership. Thanks to the examples of some of the inspiring academics I have interviewed, I have begun to experience the pleasures and challenges of truly collaborative cowriting, whereby two writers allow their words and ideas to cross-fertilize until their writing becomes something greater than the sum of its individual parts. I also routinely seek out colleagues willing to offer me the kind of early feedback that, like so many of the humanities-trained scholars I know, I once avoided and even feared. The social axis of my BASE has grown longer and stronger—and, along the way, its behavioral, artisanal, and emotional axes have lengthened and strengthened as well. With supportive friends and colleagues included in my writing practice, I write more often and more fluently. Every round of constructive feedback helps me hone my craft and reach out to my target audiences more effectively. And when I write in the company of others, my emotions tip much more readily toward pleasure, self-confidence, and joy.

7. Writing for others

Why do academics write, and for whom? When I asked successful scholars to describe a piece of writing of which they are especially proud, some pointed to the conceptual, methodological, and artisanal qualities of the work itself:

I’m pleased with my paper on chimpanzees and mirror recognition because I was able to articulate a difficult argument. (Cecilia Heyes, Psychology, University of Oxford)

It held together nicely. (Elizabeth Rose, Management Studies, Aalto University)

Some foregrounded their own roles and identities as writers:

It was written from the heart. (Kristina Lejon, Clinical Microbiology, Umeå University)

There’s a little bit of twinkle in the eye. (Michèle Lamont, Sociology, Harvard University)

A few mentioned their feeling of achievement upon having survived a difficult process:

I’m proud of my thesis in the sense that it was very hard work to finish; it was something that was giving me nausea every day. (Lena Roos, Religious Studies, Uppsala University)

A striking number, however, dwelled mainly on their pleasure and pride in knowing that their work has made a difference to other people:

I’m proud of the comments I’ve got from colleagues saying, “Wow.” As one of the reviewers said, “You said something that needed to be said.” (John Dumay, Accounting, Macquarie University)

I have to satisfy my peers who will review my work, but the greatest pleasure I derived from my latest book was when I bumped into a neighbor on the way to school, walking with my youngest son. She said that when she finished reading chapter 2, she couldn’t wait for chapter 3. (Kevin Kenny, History, Boston College)

These responses highlighted one of the most crucial yet least discussed aspects of academic writing and publication: the role that our readers play in shaping not only how and what we write but also how we feel about our writing.

The editors I spoke to were particularly adamant about the importance of paying attention to readers. “We don’t just publish papers because the research is solid,” noted Tim Appenzeller, a former magazine editor at Nature; “we publish them because the research is important in some broader sense, and we want the authors to make a case that it’s important.” Many academics, he added, “are not sympathetic to a wider audience; they are much more concerned with looking good to their immediate peers.” And those peers can be hard to ignore. One of my interview subjects confessed to having a colleague with “a really horrible screechy voice”:

When we were working on our book—especially the theoretical parts—I had her as a parrot screeching on my shoulder, even though she wasn’t the person I wanted to write to. [Name withheld]

All too often, in fact, our imagined reader is what literary scholar Leah Price describes as “a stern critic who is weighing how original and how learned we are,” rather than “someone who could enjoy and be entertained and amused and excited by our writing.” Our real enemy, according to Price, “isn’t disapproval or bad reviews or that imaginary critic who’s poking holes in your argument”:

The thing we should be afraid of is indifference or boredom: not making our argument interesting enough for someone even to care whether it has holes in it. (Leah Price, English, Harvard University)

“There’s nothing quite like a narrative”

Lee Shulman

Graduate School of Education, Stanford University (USA)

As a young Yeshiva student, Lee Shulman landed a job helping to run religious services in a Jewish community center. Before long, he was delivering the sermons:

I remember having to think hard about how to craft a fifteen- to twenty-minute talk that analyzes a piece of biblical or other religious text and then relates it to some real problem or issue in the world. That became a kind of story grammar, a kind of template.

Later, he brought a similar suite of techniques—storytelling, close analysis, and attention to real-world relevance—to his educational scholarship:

I like looking at a really complicated, messy kind of problem and trying to clean it up by making a number of distinctions and helping people see the world through the lenses of those now distinguished categories. So I’ll often begin by saying, “I’d like to tell you three stories.” There’s nothing quite like a narrative for reminding people of complexities and frustrations the world presents to them, often in quite funny ways.

His most influential articles have typically begun either as delivered talks or as something he “imagined saying”:

Even before a very large audience, I try to identify three or four people in the audience who are what my friend Howard Gardner calls “charismatic listeners.” These are people in the audience who are smiling, who are at the same rhythm as the speaker, who are nodding, who are laughing at the right times. After a while, I’m talking to them.

Often Shulman agrees to “write up” a talk for publication, only to find himself procrastinating until the deadline looms: “So I am likely to finish writing a paper, even in my seventies now, staying up till three in the morning.” Although he still regards academic writing as “a more difficult, painful, and challenging aspect of public speaking,” he takes pride in his ability to communicate clearly and engagingly, whatever the medium:

Late one night in Buenos Aires, a woman on the faculty of the university leaned over to me after my talk and said, “You know, Professor Shulman, if you taught here in Argentina, you would not be as respected as you are in the United States.” “Why is that?” I asked. “Because you are far too easy to understand.”

In the introduction to his book A Very Short, Fairly Interesting, and Reasonably Cheap Book about Studying Organisations, author Christopher Grey gives voice to the anxieties that for a long time held him back from finishing the manuscript:

Every time I tried to write something interesting I felt, as if it were at my shoulder, a hypothetical reviewer criticising: “the argument is confused”; “the author seems unaware of Joe Blogg’s groundbreaking paper from last year”; “the author misunderstands Josephine Blogg’s seminal book”; “theoretically naïve”; “lacking evidence”; or, worst of all, “Grey hasn’t got a clue—as we have long suspected.”1

Yet despite these anxieties, his book became an international success:

A business journalist at The Observer called my book “indispensable and subversive.” I think I’m going to have that carved on my tombstone. And then underneath it will say, “It turns out he wasn’t indispensable.” (Christopher Grey, Organization Studies, Royal Holloway, University of London)

Many of the academics I interviewed noted the challenges and rewards of targeting specific publications for specific audiences—for example, public policy makers:

People think it’s easy. Actually it’s very hard to get policy makers’ attention. And you can’t always give easy answers. As an academic, you want to say, “Here is what I think, but there are all these qualifications. Here’s why some aspects of this question are unanswerable.” (Janet Currie, Economics and Public Affairs, Princeton University)

Or practicing nurses:

I write for nurses who are studying and who are thoughtful about what’s actually going on in nursing. I try to make contact with the deep humanity of what they do. (Trudy Rudge, Nursing, University of Sydney)

Or university administrators:

I recently wrote a couple of courses for an online learning program for university leaders and managers. It reformed my writing considerably, as I had to move away from thinking about academic writing as being quite formal and quite distant from the reader. (Shelda Debowski, academic leadership consultant, Australia)

Or businesspeople:

I wrote an article on bronchopulmonary dysplasia for International Innovation, in which I had to explain what I do to a new and different audience—pharmaceutical CEOs, bankers, investors—folks whom I don’t normally interact with. It was a great experience. (Kurt Albertine, Pediatrics, University of Utah)

Or students:

I published an article in the Huffington Post about a new edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, so that I could say to my students, “We’re talking about this book in class, and I also wrote something about it that you can read on the Internet.” I wanted to model for them a literary scholar engaging with a critical public in real time. (Victoria Rosner, English, Columbia University)

But the gold standard of academic writing, for most, is the scholarly book or article that speaks to readers both within and beyond academe:

The phrase I had in my mind as I wrote my book was that I wanted mathematicians to agree with it and my wife to understand it. (Bill Barton, Mathematics Education, University of Auckland)

Whether they tailor their writing for specific audiences or cast a wider net, I found, virtually all successful academics put enormous amounts of craft and care into making their work accessible to their chosen readers. I heard versions of this message from scientists:

How I would write an article for submission to, say, Nature and Science is very different from how I would write if I wanted to submit it to a more specialist disciplinary journal. That’s very different from how I write a grant application, and again that’s very different from writing a review-style article. (Russell Gray, Director, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History)

And from social scientists:

You have to adjust your style to address different audiences. If you only write in these strictly professional papers, work within academic borders, your writing will deteriorate over time; you’re going to become more and more boring. (Stefan Svallfors, Sociology, Umeå University)

And from humanities scholars:

If what we do loses touch with the general audience, loses touch with our civilization, it’s sort of pointless. If the whole fabric of the academic enterprise doesn’t connect in any way with the literature, arts, and public life of the time, then I think we’re not doing our job. (Kwame Anthony Appiah, Philosophy, Princeton University)

Indeed, many regard the ability to disseminate their research not merely as a useful skill but as an ethical imperative:

The taxpayer has just funded your research. The least you can do is tell them what you did. (Miles Padgett, Physics, University of Glasgow)

But writing for others is not just a one-way street. The very act of reaching out to new audiences can yield unexpected rewards:

I think writing for a general audience actually improves my research because I can capture the attention of students better as well as write better proposals. It forces you to step back and reconsider a lot of dearly held assumptions. (Mark Moldwin, Space Sciences and Applied Physics, University of Michigan)

Some authors may even acquire new perspectives on their subject matter. When historian Michael Reilly published two collections of nineteenth-century historical texts by people from the island of Mangaia in the South Pacific, he discovered that his own scholarly contributions—the learned commentary, the detailed historical analyses, the English translations—meant much less to many readers than did the original texts, which until then had been inaccessible to general readers:

Mangaians have told me that they didn’t worry about reading any of the English; they just read all the vernacular texts through from end to end. That’s fine with me; it’s quite nice that there are all these different reading strategies going on. (Michael Reilly, Māori, Pacific, and Indigenous Studies, University of Otago)

“The people we have studied talk back to us”

Ruth Behar

Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan (USA)

As a graduate student, anthropologist Ruth Behar “didn’t even really think about audience.” Like most students, she wrote to please her professors:

But then I discovered that the professor I was trying most to please expected something less academic, more poetic and descriptive. I was trying to write neutrally in the standard academic way, keeping a certain distance from what I was writing about. But then I started introducing other kinds of feeling into the work—longing, rage.

The first time she presented a conference paper containing deeply personal material, Behar was so nervous that she broke out with fever blisters:

I was in such a state of anxiety that I was going to present this in public to my fellow anthropologists. But people were very moved by it, and that was pretty much when I decided that I was going to be this vulnerable observer: I was going to find a way to merge ethnography with personal narrative.

It was a risky move professionally; however, her readers’ responses over the years have convinced her that she made the right decision:

Students write to me saying, “I went into anthropology because I read your work,” or “I’m still in academia because I read The Vulnerable Observer,” or whatever. So I know that the work I do reaches people. It reaches a lot of women. It reaches a lot of minority students who aren’t sure if they want to be in the academy; they’re looking for something that is going to allow them to write meaningfully.

Anthropologists, Behar observes, used to have no conception that their own research subjects might be among their future readers:

They worked in peripheral areas and brought that knowledge back to the metropolis. But now the people we have studied talk back to us.

Recently she returned to the small village in Spain where she conducted her PhD research thirty years ago:

I literally went from seeing people working with traditional tools on the land to seeing all of these tools behind glass in an ethnographic museum. The people there are very excited because I have returned a piece of their history to them.

Likewise, when cultural anthropologist Jennifer Meta Robinson started researching a scholarly book on farmers’ markets, she quickly came to realize that “life is a text” with multiple authors, readers, and interpretations:

My audience now includes the people I am interviewing: farmers, growers, customers. At the same time I am trying to speak beyond that audience to people who have wider influence: policy makers, educators, community organizers. (Jennifer Meta Robinson, Anthropology, Indiana University)

A number of the writers I interviewed have become so deeply committed to telling their readers’ stories—and their own—that they have deliberately crossed the line between research and activism. Political scientist Sarah Maddison wades into political issues that few other academics are willing to broach:

I think of my books on aboriginal politics in Australia as a political intervention: I write to deliberately stir the pot. (Sarah Maddison, Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne)

Physician Donald Barr’s most influential article chronicles the day he decided to slow down and “listen—really listen” to an elderly patient:

She talked for twenty-two minutes, even though the nurses were tapping their watches. I diagnosed terminal lung cancer at that visit, and yet when she left, she said that was the best visit she ever had with a doctor, because I was the only one who had ever listened. So I simply described that encounter in about 250 words, and that article is still widely reprinted and taught in many places across the country. (Donald A. Barr, Human Biology, Stanford University)

And literary scholar Susan Gubar has transformed her own experiences with ovarian cancer into health advocacy for the benefit of others. “There are more than a thousand books about breast cancer,” she told me, “and those illness narratives have played a major role in getting money for research”:

But no one has ever been able to do that for ovarian cancer because its symptoms are so disgusting and its treatments are so painful and dreadful. So I wrote a book calling for new detection techniques and different ways of dealing with the disease and protesting the protocols that are so dehumanizing for patients. Someone had to do it, and I’m very glad that I was given enough time to complete the book. (Susan Gubar, English, Indiana University)

A vast body of scholarly literature explores the practical, theoretical, and rhetorical challenges involved in writing for different kinds of audiences, both real and imagined: academic and nonacademic; addressed and invoked; rhetorical, universal, ideal, and implied.2 Who are the readers for whom we are really writing, and how will we know when we have reached them? How can we reconcile what we want to say with what we think our readers and reviewers want to hear? These are complex questions that many academics have never been trained to address or indeed been encouraged to consider closely. Undergraduate students typically learn to write only for the teachers who will be grading their assignments: for example, in a 2014 study of more than two thousand undergraduate writing assignments from a variety of disciplines at US universities, Dan Melzer found that students were asked to write for general audiences only 7 percent of the time and to their own peers only 6 percent of the time.3 The situation shifts only marginally in graduate school; unless doctoral students are pursuing a PhD by publication, most write for an audience of just a few people, namely, their dissertation adviser and the members of their examining committee. Even published academics may find it difficult to imagine real people—interested colleagues rather than pejorative judges—sitting at the other end of their sentences. Literary scholar Janelle Jenstad confessed that it took her many years to stop “writing up” to an audience that she felt was judging her:

Only now that I’m post-tenure do I finally feel that I’m writing for peers. I’m sharing information with people who are going to be excited about it in the same way that I’m excited when I read an article that changes how I thought about something or that I can use in the classroom. (Janelle Jenstad, English, University of Victoria)

“A vehicle for their voices”

Marysol Asencio

Department of Sociology, University of Connecticut (USA)

Marysol Asencio had an “epiphanic moment” right in the middle of our interview, when she realized that writing has always felt to her “like a luxury and a privilege” rather than “real work.” Coming from a working-class background, she found it difficult to explain to her family—and to herself—that writing is a legitimate part of an academic’s workload, just like teaching and service:

If you’ve been taught that writing is not necessarily worthwhile and doesn’t symbolize real work, then when you’re asked to do eighty committees, you do eighty committees, rather than saying, “On Monday morning, I carve out my writing time” or “I can’t touch Friday; that’s my writing day.”

Asencio confessed that she did most of her scholarly writing on weekends and in the evenings, treating writing “as a sort of secret thing”: “because I have doubts as to whether it’s legitimate, whether I’m selfish, whether it’s lazy or egotistical.” Her political activism has contributed to her sense of guilt: “There’s the whole issue of how activists look at academics: ’You could be out there occupying Wall Street 24/7. Why are you choosing to write?’ ” Over time, however, she has come to see writing itself as a form of activism:

My work is with marginalized people, queer people, people of color, immigrants, and the poor—not the typical majority or core population. I write about people who are not in the literature; I am a vehicle for their voices.

She has also realized that “someone like me has a right to be part of the conversation”:

You always feel illegitimate. In many ways, academia can feel like it is made for white, middle-class males. The more you are not a white, middle-class male yourself, the more you can feel not welcomed. But I have something to contribute. I have something to contribute exactly because of where I came from.

Growing up in an environment where girls were expected to marry young and start a family, Asencio longed to “get away from traditional gender roles and expectations and be expanded physically, mentally, emotionally”:

I think that I saw very early on that education did that for me. Even though I grew up in a small, little apartment, books opened up worlds.

So how can academics learn to write more effectively for their target audiences, whether general or discipline specific? Most of the advice offered by the writers I interviewed echoes principles addressed elsewhere in this book. Sharpen your writing skills:

Many academics just don’t have basic writing skills. At some point, as an editor, you get irritated with people who have every sentence backwards. It’s totally fixable. (Sam Elworthy, Director, Auckland University Press)

Strive for clarity:

So many academics get so caught up in show-offy, jargon-filled fads and trends. Gradually they become immune to the goal of clear communication and to the joy of beautiful, simple, evocative, concrete language. (Douglas Hofstadter, Cognitive Science, Indiana University)

Avoid condescension:

They oversimplify, and to use a phrase that comes up all the time, they “dumb down.” That’s just fatal, because it betrays entirely the wrong idea. The person you’re writing for doesn’t necessarily know what you know—they may not use the sort of methodological apparatuses that you’re used to or the jargon—but that doesn’t mean they’re dumb. (Elizabeth Knoll, former Senior Editor at Large, Harvard University Press)

Solicit feedback from people you can count on:

Show your writing to someone you can trust to give you really powerful, positive, but also critical feedback—I think that’s about the best thing you can do in your writing. Do that in a really safe relationship with somebody who you know has really got your interests at heart. (Alison Jones, Education, University of Auckland)

Learn what specific audiences are looking for:

Sitting on National Science Foundation review panels and reading other people’s proposals—understanding what’s selling the idea, where the holes are, and hearing the other people in the room—that has been an amazing training for me. (Patricia Culligan, Engineering, Columbia University)

Pay attention to the comments of anonymous peer reviewers, but don’t let one or two negative reviews derail you:

I had a pretty negative report on my first book from a reader who I felt had really not understood it. I was quite crushed, but I didn’t think, “Oh my God, I have to change everything because one reader doesn’t like this.” I got advice from colleagues who said I could push back a bit. (Marjorie Howes, English, Boston College)

Above all, let your readers see your passion for your subject:

One way to find one’s voice is to show one’s enthusiasm for what one is writing about. I’m very interested in how you can write about what you love in a way that that love is conveyed. (Ludmilla Jordanova, History, Durham University)

Good writing, after all, will always find appreciative readers. Psychologist Steven Pinker recalls being seduced by a book review from far outside his own field:

The author of the book wrote, “It is often said that a camel is a horse designed by a committee—a quote that does grave injustice to a splendid creature and all too much honor to the creative power of committees.” The book reverse engineered the camel—the joints, the feet, the water storage—and though I ordinarily wouldn’t read a book on animal engineering, I knew from the review that it was written with such flair that I just had to buy it. (Steven Pinker, Psychology, Harvard University)

Pinker’s conclusion? “There is no field in which you can’t be stylish.” Likewise, there is no topic that cannot be made accessible and interesting to many different kinds of readers.

Things to try

Find your “charismatic listeners”

Write down the names of all the people who have given you encouraging feedback on your writing over the past few years: the partner or parent who took a fine-toothed yet gentle comb to the first draft of your manuscript, the old friend from graduate school who saw your newly published article in a peer-reviewed journal and emailed to congratulate you, the overseas scholar who approached you after a conference presentation to suggest a future collaboration. Could any of these people become a “critical friend,” someone from whom you can solicit honest but reliably supportive feedback? Most academics already get more than their share of critical feedback, so you might as well pack a few cheerleaders into your corner.

Cross-train

All academics must vary their writing style from time to time: a scientific-journal article looks quite different from an encyclopedia entry, which in turn bears little resemblance to a grant proposal or a promotion application. Rather than regarding activities such as lecturing, blogging, and community engagement as time-sucking distractions from your research, try reconceptualizing them as muscle-building tonics instead. The more you cross-train by writing across genres as part of your everyday academic work, the better prepared you will be to adapt to new audiences when you write for publication.

Write a letter, not a diary

The following exercise is adapted from Gillie Bolton and Stephen Rowland’s book Inspirational Writing for Academic Publication. First, write a letter to your imagined readers, asking them what they want from your writing. Next, write their reply. Finally, produce a summary of your research that takes into account your imagined readers’ questions and objections. This third piece of writing might end up becoming the introduction to your article or book.4

Read a book

You can’t always judge a book by its cover, but you can often gauge its academic register by its pronoun usage. Self-help books for scholars who aspire to write for nonacademic audiences speak directly to you about how to speak directly to others. Examples of this genre include William Germano’s Getting It Published, Kathleen Kendall-Tackett’s How to Write for a General Audience, Lynn Nygaard’s Writing for Scholars, Laurel Richardson’s Writing Strategies, Ann Curthoys and Ann McGrath’s How to Write History That People Want to Read, and Dennis Meredith’s Explaining Research. (Robert Nash takes a slightly different tack in Liberating Scholarly Writing, which focuses on the value of weaving personal narrative into research writing; but even in this I-dominated book, you are the author’s interlocutor.) In scholarly books about writing for others, by contrast, third-person pronouns dominate. Whether in single-authored studies such as Gerald Graff’s Clueless in Academe, Marjorie Garber’s Academic Instincts, or Sarah Perrault’s Communicating Popular Science or in edited collections such as Angelika Bammer and Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres’s The Future of Scholarly Writing or Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb’s Just Being Difficult?, academics who critique the impersonal, jargon-driven nature of academic discourse mostly stop short of addressing you.5