{"id":69970,"date":"2023-09-26T00:07:30","date_gmt":"2023-09-26T04:07:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/world.edu\/?p=69970"},"modified":"2023-09-26T00:07:30","modified_gmt":"2023-09-26T04:07:30","slug":"why-write","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.edu\/why-write\/","title":{"rendered":"Why write?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been clearing out my book shelves. Getting rid of anything that I think I won\u2019t actually look at again. It\u2019s a pretty dusty dirty task as some of the books are quite old. They haven\u2019t been opened for a long time.<\/p>\n

In order to work out what I want to keep I\u2019ve found myself re-opening quite a few. Cue sitting on floor? Yes. Cue sneezing? Yes. But also cue browsing through what was once good advice and sensible ideas about writing and accurate depictions of academic life. But it\u2019s now quaintly na\u00efve. And some of what is naively written is in stark contrast to what we might write now.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s an example. Fifteen years ago\u00a0Arthur Asa Berger wrote a book about academic writing<\/a>. At the time he was already retired from his post in Broadcast Communications at SFSU. He called the book a toolkit, but I guess it\u2019s a collection of Berger\u2019s best advice based on his own academic writing practices.<\/p>\n

I won\u2019t bore you with what\u2019s in the book. But I do want to talk about one part. Berger ends the book with a coda. An afterthought where he talks about the purposes of academic writing. He nominates four reasons why it\u2019s worth all the hard work:<\/p>\n

Personal validation.<\/strong>\u00a0Being accepted by a publisher is always a thrill Berger says. And that thrill helps you get through the darker writing times when you get poor reviews and negative comments.<\/p>\n

Self-discovery.<\/strong>\u00a0Putting words onto the page is a means of surfacing and synthesising and developing ideas. Berger is one of those people who never entirely knows what he thinks until he writes it.<\/p>\n

Pleasure.<\/strong>\u00a0Berger writes, he says, because the creative act of putting words on a page is gratifying and fulfilling. And what\u2019s more, he says, if writers find the writing process pleasurable, then they often communicate that to their readers \u2013 they then find pleasure in the reading.<\/p>\n

Conversation<\/strong>. For Berger, writing is a conversation with the reader, an imagined listener who was present for previous writings, and will be present in the future.<\/p>\n

Now, I think these for reasons are all true and helpful. But my, how times have changed. These days, those of us who write about writing generally include other reasons to write. Two reasons in fact take pride of place in our answer to the why write question. We start our writing advice by addressing our context.<\/p>\n

Purpose 1.<\/p>\n

As one of my colleagues said to me the other day, citations are now\u00a0academic currency.<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0What we write, how much, where it is published, how often we write and whether other people cite us \u2013 these all count and are counted.<\/p>\n

For individual academics, writing is a means to getting a job, keeping a job, getting promoted, winning funding and building a personal profile. For institutions, the collective writing and citing of staff counts for reputation, rankings, enrolments and funding. So this is a writing political economy, with opportunities to participate inequitably distributed within disciplines, institutions and around the world. Despite the apparent equality of audit measures, the publication landscape is highly uneven, weighted to the global north and to particular elite institutions.<\/p>\n

We all know thus. It\u2019s now everyday academic life. So you often hear people talking about publishing and perishing, and it is writing as academic currency that they are referring to. Not pleasure. Not conversation. I\u2019ve also heard and read the occasional comment that the press to publish isn\u2019t real, and references to it are greatly exaggerated. IMHO this kind of dismissal comes from a position of great privilege and from an institutional location which is now far from the norm.<\/p>\n

Purpose 2.<\/p>\n

We now worry much more about communicating the results of our research. That is, we write not to an imaginary reader but real readers, plural. In some countries, like the UK, concerns about the take-up of research led to a focus on\u00a0\u201cimpact<\/em><\/strong>\u201d. Who uses our research and what for. Impact is generally dependent on\u00a0\u201cpublic engagement<\/em>\u201d\u00a0<\/strong>which is where writing comes in. But the writing that is required for impact may not be the writing that earns citations.<\/p>\n

Both impact and public engagement are also subject to counting \u2013 ranking, funding and so on depend on these scores. Many of us are now in a position where we not only have to produce citations as currency, but also public engagement and impact work as well.<\/p>\n

Academic books about writing usually now recognise the dominant trend for writing to stand in for quality, as well as individual and institutional performance. Blogs and books often begin by acknowledging these performative measures as the context within which academic writing is done. Outputs must be generated at an acceptable rate, or else\u2026<\/p>\n

Looking back at Berger\u2019 s book shows an interesting shift. It\u2019s not that his four purposes don\u2019t matter any more. No, they do \u2013 the kinds of purposes for writing that Berger proposes \u2013 writing as personal validation, as self-discovery, as pleasure and as conversation \u2013 are now talked about as resistance to the pressures that have writing as a mandated academic product<\/strong>. Bergers four purposes are seen as additional reasons to write, writing for\/against that demanded by our institutions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been clearing out my book shelves. Getting rid of anything that I think I won\u2019t actually look at again. It\u2019s a pretty dusty dirty task as some of the books are quite old. They haven\u2019t been opened for a long time. In order to work out what I want to keep I\u2019ve found myself […]\n… learn more→<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[8148],"coauthors":[11733],"class_list":["post-69970","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-higher-education","tag-writing-3"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhy write? - World leading higher education information and services<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/world.edu\/why-write\/\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Why write? - World leading higher education information and services\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I\u2019ve been clearing out my book shelves. 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