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We’ve just been to a university research conference, where academics and doctoral students from all disciplines get together for a couple of days and present papers on their current research. People asked each other what they thought of the conference. The most common response was, ‘I never knew!’ People were astonished at all the fascinating work, how it echoed with their own work even if it was from another discipline, and how there was so much enthusiasm for this aspect of the job. Why didn’t people know this already? Well, the value of conferences is precisely that it allows us to pause – pause from researching and pause from teaching and all the other jobs academics have – and to listen. This is a podcast about academic writing, but academic listening is crucial to the process of writing. Without that curious, enthusiastic listening, it will be all the harder for each of us to write, in turn, with enthusiasm and a sense of what future conference audiences will want to hear from us.

Boredom is a deadly sin, for academics. Boring writing is like boring talking, it is writing that keeps going long after people have stopped reading, talking that keeps going long after people have stopped listening. So practicing listening is a way of enlivening our own work and becoming more aware of the need to hold our own audiences. Conferences work like this, especially if – as with the conference we have just been at – they are not competitive and hierarchical. Research doesn’t have to be boring. I never knew that!

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Who gets the right to speak? Or to write? It can be difficult joining a conversation when the conversation is already happening, especially if that conversation is being dominated by largely white men. Some academics lean into their exclusion from the conversation, but it is mean to say this is a case of self-sabotage. It is a matter of how we work to get the right to write, and how those already within the conversation invite others to join them.

Academic writing shouldn’t involve too much ‘masking’, to imitate those already there, but a certain amount of this may be used, as described in The Emperor of Gladness, by Ocean Vuong: masking to be heard.

Where teaching or administration takes up most of an academic’s time, seeming to push research to the margins, there is always SoTL: the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. That means, writing about the teaching and learning that dominates the job. Or we can (and should) write textbooks for students. (Universities have become sniffy about academics writing textbooks, but they are useful, important, and, in contrast to research monographs, they may even make money!)

Teaching should bleed into research and research should bleed into teaching, and both should bleed into administration and back again from bleeding administration to teaching and to research.

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Anne Carson, the Canadian writer, has written an article about writing, since she developed Parkinson’s Disease. Embarrassed by how her handwriting has got so much worse, the title of her article, quoting Confucius, apparently, was ‘Beware the Man Whose Handwriting Sways Like a Reed in the Wind’. We may be embarrassed by our handwriting because we’re embarrassed by our actual personalities. And typing has a ‘handwriting’, just like pen and paper. Lesley Smith’s 2023 book ‘Handwritten: Remarkable People on the Page’, gives us a chance to look at the handwriting of some famous figures. Is it unfair to judge their personalities from their handwriting?

Is this an issue worth exploring for academic writers, embarrassed by ‘revealing’ their own personalities through their writing? Or should we ignore it, as one of the most trusted professions – doctors – seem to have terrible handwriting?

What we say and how we say it may of course tell two stories rather than one. Rom Harré noted how a handwritten sign may seem to mean the same as a printed one, but a handwritten sign saying ‘warning – nuclear power station’ would be worrying, wouldn’t it?

Handwriting that ‘sways in the wind’ might represent a person who sways in the wind too. The politician Tony Benn said there were two kinds of politician: signposts (who always pointed in one direction or another) and weather vanes (who swayed with the wind). As academics, we shouldn’t sway too much, but then again, as the climate changes, shouldn’t we be prepared to change? Perhaps we should be climate vanes?

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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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