Day Three – Reflections on Academic Writing

 

Ideas and feelings: Some reflections on academic writing

Academic Writing Month provides a timely opportunity to reflect on the notion that, while all writing involves ideas, it is never purely an intellectual exercise. Putting thoughts into words and publishing them is, at some level, an emotional risk for any writer. As scholars, we expose our work to public scrutiny and sometimes hostile readings, and its inevitable mistakes and shortcomings can seem to sit like little discursive landmines, always threatening to be uncovered and detonated.
An editor once commented to me that the book we were working on had scope to be ‘generous to the reader’ in the matter of endnotes. This way of seeing referencing – as part of the reading experience rather than a structural component of evidence – alerted me to my own, entrenched, writing desires. At times, it is as if I write merely to prove myself ‘not wrong’ rather than to engage in the messy, fraught business of exploring ideas. Humanities scholarship doesn’t tolerate negative results in the same way as the sciences do, and perhaps this disciplinary difference generates a timidity that not only impedes the wilder, more exciting, reaches of our thinking, but also obstructs literary style.
If we write, as most of us now must, for a crossover market, the default defensive style of scholarly writing will in any case merely annoy our readers rather than impress them with the unassailability of a given intellectual position. General readers demand clearly-written prose which carries ideas rather than wields them as weapons, and opens up for them new ways of seeing rather than insisting on the absolute correctness of our own. This is our challenge, if we are willing to take it up.