It’s certainly not the case that I find all writing enjoyable. Writing reports certainly isn’t. Writing e-mails more often leads in the other direction, filling my mind with clutter while diminishing the energy with which I might impose order on it. Writing journal articles rarely has this soothing quality, instead leaving me forced to jump through hoops which I neither endorse nor fully understand. There are lots of forms of writing which we engage in as academics, many of which we tend not to consider as ‘writing’ in spite of the fact they involve constructing sentences for specific purposes.
It seems there are certain outputs which naturally lend themselves to more enjoyable writing. Book chapters often provide a freedom which journal articles lack. Blog posts escape the formality required of a report. But beneath these format differences lies a more fundamental question: why are we writing in the first place? Are we doing it to scratch an intellectual itch? To fulfill a need? To get rid of persistent thoughts? Or are we doing it because we’re expected to, whether through informal expectations of how someone in our role ought to spend their time or formally because it’s required for our professional advancement?
Not only will the answers to these questions vary between people, they are liable to change within one person over time. There was a point where writing a guest blog for a popular site could provoke a degree of perfectionism in me. I would be conscious of a broader audience than the one available via my personal blog, leading me to feel I needed to meticulously craft every aspect of the piece. I would get bogged down in how my arguments might be (mis)interpreted and try to adapt them accordingly. In contrast I now experience little difference between writing a blog post for my own blog and writing for a popular group blog. I just take a little less care with the former than I do the latter. I am more content for my writing to be off the cuff, reflecting the order in which the ideas emerged rather than any judgement about maximising their rhetorical impact.
Earlier this year I had a conversation over dinner with a number of professors who described how writing journal articles had become utterly routine for them over time, to the extent they found the process slightly deadening and worried they had lost a creative spark. It was a matter of discovering a format which worked for them and then repeating it as required. Obviously elements of that format were mandated by the journal itself and the conventions within their field. But there were particular ways of bringing that format to life, putting a personal stamp upon it, which they discovered over time. This reassured me that the antipathy I felt towards journal articles was something I could overcome with time, even if it didn’t challenge my perception there’s less room for creativity with the format. But it illustrates how we have a lived relationship with different formats in which we write, shaped by our experience of writing them and having that writing received by others.
It also matters of course what is valued in the systems we work within. I’ve been a regular blogger throughout my adult life, including an avid research blogger since early in my part-time PhD. But it’s only in the last few years that an employer has shown a meaningful interest in this activity. When I started blogging it was a practice viewed with suspicion by many within higher education. It’s now widely recognised as an effective means through which to disseminate knowledge within academic communities and beyond them. Is it easier to enjoy a form of writing if you know it is valued? I don’t think the answer to that question is at all straightforward. The freedom I enjoy with having my own personal blog is that I experience any one contribution to it as devoid of instrumental considerations, even as I recognise the blog itself carries a certain cachet in terms of network and prestige.
To have a place where you write purely for yourself, for your own amusement or edification, creates a space of freedom that becomes increasingly precious in an academic landscape dominated by metrics and “impact.” Yet this freedom becomes more complicated in the age of generative AI, which forces us to confront our motivations in new ways.
Generative AI doesn’t just pose practical questions of how we write, it forces us to reflect on why we write. If it’s now possible for a machine to write on your behalf, why would you insist on producing your own words in the slow and uneven process which until recently was the only route through which writing could occur? Is it because you’re worried that your colleagues might find out and disapprove of your turn to machine writing? Is it because journals and publishers have asked you to affirm that your writing is human generated and you’re concerned that you’ll be found out if you breach this agreement? If these are the only reasons to retain the human quality of academic writing then we can reasonably expect machine writing to be ubiquitous in a matter of years.
If we approach our writing in entirely instrumental terms then it will maximise our frustration when we encounter trouble. If our writing is fundamentally a matter of ‘getting things done’, to invoke the name of David Allen’s (2001) well known productivity system, obstacles to the process will show up as problems to be solved. If we encounter a block then we are likely to seek to circumvent that block as quickly and effectively as possible. If we are unsure what we are trying to say then we are likely to seek intellectual direction as quickly as possible.
This instrumentalism is difficult to avoid in contemporary academic life. There’s a risk when we write about ‘instrumentalism’ and ‘competitive individualism’ in academia that we impute this to those around us, tacitly claiming the purity of our own motivations in the process. The reality is that we all write instrumentally at least some of the time, at least if we are either employed as academics or seeking this employment in the future.
What we write is the currency through which we establish our worth, and the hidden injuries which follow from this are hard to confront head on. It’s easier to bemoan the careerism of those around us, let alone the dreaded managers who are written about with a surprising frequency as if they are little more than automatons mindlessly enacting the policies of distant and sinister figures. The poetics of these accounts, diagnosed by Bacevic (2019) in a detailed study of interventions into debates about scholarship and the experiences of those undertaking the interventions, can do a lot of psychic work for readers and writers.
It’s not an uncommon experience to find the act of writing bringing clarity to the project of writing, in the sense that your capacity to articulate why you’re doing these things grows alongside your capacity to explain what you’re doing. But if the answer to why follows from what you are doing, in what sense are these the causes of the project? Is it like going for a walk on a summer’s day and pointing to where you are in order to explain why you are walking?
Who are you writing for? If I imagine myself as able to write a practical text, one which supports a change in how others relate to their writing, it implies that I’m addressing myself to academic writers. I’m imagining people will read this text, working through the meandering self-reflective sub-clauses which I’m so terribly prone to, leaving with a deeper sense of how they relate to their own writing. I’m imagining that I’m producing something which will have the capacity to provoke questions in readers.
But beneath these surface motivations lies what we might call a “fundamental fantasy” about writing. I suspect that every academic has such a fantasy. What is your writing doing for you? How is it able to have this effect on you? Where do you imagine your writing might lead you?There’s a profound satisfaction I find in expressing diffuse and abstract ideas in precise ways which enable other people to understand them. This deep interest in articulacy comes, I suspect, from my experience of struggling to articulate myself for years as a child.
There are no straightforward or easy answers here, at least if you’re resisting the temptation to treat these questions in a narrow or superficial way. Instead it’s a gradual process of unpacking your nature as a writer through carefully inquiring in an open and curious way about your experience of the process.
Mark Carrigan 