So here goes the confessional.

I’ll start with a minor mistake about author order – something that neither the publisher, marketing staff nor I considered at the time. A while ago, I co-edited two handbooks for doctoral researchers. My co-editor and I decided to alternate the order of names so that she would be first editor on one, and I would be first on the other. Democratic and a fair distribution of attributions, we thought. The design team developed covers and spines that would fit together so it would symbolically be clear that the books were a pair. They could be bought singly of course, but they were designed to be put together. What we hadn’t considered was that in university bookshops, and in bookshops catering for university students, the books were often filed alphabetically.

This meant that, rather than being seen as a pair – one for supervisors and one for students – the texts were quite often put as separate titles on separate shelves. They were half a set – see above and below.

Whether this ultimately affected sales isn’t really clear, but it was an interesting thing for all of us to think about!

Here’s my second example – and it’s one about titles and covers.

A while ago I wrote a book about headteachers’ work. As a former headteacher, this is something I not only know a bit about, but it’s also something I care about. When I arrived in England from Australia I was pretty outraged by the way in which I saw headteachers being named and shamed and also feted and rewarded. Well of course there is a longer argument attached to why I felt so strongly about this and I decided I’d better write about it. It took me a long time to get the material for the book together and I was pretty happy with it when I’d finished. The title of the book that I’d initially suggested to the publisher was simply Heads on the block, but this ended up being the strap line, with the final title being School leadership – heads on the block?

I was particularly concerned about the cover for the book and after much to-ing and fro-ing between the designers, the publisher and me, we decided on a pretty graphic picture of a head-like chap slumped against a wall looking very stressed.

I loved it then. And I still love it even now. What a contrast to all those triumphal books about leadership I thought, and doesn’t everyone who’s actually done the job know that there are lots of times just like this?

Well, the book has been a bit of a publisher’s problem child. Heads don’t want to read about hard times, they have enough of them – although heads weren’t actually the target market. But it turns out that people who teach and research leadership largely recommend and buy the triumphal books. That’s why there’s so many of them and they keep being written. Buyers just weren’t attracted in great numbers to either the title or the cover – both of which aptly represented the argument made in the book. It was actually the nature of the book rather than its title or cover which were the issue. However this might have been less obvious had we chosen a less graphic title and cover. (As compensation, the book has been well reviewed and has won a little award as well, so it isn’t all bad news. And my publisher has been at great pains to tell me that these things happen and it’s not my fault. But it was a lesson.)

Clever titles which don’t give much away can be used by academic star writers whose name alone is enough to sell their books. For the rest of us, the clever bits are at best left for strap lines. In reality and not because of the heads on the block example, I’m OK with the publisher taking the running with the title of the book. Publishers care a lot about titles because they do have a direct impact on sales and on readership. Straightforward titles that give a pretty good indication of the contents are likely to come high up in searches of online book depositories and in academic data-bases. They are likely to appear ‘safe bets’ to those browsing catalogues – people such as university librarians. (And it is still university libraries which are the basis of most academic book markets.)

Nearly all of the books with which I’ve been involved have titles which aren’t entirely mine. The marketing team has a big say in these, it’s not just the commissioning publisher or editor, and the conversation about titles often happens at the point where there is a decision being made about whether to offer a contract or not. My experience is that it is not at all uncommon for a contract to be offered with a different title than the one submitted on the proposal. Now of course there is room for manoeuvre over this, but ultimately the final title will end up being something that the company believes it can market and sell. That seems fair enough to me. Publishers know the book trade and I know my academic field and there is an overlap in the middle where we put our collective know-how together.

Publishers generally seem to think that book covers are not nearly so important as titles. Like many authors I’ve therefore been able to have a real say about book covers – in some instances I’ve actually supplied the photographs or concepts which have been used. For instance I came up with the idea for the cover of the latest book on writing journal articles. It’s not brill but what matters is that it’s inoffensive.

Inoffensive matters a lot because there is one book where I and my co-author had no say in the cover. She and I and our commissioning publisher hate it with a passion and we are all anxious to change it with the second edition. It’s so awful I can’t bear to put the picture of it here. Good book, if I say so shamelessly, but really, really awful cover – which has made no difference, it seems, to sales as you’ll gather from the reference to second edition.

So let me try to sum up the cover question. I’ve learnt that book covers probably don’t do much other than reinforce the message given by the title and the contents. What matters most is that the cover design allows the title to be read clearly when the image is compressed to the size it appears in catalogues and online. If the design is too busy, or the font is too hard to read, then it won’t compete with those that stand out and say what’s inside, loud and clear. There is also of course the matter of expense in relation to covers, and this goes to the question of anticipated sales – which goes not to the title or cover design, but the actual contents of the book and its anticipated readers. And that’s another post.

So how much does a cover and title and author order matter? What do you think? Do you have other examples to add to mine?

A long while before the event my friend Jill and I decided to rent a house and stay a few additional days. Well that was our intention. We duly booked a house on the waterfront some way away from the conference but close enough to public transport for us to be sure that we could manage getting to and from the venue. However, the best laid plans…

A few weeks before the actual conference, and months after our booking and the saga of transferring money from one country to another, we were contacted by the agent who told us that the owner had taken the house off the rental market. We were not to worry, they had found us something comparable. Jill checked it out online but just as she was about to email the agent to say it looked OK they emailed again to say that the substitute had gone and they had found another one for us, somewhat cheaper, and just as good. Well, life and work got in the way and we took them at their word.

At the last minute I got a bit panicked about where the third option seemed to be on the map – something like an address had arrived only a few days before we were due to leave. I decided to hire a car just in case, and Jill took on the job of trying to find out how we would pick up the key. The day before we left (!) we got some fairly vague instruction about key handover. I printed out some dodgy guidance to our apartment from a web search and we both crossed our fingers that things would be OK.

We arrived at the airport at 9 30 pm at night – it was by then dark – and took the mandatory hour to manoeuver the Spanish hire car queue and forms, finally setting off nervously, in pitch black, much later than we had hoped.

The map got us as far as the town we were originally going to stay in and then let us down. Badly. There were no signs at all to anything that looked like our destination. We drove around and around hoping to see something pointing in our direction, but no luck. We eventually stopped at a petrol station where a very kind person with very little English offered to drive to our pickup point, with us following him.

Our substitute apartment was in a half-built marina, miles away from anything. It was clearly a victim of the Spanish economic collapse and we momentarily felt some sympathy for the owner of the adequate apartment we eventually got into; it was by then well past midnight.

We managed to find out way out of the marina in the morning, and back onto the road to the town where the conference was, writing down as many signs as possible so we could find our way back again. Despite this precaution, the next night we found ourselves in the same predicament, lost and going round in circles, and once again we stopped to ask directions and once again yet another kind person drove in front of us to a point from which we could find our way.

The next morning we decided to construct a narrative to help us find our way back that night. It went something like this. Go straight on at the roundabout with the barrels. Do not turn right at the roundabout with the boat. The half built apartments are on our left. There’s the sherry bodega on the right. The sign with the green neon spectacles is nearly our turnoff. And so on.

We did find our way back on the next two nights using this rather comical approach and we realized that it was probably a pretty common strategy in pre-map days. Make up a memorable story to help make sense of the route.

But why am I telling this story? Why is this important, other than being a saga not entirely atypical of academic life?

Well, it’s because the experience reminded me that it can be very helpful to construct a narrative as a means of making sense of something strange and unfamiliar. It reminded me that this kind of narrative meaning-making is something that I do pretty routinely as a researcher but it’s one that sometimes I struggle to convince doctoral researchers that they need to do. The ethnographers are quite happy with writing every night, but some other researchers are less convinced.

I construct a narrative to record each and every piece of field-work, and each and every piece of significant reading that I do. However I don’t just talk them through. Because I might need to remember them, and because I don’t do the same thing day after day, I write these narratives down. I have note-book after notebook of field work narratives, and all manner of files on my computer, which tell the story of what I’ve done. These narratives never get cut and pasted into anything. They do get read and re-read quite often, and some do form the basis of writing intended for more public viewing. But these narratives are actually not meant for anything other than for me to work out where I’ve been and where I’m going.

These narratives are what Anthony Paré calls writing as a heuristic – writing to make meaning and knowledge – and what I think of as the important writing along the way. It’s writing in order to make sense of the process of researching, reading, observing, interacting… Just like the rather childish narrative Jill and I constructed to help us find our way to where we needed to be, heuristic writing works the same way. As Anthony says, this kind of writing allows us to engage in “intellectual exploration, problem-solving and discovery”.

Maybe some people feel that these kinds of meaning-making narratives are wasted words if they are not for a public purpose. However nothing could be further from the reality. It takes a lot more than 80- 100,00 words to actually complete a thesis. The narrative that we finally produce as the thesis is only possible because of all the other sense-making writing that we have done beforehand.

I sometimes wonder if, in all of the talk about writing for publication, we lose sight of this most important function of writing and undervalue its importance. Writing is the best way we have to make sense of complex and shifting experiences. Narratives to help us find our way are a crucial part of the researcher’t toolkit.

Not convinced? Read Anthony’s elegant exposition of the importance of writing as a heuristic and see for yourself.

The problem with this approach is that we often lose sight of the writing itself. Writing is craft, certainly it’s art-ful. Writing involves choosing words with care, arranging them in relation to each other in order to make sense – sense not only meaning understanding but also as provoking senses – writing can go well beyond the simply cognitive.

If we think of ourselves as writers, then we can become interested in more than simply finding out how to get the stuff out there. We can become interested in writing per se. We might also then be interested in other people’s writing practices, and in reading all kinds of writing, not just the scholarly monograph and the holiday novel.

There are lots of interesting resources about writing. Some are intended for people doing creative writing courses, some are written by star authors for their readers and some are writers writing about writing just because they are interested in the subject. I’ve got a stack of all of these varieties – some of them are pretty germane to academic writing as well as to that which is dubbed ‘creative’.

I often find myself dipping in and out of these books at odd moments – something that would be approved of by the author of one of my fave books of writing about writing – Steven King. Yes, that Steven King. The one who writes mega-selling horror stories. His book is called On writing: a memoir of the craft. (2000). He tells the story of how he came to writing and he has a lot to say about what counts as good writing. Much of this is relevant to academic writers, particularly those unsure of their ‘voice’.

Take his comments on vocabulary.

One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you’re maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed. Make yourself a promise right now that you’ll never use ‘emolument’ when you mean ‘tip‘…. (p 129)

Of course the question of vocabulary is not the same for academic writers although the sense of being embarrassed about short words might be. Part of the process of working in an academic discipline is using the technical language that is particular to it. However using the right terminology with precision is not the same as using complicated multi-syllabic words when the obvious ones will do.

With this caveat, I reckon King’s advice really does also apply to academic writing. I can’t tell you the number of times that as a journal reviewer I’ve reeled away from someone who has said something pretty straightforward in the most tortured terms imaginable. King says that as you read your vocabulary improves, if you watch out for words – this is also the case with academic writing and reading. Read Steven King I want to say to those self-consciously ‘clever’ academic writers, and right now before you do the revisions!

Then there’s the writer’s companion Anne Lamott, whose text bird by bird, some instructions on writing and life (1994) is mandatory reading in many creative writing courses. It’s pretty folksy stuff but very good for reminders about the kinds of issues that haunt the average writer. Here’s Lamott on perfectionism.

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based in the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun doing it.

Besides, perfectionism will ruin your writing, blocking inventiveness and playfulness and life force (these are words we are allowed to use in California). Perfectionism means that you try desperately not to leave so much mess to clean up. But clutter and mess show us that life is being lived. Clutter is wonderfully fertile ground – you can still discover new treasures under all those piles, clean things up, edit things out, fix things, get a grip. Tidiness suggests that something is as good as it’s going to get. Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation, while writing needs to breathe and move. (p 28-29)

Despite the stories of Kurt Vonnegut and James Joyce who allegedly wrote each sentence till they thought it was perfect, it does seem to be the case that the vast majority of writers go for a shitty draft, as Lamott puts it, that they can keep working on. Just get it down and don’t delay over it is pretty common advice to academic writers too, but maybe it helps to know that this is the way that other writers work as well.

But, here in Lamott’s creative writing advice we see more than the usual admonition about not agonising over each and every word first up. We also see something of the desirable ‘product’ – writing that has life, that is not suspended, that is messy, that is mobile, that is playful… Isn’t that a good way to think about academic writing too?

I want to suggest now that this is actually a book worth reading – not so that you can literally do what the title suggests, although you might feel this is very acceptable after you’ve read it – but rather worth reading for the key points that Bayard makes. I contend that these are as relevant to academic reading – and the dreaded ‘literature review’ in particular – as any of the how-to-do it texts, including my own.

The first section of the book – on books you haven’t read, books you’ve skimmed, books you’ve never heard of and books you’ve forgotten – contains ideas highly relevant to academic work. Let me take the first of these, books you haven’t read, as a means of illustrating why I make this assertion.

Bayard, who is actually a professor of literature, takes as his way in to discussion about not reading Musil’s The man without qualities – I confess I’d have to put this down as a +FB (one of the books I’ve read but forgotten). One of the characters in the book is a General Stumm who decides to do some reading in order to find out about his political opposition, but is so daunted by the number of volumes in the library that he visits that he decides that it is an impossible task and not worth beginning. Fortunately a handy librarian tells him that it is quite possible to understand the library and what’s in it by reading books about books.

Bayard takes from Musil the idea that it is never possible to read everything and foolish to try or pretend. Rather it is important, he suggests, to try to grasp the shape of the collective library as well as the relationships that elements of the whole have with each other. He assures us that people interested in books are those who not only take account of the content of any text that they read, but also its location in relation to those that they have not. It is the capacity to understand the place of a book within the collective library that makes it possible for a reader to merely skim the contents in order to grasp its most essential points.

Later in the first section of his book, Bayard also talks about the notion of an inner library, a subset of the collective library. These are those particular books which orient individual readers to books in general and to other people. An inner library includes those books which have made a deep impression on the reader and those which are most useful and used.

Both of these points are highly germane to academic reading and I think the notion of a collective and inner library might be very helpful in approaching the task of ‘doing’ the literature ‘review’.

It is critical in undertaking any review of literature to take on board the notion that the task is simultaneously about coming to grips with some texts, but also understanding the shape of the field – its collective library – and where a particular text fits in relation to others. It is also important to understand that every person in the field will assemble their own inner library, the set of texts that help them come to grips with key ideas, debates, gaps and blind spots. While there may be some key texts that must be read, they may actually only need to be skimmed in the way Bayard suggests (see my post on skimming an academic book), so that its broad contribution and its location, its relationship to and location in the rest of the library, is understood – rather than its every detail.

Understanding this might remove some of the guilt and shame from the literatures task.

Bayard’s book, Id suggest, could well be set on research training courses to orient beginning researchers to the literatures task. Alternatively, it’s a deceptively straightforward read which could be taken on holiday without too much resentment.

PS: See a very witty but serious video discussion about these ideas between Pierre Bayard and Umberto Eco.

I was recently talking about this with Jon McGregor who, because he is a prize winning writer, often gets asked about his practice. His advice is, that when writing a big text like a book, to never complete a sequence of events, but always leave the writing unfinished. And instead of just stopping dead, finish off with a set of points that indicate where the writing is intended to go next.

The habits of accomplished writers have something to offer busy academics. Judging by the little box of library cards that Jon had with him that day, I suspect he might be one of those people who also has an overall mapped out structure that he follows. I noticed a recent picture of Will Self in his office where he was surrounded by orderly sequenced post-it notes, which suggests that he too follows some kind of mapping out approach. I know not all writers do this, but it does seem a helpful strategy for academic writers to consider.

When writing a big text like a book – this applies to a thesis too – I always have about a page abstract of the whole thing and then another half page for each chapter which has bullet points of the various bits that I think will go in. This is printed out in hard copy and sits next to my computer. I also cut and paste the chapter abstract into the screen document and then proceed to fill it in. And if I have to stop writing half way through something I always leave an expanded set of bullet points to help me start off again. So I have both an overall plan, a plan for the specific piece I’m writing and a place to start when I get back to it. I do much the same for a journal article.

I now rarely find myself wasting time wondering where I am going when I come back to a piece of writing, even if the break from it is one, two or even three weeks long.

Of course this is not the only way to keep track. Do you have strategies that work for you to keep track of your thinking for writing?

Why do I tell this story now? Well, because I get a bit alarmed at some of the assumptions that might get made about who the public is that we are now expected to write for and talk with.

Reading some of the advice on offer might cause some to think that we are only to write in the first person, in the active voice, using words of two syllables. This is fine if we are writing for The Daily Mail, which of course, we may very well want to do. However there are some publics for whom this is highly inappropriate.

But let me be clear here before I go on. I’m not endorsing writing – or talking – which is in love with its own cleverness. Nor am I suggesting that any old writing/talking is OK and we ought not to work hard to make sure that we communicate what we want to say. All of us in the academy need to keep working on how we can write and speak well.

BUT I do want to say that how this actually ends up in a text or a conversation or a key-note is absolutely dependent on who we are talking with and writing for. We can’t just assume that people will or – as in the story with which I started – assume that they won’t know what we are saying.

One of the consequences of the democratization of higher education, and the growth of the alt-ac career, is that there are now lots of people in all kinds of places and positions who have read what we in the academy have read, are interested in at least some of the same things, and are quite capable of using the same kind of language.

Just last week I was at a conference listening to an eminent artist and a senior gallery staff member discussing Felix Guattari’s ‘ecosophy’. Now I hadn’t read the specific book in question and neither had a number of other people in the audience so we all had to have it explained to us. The conversation between the two people ranged over a fair bit of what might be called ‘high theory’ and most people in the audience, in which academics were in a minority, seemed to keep up.

This audience was a public. But it was a pretty specific little public and it certainly expected a particular kind of engagement. It is one of the publics that I try to work with – and I have to work to keep up with its members. (Now heading off to find the Guattari in question.) If I write for them, I have to write well, but also in the genre and language that they expect – that is, absolutely not The Daily Mail. I have to talk enough of the language of this specific community to get a hearing.

And not long before I’d talked with some parents at an inner city school about the arts programme that their kids were doing. While they used pretty straight forward language, what they had to say was also insightful and interesting. I couldn’t assume that just because they had been badly served by their own schooling that they weren’t bright, lively and informed. They also were a public.

It seems to me that we must avoid at all costs any kind of implication that public engagement means that there is some kind of homogenous public out there for whom we have to behave uniformly. And we must avoid any implied view that the public is a them, a not us.

Recognizing the diversity of publics and our place within them, and as one of them, means that there are some fundamental questions we must ask ourselves before we start composing a letter, article, or conversation:

• Who is the public for whom I am writing?
• What do they read and talk about and how? What does this have in common with what I do?
• How can I find out what they expect from me?
• How can I communicate clearly and well what I want to say in ways that meet both their expectations and their interests?

And I think that we really need to be open to a further question:
• What might I learn from this public?

So you’re now ready to do a publishing plan. There are three key parts to the plan- choosing the journal, writing the abstract, and setting a deadline for drafts and completion. I will talk briefly about each. I’m really not trying to get you to buy the new book on writing journal articles, honest, but Barbara and I do deal with each of these steps in much more detail in it.

Step One: Choose the journal.

Well in reality choose two, one that you try first and then another one for backup in case the first one doesn’t work out so well.
In choosing a journal, you are actually choosing a community of researchers, writers and readers (a discourse community), so you need to think about
• which discourse communities you are already in – which journals did you use most in your PhD?
• which discourse communities you really want to read your work. If this is not the same as the first answer, then you have a substantial bit of research to do in order to find out where these discourse communities publish.

You can tell something about a journal’s discourse community from looking at the editorial board – they will be respected members of it – and you can find out something about the kinds of conversations they have, and have already had about your topic, from the title and abstracts of papers. You might also want to do a search of key terms.

Step Two: Write the abstract for each article

The point of doing this is twofold – so that you can see whether in fact you do have separate articles or you are just writing the same one over and over, and so that you can actually remember what you were thinking about when you come back to number two, three, four and five on your list.

It’s good to work with sentence skeletons for your abstracts which you can get from the journals you are looking at. However, below is a generic starter which will at least get the argument and content down on paper and can be rewritten later to suit the journal:

Working abstract draft skeleton

(1) XXX is now a significant issue/debate/problem/trend … in/for ( name literature, policy, practice )… because .. ( add up to two sentences)

(2) In this paper I focus on ( name the aspect of XXX you are going to talk about)

(3) The paper draws on findings from/literatures in/ texts/theories .. ( be specific) which I ( something about your method here) …. in order to…

(4) My analysis/reading … shows that..

(5) The paper argues/I argue that …

(6) I conclude by suggesting that ….. (refer back to the issue/debate/problem/trend)

Step Three: Schedule the papers

You will need here to look both realistically and ambitiously at your calendar and your obligations and allow enough time for each paper to be written. You could even timetable writing each of the five pieces of the separate papers that you’ve outlined in the working abstract.

You also need to find a way to keep this plan with its journal research, abstract and timetable handy and visible. You need to keep it in mind as well as keeping it together. There are lots of ways to do this including hard copy. I tend to use a word table with linked abstracts, stickies on my desk-top and deadlines in my calendar.

It’s all change-able of course. However, getting the plan and the abstracts together does give you a real road map of how to get things published and when.

In the next publish from your PhD post I will talk about writing for new readers.

Some of them are stuck in thinking how they might get something, anything, out of the thesis. A few of these people have just finished and are not sure where and how to start. Others are a way away from the post-viva celebration. They might have already had one or two shots at writing an article. Maybe they’ve even sent something to a journal and it’s come back with a lot of comments and exhortations to rewrite. And the requirements seem like such a lot, and so they put the paper away hoping that at some time in the future they’ll have the energy to revisit it.

Now one big reason for feeling stuck on getting articles out of the thesis is because people are still actually stuck in the thesis. This is not the only reason of course, but it is the one I’m going to talk about in this post.

It takes a long time to put a thesis text together. The writer has to juggle with multiple ideas and themes and findings and not only wrestle them into a logical order, but also create an argument. There is an overall thesis argument, and there is a mini argument made in each chapter. The text itself has to flow and feel coherent, and accordingly the writer spends time attending to the ways in which the reader can be smoothly guided through all of the twists and turns. At the end of all this, both the reader – and the writer – are presented with a complex and unified argument and book. It can seem very hard to undo the text which took so long and so much effort to put together.

So when the time comes to write, many people begin by isolating a single article to do first of all. Well you have to start somewhere, right?

The worst-case scenario is that they try to write the one article which sums up the entire thesis. Now this really is likely to go nowhere. If it took 90-100,00 words to argue the thesis case, it’s going to be pretty hard to jam it into 7,000.

But let’s not take that example. Even when people find they can identify one article, which is only a part of the thesis, to write it still seems as if the entire thesis creeps back in. It all has to be covered, or at least a substantial part of it. It’s impossible to write this bit without covering that bit too and that means that this other section has to be included and… and… before you know it, there’s too many words and the article is nowhere near an end.

The problem here is one of letting go of that entire Big Book that took so long to write, letting go of all those complexities and side issues and all that literature and methodological sophistication.

One strategy therefore is not to think about writing one article with all of its attendant problems of letting go and undoing. Rather, plan right at the start all of the possible articles that could be written. This means that you don’t have to worry about leaving some things out, because you know they will be covered in future articles.

So two steps to letting go.

Step One

It’s helpful to start the process of thinking of all of the articles to ask yourself some questions:
• Have I got anything to say about methodology or methods that isn’t already in the literature?
• Did I make a particular theoretical move in the thesis that I haven’t read about yet? Did I combine theories in a new or unusual way?
• Did my literature work reveal any patterns that deserve commentary?
• What was the single most important finding of the thesis? What was the close runner up?
• Was there something that I couldn’t spend as much time on as I wanted because it wasn’t directly germane to the question I was asking?
• Was there something unexpected that happened or that I ‘found’?
• Is there a taken for granted assumption in my area that my research really challenges?

It may also be worthwhile going back to the examiners’ comments, because they might have indicated some potential publishing options too.

Step Two

Having done this prior thinking, here’s a strategy that seems to work for a lot of stuck people I meet in workshops:

(1) Generate as many possible article topics as you can possibly think of through an initial brainstorm, a serious conversation with a friend or some timed list making.

(2) Sort the list. You could look at three kinds of sorting – those articles that you most want to write, those that people most need to read and those where you already know a journal that would be interested. These lists might of course be the same.

(3) Sit on the lists for a shortish period of time, say two weeks. Then talk through your big list and the sorted lists with a trusted colleague or mentor to decide on a real short list. One of the things to consider here is whether you need to publish something in particular first, in order to build on it for the second and third articles.

Once you’ve got your list of papers, all you have to do is write them, right? Well no. But having a list is a big step forward. You now have a publishing agenda.

In the next post I’ll talk about the publication plan as a strategy for refining the agenda and setting some goals.

I think that there is often a need to do this kind of cleansing when you are writing continually, moving through one big text, or from piece to piece. It’s very easy to feel a bit bored or stale and get turned off the writing process. I think it’s as important to refresh the writing palate as it is to have a routine, and to find ways to motivate/bribe yourself.

I’m not talking about having a break here, or doing some gardening or housework, or going to the gym. I’m talking about finding ways to revitalise the thinking process and to find new intellectual energy for the next or ongoing task. It’s a kind of different mental space.

Everyone will find their own way of doing this, but I thought I’d share ten mind-cleansing activities that I use.

(1) Take a break for a couple of days. Go somewhere interesting. Get out and do stuff in the interesting place. Take a notebook but don’t plan to use it unless it is to jot down an idea that has come to you apparently from nowhere. Do no sustained writing.

(2) Go to a gallery. Think about the ideas that the artists are working with and on. Go on a tour of an exhibition. Go to the bookshop and scan the sections that you would normally leave alone.

(3) Read something academic but right out of your area. I always have a few books that are apparently nothing to do with what I’m currently doing. Right now for example I’m dipping in and out of George Mackay’s book on radical gardening.

(4) Read something that is related to your interests but of no immediate ‘use’ – I’ve also got Erik Olin Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias on the go.

(5) Or take four days out and read a serious piece of theory that you’ve been meaning to get to grips with but haven’t. You know that one you’ve been winging your way on so far but have been scared you’ll be found out about. Or the one everyone seems to be talking about, or ignoring, or have forgotten. Do no writing during this time. Just read…. slowly.

(6) Go to a literary festival. Watch writers on television and listen to them on the radio. Hear other writers talk about what they do and how they do it. Be amused. Be read to. Listen to the multiple ways in which language is used.

(7) Download some of those talk programmes that are on when you are working and listen to them in the car. Unlike television, good spoken word programmes are available via international podcasts. Explore other countries’ public intellectuals and public engagement approaches.

(8) Make time to meet up with people outside your discipline. Ask them about their work. Find out what they are reading and writing. You can even do this over lunch and dinner or go to the movies or the theatre with them.

(9) Take one of the ideas that you are currently working with and try to explore it through another medium – use images, sounds, movement – to investigate what it is like to think through another language. Try writing a synopsis for a fictional piece that would tackle your current academic project. Write a haiku about the point you most want to make.

(10) Do the writing equivalent of doodling. Keep a notebook or folder on your desktop or ipad for ideas. Spend some time just fantasizing about what you could write, rather than what you have to. Make a list of potential titles and killer opening sentences. (It’s surprising how often these come back and get used!)

So there’s my ten writing refreshers. I want to stress that these are not time wasters and not time out. They aren’t the same as having a break. These are activities which are designed to stimulate the mind, a kind of mini-retreat.

What can you add to this list?

Coincidentally, just this week @deevybee published a blog post which suggested that writing book chapters was a recipe for ‘burying your work’. Through an examination of her own work on googlescholar, she had ascertained that it was her refereed journal papers that were most cited. This was not because her chapters were not as rigorous or scholarly, she suggested, but rather it was/is a problem of access. Getting at a chapter is just much more difficult that getting to journal articles, particularly as these appear more and more in various open access repositories. @deevybee is a professor of developmental neuropsychology and was clear that this was a problem in her field. She did speculate that it might be a problem that also applied to other disciplines.

The discipline specificity of the what-to-publish-problem is why it is so difficult to offer generic advice. So I want to preface my two pennies worth on the question by acknowledging that what I say here applies to my own field of education and some other social sciences and humanities disciplines.

I’m happy to write book chapters. I’ll of course only write chapters for books where there is a decent publisher and someone I know to be a credible editor. And sometimes I just don’t have time or the interest in the project. But I don’t have a rule which says no book chapters.

In my field, edited books do different work than refereed journal articles, books and less formal writing, like blogs and reviews. These various forms of writing don’t necessarily substitute for each other.

In my field, edited books are often used by under and post graduate students to get a feel for a topic and something of its scope and debates. Handbooks in particular lay out a field and its various permutations. As a supervisor, if I want to help someone get on top of a topic like identity or visual culture or policy sociology, I may well point them to a handbook to start with.

Other edited books gather together perspectives on something which perhaps has hitherto been scattered. They provide focus on a topic or approach. They lay down a marker in an area. Again, these kinds of texts are often used by students, but in my field, these kinds of texts also get used by practitioners.

Chapters from edited books also often get used for teaching purposes as, of course, do journal articles. But unless the writer belongs to the Society of Authors, the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society or something similar – a body which can collect copyright payments on behalf of authors – they won’t necessarily know this to be the case. Use of chapters for teaching purposes doesn’t always (or perhaps even often) result in citations in googlescholar and other citation indices, even though the material may well be used extensively in essays and dissertations.

Finally, in my field, edited books often end up in libraries in countries which cannot afford a lot of English language journals. A handbook or a seminal edited text is cheaper than a set of ongoing journal subscriptions. It provides a base level resource which can then support internet searches for open access sources, working outwards from the chapter authors and their own citations.

So having said all of this, would I advise an early career or doctoral scholar in my field to write book chapters?

Well, probably not as the main genre that they try to publish. One or two book chapters, maybe, if the book looks like it will have a readership. It’s not a case of do-as-I-do. The sad fact is that for employment, promotion and those elusive bids, books and refereed journal articles count more than chapters. However, one or two chapters in a good edited collection can signify to an employment panel or bid referee that your work has been sought out by a senior scholar, that you are in a key network or two, and that you can produce something to a deadline and word length.

So in my field then, and some others like it, book chapters are not (yet) a waste of time although they are to be handled with caution. Invitations to contribute a book chapter to an edited collection must ALWAYS be scrutinised for their potential benefits such as – use for teaching purposes, influence in a wider field of practice, co-location with key scholars in the area and potential for opening up further opportunities. If these are important to you at this time in your career, then a chapter may well be worth doing.

And there’s nothing really to stop chapters being put up on some kind of academic publication repository in some kind of penultimate version.

So check out:

Why write a book review: Patter

How to critique an academic book: Grad School Ninja

How to write a history review: History Professor.Org

How to write a critical book review: Carleton College History

And while this is not about academic books, it’s also helpful
How to write a bad review: Salon

These posts contain good advice about being suitably respectful in approach. They provide pretty concise instructions about what information you need to include in a review.

There are also online book reviews sites – LSE Review of Books is relatively new but already has a very impressive set of reviews published. In my own field of education, Gene Glass, Nick Burbules and Kate Corby founded the Education Review in 1998. It reviews books in Spanish, Portugese and English. These and other online book review resources are not only helpful places to look if you are considering buying or recommending a particular book, but are also fine places to visit if you want to see the range of what counts as a book review

I reckon that there are two kinds of book reviews.

One difference is simply how long the review is. There are reviews that are pretty short and factual. They tell you what’s in a book and that’s that. Some of them add a catchy introduction to help the reader see the connections between the book and their experience. Then they take you through the text in an abbreviated way. Longer reviews may deal with one book or more. Some essay reviews are so detailed that you almost feel that you don’t have to read the text yourself. Like Ranciere’s ignorant schoolmaster you can talk about the text or topic without having read it yourself!! I’m not recommending this as a strategy BTW because who knows if I would actually agree with a reviewer’s reading – it’s more a comment on how informative some reviews can be. What’s important, I think, is that detailed reviews do give you a pretty good understanding of what’s in a text and whether you want to engage with it as a reader.

The other difference between types of reviews is whether the reviewer has added something of their own, or just primarily dealt with the text. All reviews do contain some evaluative comment, usually at the end, about the book’s strengths and weaknesses. So the reviewer inevitably has to take a stand, and put themselves out there and in it.

But some reviews do more than evaluate. They provide some kind of additionality – what I am going to call A VIEW – to what’s already in the text. This might be for example through the reviewer: making a connection to a broader topic related to that dealt with in the book; proving a coherent analysis of the field and the kind of contribution that the book makes; or offering an interpretation of the topic of the book through a specific argument.

Have a look at this example (I do know its about education but I’m reading for genre not content per se) to see what I mean by A VIEW:

Policy for the Poor and Poor Education Policy: An Essay Review, by Michael Apple. Education Review 14 (10)

Michael Apple uses a review of an edited book, about education policy and poverty, to make an argument about the absolute necessity for critical research in global contexts. He begins his essay review by discussing an immediate economic situation in Spain ( in 2011), then links this to the global spread of neoliberal policies and their consequences. He then mentions some of the research that already exists about global poverty and policy and what it shows. He thus situates the book he is reviewing in the context of both this international realpolitik and the literatures. It is two and a half pages before he gets to the actual text he is reviewing. His evaluation of the book – and he does have positive and some critical comments to make – are related to the warrant he set up at the beginning of the essay viz. the state of global poverty and education policy. His summary conclusion is also related to this warrant as he returns at the end of specific comments on the text to his overall argument about the need for (educational) researchers to do research which helps makes sense of, and disrupt, local and global inequalities and their relationalities.

Now I don’t want to say that either the factual review or the review with A VIEW is better than the other. They both have their place and both are legitimate. Both contain the basic bibliographic information about the book, and provide some synthesis and evaluation of its contents.

But writing a factual review with a catchy introduction is a different kettle of fish than writing A VIEW – it is much more like a report. As I have suggested in the example above, A VIEW is actually an argument and as such requires careful plotting of its introductory warrant (the thesis), the moves in the argument and its conclusion. Writers of A VIEW also have to be very careful that they don’t spend all the time talking about what interests them and that they do due justice to the text that they are reviewing. There’s some ethics involved here too.

So there’s a choice in thinking about reviewing books – long or short, with or without A VIEW.

But just between ourselves, I must say that I do prefer to read and write A VIEW rather than the factual review. A VIEW certainly feels to me more like a creative, rather than a quotidian process. And I can recommend having a crack at it.

Instead, you sit down and your internal editor rushes you to be instantly perfect. Sometimes a flash of brilliance comes about straight away, but not often.

Thomson says, “We all assume that we ought to be able to just do whatever writing task comes before us”. However, she continues, “we would never assume this of music for instance”.

Anyone can play guitar… Perfectly? Straight away? (photo by ginnerobot)

Writing a song may start with a few random chords or a stab at some lyrics. As you go along, you get more adventurous, add better chords, change words, and pick away until you’re satisfied. On the odd occasion, a song-writer may strike up a riff out of nowhere and get a song finished in minutes. And, like with writing, that’s rare.

With music, we’re aware that you need to practice. It’s important to practice how to play an instrument and it’s important to practice as you compose new material.

Yet with writing, perfect feels possible. No, wait, perfect feels NECESSARY.

Why?

I talked about 750words a while back. 750words is one way to let a stream of writing happen without getting bogged down with the finer detail. Just get on with writing and edit later.

Writing and editing are two different things.

Writing should be practice, all the time.

Okay, it’s more difficult in an exam. But even exams are best handled with plans. Before you write your answer, it’s handy to make a few notes for preparation and getting an order.

Outside the exam setting, the writing is the practice. The editing is the crafting. The re-writing is a combination of practice and crafting.

Telling you to ‘just do it’ is useful and misleading in equal doses. Useful because you’re getting words out and the practice has started. Misleading because writing isn’t just about random words on a page.

As you practice (i.e. as you write), you should still attempt to be clear. If you don’t know what you’re talking about, you’ll only confuse yourself later.

James Hayton of 3 Month Thesis says “you aren’t doing it wrong if you’re producing work you’re happy with! You are doing it wrong if you end up with a scrambled mess of half-baked chapters to sort out later”.

The take home point is this: Just getting the words on the page is not enough. It needs to be part of your bigger picture plan. Writing is practice, and so is editing. Everything is practice until you’ve finished.

Remember, ‘finished’ doesn’t mean ‘perfect’. Simply writing words doesn’t help you improve. Making use of those words and achieving clarity as you move along does.

Just write, so long as you understand why you’re writing and what you’re trying to achieve. Your inner editor will wince and scream at you, while you tell it to calm down as you’ll deal with that at a more convenient moment. That moment isn’t in a month or two, when you’ve forgotten what you were doing. However, that moment is at a different point to the writing.

Hayton calls advice to ‘just get words on the page’ as “the worst thesis writing advice ever“. That might sound harsh, but he’s right. Without context, the advice stinks. Give it context and know *why* you’re writing like that.

–

NOTE: I wrote this post without editing. I wanted to get the words on the page.

But…I had an idea of what I wanted to write. There was context. It may not be an academic text, but the same should apply for many types of writing. So long as there’s context!

For this post, the idea originated from reading Pat Thomson’s piece that I mentioned at the start. I considered what I wanted to talk about for a minute or two. In the process, I remembered my 750words post and looked for James Hayton’s piece on writing advice, because I thought it would fit. Thankfully, it did.

Armed with this, I started writing. It didn’t matter what words came out, because I had a purpose and I’d found enough context. The only editing was on the fly, when there was an obvious change in my head, moments after I’d typed the initial words.

I’m sure this post could be re-written and better crafted. But it took very little time and it still makes sense. That’s what I wanted to get across.

I don’t always write in this way, but it’s another way to practice. There is no single way to write and there is no perfect sentence. With that in mind, you should cut yourself some slack and enjoy the writing process. A new sense of calm may well help your writing improve. Win-win!

Maybe it is because writing is ubiquitous that we all assume that we ought to be able to just do whatever writing task comes before us. And we therefore feel inadequate when we struggle or find something that doesn’t come as easily as breathing, when we have the writing equivalent of asthma.

It’s interesting that we would never assume this of music for instance. We all recognize that it is not only learners who have to practice scales, and who rehearse and rehearse before they perform something in public. We also may know about artists and designers who keep sketch books of ideas, and do multiple trials and test pieces before they arrive at something that they are satisfied that they can and want to take to completion.

And yet this is not how we approach academic writing. Most of us seem to operate as if all we have to do is to sit down facing the screen and we ought then to be able to write. If we can’t write it’s because we have writer’s block. We might brainstorm first, or ‘dump’ some ideas on a page, but this is preparation, not practice. Even if there are multiple drafts of a piece of writing, we don’t see these as practice.

I’m intrigued by the idea that writing might be something that can be practiced, like musical scales, or mixing colour with paint, or throwing a pot.

In our book on doctoral writing, Barbara Kamler and I talk about writing along the way of the thesis. This is writing that is done simply to orient the thinking and the writing to come. As we begin to revise the book for a second edition, I’ve been thinking how we might think and write more explicitly of writing as something to be practiced.

When we do this we’ll owe a debt to Patricia Goodson. She’s just published a book entitled Becoming an academic writer which is designed to support practicing in academic writing. It contains 50 exercises, each of which uses a 10 -15 minute timer, so these might be especially interesting for pomodoro aficionados. She suggests establishing a routine of academic writing practice consisting of 10 -15 minutes each day. She suggests working on a relevant exercise over a series of sessions.

Her first tranche of exercises are arranged around general academic writing – daily writing, building academic vocabulary, identifying and rectifying your grammar mistakes, feedback and editing. The second tranche are designed to support the thinking about and writing of specific sections of a thesis – introduction, methods, findings, conclusions and abstracts. Goodson always provides a structure for the 10 -15 minute sessions. These are either in the form of questions to answer, or as skeleton sentences or prompts which focus the writing. She also provides some specific pointers for non-native speakers.

Let me give you a flavor of a Goodson exercise. Before beginning to actually write about literatures – for real – she suggests a sentence prompt exercise (it’s exercise 33, p. 149 to be precise), to be worked on for 15 minute sessions each day. Here are three of her questions/prompts for this exercise:

(1) These are the studies/reports that support (or validate) my problem, research question, or hypothesis to be tested….. (Compile all citations lending support to your topic). These studies/reports agree that my problem (research question or hypothesis) is worth studying , because…..

(2) These are the studies that contradict the importance of my problem, research question, or hypothesis to be tested… (compile all citations disagreeing that your topic is worthy of study or deserves testing). These studies/reports disagree that the topic I chose should be examined because….

(3) The sources (citations) that carry the most authority, regarding the problem, topic, research question or approach I am taking are these…. (compile all the citations carrying the greatest weight, the ones holding the most authority in your field). The reason(s) they carry such authority is….

This might seem an obvious thing to do, and indeed most of Goodson’s exercises don’t seem startling at first glance. But they are very tightly focused, and do require the kinds of thinking and writing that are used in academic writing/work.

Exercise 33 for example not only requires a review of the entire set of readings that have been undertaken but also categorization and evaluation. The exercise requires the writer to make a decision about where things fit. It explicitly works against what Barbara and I call the laundry list approach, where a set of texts are simply organised around a theme and no evaluation given at all. This kind of grouping and assessing work is fundamental to any work with literatures, and indeed to work with any form of data. The exercise also positions the writer to find the warrant for their work within the literatures and to identify the space in which they will situate their specific contribution. So it does a lot of work in an apparently straightforward bit of practice.

I don’t agree with everything that ‘s in the book of course. Barbara and I always begin with abstracts rather than leave them till the end. However, it seems to me that this is an extremely useful text which could equally be used by individuals, writing groups or writing classes. Its focus on practice is very helpful because it directs all of us to the work that needs to be done in order to write well. It’s certainly a book I’ll be recommending to my students and working with.

BTW, this was a book review post. I’m often asked what books I recommend, and this is one. I paid for it myself so it wasn’t a freebie I had to review! Just so you know.

Goodson, P (2013) Becoming an academic writer. 50 exercises for paced, productive and powerful writing. Thousand Oaks: Sage

Now, fast forward via multiple generations of multiple kinds of animals variously teased and tormented in boxes and mazes and other apparatus, and the notion of reward and punishment emerges as a very serious idea indeed. Without being at all precise about its genealogy, I’ll just say that the notion that rewards and punishments could be manipulated to produce desirable behavior became pretty popular. Educators of all kinds seized on it. Bosses decided that it might be a good management tool. And some elected policy makers decided to stake their flimsy political lives on carrot and stick regimes.

And here and now, despite what I say about reward and punishment in all other arenas, I confess that this is the way I make myself write.

I’ve talked about the importance of routine before. Having a regular time to write comes out as pretty significant for most productive writers. My routine for writing is in the morning.

I now want to own up to the fact that writing is a bit more than routine for me. Somehow along the way I’ve got addicted to writing. This happened long before I took up serious academic writing, and even before I wrote pretty regularly for professional journals. I actually do have to write everyday or I start going a bit stir crazy. I’ve tried to make this less compulsive. I’ve been known to go away on holidays determined not to write, so I take no writing implements at all. But I can’t last more than a couple of days and I’m off at the nearest newsagent buying a notebook and pen. I’ve just been at one of those British summer festivals with mud and glamping where there were no notebooks to be had, so I flattened out a Boots prescription box and wrote on that. So I really do mean addiction. It’s morning so I must be writing.

But it’s actually even worse than this. I find that I am most productive when I operate a kind of self-imposed reward and punishment regime. I have a set target each day. This is not a word count, but a chunk of writing. I’m book writing at present so the first chunk of each chapter is always the introductory section where you have to invent something interesting to suck the reader in and then you map out what you are going to do. That’s a chunk. The introduction also maps out the other chunks that have to be done, and so after the first go, there you are with a programme for each morning’s writing.

So yesterday I started a new chapter. And here’s the rub. I couldn’t have breakfast until I’d completed the introductory section. And after that, I couldn’t have lunch until I’d done the first section. Put positively, I rewarded myself for each chunk completed, with food. Just like Pavlov’s dog, or the rat that I used to run in Psychology 1.

Does this routine have a down-side? Oooooh yes. On slow writing days this practice is more like punishing myself for not writing enough and fast enough, rather than rewarding myself for achievement. And have I ever not had lunch? Yes. I sit at the screen until I’ve reached the daily target.

But I also don’t write after lunch. Ever. That’s when I do all the other things like marking and reading and email. Or I go into work and\or I have meetings and tutorials.

I’ve also talked before about cleaning and gardening while writing. This is thinking time for writing. The bad news for me is that cleaning and gardening time doesn’t make any difference to the reward for writing the section. If I have to stop and think for an hour and do something else then so be it. There’s no breakfast or lunch in there. And if I piss about with email and twitter then that’s just more time till I eat. It’s only writing the section/chunk that gets the reward.

Does this all take organization? Oooooh yes. When I’m seriously writing, I not only have to tidy my desk, but also do some serious shopping. The breakfast and lunch have to be real rewards not a desultory scrap of something from the bottom of the fridge. Right now it’s mango, peach, blueberry, rasberry and strawberry season so breakfast IS something to work for. And I’ve stocked up on some good salad ingredients for lunch and some fancy bits of Italian grilled stuff that make it seem something other than just ordinary. Treats are in order.

When people ask me how come I write so much, I generally just laugh. But now you know. The answer is Pavlov’s dog. A combination of routine, addiction and reward and punishment. I suppose there’s a fancy name for this kind of OCD behaviour somewhere, but for now Pavlov’s dog will do. It works for me and so I keep doing it.

I’m absolutely sure, however, that this is not the only way to become highly productive. Do you have secret ways to make yourself write and complete?

Some thoughts on working collaboratively

I recently led a discussion on #ECRchat about working collaboratively. A lot of the discussion was about how you find people to work with and what you need to do to set it up. Of course not everyone wants to work collaboratively and it seems less expected in some disciplines than others. However, certainly in the UK, it is increasingly the way to actually realize research projects, to get funding, to generate publications and to manage public engagement.

In our new book, Writing for peer reviewed journals: strategies for getting published, Barbara Kamler and I write about long term writing and research partnerships like ours.

We interviewed a number of our colleagues about their collaborations.  There was not one that did not extend well beyond the professional. Long-term writing and research partners talked about each other as family, as life long friends, as being more and different together than separate.

Some of the things that the interviewees said were important in these relationships were:
•       a shared world-view
•       deep respect for each other’s knowledge and skills
•       the same basic commitment to an axiological and epistemological position
•       mutual enthusiasm for a broad intellectual agenda
•       they had invented a process for developing a similar writing ‘voice’ (and we detail these in our chapter 8)
•       a great deal of humour
•       tolerance of each other’s idiosyncrasies and preparedness to give and take
•       the capacity to have time apart and to pick things up again as if there had been no break

We were interested to see how often these professional relationships were almost instantaneous. People read each other’s work, or had an initial conversation, did a presentation or one paper together and knew that the relationship would work.

Barbara and I got together in just this way. I gave a talk at a conference about writing my thesis, we had a chat afterwards and then decided to do a joint conference paper. We had such a good time together – we found we not only had a shared view of writing, despite our disciplinary differences, but also thought the same things were funny, were both closet foodies and frequented the same kinds of shops. We just wanted to keep going and so we invented a work programme that would allow this to happen.

Not all collaborations are like this of course, and there are no rules about how to form deep and ongoing collaboration. But there are obvious things to do at the outset of any joint work – frank and open discussions of work habits and practices, discussion of particular responses that could get in the way of work proceeding, agreement about who will do what when, developing a protocol on authorship.

However there was a something involved in these long-term writing and research partnerships, some kind of je ne sais quoi, which was really hard for us to pin down. We were struck by how people spoke of each other with genuine affection and when they talked together, we witnessed the level of intimacy they had developed. Indeed, many of them did finish each other’s sentences! This was more than simply liking people, but a kind of ‘best friend’ relationship which operated across blurred professional and personal boundaries.

I am lucky to have more than one of these kinds of long term collaborations and I can really recommend them as a way to make the production of academic work  a pleasure, as well as work. It seems though that these long term working relationships are things that you stumble over rather than necessarily find if you go looking. You just have to be prepared and open to them when the opportunity presents and take things further if they look promising.

Pat

You can also catch up with the chat via this Storify or view the full archive of tweets here, #ECRchat_tweets_2012_08_09.pdf.

#ECRchat will be back at the same time next week with your host Andrew Frayn, discussing work-life balance. That’s 11:00-12:00 in the UK (BST), 12:00-13:00 in Europe (CEST), and 20:00-21:00 in Australia (EST), on Thursday 16th August.

In our new book, Writing for peer reviewed journals: strategies for getting published, Barbara Kamler and I write about long term writing and research partnerships like ours. We interviewed a number of our colleagues about their collaborations. There was not one that did not extend well beyond the professional. Long-term writing and research partners talked about each other as family, as life long friends, as being more and different together than separate.

Some of the things that the interviewees said were important in these relationships were:
• a shared world-view
• deep respect for each other’s knowledge and skills
• the same basic commitment to an axiological and epistemological position
• mutual enthusiasm for a broad intellectual agenda
• they had invented a process for developing a similar writing ‘voice’ (and we detail these in our chapter 8)
• a great deal of humour
• tolerance of each other’s idiosyncrasies and preparedness to give and take
• the capacity to have time apart and to pick things up again as if there had been no break

We were interested to see how often these professional relationships were almost instantaneous. People read each other’s work, or had an initial conversation, did a presentation or one paper together and knew that the relationship would work.

Barbara and I got together in just this way. I gave a talk at a conference about writing my thesis, we had a chat afterwards and then decided to do a joint conference paper. We had such a good time together – we found we not only had a shared view of writing, despite our disciplinary differences, but also thought the same things were funny, were both closet foodies and frequented the same kinds of shops. We just wanted to keep going and so we invented a work programme that would allow this to happen.

Not all collaborations are like this of course, and there are no rules about how to form deep and ongoing collaboration. But there are obvious things to do at the outset of any joint work – frank and open discussions of work habits and practices, discussion of particular responses that could get in the way of work proceeding, agreement about who will do what when, developing a protocol on authorship.

However there was a something involved in these long-term writing and research partnerships, some kind of je ne sais quoi, which was really hard for us to pin down. We were struck by how people spoke of each other with genuine affection and when they talked together, we witnessed the level of intimacy they had developed. Indeed, many of them did finish each other’s sentences! This was more than simply liking people, but a kind of ‘best friend’ relationship which operated across blurred professional and personal boundaries.

I am lucky to have more than one of these kinds of long term collaborations and I can really recommend them as a way to make the production of academic work a pleasure, as well as work. It seems though that these long term working relationships are things that you stumble over rather than necessarily find if you go looking. You just have to be prepared and open to them when the opportunity presents and take things further if they look promising.

I’m writing this post at the same time as I’m beginning a book about bringing theory – in this case Bourdieu – to a particular area – I’m writing about leadership and management. My challenge, to start with, is to think about what I mean by theory – what it is, where and how it is used. I need to be able to say why it’s a good idea… so at present I share some of the same concerns as the theory-challenged thesis writer.

My focus is on social and cultural theory. So that’s people like Foucault and Bourdieu and Dewey, who offer a pretty comprehensive framework to analyse a social problem, practice, puzzle, circumstance, experience, happening.

Raewyn Connell, in her book Southern Theory (2007), suggests that a general social or cultural theory is one which develops a broad vision of the social, and offers concepts that apply beyond a particular society, place or time. Such texts make propositions or hypotheses that are relevant everywhere, or propose methods of analysis that will work under all conditions (p. 28)

A general social theory can be found in a text or set of texts in which someone’s made a pretty serious attempt to make some sense of the world. Yes the world, or at least a good chunk of it, not just a little piece.

A general social theory has ambition and sweep. It works to tidy up ideas, bring them into line, codify and categorize them, establish causalities and connections. It generalizes. It offers constructs for seeing a range of phenomena and for generating sum and substance. It offers a logical and clear narrative thread which draws a rational border around that which is to be explained, eliminating mess and ill-fitting pieces.(1)

Connell identifies a number of problems with this kind of theory:
(1) General social theories make claims to apply everywhere and at all times and in all places – in other words, there is a bid for universality.
(2) However they mostly read the world from the centre – in most cases from Europe and its histories of intellectual thought. In the general social theories most in use in English speaking universities, significant theoretical traditions from ‘the periphery’ of the European world are ignored.
(3) General social theories assume that the questions addressed and the methods used will be the same everywhere. Things which appear to be local, idiosyncratic and particular are excluded, although these may actually be indicative of the non-sense being made.

Does this set of problems ring true to you? They do to me. But is the answer to these problems to abandon theory altogether? Well, no. I think it means that we need to handle theories with caution, be careful about what we ask of and do with them. And we need to learn about other traditions of sense-making.

Connell makes some pretty interesting points about why we should bother to continue to ‘do theory’, to keep trying to make sense of the world and the ways in which it works variously in different places. She suggests that, in current ‘globalising’ times (globalisation is another one of those general theories to be used but with suspicion), social science – and I would add arts and humanities and I’m pretty sure she’ d agree with this – cannot afford to vacate the public space of meaning-making and leave it to politicians, market researchers, techno-rationalist economists and media. Rather, she suggests, there is a role for scholarship which:

(1) generates compassion for those who are bearing the brunt of global social, economic, political and cultural changes
(2) interrogates the ideas and practices which perpetuate global and local injustices
(3) produces knowledges that are helpful to those who are attempting to change unjust practices and relations and which work to generate better, new, alternative and fairer ways to do things.

OK, so it sounds a bit utopian. And maybe it sounds a bit too activist for some. We all have to make up our own minds about where we stand in our research (Griffiths, 1998).

But it certainly sounds to me like a better reason to do theory than ‘it’s what your examiners expect’. ( Well I know you have to do that, but I’m suggesting that you can do both.) And it absolutely sounds like a good set of reasons for thinking that theory might be really necessary in a field like leadership and management which is often complicit in practices that reproduce the status quo. (So there’s my position).

So for my book writing, this means thinking about theory in a way that not only recognizes its partiality and contingency, but also thinking hard about in whose interests it works. And this is the position I’m now trying to work through, of which more in another post.

References
Connell, R 2007 Southern Theory Cambridge: Polity
Griffiths, M 1998 Educational research for social justice: Getting off the fence. Buckingham: Open University Press

(1) I think that this list probably owes a debt to Thomas (2007) but I can’t find the page; it’s a helpful book if you’re interested in theory in social science, even though it says it’s about education – and the title has a great strap line.
Thomas, G 2007 Education and theory. Strangers in paradigms. Maidenhead: Open University Press

To help make clear the difference between the types of books you might want to get to know better, I’ll give an example of my own. I’m currently reading some books on narrative very closely. This is for a particular piece of research I’m doing on community theatre. I have also read a lot of Bourdieu and Foucault closely, and I often re-read pieces of them, because they tend to be useful for much of my own research and that of the doctoral researchers I work with. But I do just love de Certeau’s “The practice of everyday life”. I actually don’t particularly agree with his basic argument about tactics and strategies as it’s a bit too binary for me, and I don’t actually use him much in my work, but I really relish the way he writes about the texture of ordinary things like travel and walking around. I read him for pleasure.

So, having clarified the types of books you might want to really get to grips with, what do I mean by reading closely? Well, apart from reading more slowly, which you do need to do, there are particular things that are important when getting to know a text well.

Systematically explore the writer’s language

Each academic writer has their own way of using language, and so it’s important to understand the particular meanings/definitions they adopt. Find the key terms that they are using and see how they are used and in what contexts. It can be helpful to make a tiny dictionary of the key terms that are most germane to the argument being made.

Good academic writers will try to be as unambiguous as possible about the specific ways in which they use terms that are common-place or common to their discipline. They will define the particular way that they use a term such as culture, identity or democracy.

Academic writers also often generate their own terms to encapsulate a key idea (concept). Sometimes, this new terminology constitutes a theorization, so it’s important to take note of whether the new terms invented by the writer are at the level of concept or theory. Bourdieu’s field, capitals and habitus are examples of key concepts which, taken together, become a social theory.

Get to know the writer’s resources

Every academic writer draws on others. This can of course be seen in the reference list so a first step in getting to know an academic writer’s resources is to see who they are citing and either building on or registering some difference with.

One of the characteristics of academic scholarship is that people position themselves with a particular tradition, but take issue with some insiders, as well as with some ‘outside’. You need to get onto this too. Who is the writer differentiating themselves from and who are they talking about as similar and is this part of an insider or outsider debate?

Sometimes the who/what/how of using other people’s work is actually in the text. There may be an explicit discussion of a particular work, scholar or tradition. The fact that the writer has chosen to spend time on this tells you that they are working with the material either to take issue with it, or to show how they will apply or add to it. If you have the time it is really helpful to read the original that is being discussed.

Explicit references to the work of others are easy to see. However texts also have embedded resources which are not so obvious. All academic writers use inter-textual references where readers must already know the field in order to see the wider points being made. For example, the notion of performativity is often used in discussions of modern universities without reference to Lyotard (or indeed Butler who has an entirely different take). It may help your understanding of the text you are examining if you not only know the assumed reference ( eg Lyotard and Butler), but also a range of other texts that have used the same theorization. This kind of understanding can only be built up over time and that is why it is important to read both widely and deeply.

Become familiar with the writer’s overarching propositions

If this is a book by someone who is important to your study or your ongoing research agenda then it may well be advantageous to read more of their work. Reading other books by the same author will show you how they develop ideas over time, adjusting and modifying their theories and terms as they do more reading and research, take critiques into account and adjust to changing contexts.

It is important to become very clear about the wider problem, puzzle or phenomenon that the writer is addressing. It is helpful to ask yourself – if this text was a case, what is it a case of? What is the wider issue with which this writer is concerned? Why do they think this is important? Why have they spend part of their life writing this particular book? Why is what is in this book important to the larger issue with which they are concerned?

It is then critical to be very clear about what the writer offers in relation to the larger problem/puzzle/phenomenon compared to others in the field. What is the unique contribution that they offer?

When doing this, it is very helpful to write a plain language version of the key meta-propositions that the writer makes. In your own words, say what it is that you understand the author to be arguing and claiming. This goes beyond the kind of summary that you did when you first encountered the book. Here, you are going for something like the answer to a question you yourself might also be asked – What do you want to be known for?

When you get to know a text very well in this way, you will be able to discuss it and the writer with authority, and in detail. You’ll have made yourself an expert on this particular book.

One of its more endearing habits is that people invariably thank bus drivers when they get off the bus. Even though the drivers are just doing their job, the culture of the city is to thank them. And it’s quite common for people to stop and let other people into traffic queues, none of this I-was-here-first-and-you-can–just wait-for-however-long-it-takes. In fact it’s really unusual for someone not to let others in, even though the traffic is often terrible. This considerate travel behaviour is a local cultural idiosyncrasy, probably not exclusive to Nottingham, but certainly one of the things that you notice when you move here.

I was musing about this peculiarity in relation to academic cultures the other day, and thinking about how it is that the university organisational equivalents to Nottingham traffic behaviour work. All occupations seem to have their own distinctive little conventions and ours is no different and when someone does something out of the ordinary it’s really obvious… just as being an oink travelling down my very narrow street is. Break the hidden rule and everyone notices.

For example I’ve observed that it’s really not acceptable in my institution to be immodest in public. It’s absolutely necessary of course when writing job and grant applications to big yourself up, but it’s really not OK to rush around the corridor with your latest article or book – even though these are a cause for celebration. Very little beats the pleasure of seeing your hard won words in print but you must whoop whoop in private. It’s even less acceptable to tell people if you’ve had some kind of award. Your colleagues have to read about it in the Times Higher, rather than hear it from you, and only then can they can congratulate you.

I’m not talking about going on some kind of maniacal ego trip here – something seriously over the top where success is shoved down everyone’s throat at every opportunity. No, I’m simply suggesting that something past a secret conversation in the loo with your bestie might be permitted – that some kind of public marking of meaningful events might be a good thing.

I’ve come to think that this lack of recognition is actually symptomatic of greedy institutional cultures – and so I’m dead keen to try to disrupt them. This is why we’ve instituted an annual book celebration for our arts and social sciences faculties. Once a year we get all the books together and have a knees-up. And because the celebration is collective, it turns out that it’s actually a better-than-OK thing to do … It feels like an institutional pat on the back for the hard work that people have put in, in order to get their work out there.

So I’m wondering – do other institutions have better ways of acknowledging success and achievement, or is keeping quiet at all costs a global academic convention?

What do you think? Does your university or alt-academic office have non-cheesy ways of acknowledging the things that everyone must do but are hard work and a real achievement?

Post script:
After I’d written this blog post I saw that thesis whisperer had a post on the same issue calling for a gong for PhDs, you might like to check that out too if you haven’t already. So clearly the practice of keeping schtum about achievements is not just the case here in England!!

As I’ve suggested, you don’t want to read every book in the same way. There are some that can immediately be skimmed, others engaged with more thoroughly. But this one looks tasty so it’s time to work out if your impressions are correct. (It might be a mango. I don’t want to labour this metaphor so it’s not too prominent here I hope!).

Peeling back

First of all you need to read right through the book. You can make notes in pencil in the margin or on sticky notes as you go along – but not too many!! If you are spending a lot of time writing more than a few things in or on a chapter then it’s probably far too much. You’re going to get another go at it if you decide that this book really is one to savour. But if you find yourself skipping pages that’s OK too, it probably means that the book is not as succulent as you first thought.

Once you have got to the end of the book then it’s pretty helpful to IMMEDIATELY write a summary of the book’s argument in a few sentences. Yes really, a few sentences, certainly no more than a paragraph.

1. Start the paragraph by stating the purpose of the book – what problem or issue is the author addressing. What is their intention? This might be a problem of policy, practice, a gap in the literatures or a theoretical question.
2. Sum up the argument made.
3. Finally, finish with the claim(s) made by the author. Be really clear about the point they are trying to make – this is after all why they have spent part of their lives writing the book – if you can get this point into one sentence all the better.

It is now that you may decide that you want to go back and read some bits, or even the lot, in more detail and make a few additional notes. You may decide to note just a couple of quotations or key passages. This little addition may very well be sufficient for your purposes. However you may decide that the book warrants a closer read.

Getting into the substance

There are always some books that are more germane to you than others. If this is one of them then it is helpful to augment the middle section of your summary paragraph by detailing the moves in the argument. You can do this by writing a very short outline, no more than a few sentences, about each move of the argument. A move may be a single chapter or it might be more than one.

What I’m suggesting is in fact the reverse process of the familiar approach to developing a plan for your writing by jotting down a set of headings and bullet points – these provide a skeleton that you then add the flesh to. The approach to a completed book is precisely the opposite. You work back from the text to see what the headings and bullet points might have been. This is a kind of backwards mapping of the text. All the fleshy parts of the book are stripped away to reveal the way that it works.

This outline should allow you to lay bare the way in which each chapter is related to the next. Now you can not only see and evaluate each move, but also ascertain the relationship between them. If it’s important to you may want to note things about each move that are important to your interest – the evidence used, the theoretical approach, the connections with other literatures you are reading.

By this stage you will probably have written a couple of pages -these are your interpretation of the book’s structure and argument. They are also the notes which you can insert into bibliographic software or use in whatever way you have developed to keep track of the books that are important to your study. If you are clever then you can may be able to hyperlink these notes to the actual text (ebook) or to stickies or supplementary notations (quotations, musings etc)

Doing this kind of structural noting is a good way to engage seriously with a text, and it is also a really useful way to build your knowlegde about how large texts can be organized successfully.

However, even this reading may not be sufficient.

If the book turns out to be a very juicy read and becomes one you decide you really want to get down and dirty with, then the next and final instalment will deal with this – sucking the stone!!

There are two concepts that are helpful in deciding which of these is the case. They are:

(1) Blind spots – these are the things the method, definitions or theoretical approach does not allow to be seen/said. For example, surveys are very good for answering questions such as how many, and how often. They are not very good at probing the reasons why this may be the case. Conversely, a small number of case studies may allow you to build really rich descriptions but does not allow you to generalise to scale.

(2) Blank spots – these are the things that are not yet covered by this study. All studies have a particular scope, location, are conducted at a particular time, in a particular context and with particular people and things… there are therefore plenty of other circumstances which the research doesn’t cover. These things-not-covered constitute blank spots.

Having blank and blind spots in a piece of research is not necessarily a problem. In reality, all studies have these. All research is partial. It can’t do everything, cover all possibilities. It is therefore not a sign of inadequate research that some things are left unprobed since no research can do this.

The problem comes when there is an ambit claim made for coverage. In reality, most researchers do acknowledge the limitations of their particular studies and make their claims for contribution fit these. In other words, they do not claim things that they evidentially can’t because of the blank and blind spots in the research design.

Research that is inadequate is very often where the method, findings and claims do not match. The researcher has asked a question and then they have claimed that they have found things that they haven’t – and indeed couldn’t because the method wouldn’t allow it. They claim that the findings can apply to situations where there is insufficient evidence to suggest they will, in other words they claim coverage far greater than the particular study will allow.

There is also of course sloppy research where methods have been applied badly – texts under-analysed or statistics misapplied or carried out inadequately.

New researchers often get inadequacies and blank and blind spots muddled up. While research which has blank and blind spots might be disappointing, it is not actually sloppy – it’s either under-ambitious or, in reality, more likely simply partial. It’s important in literature reviews not to suggest something is sloppy research when it is simply limited by its methods or scope/location/sample etc and doesn’t make claims to be more than it is. It is important always in literature reviewing to look for the ‘fit’ between the blank and blind spots and the claims made in any piece of empirical research.

It is also particularly important – no, it’s crucial – to be clear about the blank and blind spots in your own research and getting this crystal clear before beginning to write the last chapter of the dissertation when the claims about contribution to knowledge are made. It is often when bigger claims are made than can actually be justified – for example policy recommendations are made on the back of small studies with limited scope and particular samples- that examiners get punitive.

It is not a weakness to note the blank and blind spots, and there is no need to go on about them at length, or to be apologetic. All research has blank and blind spots and we just need to know what they are, so that we know what we are legitimately able to say.

Note
The notion of blank and blind spots used here is based on: Wagner, J. 1993, ‘Ignorance in educational research: Or, how can you not know that?’, Educational Researcher, vol. 22, no. 5, pp. 15-23. Barbara Kamler and I have worked with/on it as a pedagogical strategy.

Now I’m here to tell you that some books are like mangoes and they have stones that you can suck on for days, weeks and years.

The first thing to do with a book or an article is to work out whether in fact it is a mango or something else. Life is too short, as are budgets, to be buying a whole basket of fruit simply in the hope that one of them will turn out to be the mango. Yet that is often what I see early researchers do in libraries. And they often end up having spent a lot of time reading something that isn’t that useful to them. In reality it is important to be selective about what books you choose to read right from the get go.

You need to decide whether this book is one that you need to read carefully or not. Maybe it is one that you don’t bother with at all. Could it be one that you can skip over, noting only its bare bibliographical details and its major points? If it’s either of these, then it’s definitely not a mango.

To make this decision, mango or not, you first of all need to locate the book or article in relation to the field and your particular interest. If you are just reading randomly – and that’s a very good thing to do some of the time – then connecting the text with a particular interest is not so important. However most of us read more purposefully most of the time and so understanding where the book fits more generally is important.

In the case of a book, the author and publisher will have left some clues.

Before you start reading, check out :

(1) The title of the book. You may have noticed that academic book titles are getting more boring. These days publishers are wary of clever titles that make the reader guess what’s inside. There are too many books out there and much shopping is now done online rather than browsing in a book shop, so the way to sell books is by making sure they have explicit titles. Publishers usually make either the main title or its strap line say something quite specific. My next book, written with Barbara Kamler, for example, is entitled Writing for peer reviewed journals: strategies for getting published. Its pretty clear, we think, from the title what you can expect it to be about!

(2) The blurb on the back. This has been written specifically to tell you about the book’s purposes, something of its contents and something about what academic discipline it contributes to. You should be able to see from this whether the book is coming at the topic in a way that is completely irrelevant or is potentially of interest and use.

(3) The titles of chapters. If these are sensibly titled, these will give you an idea of what is covered in the text. If you are looking for something specific then you may now have enough information to decide whether to go any further.

If you are still interested in the book, then you should do a bit of pre-reading. These days, online publishers try to offer something of this experience with the sample chapter or the ‘look inside’ facility. In a bookshop or at a publisher’s conference stand then it is really easy to skim the introduction, where the writer will lay out the need for the book and tell you something more about what’s in it. You can also flick through a few chapters, reading the odd page here and there. You can check out the figures and tables, seeing if they have useful information. This pre-reading will not only give you even more detail about the contents, but also let you see the style of the writing.

At this point, you should not only know whether this book is of interest but also its disciplinary location, its intended contribution, something of the argument and a little about the way in which it marshals ‘evidence’. You will also have formed a view about whether this is a book that you would like to buy, or whether it is one that you will get from the library or one that you won’t bother with any more, or one you will come back to later to recheck.

In other words you will have made a decision about whether the book is potentially a mango, or something else. Of course you can still end up with something that isn’t as useful as you thought it might be because no method of choosing is completely infallible. However, having a method is much better than having something unsystematic and relatively random.

And once you have your mango, all that remains is to make your way to the stone.

In both instances some of the people who applied had good ideas, the kinds of track records that garnered attention, and wrote well structured applications about researchable topics. So that was enough to get them to the short-list and to an interview.

But also in both instances I was pretty shocked when it quickly become apparent that very few of the hopefuls had done their homework. They hadn’t really checked out who was interviewing them, for what and where – and if they had, they hadn’t thought about what that might mean in terms of what they wanted to do.

Now I wasn’t looking for someone to tell me that they wanted to come to a Russell Group university, or that they wanted to work with me or my colleage because we did fantabulous work. We did hear both those things and it made us embarrassed. Sucking up really doesn’t go down well with most interviewers and it’s definitely to be avoided unless you are really completely and absolutely sure that the people you are talking to like to be flattered.

I was looking for something else. I was looking for connections. Let me explain.

If I am to supervise and/or mentor someone, then I want to know that there is something in what they have to offer that I think is worthwhile and interesting AND that can contribute to and extend the work that I and colleagues already undertake. I’m looking for potential synergies and for the ways in which the proposed research will contribute to the research networks and centre of which I’m part.

So if you are applying for a studentship or postdoc with me then I expect you to persuade me that there are these kinds of connections. And you can only do this if you actually know what it is that I do.

In order to understand what I and my colleagues do you need to do some homework. You need to check out my university webpage. What am I researching? What am I writing about? What can you see which might tell you not only about what I’d find of interest but also what I’d really not be at all interested in? Maybe you need to check out a couple of things I’ve written. Maybe you need to look me up on academia.edu or researchgate or on twitter. Who am I connected with? What is my research centre doing at present? What seminars does it hold?

This really won’t take long to do and will likely produce two results:

(1) It’ll reduce the possibility of you being seen as being disinterested. Doing this kind of investigation will help you to avoid the kinds of (dumb) questions at interview that can be interpreted as meaning that you haven’t even been bothered to take the time to find out anything about where you are applying to.

(2) It will position you positively. Take some time thinking about me as a reader and as an audience for your work. How can you explain what you want to do, given what you know about me? Rather than flatter me, engage me in a conversation that I will find so interesting that I will be convinced that you will make a great addition to the team.

So don’t think you’ve done enough when you are told that you have an interview. Now is the time to do the homework. It can pay off big time.

To my mind there are four issues here which are related and each is important. They are:

(1) what kinds of learning opportunities are offered to postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers
(2) whether these opportunities are a universal part of the postdoctoral and postgraduate experience or are available only on a competitive basis
(3) if they are competitive, what might be an equitable selection process, and who might decide who is selected and on what basis
(4) when is an opportunity really about learning and when does it become ‘exploitation’.

There’s been discussion about these things and indeed some action. The ‘Roberts’ money in the UK for example was directed to activities which involved postgraduate researchers in scholarly career learning. I saw a lot of workshops running and while these might have been – and are if they are still running – valuable, they were/are, it seems to me, hardly sufficient.

This is how it looks to me. On the one hand there are some doctoral and postdoctoral researchers who get to hang around research projects, write with mentors and some even do research which contributes to a larger project. But some are used shamelessly as substitute teachers or as unpaid research fellows. Yet at the same time and often in the same institutions, there are others who desperately want to get some teaching experience and it is never on offer. They would like nothing better than to hang around a big project, but the PI can’t make the time to make it happen. They cry out for their supervisors or mentors to write something with them.

There is something horribly random about this landscape and there is no doubt that it is deeply, deeply inequitable. There clearly does need to be much more done to change this situation via a coordinated set of policies, structures, regulations and incentives that will make a difference. But there are also particular institutional supervision and support cultures implicated here and these have embedded in them either shared or privatised practices around the distribution of learning opportunities, and shared or privatised understandings of what counts as learning and what counts as exploitation.

If nothing else, the Birmingham move at least brought this skewed topography centre stage. But it is highly likely to slip quietly off the agenda now that the ad has been withdrawn. It’s important that this not happen.

As my colleague Debbie Epstein from Cardiff argued earlier this week, there is a real need for a comprehensive review of postgraduate and postdoctoral learning opportunities – one that goes well beyond ‘training’. I agree and suggest that as a first stage, any review also MUST promote debate about what might count as a universal learning entitlement at this stage of formal education.

So this is my small contribution to raising the issue – and I think there will be more posts to come. What do you think ALL doctoral and postdoctoral researchers should be entitled to experience and learn and what should be available to just some?