If we examine academic writing we find a peculiar practice caught uneasily between competing imperatives. As Billig (2013: loc 277) observes “in current times academics are writing and publishing as part of their paid employment” which means they are “not writing in answer to a higher calling or because they have dedicated themselves to the pursuit of truth”. It’s a sobering recognition stated with a bluntness intended to produce a rhetorical effect. The reality is slightly more complex than that, even if invoking complexity is a dependable trope of academic writing which itself deserves analysis (Healy 2018).
This tension between writing as employment and writing as vocation becomes even more pronounced when LLMs are ubiquitous features of university life. These technologies promise to make academic writing easier, but is ease always what we should be striving for?
It goes deeper than simply making academic writing easier. If we suggest there is something inherently problematic about easing the burden involved in academic writing, helping us move through difficulties with more speed and finesse, it would follow that academic writing should be hard. Yet I’ve suggested that enjoyment of academic writing is integral to finding success in it. It’s only if you find joy in the process that you are likely to sustain it long term, as per Elbow’s (1981) argument discussed earlier. The point is not that it should be difficult, or that it shouldn’t be easy, as much as that periods of difficulty are inherently valuable.
The philosopher Simon Critchley (2024: 14) captures this in a poetic mode when describing the self-effacing dimension of writing:
“To write is to aspire towards, even to hope for, the mystery of a clearing that is other than the self, the vast windowless sunlit room of living experience. To write is to participate in the struggle to efface oneself. The problem is that the self keeps getting in the way. We look for a clearing, but as we go through dense woods and undergrowth, we keep getting snagged in branches, smeared with dirt, and dragged back into the darkening landscape of doubt, the self-doubt that haunts and hunts the writer at every step.”
I suggested earlier that machine writing could be seen as foregoing a tea ceremony in order to take a caffeine pill instead, skipping straight to the outcome oblivious to the importance of the process itself. If you reach for the outcome, imagining the important thing is to be finished as quickly and effectively as possible, it must inevitably change the relationship to the process. What is the process? What is it that we risk losing if we skip over it? If Critchley’s depiction captures something significant about it, getting “snagged in branches, smeared with dirt, and dragged back into the darkening landscape of doubt”, surely this is something it would be beneficial to skip through if we could? Does it not sound pretty horrendous?
It certainly can be but Critchley (2024: 15) is drawing our attention to “the sensory, corporeal experiences available in poetry, prose, and music” in a manner which is often overlooked with the seemingly cerebral activity of writing, particularly when it is academic. It’s only if we can be present with what hunts and haunts the writer that the more existential dimensions of the process can open up to us:
“To write is to get oneself out of the way as much as possible, in order to see the things themselves and not just our ideas about things, our own reflection staring back at us. It is to allow the possibility that in the experience of art there is an experience of the sacred where things come alive and we come alive in the process of observing, attending, watching, listening, or reading.” (Critchley 2024: 15).
Obviously I can see how talking about the ‘experience of the sacred’ might put some readers off. It’s an odd thing to encounter in a book about academic writing and artificial intelligence. Instead we could focus on the aliveness, what we feel in ourselves and what we feel in the things we are writing about.
Peter Elbow draws attention to the complexity of the experience through which we grapple with our inarticulacy as we struggle to find the words to express what we feel within us:
“What is it that goes awry when we hold back or push away a wrong word because we know it’s wrong—and then stumble around unable to find a better one, end up being mushy and unclear, and finally lose track of what we were trying to get at? And what is it that goes right when someone encourages us to use that wrong word and we finally get to what we are trying to say? The key event is this: in pushing away the wrong word we lose track of the feeling of what we were trying to get at, the feeling that somehow gave rise to that wrong word “childish”—the felt meaning, the felt sense. The word “childish” may have been wrong, but it happened to be the only word I had with a string on it leading back to the important thing: my actual reaction to the essay, the insight itself I wanted to express.”
He goes on to observe that while we rarely “find the ‘right’ words on the first go around” continuing with the process, “listening for a wrongness or gap behind the new set of words”, often leads us to “finally find the words that click, that express exactly what we feel”. Even if this is only an occasional experience it is one I expect anyone reading a book about academic writing will have felt at some point. The sense of having found a felicitous phrase, not as an objective judgement of style but rather as a subjective expression of congruence. In finding these words we have given external form to something which previously existed within us. He describes this as the crucial event in writing and thinking: “being able to make the move between a piece of nonverbal felt meaning and a piece of language” (Elbow 1981: loc 182). Learning to make this move involves a tolerance for inarticulacy, an acceptance of finding oneself caught in an almost unbridgeable gap between our inner world and the outer expression we can give to it through language. It’s an uncomfortable position to find oneself in, which can turn into an agonizing position to remain in.
As I’m writing this I’m aware that while I’m clear about the core message of this book, the step-by-step construction of that message through a series of justifications is escaping me. I know what the pieces are, I know what the finished puzzle should look like but at the moment I feel lost in a mess of my own creation. I’ve had the thought twice today that I could just abandon this project and leave it as a series of essays which I post on my blog. No one is asking me to produce this book. No one is really expecting me to produce this book. I don’t have a publisher yet, largely because past experience suggests I enjoy writing more without that pressure. I could entirely abandon the project and only the closest readers of my blog would possibly notice this project I had made vague allusions to never saw the light of day. I’m almost certain that no one would ever ask me about what happened to the book I had obliquely referred to a few times in 2024. Even if they did, anyone asking me the question would undoubtedly be satisfied by me saying that I’d simply moved onto another project. In this sense “How to Enjoy Writing” has no existence outside my own mind and the ecology of ideas which I’ve built up around it. This leaves me aware that if I abandoned the project in the face of these difficulties, I would face absolutely no external consequences. No angry publisher, frustrated colleague or disappointed colleagues. No external sanctions. No ramifications of any sort beyond those I impose on myself.
So why do I continue when it feels difficult? In large part because I have what Elbow (1980: 60) describes as “ideas that are powerful and exciting to me” which has imbued the project with a sense of energy in spite of my chronic uncertainty. This combination of energy and uncertainty, power and doubt, often characterize the writing process for me. I’m writing quickly but I don’t know where it’s going. The pages accumulate as I procrastinate from the editing. The ideas grow ever more exciting as they take on definitive shape.
This struggle, the uncertain path through difficulty toward clarity, is precisely what AI writing tools might short-circuit. As Elbow (1980: 18) suggests, some writing is “too abjectly obedient” and lacks resistance: “There is no resistance in their words; you cannot feel any force-being-overcome, any otherness. No surprise.” Machine writing will never “scratch or bite you.” It delivers what you ask for without the necessary struggle that often produces our most valuable insights.
Mark Carrigan 