Abstract
Academics are often criticized for their poor or rotten writing. In this essay, I look first at several ways in which academic writing may be regarded as, for example, obscure and turgid. Second, I discuss reasons why, despite such criticism, academics persevere with their writing. Third, I outline a number of approaches to the how of academic writing as a daily practice. Finally, I present my playful yet serious efforts to confront the hows and whys of academic (and post-academic) writing as an important human and social practice.
He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how
Why and How Are Academics Such Poor Writers?
Are we academic writers really that bad? Do we really stink (see Pinker, 2014)? And if we do, why do we bother to write at all? Also, if we still want to write, then how could we make our writing less awful?
We academics are rotten writers for a number of reasons. First, we employ academese which is “turgid, soggy, wooden, bloated, clumsy, obscure, unpleasant to read, and impossible to understand” (Pinker, 2014). We so regularly contaminate our sentences with “gratuitous educational jargon and serpentine syntax” that readers might suspect we are trained to be abstract and convoluted rather than clear and concise (after Sword, 2012, p. 5). We adopt a writing style which “exudes erudition” but which is also “pompous and needlessly complex,” often deploying technical language to make simple concepts appear profound (Ghodsee, 2016, p. 6). We learn to write badly by using the “dead language” of academia which is moribund because it is “no-one’s mother tongue” (see Bourdieu, Passeron, & de Saint Martin, 1996, p. 8). Ironically, such academic English is dead even though the world language on which it is parasitic is vibrantly alive (see Billig, 2013).
Second, we excuse ourselves as rotten writers by claiming that “difficult [a convenient euphemism for ‘stinky’?] writing is unavoidable because of the abstractness and complexity of our subject matter.” This so-called insider-shorthand theory makes us cram together the polysyllables (see Pinker, 2014). As stinky writers, we produce arcane texts.
Third, we think we have to write abstrusely and rottenly to succeed as academics: Ponderous prose will get us published. Our abstractions and nominalizations and other bloated words will ease our networking with like-minded pedants. Sadly, we think that if we write simply and clearly like actual human beings, we risk being seen as inadequate, untrained, unpublishable, and not worthy of belonging to the elite club (Billig, 2013).
Fourth, we academics often write badly because of what Pinker calls the curse of knowledge—the assumption that readers know what we are writing about, especially when we use our own abbreviations and treasured jargon. For example, philosophers may well be comfortable using Latin terms such as ceteris paribus and inter alia, but most human readers prefer simpler English versions. Writers should not be perceived as being less rigorous merely because they write in clear English. After all, we can speak with the vulgar without ceasing to think with the learned (see Blanshard, 1954). The trouble is that foggy writing comes easily to academic writers. It is clarity and simplicity which takes practice: “in writing badly, we are wasting each other’s time, sowing confusion and error, and turning our profession into a laughing stock” (Pinker, 2014). Furthermore, if we really want to achieve change, we need to attract an audience but, as Pinker and others have shown, most of us fail to do so. If we want to be active critics of society, we will not be successful when our writing is clogged with “unreadable jargon” and is “chaotic, negative, dark, and inaccessible” (see Wolff, 2018, p. 36).
Fifth, we may be tempted into producing academic bullshit, especially if we come from the humanities and social sciences. Of course, we don’t like being called academic bull-shitters as the term is offensive and suggests that our writing is pretentious and lacks rigor. Perhaps we object to the offensive term because we are afraid that our critics might just be right. Indeed, when we are accused of writing bullshit, critics might be saying that we are showing a reckless disregard for the truth or even a tendency to lie. We might be less offended, though, if we think we are being characterized as ludic or playful rather than as dishonest (see Eubanks & Schaeffer, 2008).
Certainly, non-academics regard writing as bullshit when it is abstract and vague and full of jargon. Here, academics are accused of hiding behind prose which is dense, exaggerated, obfuscating, overblown, and full of deepities as our frequent claims to profundity have been termed (see Dennett, 2013). We could write more clearly and simply but we use our academic bullshit to continue a vicious cycle which encourages students and new staff to imitate abstruse, professorial styles. These may sound strong and professional to us but are full of agentless sentences and an overabundance of opaque nominalizations. Of course, academics prefer to call their bullshit earnest and necessary because it appears to enhance each writer’s ethos and reputation. Even the claim that our published writing should be described as “entering the conversation” may itself be regarded by the public as a form of bull-shitting. Academic references to “theoretical frameworks” also provoke strong cries of “bullshit!” whether it is Marxist bullshit, feminist bullshit, deconstructionist bullshit, or something else (see Eubanks & Schaeffer, 2008, pp. 382-384). To be better writers, we must negate our bull-shitting and deepity-making tendencies.
Why Do We Academics Write?
We write because we are told that, in this managerial and neoliberal era, we have to. We must publish to earn cash for our universities and kudos and impact for ourselves and our departments. Or we, as academics or departments or universities, will perish from the face of the earth. Indeed, institutional and external calls for academics to write are part of a broader demand for greater academic accountability and productivity brought about by such managerial intrusions as the United Kingdom’s Research Excellence Framework. Academic workers now must write to produce measurable output. We have become part of the surveillance state. And we are now also aware that our data (including our words) will be relentlessly mined by giant media corporations.
But writers, including academics, write for a host of reasons. Here is a selection: To record the world as it is (or rather as we see it). To set down the past before it is all forgotten or to excavate the past because it has been forgotten. To satisfy a desire for revenge. Because to write is to take risks, and it is only by taking risks that we know we are alive. To produce order out of chaos. To delight and instruct (not often found after the early twentieth century, or not in that form). To please ourselves. To express ourselves. To paint a portrait of society and its ills. To thumb our noses at Death. To make money. To show the bastards. Because to create is human. To justify earlier failures. To spin a fascinating tale. To amuse and please the reader and ourselves. Graphomania. Compulsive logorrhea. Because we are driven to it by some force outside our control (the university, the research assessment device). To act out antisocial behaviour (punishable in real life). To master a craft. To subvert the establishment. Because the story took hold and wouldn’t let go (the Ancient Mariner defense). To search for understanding. To defend a minority or oppressed class. To speak for those who cannot speak for themselves. To expose appalling wrongs or atrocities. To record the times. To celebrate life in all its complexity. To allow for the possibility of hope and redemption. (adapted from Atwood, 2002, pp. xx-xxii)
Allowing for the possibility of redemption, of seeing writing as an act of hope, of exposing wrongs, as defending the oppressed, of speaking for others, are not that different from the following description of the New Testament and the Communist Manifesto: . . . both documents are expressions of the same hope: that some day we shall be willing and able to treat the needs of all human beings with the respect and consideration with which we treat the needs of those closest to us, those whom we love. (Rorty, 1999, pp. 202-203)
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This “hope for social justice,” according to Rorty, is “the only basis for a worthwhile human life.” What he longed for was a new text to sustain hope for “a utopia here on earth,” combining the New Testament’s yearning for fraternity and solidarity with the Manifesto’s descriptions of our inhumanity to one another (see Rorty, 1999, pp. 204-209). Rorty aligned himself with Dewey, Derrida, and Habermas as anti-authoritarian philosophers of freedom and justice, devoted to the idea of social hope, especially through participation in a democratic society and the possibilities of a utopian future (see Rorty, 1999). Writing as an act of hope for social justice is also an expression of political justice as presented in Orwell’s essay “Why I write,” where he uses the word “political” in the widest possible sense: Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after . . . Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 [when Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War] has been written, directly or indirectly,
Joan Didion “stole” Orwell’s title “Why I write.” She liked the sound of the words they share, “I, I, I,” because “in many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act” (Didion, 1976). Hence, she also steals Orwell’s main reason for writing in hoping to push others toward her way of seeing and changing the world by setting words down on paper. Furthermore, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear” (Didion, 1976).
The act of writing and the possibility of hope are bound up with the notion of community, especially democratic community. For example, Elkins, a professor of legal education, views writing as a community activity: I write and teach what I read . . . Writing and teaching have always, for me, been joined at the hip. I became a writer by way of teaching, then I found that I teach to write, teach to learn, and I ask students to join me in that effort. I write what I teach. I teach what I write. I don’t see writing being separate and apart from teaching itself. (see Elkins, 2013, p. 334)
In answer to the question “Why write?” academics could always answer that they are just doing it for the hell of it or for the fun of it and that these are reasons enough. But Elkins prefers to write to make an argument: to be part of “the culture of argument,” even to “edify and entertain.” In this way, writing provides “a sense of belonging, a sense that by writing I have made myself a part of a community . . . this claim to being a part of a community is not just rhetoric . . . The sense of being a writer is real, it brings with it a kind of life—a reason to write” (see Elkins, 2013, pp. 338-340).
This sense of belonging to a communal culture of argument reflects the view that education is an initiation into a global conversation about what we have done and what we might or should do. It is through private and public discourse that we learn to recognize and understand contributing voices to our human dialogue (see Oakeshott, 1962). Furthermore, this important reason for joining academic conversations and producing texts, justifying why we write, is also an attempt to analyze educational and socio-political problems from various critical perspectives. 3 As such, our texts should be deliberative and argumentative and help us make suggestions for action and change (see I. Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012).
Our reasons for writing as academics and post-academics and as non-academics, for engaging in communal, and not just disciplinary, conversations, are or should be connected to suggestions for change and action. Pragmatists believe that we should focus our analyses on urgent social issues such as promoting democracy, equality, freedom, and social justice. Here social change and action are meant to result from ordinary argumentative give-and-take or general conversational exchange rather than from highly theorized scholastic writing (see Rorty, 2007). Furthermore, others have argued that, as we now occupy a scholarly world with frayed disciplinary boundaries, we should use the strengths of, for example, assemblage and bricolage to develop an elastic conversation about what we should try to implement (see Kincheloe & Berry, 2004). If we try to write as humans for other humans, then we are more likely to make our writing less rotten and more accessible to a wider audience.
How We Academics (Should) Write
Why resides in how, and how is highly specific. (Rhodes)
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One of the conversations we should regularly have is about our academic writing as a daily, human, practice. For example, By reflecting on the writing processes and practices of others, I offer a lens through which researchers-as-writers can examine their own writing practices, and by so doing, expand their personal repertoires of practices and approaches for producing meaningful texts. (Cloutier, 2016, Abstract, p. 69)
Attempts to help improve academic writing are needed because we are “inept” at conveying ideas (Pinker, 2014, p. 3) and fail to bridge the gap between our perceptions of good writing and what we actually publish (Sword, 2012, p. 3). Producing meaningful (accessible? human? readable?) texts depends not just on what we write but how we write. However, becoming better writers is not just a matter of attending to how we frame or shape our writing. Neither is it just about building momentum or providing good examples or producing rich descriptions to create texts which are clear and engaging. Nor is it simply a matter of using or avoiding first person pronouns or avoiding the passive voice or alternating the length of sentences though considering all of these will help (see Sword, 2012). Technique and style are important but we also need to attend to the daily practice of writing (see Cloutier, 2016).
Issues raised when we examine daily practice include questions about where the authors get their ideas from, 5 how they write (physical location, time, rituals, process), and their experiences of getting or not getting published (see Cloutier, 2016). However, no one is going to (or should) pronounce strict rules about writing or offer themselves as models or experts. 6 What we can usefully provide are specimen case studies which illuminate how writers actually work in practice often through ordinary processes of accident, daring, inspiration, 7 luck, and wit. However, most effective and productive writers are present at their work every day and learn to make their writing practice routine and mundane (Silvia, 2007).
Of course, writing is linked to other supposedly nonwriting practices such as talking, reading, sketching, and thinking (see Cloutier, 2016). Indeed, “reading is the one necessary prerequisite for writing,” for it is one of the most basic forms of research (see Rhodes, 1995, p. 7). Writing for a scholarly (or even wider) community is, as discussed above, joining in an elastic conversation which requires that we know what others have said and are saying. Here, the why of writing directly affects the how of participating in any discourse community. Apart from actually talking with other scholars, the most important way of joining in is to read what others have written. Reading and taking notes are effective ways of getting one’s writing going, of seeing reading and noting as enmeshed processes which help writers capture ideas for their own texts. Furthermore, reading can be viewed as the lubricant that keeps academic conversations (and thus academic writing) going. It forms the basis from which most academic conversations start and the end point toward which authors aspire (that one’s work be not only published but also read). (Cloutier, 2016, p. 75)
Indeed, “reading is key . . . Reading brings confidence . . . From reading, one also acquires those concepts that reorientate thought” (St Pierre, 2019, p. 11). Here the connections between reading, writing, and thinking are crucially emphasized. We sometimes claim we write what we think, but more often, we learn and clarify what we think during the act of writing itself: “How do I know what I think until I see what I say” (attributed to E. M. Forster) and “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say” (attributed to Flannery O’Connor). The quotation from O’Connor comes nearest to the notion that the why of writing resides within the how of writing.
One way clarifying our thinking, putting order into our ideas, is to prepare rough or even detailed outlines even if eventually we abandon them. For some, “Outlining is writing, not a prelude to ‘real’ writing . . . People who write a lot outline a lot” (Silvia, 2007, p. 79). Outlining is meant to help us toward clear thinking, clearing our heads of clutter. “Clear thinking becomes clear writing: one can’t exist without the other. It’s impossible for a muddy thinker to write good English” . . . “Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident” (Zinsser, 2006, pp. 8-9).
Of course, thinking (muddy or clear) is a dangerous exercise. Indeed, Thinking is liable to be neglected both by the university and by the dominant powers that surround the university until and unless the interests of the powerful are in jeopardy. But that the university can be and is attacked even by or especially by the state suggests that thought is liable to be dangerous; or at least sensed as such by national powers. (see Barnett & Bengtsen, 2018, p. 4)
Or, put somewhat differently, “you don’t have to be Al Capone to transgress—you just have to think. In human society . . . thinking’s the greatest transgression of all. Cri-ti-cal think-ing—there is the ultimate subversion” (Roth, 1999, p. 2).
We can also cut our cluttered and muddy writing by attending to our titles: The title of an academic article offers a powerful first impression, but what impression do we want to give? That our article will be dry, technical, and straightforward? Stuffed with opaque disciplinary jargon? Or amusing, intriguing, or provocative? And what about catchy titles? Do they show us up as frivolous and unscholarly or present us as enigmatic and playful academics who like to entertain and engage listeners and readers (Sword, 2012)?
Can we write compelling titles and be acceptable to, and respected within, the academic club? Can our titles engage and inform at the same time? Sadly, informative titles often end up as long-winded, jargon-laden, and abstract. They sound “academic” but are hardly inviting to normal, human, persons. Our titles can be more “engaging and informative” even if we just make modest attempts to amuse, entertain, or capture the attention of our intended audience. This is especially so if we use our titles to ask questions, employ metaphors, or even make provocative statements (see Sword, 2012).
Outlining and writing informative and engaging titles are useful ways of clearing the clutter. But clutter and messiness also have their uses. Early messiness in the writing process, even deliberately keeping things messy, seems to enhance our thinking as we try to work out what we really think and then start to make connections among the ideas generated. This need for mulling over our thoughts helps us shape and reshape our words until we get a better sense of what we are trying to say. We can use our initial messiness to help us rewrite and edit our inchoate texts. We thus write and rewrite, shape and reshape, until we think that are our texts are persuasive or even convincing (see Cloutier, 2016).
Endorsing writing as a daily, human, practice helps us become more convincing and persuasive in the attempts we may make to achieve our main purposes, to realize the main whys of our writing. Successfully realizing our whys, our main purposes of, or reasons for, writing depends on becoming better at the hows of writing. Unless we do so, as a matter of urgency, we will never convincingly critique social ills, or promote greater human solidarity or fraternity or community or social justice. We will never be compelling enough to join the ongoing global conversation. To convince others, we need continuously to critique our own writing, to become clearer about our purposes and intentions and means mainly though editing and rewriting. After all, we humans are not just the storytelling animals but we also aspire to be critical and self-critical animals. 8
As critical and self-critical animals, we need to be able to critique the texts of others and those that we ourselves create. We need to look at all texts dynamically to see how writers as social agents (as “textors”) “texture” their texts by setting up relations between their elements. We need to analyze how and why writers choose their words and put them together to persuade us about their truth-claims and values. Here, especially, we need to be aware that one important method of texturing is the accidental or, more perniciously, deliberate use of nominalizations. For example, in the claim that the modern world is swept by change, the word “change” is used as a nominalization or entity thereby removing people (who do the actual sweeping) from the text. A more honest way of making the case would be to say that multinational corporations in collaboration with governments are changing the world in a variety of ways, thereby putting people as agents of change back in the text (see N. Fairclough, 2003).
Nominalization is, therefore, a process of obfuscation, a route toward rotten writing. We need to watch out for all attempts made by writers to empty their prose of people as agents by substituting “things that act like people,” even “fictional things” that are used as if they were “objective entities.” For example, economic concepts such as “market forces” may have motives ascribed to them, making them sound and act like humans as they demand or dictate or forbid certain actions or policies. They appear to crowd out actual people: Such abstractions take on a quasi-human role by seeming to demand obeisance from real human beings (see Billig, 2013).
Indeed, the trouble is that many academics fail to offer their constructs as if they were (only) metaphors. Instead, they offer their “reifications,” “nominalizations” and “mediatizations” as describing real, not metaphorical processes . . . writers claim that the words are doing things that they cannot possibly do. It is the same with approaches and theories. The more convinced we are of their usefulness, the more we write about them in impossible ways. (Billig, 2013, p. 142)
In attending to the how of our writing, we need to avoid the error of describing and interpreting the human world without identifying or mentioning the people who might actually make things happen.
Writing as a daily practice connects, especially, with reading and critical thinking as other important daily practices. Indeed, “discursive thought” itself arises from our readings of other texts for we don’t just write down or write up previous thoughts or notes (see Essen & Varlander, 2013, p. 408). Instead, when we write, we assemble, reassemble, and synthesize as bricoleur-textors, in a process of shaping and reshaping the material at hand. In the daily practice of writing, we academics might even imagine the process not as a tedious chore but as an activity we might actually enjoy.
For example, instead of fearing academic writing as an anxious struggle, we might welcome it as an animating experience, an adventure in thought. Moving from fear to animation in this way reshapes academic life via an epiphany so that writing becomes a renewed quest, even a source of joy (see Denzin, 2014; Dewsbury, 2014). The notion of writing as quest evokes connotations of challenge, exploration, adventure, and search admitting also that all these carry with them possibilities of different kinds of stress and tension for the writer.
More Specifically: Why and How Do I Write?
Why Do I Write?
As a post-academic, I recognize many of Atwood’s reasons for writing. Writing to know that I am still alive and to thumb my nose at death are important as I age and inevitably decline. I don’t especially write for money though I won’t say no if some comes my way.
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I like to think I subvert the establishment a little, transgress a bit, and that I occasionally speak for others. At my best I want to write as a storyteller. And that I also, at times, like Philip Roth, see “sheer playfulness and deadly seriousness as my closest friends” and write either destructively or lawlessly “for the fun of it” (see Churchwell, 2018). As a humanist and pragmatist (and by trying not to be a bull-shitter), I write to promote the possibility of human solidarity and hope: I feel that writing is an act of hope, a sort of communion with our fellow men. The writer of good will carries a lamp to illuminate the dark corners. Only that, nothing more—a tiny beam of light to show some hidden aspect of reality, to help decipher and understand it and thus to initiate, if possible, a change in the conscience of some readers. This kind of writer is not seduced by the mermaid’s voice of celebrity or tempted by exclusive literary circles. He has both feet planted firmly on the ground and walks hand in hand with the people in the streets. He knows that the lamp is very small and the shadows are immense. This makes him humble. (Isabelle Allende, 1993)
Allende’s writing as an act of hope evokes Rorty’s pragmatist vision for “a utopia here on earth” sustained by notions of solidarity but fully aware that man’s inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn (see Rorty, 1999, pp. 204-209). For me, human writing is always an attempt to connect with human readers, to achieve even more adventurous couplings, to suggest that we experiment with more creative ways of being human, to make (even) our academic stories actually sound human. (adapted from Badley, 2019, p. 9)
Furthermore, I see philosophy and writing, like Dewey, as a way of contributing to the ongoing conversation about political and social action and, after Rorty, as choosing sides in that conversation to promote radical change. By adopting a pragmatic approach and stance, and by being interested rather than disinterested, I hope to contribute to programs of action for change (see Badley, 2015; Rorty, 2007).
Overall, why do I continue to write now, now that I am an academic no more? One reason is that I write now because I have entered another sort of life (see Badley, 2014), a post-academic sort of life (see Badley, 2019), where I can continue with my own playful and serious adventures in reflecting and thinking, in essaying and writing as methods of inquiry. My post-academic sort of life helps me become a counter-life writer, a performer who can adopt different roles to suit any stance I want to add my small voice to ongoing conversations. This is the approach adopted by the playful and pragmatic, yet serious, Montaigne in his retirement from the anxieties of public office (see Badley, 2015).
And How Do I Write?
The short answer is “falteringly” and “variously” because I write as flawed conversationalist, democrat, humanist, and pragmatist but not as epistocrat (often defined as one who supports rule by the knowers rather than by ordinary citizens) or as post-humanist. I claim to have served my apprenticeship (including that of blocked writer) but I do not profess mastery because I am still learning and trying to improve. I see my writing as knowledge-in-the-making even though I am not as skilled as some in using writing to learn what I know rather than to state what I think I know. I write from my own shaky stance which itself shifts with each new point of view. And I challenge my very aims and goals each time as I critique myself and others. I do know that my method of writing, my how, may be so eclectic and even rambling that it may be challenged by others as lacking focus. All I aspire to is a modest significance which others might attack as shallow. And, as I attempt to write as clearly and simply as possible, I know that I might be regarded as simplistic. My grasp of concepts will always be challenged as the most important (democracy, equality, freedom, justice, etc.) are endlessly contestable.
I am a concept-mongering creature (Brandom, 1994) and take part in the main academic (and post-academic) business of dealing and trading in ideas that interest and intrigue me. Our human mongering is a matter of expressing ourselves in speech and writing. Furthermore, it is part of that dealing and mongering to try to make what we say and what we write as explicit as possible. If successful, we not only make our writing explicit but we also make ourselves explicit (Brandom, 1994). We try to work out how to make the words of our language and discourse communities express our conceptual meanings appropriately. We try to make explicit what we mean by the particular use of the words, phrases, and sentences we utter or write. As self-expressive beings, we use our words in our reasoning and in our representing of what we claim to understand (see Brandom, 1994). However, all of this concept-mongering is inevitably and rightly open to challenge. Our expressiveness and reflectiveness, our attempts to make connections, lead us to understand that knowledge-in-the-making is always a matter for further contestation and debate (Badley, 2009).
I have other hows of writing for I also write as assembleur, bricoleur, blue-collar writer, critic, essayist, fabricator, funster, maker, scholar, shaper, scriptor, and textor among others. In these latter roles, I like the idea of being a textor who weaves a “pleated text,” a scriptor who alters the boundaries between academic writing, creative writing, and autobiography (see Richardson, 2002). Here again Roth is a useful exemplar for he claimed that just as his fiction was referred to as autobiography, so his autobiography was regarded as fiction. Hence, he decided to let others decide what it was or wasn’t (see Churchwell, 2018).
As a post-academic writer, I see myself as a wanderer or nomad who crosses boundaries (including disciplinary boundaries), an experimenter, and a trial and error-ist (for to wander is to err is to make mistakes and is, I hope, to learn from them). As a boundary-spanner, I see with my own eyes, speak in my own voice, write with my own hands, and think with my own mind as I negotiate with others (the quick and the dead) as co-writer and co-laborer. My writing is therefore an experiment in reflecting, speculating, and thinking; playing with thinking; disrupting of thinking; serious playing with concepts; and making of new concepts. It is a bricolage made out of new and old concepts, deconstructed and reconstructed, made and remade, shaped and reshaped. As wanderer, I claim also to be an action researcher, to see my experiments and trials and errors as both research and action or at least as inquiry and suggestions for action. I see action research and post-academic writing as members of an extended family of inquiring activities and continuing conversations (see Winter & Badley, 2007).
And I am a scrabbler for concepts and words who becomes a scribbler to set down words first for myself and then a scribe trying to mend my sentences to write for others. Scrabbling and scribbling help me address important issues and create text while scribing is writing for transaction, writing for audience. Next, I am a scrubber engaged in scrapping words and scraping sentences clean. This entails screening and scrutinizing paragraphs to fix them. As scribbler and scribe, I seek membership of the academic club by mastering its rules. But while being concerned about writing for my peers, I recall the advice that “the true writer always plays to an audience of one” (Strunk & White, 1959/2009, p. 84).
If we accept this apparently frivolous approach to academic writing, then mastering the rules may also suggest ways in which we may want to challenge and critique them. Like Hamlet, we could put an antic disposition on to resist authoritarianism and power. Like Hermes, the god of science, technology, and writing, we could adopt the ruses and tricks of writing to subvert oppression. Overall, we academic scribblers and scribes might agree that “Writing represents (in every sense of the word) enjoyment. It plays enjoyment, renders it present and absent. It is play . . .” (Derrida, 1976, p. 312). And when we see even academic writing as play, we resist attempts at closure (Badley, 2011).
Why and how do I write? Because I’m a humanist and because I try to write like a human . . . and because I know that both humans and humanism need to change and to improve, to be reconstelated and rethought: Today’s humanism is overdue for a radical rethinking . . . reconstelating Said’s democratic criticism with Derrida’s humanism-to-come where the aim is the creation of a self-critical community which is also open to the other. This recognizing of the other already within should lead to “a more conscientious—more viable—other kind of being in community with each other” (see Karavanta & Morgan, 2008, p. 17).
I share the view that qualitative researchers and writers should seek to address political and social issues by promoting such (admittedly contested) concepts as democracy, equality, freedom, and solidarity (see Denzin, 2014). Denzin argues for a fruitful dialogue which could be achieved through a gradual reweaving of individual or communal beliefs and desires. In this way, fruitful dialogue becomes a conversational exchange between writers and members of a wider public (see Badley, 2015; Rorty, 2007). Qualitative writers should continue to argue for their colleges and universities to be publicly regarded as places where they can vigorously promote a good life grounded in democracy and social justice. Of course, as part of this conversation, any suggestions or calls for action should be seen as experiments and not as final solutions. Indeed, qualitative researchers should urge their own institutions to become pragmatic universities which, based on such concepts as emancipation, freedom, and justice, would help sustain a free and open society (see Badley, 2016).
Furthermore, this suggests using fruitful dialogue to promote a view of society as one which is held together by our agreeing, in effect, to make justice the first virtue (see Rorty, 1998). I don’t think that any blue-collar qualitative researchers or writers would have any problems with this formulation. We will only make our dialogue with others in the democratic and fruitful ways that Denzin urges if we become less formal and pretentious and more simple and demotic. To speak and write to other human beings, even academics, we need to learn to speak and write human to move away from what Wright Mills called the academic pose toward a less stiff blue-collar approach (see Badley, 2016).
Writing human prose and engaging in fruitful dialogue also mean rejecting much of what the corporate, neoliberal academicwritingmachine would have us become (see Henderson, Honan, & Loch, 2016). Rejecting the machine, I now try to write my soft post-academic stuff more for my own amusement (like Derrida) than for the managerial demands of some research excellence framework (as most beleaguered U.K. researchers must do). I write from my own distorted, idiosyncratic, flawed, and wonky perspective as an “I.” As such I don’t really count and don’t qualify because my “outputs” don’t matter to the “neocons.” If I publish my soft texts, then I do so for a wider community of readers rather than for a hard-core cadre of research adjudicators. “Academics need to publish . . .” (Henderson et al., 2016, p. 9), but we soft post-academics don’t.
We are post- and past-formal assessment. We continue to work as scriptors, as boundary-spanners, and as textors who compose by weaving new texts from the threads of other texts (see Badley, 2011). As (past-it) post-academics, we are (too?) slow and (too?) soft scholars, still making connections, still experimenting, still learning, still playful and serious, still assembling and reassembling. We continue to build our own sorts of post-academic lives as we connect and disconnect with other assemblers and dis-assemblers irrespective of our attachment to the academicwritingmachine (see Henderson et al., 2016).
We post-academic scrabblers, scribblers, scriptors, scrubbers, and serious funsters (and serial punsters) must also ask our transgressive questions of the AcademicConferenceMachine (Benozzo et al., 2019). Here we should recall that in human institutions such as the university or the academic conference, “thinking’s the greatest transgression of all . . . Cri-ti-cal thinking . . . the ultimate subversion” (see Roth, 1999, p. 2). As textors, especially, we should be wary of producing what the AcademicConferenceMachine seems to require—new knowledge as neoliberal intellectual capital (Benozzo et al., 2019). Our contributions, assuming we can get funding to attend from our managerial masters, could or should be attempts to weave non-standard, yet accessible, texts to keep the fruitful human dialogue alive. We could and should strive, even as serious funsters, to be free-writing scriptors rather than controlled academic-writing-machinists.
Finally: Why and How Do I Write?
I am one of those “always—imprecise writers” who begin with and write from their doubts. “That’s why they write, isn’t it?” (Fresán, 2017, p. 502). Or “To maintain the state of doubt and to carry on systematic and protracted inquiry—these are the essentials of thinking” (Dewey, 1910/1991, p. 13).
And, a word of advice to such of my hearers as may happen to be professors. I am allowed to use plain English because everybody knows that I could use mathematical logic if I chose . . . I suggest to young professors that their first work should be written in a jargon only to be understood by the erudite few. With that behind them, they can ever after say what they have to say in a language “understanded of the people.” In these days, when our very lives are at the mercy of the professors, I cannot but think that they would deserve our gratitude if they adopted my advice. (Bertrand Russell, n.d.)
So, finally . . . Why do I really write now? For the serious fun of it, for the enjoyment. And how do I write now? Playfully and seriously—while remembering Russell’s advice to use language which can be understanded of the people. O lucky post-academic man . . . for I can try to be serious and playful without thinking that being obtuse would make me sound smarter (see Ghodsee, 2016). 10 Yet all I produce is a bit of autobiography, a mystory, another sort of life, a verbi-age, a playful bricolage of words, a “piecemeal superflux” of reused materials, “pieced and patched and recycled” (see Mullan, 2018). Here we all need to remember that “to write perfect prose is neither more nor less difficult than to lead a perfect life” (see Blanshard, 1954, p. 69). But we can continue learning to write better by reading, by doing, by experimenting, by setting down what we think we know and understand and by keeping the conversation going (see Badley, 2009; Yoo, 2017).
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.