what do academic writing and dance music have in common?

My son is a musician. He DJs and performs, writes and records and he does pretty well – you can check him out here and here.

I had a conversation with him a while ago about his music writing and my academic writing and there were four things that we agreed we had in common.

(1) What to do when you don’t know what to do

Musician: When you don’t know what you do you just go into the studio and lay down bits of stuff. Good ideas often come from just playing around, trying things out.

Academic: When you don’t know what to do you can just go to the study and write about anything. Good ideas often come from just playing around, trying things out.

(2) What to do when you can’t work out how to best develop the idea

Musician: You have to know what’s at the cutting edge. That means seriously and regularly reading the most up to date magazines, going to gigs and networking face to face and online with other people who have the same interest in finding out what’s going on.

Academic: You have to know what’s hot and what’s being debated. That means seriously and regularly reading the journals, going to conferences, networking face to face and online with other people who have the same interest in finding out what’s going on.

(3) What to do when you don’t know if anyone’s interested in what you have to offer

Musician: You have to put it out there and then you have to read the crowd. If what you are doing isn’t keeping them up and dancing then you have to mix it up – sometimes that means calling on a tried and tested crowed pleaser.

Academic: You have to put it out there and then you have to actively see what people think. If what you are doing isn’t getting published or isn’t making any dent in the current debates or you’re not informing policy or practice, then you have to mix it up. You might even have to switch to a topic or genre that is more likely to get taken up.

(4) What to do if you can’t seem to make it work

Musician: Sometimes, in fact quite often, you have half an idea, you have some of the tune but no chorus or you have a killer riff and no lyrics… and then you just have to sit with it until it comes to you… which it usually does. It just takes as long as it takes. Sometimes that’s quite quick, other times it’s a long wait.

Academic: Sometimes, in fact quite often, you have half an idea, you have an analysis and no angle, or you have an argument but it needs some theory, and then you just have to sit with it until it comes to you… which it usually does. It just takes as long as it takes. Sometimes that’s quite quick, other times it’s a long wait.

What’s interesting is that while everyone would easily accept that making music is creative, it’s a lot less common to think about academic writing as creative. This is probably because the whole process of writing is seen as some kind of technical process or something that we just do… but it seems to me that we might learn a bit if we made a conscious effort to think about the parallels between our academic work and that of other creative people.

Do you agree? Which creative practice do you think is like academic work?

things they don’t tell you about writing

a joint post by Inger Mewburn, the Thesis Whisperer, and Pat Thomson

Did you plan to be a professional writer? Most academics we meet in our work don’t. What usually draws people to academia is teaching. When you think about it, teachers talk at least as much as they write. And their writing is related to planning and assessments, not the kind of extended paper writing that professional writers do.

It’s only when they start a research degree that many people realise that writing is more than ‘ passing’; it is the key to a successful academic career. It is hardly surprising, then, that writing is a source of much anxiety. There is a great deal of advice around about how to write and indeed, we have written some of this ourselves. Some people claim that it takes 10 years to become an expert at anything, but we would argue that one probably never really feels like an expert writer. Being a writer is an endless process of discovery. It is a little like becoming a professional musician; committing to being a writer means a lifetime of honing your technique through practice.

Becoming a writer is also a bit like becoming a parent. It’s not until you have walked the floor with a screaming infant at 4am that you can truly understand what all the talk about ‘tiredness’ is, but there are many aspects of parenting that no one tells you – or doesn’t think to mention. Like ear infections, strange phobias, weird little habits and so on. So it is with writing. Only by indulging in the practice of writing, day in and day out, do you really understand what it means to be a writer. Like parenting, writing can be full of surprises – both pleasant and unpleasant. We thought we would compile this list of “Things they don’t tell you about writing” in an attempt to prepare you for what is coming!

(1) They don’t tell you that once you get used to writing with a computer you can’t go back to pen and paper again – or only with great difficulty. They forget to mention that you become obsessive – and snobby – about the tools you use to write with and will bore for your country to unsuspecting graduate students about what they SHOULD use.

(2) They don’t tell you that writing ends up written not only on the page but also on your body – shoulders, neck, arms, wrists, back. Pat’s PhD led to carpal tunnel syndrome which makes your hand go numb . You wake up with a dead appendage on the end of your arm. Inger’s PhD ended up in her right shoulder and has never left. They don’t tell you how writing will affect your sleep patterns either. In the middle of a project you may find yourself waking at 3am with too many ideas whirling around your head. Indeed, some of this post was written in that witching hour.

(3) They don’t tell you to learn touch typing at school. When we were at school typing was only available to girls who they thought ought to be secretaries. The rest of us did Physics and Chemistry and now have to do versions of typist hunt and peck. This would be funny if it weren’t for the fact that kids in school still don’t seem to be taught keyboarding. All over the UK and Australia kids type on desk tops with two fingers. It’s no wonder that they prefer txting

(4) They don’t tell you when you buy your first computer that now you’re locked into an endless loop of consumer desire. You have to have the desktop, the tablet, the notebook and the phone… regardless of the fact that they all now work together. We both have cupboards full of old discs, disc drives, CDs, CD burners… which eventually end up at the local waste transfer centre.

(5) They don’t tell you that regardless of how intuitive it seems some software is always just a bugger to get to work properly. Case in point – TOC, tables, auto-formatting, auto-spelling. And don’t think that transferring from PC to Mac is entirely seamless either, despite what the blurb says. The professional writer has to be the professional digital trouble shooter.

(6) They don’t tell you that … What do you think? Are there aspects of writing that you are only now discovering? Let us know in the comments!

concluding the journal article

The conclusion to a journal article is very important. Of course, it’s hard to end things. There’s no equivalent in the journal article to the text message that says you’re dumped… or more elegantly, reader I married him.

It’s important not to rush things at the end of an article even though it might feel as if the end is nigh. That’s because the conclusion does crucial work. Unfortunately it’s often one of things that a lot of writers skimp on.

It’s pretty important to get clear about the work that the conclusion must accomplish. So here’s a few things to think about before beginning on the ending.

The conclusion must remind the reader why the article was written in the first place. At the beginning the writer will have argued that there is a space in what is known, a puzzle that needs to be solved, a debate that is continuing, or an issue that deserves discussion. The writer will have promised to fill the space, solve the puzzle, contribute to the debate or participate in the discussion. The writer should use the argument made for the need for the article to present the case that this is what they’ve done.

The conclusion must reprise the argument that has been made without repeating it ad nauseam. No-one wants to read an article and then read it all over again in the conclusion. The conclusion must be a déjà vu free zone.

The conclusion must deal with the So What and Now What questions. We’ve read this piece of research – so what? who cares? The writer must not leave the answers to these questions to chance, assuming that any sensible reader will be able to work them out for themselves. The conclusion must succintly tell the reader how and why it is that what’s been presented is significant for practice, policy or further research. They must explicitly say how it is that the article constitutes a contribution to knowledge. They must also address the implications for further research or action.

The conclusion must avoid clichés. It’s pretty easy to round off an article with a few pious sentiments. While resorting to a clutch of tired phrases won’t cause your article to be rejected, it will leave the reader with a poor lasting impression. As the conclusion is the last thing that the reader will encounter, its important that they finish with the things that you want them to remember rather than with a sigh or a grimace.

Phrases to consider when thinking about concluding might be …

I argued at the beginning of this article that…
The findings that I have presented suggest that…
This is important for… because …
To date the literature/policymakers/the profession has … but this study offers …
While this study does not offer a conclusive answer to the question of… it does…..
The research raises important questions about … for …
As a result of conducting this research, I propose that …
It would be fruitful to pursue further research about … in order to …
If policymakers were to take this study seriously, they might …

finding the right writing time/place

I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. That is, my feet are in it, the rest of me is on the draining board.

This is how Dodie Smith began I capture the castle, a journal-style novel about a teenager living in a decaying English castle. It’s a killer opening and we should all be so lucky to write something so immediately attention-grabbing. However what interests me about it today is the notion of a place for writing being important enough to write about.

One of the things I learnt while doing my PhD was that it was important to set up a distinctive routine around writing. I found one that worked for me. I got up at 5 or 6 in the morning, pulled on a pair of track pants, T-shirt and perhaps a cardigan, made a cup of tea, and then went into my office where I wrote solidly for at least three to four hours. After that I could have a shower, get dressed, have breakfast and begin the day proper. During the day I often got myself ready for the next morning’s writing, by assembling various references and bits of data and analysis. I jotted down notes reflecting on what I’d done that morning and ideas for the next. If I was about to start a new chunk of writing, then I’d plan that out so I knew where I was going.

I’m lucky in that I don’t find it hard to write but I also don’t expect the writing to be perfect first time round, so I don’t agonise over it. I just sit down and do it. It was no real bother for me to crank out a couple of thousand potential thesis words a day using this early morning routine. And, writing in the early morning also allowed me to do other things – not only reading, but I could also go to lectures, meet people, go for walks, do bits of paid work including working on other research projects and so on… I had a life as well.

I still write in this way. In fact I am writing this blog early in the morning with a cup of tea, sitting in my office, and wearing track pants, T shirt and cardigan. But what’s important I think is that it’s not only the time but also the place that matters.

My preferred place for writing is my office. It’s a loft separated by a twisted staircase from the rest of the house. It feels cut off. This helps me to maintain a separation of my writing/working space from other parts of my life. I am irritated if my space is invaded during writing time either by my dogs or my partner or the phone. “ If I’m up here I’m not at home” is my refrain for any interruptions.

Christina Nippert-Eng (1996) studied the ways in which people keep (or not) their work and home lives separate. She found that professionals – count researchers in here – as compared to blue and pink collar workers, maintain very blurred separations between the two, with work conversations, phone-calls, email, and work accoutrements spilling into most parts of home life space/time. Nippert-Eng didn’t however study academics and I suspect that we, as a group, might maintain some separations around writing and reading. For example, I keep my work books separate from my fiction collection. I don’t have everyday things in my office. I do maintain an arbitrary and probably illogical division between the two, even though work and home are in the same domestic building.

I also have a preferred way of arranging my work space. There is a skylight above my left shoulder where the generally grey East Midlands daylight seeps in. There’s a silkscreen print of silvereyes and geraniums on the wall just to my right, reminding me of a former life in Australia. My books are behind me, with those that I am using for my current papers heaped in piles on the floor. I have the option of music if I want it but this is not a necessary part of my routine.

Of course I can write in other places and I do. The most recent book was half-written with my co-author in a Singapore apartment and the other half in her Melbourne office. We worked all day writing and managed to churn out a draft chapter every two days. So it is possible for me to write elsewhere – but I just don’t like it as much, and I’m sure that if my co author hadn’t been there I would have found all manner of excuses not to write much at all.

When I did my PhD I wrote everyday. I don’t have that luxury now. However when I do write in the morning, which is generally once or twice a week, I can immediately get into the right frame of mind if I am in my office with everything in its place. Writing has become like riding a bike – an activity which is so strongly habituated that I can simply move myself to the right place at the right time to get going.

It’s for this reason that I’m glad I didn’t start writing with my feet in the kitchen sink, sitting on the draining board. It would be a truly inconvenient place to establish the habit of writing.

Do you have a writing place/time? Where is it and does it work well as a way of supporting writing and if so why and how? And yes, I really do want to know!!

Nippert-Eng, C. (1996). Home and work. Negotiating boundaries through everyday life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Smith, D (1948/2004) I capture the castle. New York:Vintage Classics

early career researchers and the high impact journal

I was recently on a shortlisting panel for the three year postdoctoral fellowships offered by my university. Each of the five faculties had produced their own priority list from which the panel was to choose a subset to be interviewed.

Two of the other academics on the panel (medicine, science) were very focused on the status of the journals in which people had published. Having a paper published in Nature was held up as a marker of the quality of the applicant.

By contrast, arts, humanities and social science were much more impressed by scholarly monographs; the interest in journals was not whether they were the highest ranked, but rather that they were not obscure and marginal – a decent enough mid-range journal was perfectly acceptable. However, quantity of output counted as well as a reasonable quality – the more the better in reality.

I know that this would not necessarily be the same for the arts, humanities and social sciences in other countries and maybe even other institutions within the UK. However this was how it was in this instance.

I tell this story to illustrate two things – firstly, it supports what we all know, that where and what you write does count. But secondly, it suggests that different disciplines and different institutions in different countries regard these things differently. These variations are why it is difficult to suggest that it is always a good thing to try to publish in the ‘best journals’. It’s not the same everywhere.

Because of the diversity of ‘rules’ it is therefore pretty important for early career researchers to understand the kinds of expectations that are held within different disciplines and to try to get some insider information about what counts in the particular institutions where they are applying. If applying to another country, it’s equally important to get the drum on what matters about publications there, as opposed to where you are.

Are these kinds of expectation fair? Well not really IMHO.

It is obviously going to be pretty difficult to get into the high status journals because of their high rejection rates. It is equally hard to produce a significant number of decent articles for decent journals in a short space of time, during and post PhD. In both instances, the time taken for review and resubmissions and the backlog of articles of many popular journals work against time-pressed early career researchers (see comment from Mark Galeotti to last post).

And, given that many early career researchers are also juggling trying to publish with holding down a full time job doing someone else’s research, or doing a lot of teaching, it also becomes a matter of time/space to do the actual thinking/writing work required.

But there’s another reason why the emphasis on the journal worries me too. It seems to me that the focus on the journal and its status – or on the number of articles produced – significantly detracts from the point of scholarly writing. We write so that we can contribute to conversations about a particular area of knowledge production. We write to stake our claim in the field and to engage others in our work and to engage with theirs.

We need to be able to ask, in the first instance – not how good is this journal but – Who is interested in my work? Who would want to read it? Who needs to read it? What journals serve this community of scholars? What publics are also interested in this work? What do they read?

Performative regimes diminish scholarly work and obscure the reasons why we publish. Making publications a key to employment is on the one hand a reasonable expectation – institutions need to make sure that they employ people who will sustain a career of active and productive scholarship. On the other hand these kinds of expectations also work as a disciplinary mechanism to ensure that early career researchers enter the academy already well-schooled in the churn of production, and with due regard for the current significance attached to particular audit-driven, status seeking regimes ( e.g. REF in the UK).

And all this of course doesn’t even deal with whether citation indices actually do the work that they say they do!

what’s at stake for an early career researcher in going for publication in a top ranked journal ?

I often get asked in workshops whether early career researchers should aim to get into a top journal. I want to give the first two parts of my answer in this post.

My first response – WHO IS SAYING THIS IS A GOOD THING, WHY AND WHAT DO THEY KNOW?

Many researchers have been told to do they should go for a ‘top journal’ by their supervisors or mentors. The advice seems to go… well…you’ve finished your PhD, you’ve been told by the examiners you have articles to publish from it, so now you ought to go out and put it into the highest ranked journal in the field. The reasons generally seem to be that this is the right thing to do and that it is good to aim high. (I’m going to address the inadequacy of these as purposes in another post).

On probing, I always discover that a relatively high proportion of the people giving this advice have never themselves been published in these journals. So I have to wonder what’s going on when more experienced researchers are telling the less experienced to do something they themselves don’t do – or haven’t managed to do. I’m sure this advice is given with the best of intentions but the Bourdieuian scholar in me notes that there is supervisory distinction to be gained here … in some institutions, a sign of a good supervisor might be that their supervisee achieves this level of publication… But whatever the logic of the advice, the thing to consider is (1) whether the advice givers know what’s involved and (2) whether they can help.

In essence the first thing that early career researchers need to do if they are told to seek out the top ranked journals is to check out the provenance of the person telling them this is the way to go. If the person has published in these journals, then they are an ‘insider’ and the early career researcher then needs to ask them more about the particular discourse community around the journal, rejection rates, reviewing processes and conventions, turnaround times and so on… If they are an editor, then they are in a position to give a novice writer even more insider knowledge. BUT if the person giving this advice is no more experienced at this kind of publishing than the early career writer, then any advice they give needs to be supplemented quite considerably.

(So if you want to know my provenance at this point, the answer is yes, I have published in top ranked journals in my field and sit on some of these Editorial Boards. However, I never ever choose a journal on the basis of its ranking, something I’ll explain in another post.)

Peer to peer conversations are of course different from supervisor/mentor conversations. Peer to peer conversations about top journal publication are about checking out whether anyone-like-me has gone for a big journal first off, whether it seems possible, and what the experience is like.

I do see this discussion a lot online. The answer that is often given to the question of whether to aim for top ranked journals goes something like – yes why not – go for it, aim high to start with and then go lower if you get rejected.

What is less often talked about even in these peer to peer conversations is that in some citation systems what makes for a high ranking is a VERY HIGH rejection rate. This means that the vast majority of people who submit to the top are ultimately not accepted for publication. A decision to submit to a top ranked journal is usually a decision to enter territory where the odds of getting rejected are relatively high. Getting accepted is a real achievement, but very few actually get there.

So the second answer I give to the question about where to publish is – WHAT’S AT STAKE IN DECIDING TO GO FOR IT.

The conversations about where to publish – between peers and experienced- less experienced writers – ought, in my view, to always consider whether the high odds of rejection are a risk that individuals are prepared to take. The conversations ought to open up the possibility of failure. But even online, the discussions rarely canvass what it’s like to be rejected, particularly when reviewers have been less than kind, and what you do about it.

In workshops I see plenty of people who have been crushed by reviews and then can’t bring themselves to rework the article and submit it somewhere else. They experience a single publication rejection as a rejection of both their scholarship and themselves as scholars. Some don’t recover from this easily. Many need support from mentors and peers in order to do the emotional labour of regrouping and rewriting. Some don’t get this at all and it becomes a problem at work or in getting work.

In my view a critical part of the answer to the question of whether to aim for top ranked journals goes to the question of how resilient the early career researcher actually is, and how secure they are in their identity as a scholar. Anyone who goes for a top ranked journal is running a known risk, and this can be anticipated and thought through beforehand.

Failure to open up discussion of the risks means that we don’t encourage people to ask themselves questions such as:
• How confident do I feel about my scholarship? Would I feel OK standing up in front of the foremost scholars in my field and telling them about my research? Does imagining this feel exciting or terrifying?
• How I will feel if I am rejected ? How do I usually respond to failure? Have I ever just given up when I have failed at something or is my pattern of behaviour one where I keep trying until I succeed? Is my history one where I need to start smaller and then gradually grow in confidence?
• Who can I get support from if I get rejected? Can they help me with both the emotional and intellectual work required to regroup?
These are really important considerations and rarely get enough airtime in either early- senior researcher or peer-to-peer conversations.

And two final comments in a more sociological vein:

1. It’s important to note what else is happening in conversations about going for it. The references to going for it are intended to be encouraging. However, there are shades here of ‘real men don’t eat quiche’. These conversations discursively position those who decide NOT to have a go at top journals as lacking in courage, gutless and feeble – and are they then potentially less than real ‘top’ scholars? Real ‘top’ scholars go for it, the rest of the pack are by definition lesser? And is scholarship positioned here as an extreme sport? Is that what we want it to be?

2. Two, dealing with the affective domain of scholarly work is not a plea for therapy for researchers. Rather it is an argument that, in failing to include discussions of the dark side of publishing, we perpetuate a situation where scholarship is seen as predominantly about thinking. The only emotional work that counts is the courage to have a go. Most of us reject the mind/emotion binary at an intellectual level and also the elevation of a boys-own-daring-do above all other affect. It is therefore somewhat bizarre that our conversations about publication rarely acknowledge the full range of cognitive and emotional labour that is involved. We do ourselves and those we intend to support a disservice by not doing so.

I haven’t finished with this topic. I will in future consider the purposes of publication and how the discipline might affect a decision whether to go for it or not.

doing the literature review – thinking about patterns and groups

If you’ve ever watched small children playing then you’ll know that one of the things that they do is to sort things into groups. A bunch of coloured pens, pencils and markers can be sorted by type, colour, size, shape, condition and so on. Type and colour could be expected to come before shape and condition – but not always.

Another thing that children do is to find patterns and repeat them over and over. I used to enjoy making patterns using a compass when I was in primary school. Looking back I can’t imagine why, but the teacher in me knows that I was also learning about shapes and spatial and mathematical relationships.

These two activities – grouping and finding patterns – are fundamental to the way that children learn about the world. They learn big categories of things first, like dog – and then learn that the big group can be further divided up – into breeds in the case of dogs. They also learn that patterns can be made out of groups of things. A picture of dogs might be divided into breeds and then organised into a pattern of sizes and colours.

This kind of learning-as-categorising is fundamental to making knowledge through research.

We are engaged in constructing groups out of bits of data. We clump them together in some way according to a logic that we need to articulate and justify. Then we often have to invent a new category name to describe the group, rather than taking one which already exists. When we talk about grouping in data analysis we usually think of this as thematising. We also make new patterns out of our data, and again, we sometimes have to make up names for the pattern we have generated through our analytic activities.

Grouping and patterning are also fundamental to the literature review.

After reading a lot of texts you are able to put groups of them together because they are about the same topic or take the same epistemological approach, or use the same methods or the same samples or have similar concerns. These groups can be named something appropriate to their common focus and their shared characteristics can then be discussed. Many people advocate mind-mapping as a means of grouping.

An example of how this kind of grouping might inform the organisation of a literature review might go something like …

Literatures in higher education can be discussed in terms of their disciplinary focus or whether they address substantive issues of practice. The two most common practice topics addressed are pedagogical change and staff development. Each of these takes up questions of online learning, the subject of my research. In this literature review I therefore firstly address online learning and pedagogical change and then secondly discuss x aspects of professional development, viz. I then return to the disciplinary literatures to see how the specificities of ’subject’ might need to be taken into account in each of these two areas and in my research project.

Once you can see that there are different groups of texts, it is also often possible to see a pattern that has emerged. For example, many topics fall into disciplinary patterns – they might come from either a sociological or a psychological discipline for example; the ways in which these disciplines shape what is done, seen and said cuts across groups. Or it may be that there is a recognisable chronological pattern – the way that research has been conducted, or a problem understood – can be seen to follow a particular set of stages. We often talk for example of first, second and third wave feminism. This is a pattern.

Understandings of patterning can similarly inform the ways in which a literature review is organised. For example…

Research into peer friendships can be located within three distinct disciplinary frames – medical, psychological and sociological. There is also an educational literature. My particular research works in the sociological tradition. I therefore firstly provide a brief review of what might be learned from the medical and psychological literatures. I then discuss the distinguishing epistemological and methodological features of a sociological approach before going to onto a more detailed discussion of the major themes that are found in these literatures. I next canvass the relevant educational texts and conclude by addressing feminist educational studies of peer friendships, since this is where my research is situated and aims to make its contribution.

In these two examples groups and patterns have provided a way to organise the literature review. This organisation is flagged up at the start of the writing and the meta-commentary forms a road map for the various sections of the text to come.

It is also worth noting the ‘funnelling’ process that occurs in the latter example; it begins with the big discipline groups and then moves inwards to a specific disciplinary subgroup.

In a future post I will talk about storyboarding as a way of thinking about meta-commentary and organisation.