On passing the General Reader Test

Once a week I stay away from home with two very good (and perhaps long-suffering) friends. They have looked after me this way for over three years; and over that sort of time it is hard to avoid the topic of one’s research in general conversation. And so, in a moment of weakness late at night, one of my friends expressed an interest in reading a draft article that we had talked about a little. It helped that the paper is about the recent history of a part of British Christianity of which both they and I have lived experience. And so, after some hesitation, I sent them a copy.

Slightly to my surprise, not just one but both took time to read it. And the best part is that, when we later fell to talking about it, they had understood it. Granted, much of the detail passed them by. But the argument they repeated back to me over a glass of wine was the one I hoped I had written. They had also been struck by some of the broader parallels with more recent events, which were implicit in it. It made my day.

Should this have been a surprise ? After all, writing is meant to be read, is it not ? But I wouldn’t be the first to note that not all academic writing is easy to read, even for specialists, let along the ‘general reader’. Indeed, some have suggested that there are perverse incentives for academics to be intentionally opaque.

I don’t tell this story in order to suggest that my writing is particularly clear; I’ve turned out my fair share of clunky writing built on muddled thinking. But it does suggest that a ‘General Reader Test’ might be one worth applying to more of our writing, particularly if you expect any non-specialist readers to stumble across it once it is released into the wild. I shall be doing so; although I might spare these particular friends too much of it, as I want them to keep them as friends.

More writing, less publishing ?

It was Stefan Collini, in what now reads as an early and prescient exposure of the problematic language of productivity in humanities research, that suggested as an aside that we might all of us be better off if there were much more writing, and rather less publishing.(1) And if you’ll excuse the fact of a blog post about writing not to be published, I rather think that his point is as relevant now, if not more so.

But (you may ask) who has time to write for the sake of it ? When under pressure to produce for research assessment, and then some more for our blogs and for the media to increase our ‘impact’, isn’t writing not to be published simply wasteful of time, an inefficiency to be overcome ? In my own case, I can recognise the train of thought, which is made more pressing still since all my writing happens outside work time. Why write that paper if there is not a conference at which to deliver it ? And, why speak at that conference if there isn’t to be a volume of papers to follow ? And if a paper is turned down for publication, can I not get it placed somewhere else, or (failing that) recycle it for blog posts or as part of a larger piece some other time ? (By extension, there have been times when I seem only to have read books if I was reviewing them.) When writing time is so precious and, for some, the act of writing itself often such a trial, ‘waste not, want not’ seems to be the motto.

But I’m beginning to find that the act of writing for the eyes of no reader has its benefits. I have recently found out something which (for complex reasons) I cannot contemplate ever writing up for publication, or at least not while some people are still alive. But I need to make sense of it, because it is materially important for my thinking on other matters; and I need some way of dealing with it in a safe way, to allow it to have its impact on the things I can publish. And so I’m beginning to write it up as a means of clarifying what it means, even it then remains in the metaphorical bottom drawer.

More generally, Paul J. Silvia has suggested that the more prolific published authors tend also to produce the highest rated work, suggesting a positive correlation between quality and quantity in published work, rather the negative correlation one might expect. And if Collini was right, then we might extend this principle to suggest that the more unpublished writing one does, the better will be the words that do eventually escape into the wild. I tried to suggest in an earlier post that every act of writing for publication has some place in the development of one’s thinking, even if this or that sentence is deleted or revised to the point of being unrecognisable at one’s next sitting. If the same applies to whole pieces written not to be published, then I need simply to write, as much and as often as possible, since in ways that are hard to document, it will make me both a better writer, and a writer who writes better history.

(1) Stefan Collini ‘Against Prodspeak: “Research” in the Humanities’, in his English Pasts (OUP, 1999), p.236.

Reflections on Academic Writing Month 2012

As AcWRiMo draws to a close, I thought it worth reflecting on, both about my own participation, and what it might tell us about the enterprise of academic writing more generally.

As it happened, on November 1st I was already in something of a purple patch with regard to my own book. I had tried a new approach (which I blogged about here) which was working very well indeed. It still is, and I don’t think I have written many more words this month than I would have otherwise. But I do think AcWRiMo has helped, in that there has been much and surprising mutual support via Twitter, as I and others have checked in to report progress day by day.

More broadly, AcWriMo has prompted much and interesting reflection on good practice for writing. Valuable posts for me included these from ThesisWhisperer and US Intellectual History, and several others that stressed the formation of a writing habit, by small daily steps. If AcWriMo becomes an annual fixture (which I hope it does), then it could hold open a space each year not only to make a determined effort at actual writing, but also to step back and think about what we do as academic authors, and how.

Two broader thoughts also present themselves. Firstly, as @jfwinters observed, AcWriMo has shown up a gap in general training provision for new graduate students. I remember a rather perfunctory graduate training course on how to structure a piece of work, but little on the day-to-day to discipline of getting words on paper. My strong impression is that if graduate students get any guidance at all, it is by the happy accident of having a supervisor who thinks it a priority, rather than because it is an integral part of learning the academic life.

Also, if we have AcWriMo, how about Friendly Peer Review Month (FrPeReMo) ? There have been a number of interesting ventures recently in Open Peer Review, in which peer review becomes an iterative process conducted in the open, as prelude (or even substitute) for formalised and anonymous peer review as managed by publishers. Part of the success of AcWriMo is that it makes one accountable to others. Why not extend the principle to some kind of mutual critique of written work (as writing) – the deal being “I’ll comment constructively on your writing if you will on mine” ? Thinking back, I don’t think anyone at all (apart from my supervisor) read my thesis before it reached proof-reading stage, and I’m sure it would have been better if they had. I need not be able to comment on the content of your writing, but I can surely come to it purely as a reader, and a fellow writer.