Pleasure and academic writing? Really? Yes, really. This podcast is about enjoyment, even if – in fact, precisely because – a lot of academics, when you mention academic writing, sigh, their shoulders drop. So let’s try to find the moments of joy in writing, and if you do (if we do), then the reader will pick up on that, too. Writing carries emotions.

Thinking about the process of writing, we can think about mountaineering or, if your knees are not so good, hill-walking. Buying your new walking boots, and all the other equipment you need, and getting to base camp is the first stage. (For the less adventurous one of us, getting to the car park near the hill.) That’s something like a literature review. Start climbing, with all the uncertainties of the weather, is like doing the empirical research or building your own argument. Getting to the summit is like completing the empirical research – and finding there’s still a long way to go. And going down hill is enjoyable and may seem easy, like writing a conclusion, but it's got its own dangers. After the climbing is complete, you might be home and looking at photos of the adventure. That is like having had a piece of writing published, and seeing it in a journal or a book. Sharing your photos with others is like being cited and people asking about your writing. All stages have their pleasures as well as their pains, and we should find the pleasures and celebrate them. Enjoy.

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Gill Simpson studied English at Leeds, and after another career, studied for a master’s degree in theology and then taught theology and religious studies in a university. She is now completing a doctorate, using autoethnography, and she talks with us about her earlier experience of academic writing as a visceral, physical experience – using handwriting rather than a word-processor. The French philosopher Derrida praises handwriting too, as ‘with the computer, everything is rapid and so easy; you get to thinking that you can go on revising for ever’. Recently, Gill has rediscovered the value of handwriting in academic writing, as it makes it more personal and engaging. That is also related to her doctoral work on how the ‘personal’ is often driven out of higher education, through focus on structures and other minutiae. Writing freely should not, however, be a luxury.

In an even more visceral metaphor, Gill talks about academic writing as being too often just about the head, with the body, like a headless horseman, allowed to gallop away into the distance. Academic writers need to focus on ‘how to’ issues, but these should include ‘how to be’ issues. In the future, Gill hopes to do more work encouraging freewriting, and encouraging joy in academic writing.

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