hope you enjoyed yesterday’s wonderful sunshine and rewarded your efforts last
week with some time off. Today is the beginning of a new week, and thus, it’s
the ideal moment to tweak your goals or plan of action. It’s a fresh
start, so if things got off a bit slow, jump back aboard the writing train today!
Writing Challenge update survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/52HKKBX. We’d love to hear how your writing is progressing and how
you think we can better support you – both during the Writing Challenge, and
into the future.
published prolifically in the fields of nineteenth and twentieth century
literature, Victorian literature, feminist theory and cultural studies. Alongside
her research work, Sue is also Associate Dean Research in the Faculty of
Humanities and Social Sciences. In this piece, Sue reflects upon the ways in
which different types of academic work require different orientations to
writing. She reminds us that writing is contextually specific and is shaped by
the intellectual environments in which we find ourselves, the physical spaces that we write in, the nature of the content that we must communicate and the
character of the conversations we hope to take part in. If academia is an
increasingly dynamic and complex profession, in turn, modern academic
identities must be adaptive and responsive to the new physical and intellectual
locations in which we work.
It
took me some time to encounter the idea that writing might not be central to
all academic work. This is because I work, or have mostly worked, in English
departments. Academics in the Humanities might sometimes think they have
trouble writing, or might struggle for the perfect term, but for many of them
thinking is writing: the two come together. I was
quite surprised when La Trobe’s Borchardt Library opened a café called
‘Writer’s Block’ (a name which I immediately blocked from my mind) because it
seemed like such a potential mozz (mozz: Colloquial–noun 1. a hex.–verb (t) 2. to hex.3. to
inconvenience; hinder – Macquarie Dictionary) that I thought no researcher would venture near it, let alone eat there.
University Research Services offer academics across the Faculties assistance
with grant writing – with shaping and communicating the content, methodology,
and importance of their projects, which is very helpful.
however, the writing, and the elucidation of the epistemology, the plan, and
the concepts in words tends to come more easily than the budgeting and
interacting with the on-line budget software. It has been more of a struggle to
convince Research Services that just as a professor good at calculations may
need assistance with words, a professor good with words may need assistance
with calculations.
This is not to suggest that Humanities researchers know how to write grant
applications, but their research generally involves and requires a facility
with writing. Writing is not their problem. In my own case, I have, sadly,
learnt to write a very good grant application (apart from the budget), while
unlearning some of the better skills of writing up the sustained research which
comes from contemplation and deep study, rather than frenzied and scattered
grant and research administration. I am looking forward to going back to some
slow writing, for just a little while…
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