Just Writing

Machers and Schmoozers

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 14:45:06 GMT

Robert Putnam, in his book Bowling Alone (2000), told of the breakdown of connections across American communities. People were no longer joining bowling teams, but bowling alone. People still made things – they were still ‘machers’ – but the skills of connecting had falling away – there were fewer ‘schmoozers’. Machers and schmoozers, or maching and schmoozing, are activities academic writers know about. Sitting alone at a keyboard trying to write something, this is the work of the macher. It can be a lonely business, as the CRAC Report said in 2023 (https://www.ukri.org/publications/crac-vitae-doctoral-training-in-the-arts-and-humanities-report/). But going to conferences, giving or receiving advice, editing the work of other people, being a good colleague – these are all schmoozing activities, or ‘networking’, if you prefer that word. Maching and schmoozing are both vital for academic writing (as they are for a good society, as Putnam noted), and it is worth thinking about our own skills at each end of that spectrum. Sheine and Julian talk about both in this episode.

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Essays and Assignments, Complex and Simple, with Su Matthan

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 12:00:37 GMT

We have a guest in this episode, Su Matthan, and we talk about the differences between essays completed at school and assignments completed at university, some of the challenges of research ethics forms, and the challenges of making complicated things simple. And writing with both hands. All of this is in a context of people learning together, more than each person learning for themselves. Academic writing is a social activity, however much it also includes a lot of solitary work.

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Proper Pride, Proper Humility

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 08:09:19 GMT

You’re likely to experience some pride as an academic writer. Seeing your name on an article or a book, having a positive response to something you’ve written. And you’re likely to experience some enforced humility as an academic writer. The withering reviews, the failed publication proposals. Here, we talk about the ‘virtuous’ pride, ‘proper pride’, the things we should be proud of (the publications, the positive responses), and the ‘bad’ pride, the things we may be tempted to be proud of but shouldn’t (the publications which simply attack people, the unoriginal piece dressed up in new clothes). It’s like that with humility, too. Peer review often humbles us, even if it helps us improve our writing, and we should never think our writing is (always) going to transform the world: proper humility means understanding the limits of our (nevertheless valuable) work. Being negatively reviewed after publication is also humbling, but perhaps even more humbling is not being read at all, being ignored. Enjoy the ‘good’ pride and accept the ‘good’ humbling moments; try to avoid the ‘bad’ pride (often ego-driven) and try to survive the humiliations. It’s all part of an academic writer’s life.

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After the Party

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 17:36:00 GMT

Last time, the 50th episode, so a party to celebrate. At least, one was deserved. So now it is after the party. Annie Pirrie, an excellent researcher who did a great deal of contract research, wrote the reports and articles out of each project. However, afterwards, she thought ‘but what about this, or that?’ Annie said that she often wrote her most interesting, quirky and original articles after the main project. That’s an interesting idea. ‘After’ is a good time to think, to recover, to re-calibrate, to re-fuel, to rest. If you are bereaved, many people say you should not make big decisions. Perhaps the same goes for writing. When you finish a big project, perhaps a book or a thesis, you should perhaps not go straight onto the next project. Instead, you should think, contemplate, perhaps do a small quirky bit of writing. Or perhaps reading – reading books you might otherwise not read, reading novels, biographies, histories, or other materials. When Julian has researched solitude, he has asked when the best times are for solitude, and many people – children and adults – said, ‘after’, the day after Christmas, the day after a celebration, the hours after a sporting event. Solitude is often experienced ‘after’, and solitude is a good place to think original thoughts about writing. Go on: enjoy the afters.

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Our 50th Episode: Please Allow Me To Introduce Myself

Sat, 17 Jan 2026 16:13:08 GMT

This is the 50th episode of Just Writing, and I guess it’s time to introduce ourselves. Well, to talk about ‘introductions’ in academic writing. How to set out your stall, how to get people excited or at least emotionally-engaged in your writing. You never get a second chance to make a first impression.

An introduction to a piece of academic writing will vary from a paragraph or two in an article, to a whole chapter in a book. But we usually start with who we are and why we are here. The ‘who?’ might include personal details: it has become more popular to describe the author’s identity, in order to clarify what biases or advantages they may have, but the personal details may simply refer to previous research on the theme. And the ‘why?’ may include why the research came about, what the intentions of the author are, and so on. Most introductions are written after the rest of the article, chapter or book, but some writers see the introduction as their motivation for the rest of the task, and in that case it may be written first.

What do we include in the introduction? A guide to the writing to come, and at least a hint at the writing’s conclusion and hoped-for significance – what comes next. What do we leave out? We should avoid over-claiming, or writing condescendingly about other authors or our readers.

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Honey at the Core

Sun, 07 Dec 2025 13:29:18 GMT

We want to talk about writing in other languages. The majority of journal articles in the journals we’re involved with, and two of the books we’ve edited, have had the majority of chapters written by authors for whom English is an additional language. Julian’s own father was German, who wrote his doctorate in his fourth language (French) and then worked and published in his fifth language, English. Some of the greatest writers in English have been writing in an additional language: Joseph Conrad, who was Polish and born in Ukraine, is an excellent example. So we don’t get all high and mighty when it comes to writers in languages other than their mother tongues.

In a previous podcast, we talked about how ‘academic’ is itself an additional language, so all writers, whatever their home language is, will have to learn to write ‘academic’. AI does a good job of converting text (from any language, including non-academic English) into ‘academic English’, but it is a very bland style. We prefer the character in writing by real people, with the distinctive features of their own culture, including their other languages. As readers, that is, we are interested in the core of the work, and the surface features just give it more character and more authenticity. We have to remember this, when marking student work or reviewing professional academic work. There is honey at the core.

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A Licence to Disagree

Sun, 16 Nov 2025 12:39:25 GMT

We want to talk about civil disagreement. We don’t always agree, and we need to know how to disagree well, in academic writing. (If we all agreed, there would be no need to write anything more.) Being disagreeable is a skill, perhaps an art, and it is better to have a creative disagreement than to have a feud.

What about starting and ending disagreements? To start a disagreement, we first need to understand, to be receptive to, to appreciate, the view that we will be disagreeing with. That gives us a licence to disagree. Like James Bond has a licence to kill: that sort of licence. And how do we end a disagreement (in a piece of academic writing)? We can either end it with a resolution. That is like the dialectics of the Ancient Greeks, or the 19th century Germans, where every thesis has an antithesis, ending in a synthesis. If that’s possible, that’s fine. But the more common way to end a disagreement is to leave room for it to continue, even if that is a little uncomfortable. That is an example of dialogue or conversation: deciding that we’ve tried to understand and appreciate the other point of view, and saying there’s more to be said. As there usually is, if we keep on thinking.

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After-times

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 08:50:07 GMT

Researching with young people, Julian found how valuable ‘after-times’ are. The day after a birthday, the time after a big sporting event, the day after Christmas or another public festival. Adults talk about the time after their children leave home, after weddings, and so on. What about the time after a piece of academic writing is complete, a paper or book manuscript or thesis submitted to a journal, publisher, or examiners? What does that feel like? We discuss the mixture of feelings such as euphoria, relief, idleness, and hope – amongst others – and what this tells us about writing, and moving from uncertainty to certainty, from being ‘trapped’ by a writing task to being ‘liberated’ from it. There are also the after-after times, the often depressing ‘so, is that is?’ times – interrupted, perhaps, by the next task, the next article, the next book. And so we move on.

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Research is the salt of academic life

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 16:25:58 GMT

We are changing gear, as Summer turns to Autumn. Academic writing seems to have seasons, but we’re not sure. All academics say they will work through the Summer holiday, but September is the month of regrets. ‘Holidays are time for blocks of writing’, we say. But they are not. Other things spill over – loose ends at the start of the Summer, preparation at the end, if we’re lucky enough to have no Summer-time teaching. Universities refer to ‘research leave’ (when you research) but don’t refer to ‘teaching leave’ as the time we do teaching. So research is intentionally described as ‘leave’, as a ‘holiday’. This is not good. Let’s forget about seasons, and think instead about seasoning. The writer May Sarton said that ‘solitude is the salt of personhood’ as ‘it brings out the authentic flavour of every experience’. We think research is the salt of academic life: it brings out the flavour of all our work. It keeps us curious, nosey (perhaps knowsy). Sheine and Julian may just be the seasoning we need, the Salt-N-Pepa of academic writing.

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I Never Knew!

Sun, 20 Jul 2025 10:13:41 GMT

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

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

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In Praise of Old Wives

Sun, 13 Jul 2025 10:40:34 GMT

‘Old wives tales’, such as ‘eat fish, it’s brain food’, tend to include knowledge gained through quiet observation over many years, perhaps several generations, and are spread quietly through informal social networks. How can we recognise and capture them in research? Much research is ‘hit and run’ research, where the author benefits and the people whose ideas and information are taken are ignored. This is not good, and recognising different voices, including those of old wives, is a matter of respect. With practice, we can find that the insights gained from articles and books are matched by the insights gained from those living respondents often anonymised or completely ignored by researchers. As academic writers, we can bridge the ‘official’ writings of other academics and the knowledge and understanding of those not yet present in the literature. (And old literature currently ignored in books and articles.) Old wives need praising.

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Stating the Bleeding Obvious

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 14:06:28 GMT

Our title, of ‘stating the bleeding obvious’ comes to us from the comedy Fawlty Towers, when Basil Fawlty, in response to something his wife said, announced the next contestant on Mastermind: Mrs Sybil Fawlty from Torquay, specialist subject, the bleeding obvious. What counts as ‘obvious’ in academic writing depends on context of course. And even if it is, in context, ‘bleeding obvious’, there may be good reasons to say it anyway. In anglophone academic writing, for example, having an introduction that explains what is to be said, and a conclusion that repeats what has been said, may seem repetitive and obvious. It is seen as such by German and French scholars. But English-language articles expect such obviousness. We give quite a few examples of ‘good’ obvious things to say.

There are other times when stating the obvious should be avoided. We give plenty of examples of those, too. And sometimes, if our conclusions seem to be obvious, it may be valuable to say what the opposite conclusions would be – as they are often just as obvious. Rutter et al use that technique in their book Fifteen Thousand Hours (1979). Clever.

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The Right to Write

Sun, 08 Jun 2025 08:18:38 GMT

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

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

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

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

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Climate Vanes

Sun, 18 May 2025 16:48:52 GMT

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

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

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

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

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The Hills Are Alive, With the Sound of Academic Writing

Sun, 16 Mar 2025 07:52:35 GMT

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

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

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Top Tips: The Name’s Writing, Just Writing

Sat, 22 Feb 2025 16:43:56 GMT

This time, we explore the writing tips that have been given to us by other people, that we still remember and happily pass on to others, too. There are some technical tips, some motivational ones; some related to style, some related to the impact of or assessment of our research. There is a surprising tip on making our writing recognised as more international, and an equally surprising link to James Bond. Symmetry, repetitive strain listening (©), and psychoanalysis all get in there. Let each piece of writing be a life well lived.

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Visceral Writing, with guest Gill Simpson

Sun, 12 Jan 2025 15:38:18 GMT

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

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

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Embrace the Gibberish Demon

Sun, 15 Dec 2024 16:14:51 GMT

What do you write about, when you don’t have anything to write about? Three starting points for what to write about: Oneself, perhaps, in the form of a journal, or using autoethnography/autobiography. Work, and what is important to that. Something you’ve read, or something in the world, that annoys (or that pleases) you.

But ‘not having anything to write about’ might be the result of demons. The ‘you can’t write anything of value’ demon, and the ‘last word’ demon. How do you get rid of those demons? Start bad and work your way up to good. In other words, start with gibberish – embrace the gibberish demon.

What’s the danger of not writing at all? What is means, is giving your agency to others. We really don’t want to be doing that!

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Didactic or Autonomous? With guest Adam Foxon

Sun, 01 Dec 2024 14:31:38 GMT

Adam talked about his teaching, which ranged from more didactic (with the Foundation Year students) to more autonomous (with the Master’s students), and said much the same could be said of his academic writing. His doctoral thesis was more didactic, a book chapter he wrote – related to the thesis – which was more relaxed and left room for the reader to engage more autonomously. Writing the thesis, Adam felt obliged to use a specific ‘official’ style, that attempted to show off how clever the author is, and attempted to prove something. And yet earlier work on his own master’s dissertation was guided by advice on clarity: clarity is clever because it makes your cleverness clear. So the doctoral thesis sits alone, and Adam would like to write academic texts in the future that also speak to the general public beyond the academy, including, perhaps, something on the theology of football. And more in the more open style that leaves readers more autonomous – free to engage in their own way.

In the book on the theology of football, and in other writing, Adam likes to write collaboratively, as that too opens up spaces for the reader to be more engaged. And what about the Green Children of Woolpit? You’ll have to listen to this podcast to find out.

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Reading Between the Lines, with Bob Bushell-Thornalley

Sun, 17 Nov 2024 09:40:01 GMT

Today we have a guest: Bob (Helen) Bushell-Thornalley. Her specialism is physical education and sport and her approach to academic writing is similar to her approach to physical activity: being in the moment, considering it a long game. It all started with her involvement in the 2012 Olympic Games in London. Looking back to the origin of the modern Olympic movement in Victorian times, which was stimulated by a concern about sedentariness, and a lack of military fitness. Bob’s doctorate involved spending a lot of time in the archives, not conversing with people (despite her supervisor saying she should) – or should we say ‘conversing with dead people’? She focused on the meetings and correspondence between Baron Pierre de Coubertin, a French educator and philosopher, and Dr William Penny Brookes, a GP in Much Wenlock, Shropshire, England, who was concerned with what would now be called ‘public health’ and (again, the newly-discovered) ‘social prescribing’.

Working in the archives, Bob had to isolate herself – not her usual way of being – and read the documents, especially the correspondence between these two key figures in the development of the modern Olympics. Not only reading the text, but reading between the lines, the white spaces telling her what had not been said. Bob became a better writer by becoming a better reader, listening to missing or excluded voices. Even so, academic writing still seems to Bob as indulgent, as is reading and thinking – and yet she, like all of us on this podcast, works in a university. How strange.

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Impact or Influence? Curiosity Trumps Everything

Sun, 03 Nov 2024 19:30:36 GMT

Does our academic writing have any influence on the world? Any ‘impact’ – the term used in UK assessments of research? It is hard to work out clear evidence of either impact or influence, but it’s worth thinking about how we might have such influence. After all, why are we bothering to write, if we don’t expect anyone to be influenced by what we’ve written? Curiosity trumps everything. It’s no good simply writing for the sake of making an impact (although some people seem to do that), but some influence is good to know. We can ask people (how did this influence you?), and we can look at citations. We can even do a research project corralling evidence of impact or influence. All good. But some things are right (or wrong) to do, whether or not they have impact or influence. And some things will only have impact or influence years after we’ve written them, perhaps even after we’re long gone.

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Goldilocks and the Three Edited Books

Sun, 20 Oct 2024 09:36:35 GMT

Today, we’re talking about editing. Both of us have been involved in editing a book, one a couple of years back (and currently in the middle of another editing job), the other just about finishing the first book editing job. So we’re both quite fresh to the role. And entertained, and exhausted. It wasn’t quite what we thought it would be, but we were determined to explore how an edited book – typically, a ‘handbook’ to be targeted at university libraries – can work better, or worse. Reading handbooks, before jumping into the editors’ pool, I noticed that some were overedited – the editors had such control of the contributing authors, that they seemed to have been made to submit, and the editor might as well have written the whole book themselves, and it would probably have been more interesting. At the other end of the spectrum, some edited handbooks are so loosely edited, that they are merely a collection of different (possibly really interesting) chapters with no connection to each other and no additional value in being in a book. What I liked most was one that retained the original voices of each of the contributing authors, but then added a book-level narrative (by the editor) that made the collection more than just the sum of its chapters. This was a matter of curation of the chapters, their ordering, the introduction to and if possible conclusion to the book (written by the editor), along with the index, a clear title, and so on. The gift of references, too, and a narrative flow across the book that doesn’t deny the distinctiveness of each contributor.

All of that means a lot of fluidity (not always liked by contributors, editors, or publishers, but absolutely necessary), a lot of friendly negotiation (keeping talking to people is crucial), and a lot of imagination and creativity. As a contributor, the process is not quite the same as writing an article for a journal – as you are one actor amongst a set of actors in a play, rather than being a solo performer amongst other soloists. As an editor, the process can be unexpected, and you don’t get as much credit for the work as you might have hoped, but it is a joy to see an edited book published – a collective joy, and all the more joyful for that communality.

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Happy Octopus Dungaree Writing, with Lori Hall

Sun, 22 Sep 2024 15:56:52 GMT

We have a guest today, Lori Hall, who talked about how academic writing is central to her identity. As are her happy octopus dungarees. Writing is personal, and Lori’s work with people who may not voices that have traditionally been heard in academic writing is an important reason for writing. We are not there to ‘voice’ people with unheard voices: we are there as microphones, to amplify such voices. And of course to add our own.

Lori’s personal writing – journalling that had and has an existential significance for her – developed into work for a master’s degree, which in turn developed into a book of conversations: Lincol LunART: Messages to the Man on the Moon from the Children of Lincolnshire, UK. Lori is now writing for her doctorate on day services for people with learning disabilities, with those using the services as co-researchers. The ethics of co-researching is problematic, and is worth working on. In the future, Lori hopes to turn some of this work into a textbook. Throughout, authenticity is important, as it is – or should be – in all academic writing.

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Rough but Ready

Sun, 08 Sep 2024 10:50:17 GMT

Actual language, Wittgenstein says, is not the same as the pure logical language loved by philosophers – including Wittgenstein in his earlier work. ‘The more narrowly we examine actual language, the sharper becomes the conflict between it and our requirement. (For the crystalline purity of logic was, of course, not a result of investigation: it was a requirement.) The conflict becomes intolerable; the requirement is now in danger of becoming empty. – We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!’ (Philosophical Investigations, p 46e, paragraph 107).

Having a ‘rough’ piece of writing is often seen as a long way from having a publishable piece of writing. Well, it depends on what the roughness is. If there are lots of grammatical or spelling errors or unchecked references, that is the kind of roughness that would annoy publishers (of journals or books), but correcting those things is just ‘work’. What about a roughness of ideas or arguments? That is rather different, but it is worth saying that having some internal tensions in a piece of writing might be a good thing for us as writers. Those ambiguities or tensions, a key word being used in several different ways, or key ideas left undefined, contexts left undescribed – all can be what will make the writing come alive. Read your rough writing, and the very roughness, like the friction that Wittgenstein finds in language, may give you the stimulus to say something really interesting. Comment on these roughnesses, especially at the start of end of the piece of writing, and suddenly you have a self-aware piece of writing. Good.

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Share Nicely: Back to the Rough Ground!

Sun, 14 Jul 2024 10:07:46 GMT

Research is a process of investigation leading to new insights, effectively shared. We’d like to talk about sharing. Share nicely, as many of us were told as kids. How do we share nicely, in academic writing? One way is not to write, but to podcast. How did we get into podcasting, and why? Sharing. This is a different kind of podcast, as it was recorded as part of a conference, and there are questions from the audience. There is also, therefore, an even less smooth soundscape. But, as Wittgenstein said, the ‘crystalline purity of logic’ was slippery ground:

We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!

Next time, we’ll be talking more about the rough ground, and perhaps Wittgenstein. In the meantime, here’s a very short, rough, podcast.

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The Sheet That Perishes?

Sun, 07 Jul 2024 13:22:56 GMT

Virginia Woolf, in Jacob’s Room, has a conversation between two people about writing. More permanent, published, writing is important – it seems more certain. Here is the conversation:

Can I never now, share, be certain? Am I doomed all my days to write letters, send voices, which fall upon the tea-table, fade upon the passage, making appointments, while life dwindles, to come and dine? Yet letters are venerable …, for the journey is a lonely one, and if bound together by notes … we went in company …

[P]eople have tried. Byron wrote letters. So did Cowper. For centuries the writing-desk has contained sheets fit precisely for the communications of friends. Masters of language, poets of long ages, have turned from the sheet that endures to the sheet that perishes, pushing aside the tea-tray, drawing close to the fire …, and addressed themselves to the task of reaching, touching, penetrating the individual heart.

So ephemeral writing is valuable too, and personal letters may in any case be ‘certain’ in the way that they can touch the recipient’s heart. The heart is enduring, as Celine Dion almost sang. And we should think about that personal quality, also, when we do academic writing. That should be ‘touching’ too, and personal, in appropriate ways. Academic writing can sometimes even be fun. One of us snuck their poems into a serious academic text, and so far, no-one seems to have noticed.

Keep the affective, keep the joy, keep the energy, in academic writing, if you can.

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Travel May Actually Broaden the Mind

Sun, 30 Jun 2024 10:58:36 GMT

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Next try fail better two

Sun, 23 Jun 2024 10:55:39 GMT

Mistakes, I’ve made a few. We all have. But surely not in our academic writing? There too. This is a podcast about mistakes, missing things, errors, corrections, and all the rest. The actor David Duchovny has a whole podcast series on ‘failing better’ (https://lemonadamedia.com/show/fail-better-with-david-duchovny/), with that title (like ours) taken from Samuel Beckett.

Sometimes, mistakes or crossings out are revealing. Freud said that all errors were guides to the subconscious, but even without that, they can be guides. One written response to a question (in one of our pieces of research) started with a positive statement crossed out, and replaced with a negative statement. Which was the ‘real’ position of the respondent? Was the first the ‘true’ position, and the second the position ‘for the public’? Or did the respondent simply correct their first statement? Perhaps both were true? These odd responses, the bumps in the road, the ‘missing bits’, are all interesting. And they need to be kept in academic writing, as far as we can. Whether or not we observe mistakes, or make them ourselves, other people will be able to misinterpret what we have written – and it’s worth being ready for that.

There is even a joy, or at least a creative opportunity, in correcting – or developing, or pushing further – a slightly iffy piece of work we might write, in the next piece of work. And there may be whole chunks of literature simply missing from the bookshelves, waiting to be written about. (Loneliness in school was one such gap, one that is now being filled in a little.)

Talking of joy, joy itself seems to be missing from the research literature in our discipline (education). Emotions – the education of the emotions, and the emotional aspects of education – are somewhat taboo, or are only dealt with pathologically, or therapeutically. Let’s get the joy back into academic writing. Or would that be a mistake?

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Pretending to be Me

Sat, 25 May 2024 10:03:56 GMT

The actor Tom Courtney wrote a book based on the writings by the poet Philip Larkin. Both actor and poet were and remain associated with Hull. Courtney’s book is called Pretending to be Me. Is that what we do when we write? Even academic writing? In this podcast, we think about the masks we wear, or the masks we are, perhaps. Is it true that ‘all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely Players’, as Shakespeare said. Merely players?

In this podcast we talk about what sort of masks we wear that are good, and what sort of masks we might wear that are not so good, in order to complete academic writing. And in the end, we agree that all the world’s a book, and all the academics merely players, and that’s not so bad after all.

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Not an Imposter Any More

Sat, 25 May 2024 09:49:15 GMT

Today we have another guest: Dr Nyree Nicholson, or Bishop Grosseteste University. Nyree talks about an experience most academics have had: feeling like an imposter. Imposter syndrome is so common, people who don’t suffer from it are considered odd. For Nyree, it was getting published – it still is getting published – that takes away that feeling of imposter syndrome, even if just for a while.

With the enthusiastic support of her master’s supervisor, Ioanna Palaiologou, Nyree got an interesting methodological element of that dissertation published in a journal. Since then, writing chapters is Nyree’s preferred genre. But the key for her is a sense of collaboration. Indeed, talking about the piece of academic she’d most like to write in the future, that would be a book about collaboration. Collaboration in professional practice, for example between parents and professionals supporting children and young people, and collaboration between academics.

So we talk about collaboration, about writing, and about overcoming imposter syndrome.

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Paying the Rent: it’s a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful thing

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 15:08:19 GMT

Academic writing and paying the rent often seem at odds with each other, at different ends of the Maslow hierarchy of needs. Yet academic writing is one way to pay the rent. In the short term, a very bad way. In the medium and long term, somewhat better. Academic writing is in general a long term thing – taking a lot of time to do and, we hope, lasting a long time after it’s done – this seems appropriate. But what are the best ways of thinking about the relationship between academic writing and paying the rent?

Think about photos we take on holiday and at special events. These photos make sense of holidays and events, we curate the photos and in doing so, curate ourselves. And photos give others a chance to understand what we’ve done. Academic writing is quite a bit like that. It creates a managed, curated, you, a thought-through version of what you think and do as an academic. It’s a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful thing.

And, to pay the rent itself, academic writing can generate royalties, payments for photocopying through the ALCS (the authors’ licensing and collecting society alcs.co.uk), and library-lending payments through the PLR system (currently limited by the cyber-attack on the British Library, who manage it). For most academic writers, these payments are small-fry, although they may pay the rent on a holiday home or something. The bigger ‘payment’ is the effect of academic writing on an academic career: that’s the big thing.

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Donkey Sanctuaries

Tue, 12 Mar 2024 16:34:20 GMT

Some academic writing stands alone, some actively seeks to join in a conversation. Both can be valuable, but in this podcast, we’re both really encouraging a more conversational approach. The idea comes from the Ancient Greek philosopher Plato, who wrote about writing in his book Phaedrus, a conversation with a man of that name. ‘You know, Phaedrus’, the book says at one point, ‘writing shares a strange feature with painting’. This is the ‘standalone’ type of writing, and Plato thinks it is not really ‘alive’.

The offsprings of painting stand there as if they are alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain most solemnly silent. The same is true of written words. You’d think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever. When it has once been written down, every discourse roams about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no less than those who have no business with it, and it doesn’t know to whom it should speak and to whom it should not. And when it is faulted and attacked unfairly, it always needs its father’s support; alone, it can neither defend itself nor come to its own support.

A more conversational type of writing is described by Plato as ‘dialectical’, the Greek word for ‘argument’.

The dialectician chooses a proper soul and plants and sows within it discourse accompanied by knowledge – discourse capable of helping itself as well as the man who planted it, which is not barren but produces a seed from which more discourse grows in the character of others. Such discourse makes the seed forever immortal and renders the man who has it as happy as any human being can be.

What about donkey sanctuaries? You’ll just have to listen. There’s Isaac Newton in there too, and mic drops.

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Fear and Loathing in Las Academia

Sun, 18 Feb 2024 07:47:28 GMT

Fear is often associated with academic writing. Sometimes we elicit fear, like moths attracted to a flame, simply to get ourselves to write: we frighten ourselves into it. Sometimes we are fearful and, instead, that stops us writing. What are these fears? Fear of failure, of course; fear of being found out; fear of not getting a contract or a promotion; fear of being rebutted or laughed at. There are ways of overcoming, mitigating, or making use of such fears, and we talk about them. Free-writing, PowerPointing, creative (ethical) use of AI, speak and transcribing, and hand-writing: all are mentioned.

There are more subtle ways in which we can block ourselves from writing. Not so much ‘I’m scared of doing it’ as ‘I’ll get around to it when I’ve done everything else’. This de-prioritising of academic writing – putting it behind all the other work (the teaching, assessment, administration, and everything else) and all the other non-work (life, friends and family, sleep) – does as much damage as the big fears. There are ways around such de-prioritising, too, and we talk about some of them. Creating times when we do prioritise academic writing can help.

Ultimately, it is not about always doing, but being. (We are human beings, after all, not human doings.) Feel the fear, and do it anyway, as one of those self-help books says.

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The power of creative critical voices

Sun, 14 Jan 2024 11:59:02 GMT

We have a guest, Philip Yeung, who talks about some of the academic writing he has done and is doing. Being critical and being creative were both important, and surprisingly similar. Both were and are also connected to leadership. Distributed leadership means listening to many voices; critical academic writing means taking account of many different voices. Being creative means doing something with those voices – developing your own theory or theoretical framework.

Just like a novelist will have many characters in the novel, but it still has one author (as the critic Bakhtin said – referring to this as heteroglossia), so, good academic writing will have many voices, each represented well by the author. We could say that typical academic writing, then, is a bit like a typical novel – many-voiced if single-authored. Philip stressed the public value of academic writing being many-voiced, critical, and creative. It responds to government and other powerful groups who often try to limit people to a single voice, a single point of view. So academic writing can give us agency in a power system. That’s a powerful message for us all!

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Fun Days

Mon, 11 Dec 2023 15:40:04 GMT

Is academic writing really fun? Honestly? Well, sometimes it can be, but – as with every academic issue – it depends what you mean, what you mean by fun. Academic writing can be a very serious business, and it is evaluated as such – in examinations, in peer review of articles and books, in assessments for promotions, and so on. Sometimes, we need an attitude of ‘I’ll just have some fun with this piece of writing’ in order to disrupt or undermine or mitigate that very seriousness. Undermining over-seriousness, certainly, while treating the activity with the right amount of seriousness of course.

But the fun in writing also depends on how seriously we take ourselves. Some academics think of themselves as so wonderful, that their writing sinks under the authors’ weighty self-regard. We need to allow our academic writing to voice other people, and not just our own wise and magnificent statements. Some authors quote other people, but you get the feeling they are only quoting the other person to make themselves look better. Such authors use other people like glove puppets – you know that the puppeteer is the real speaker, but the glove puppet is used to make it look like there’s someone else speaking. Instead, we should allow the people we quote – the other authors, the interviewees, the survey respondents – to speak for themselves. The literary critic Bakhtin said that a single novelist would put many different voices into a novel. He called this heteroglossia – being many-voice, or dialogic. If a novelist can do this with fictional characters, surely academic writers can also exhibit heteroglossia when they do their writing. And that can be fun, not least because all those voices rarely agree – with each other, or with you. That’s risky, but fun. Enjoy.

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Sometimes, Silence is Golden

Sun, 26 Nov 2023 09:21:50 GMT

T S Eliot described poetry as writing with a lot of silence on the page. How important is silence in academic writing? Academics are often generous with their words, spoken and written. Generous to the point at which people stop listening, stop reading. Often enough, beyond that point. One definition of a bore describes a person as carrying on talking after the other person has stopped listening. Academic writings should not be boring in that sense. We don’t mean that academic writers and writing should always be a laugh a minute, or should be filled with … dramatic pauses. But silence does have a role to play.

We forget that writing itself gives us silences. In ascending order of size, a comma, a semi-colon, a full-stop, a paragraph break, a section break, and a chapter break: these are all silences, pauses, that give readers time to breath and to think. (That’s why a music ‘pause’ symbol is the image for this podcast series.) Bigger silences include the gaps into which we drop those elements of what we know that we decide not to tell. In this podcast, we look at these smaller and bigger silences, along with silences of different kinds – the things we avoid saying, the things that we ‘tidy up’ or that we refrain from saying in order to speak to a wider audience.

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Golems and Persons

Sun, 29 Oct 2023 10:13:40 GMT

There’s a lot of talk about artificial intelligence. Recently in the USA, there’s been a writers’ strike, where writers for TV and films are demanding conditions on the use of artificial intelligence to replace their employment. Like the Luddites of the early nineteenth century, those on strike are not troubled by technology itself, but by the risk to their own livelihoods. That is reasonable. But what can artificial intelligence do to academic writing?

The story goes back way beyond the early nineteenth century. Back to the earliest biblical times, when it was said that Adam was made out of an inanimate lump of clay. The Hebrew word used was ‘golem’. In later times, tales were told of mystics creating a clay model, a golem, and animating it. In medieval times, tales were told of Jewish communities creating and animating such models in order to protect themselves from pogroms and persecutions. The story became popular in the early twentieth century with the short story by Rosenberg, The Golem, from 1909. Twelve years later, Karel Čapek wrote RUR (Rossum’s Universal Robots), and there we have it. Robots, dangerous machines, out of control, taking over human society.

What’s to fear, for modern academic writers? Our jobs? How good is artificial intelligence, and is it a problem if we are replaced? The lesson from all the previous tellings of the tale is, yes it is a problem, but no, it isn’t the problem we think it is. We need the mess of our lives to be there in the writing, the creativity and originality, and the capacity to dazzle. If artificial intelligence ends up doing a lot of that, then, hey, we’ll have to find something else to do, but I think it as unlikely as replacing members of our families with robots.

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Open to Possibilities

Sun, 01 Oct 2023 18:13:52 GMT

Occasionally it is worth thinking about what academic book or article you would really like to write, if you had no restrictions on your schedule and no-one telling you what you should be writing. Ten years ago, someone asked one of us what book we would really like to write. Just this year, that book was written. What is good in such an exercise is to be open to possibilities, to think imaginatively about what is important to you, or what you enjoy, or what your academic ‘fantasy’ may be. Both of us, coincidentally, have chosen books related to literature or writing, and books that are a little different, a little ‘off-centre’, perhaps, or not fitting neatly into disciplinary boundaries. A lot of such wished-for writing is ill-fitting, because the conventional pressure on academics is to writing right in the middle of a discipline. So being open to possibilities is also being open to writing between or outside disciplines.

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Twice the Power

Sun, 03 Sep 2023 12:34:22 GMT

A young man visited a rabbi, to say that they were bisexual. They were worried about how the aged rabbi would respond. The rabbi started with the unsurprising statement, ‘Young man, you should be careful’, but went on to say, ‘you should be careful, because you have twice the power of love’. The young man was impressed by that response. To have twice the power of love – or, in the language of some indigenous Americans, to be ‘two-spirit’ – is a positive take.

How is that relevant to academic writing? Well, as writers who are also speakers, I think we have twice the power of communication. This is important. Some have said that having two voices (a spoken and a written voice) is like being a ventriloquist with their dummy, or an actor and parts, a singer and stage presence. Others think of it differently. But they are two, two slightly different, slightly independent, voices, and both can be nurtured – with the written voice usually needing more care taken over it, as it carries so much further. Sometimes one of the voices can be suppressed. Some academic speak like their texts (and are incomprehensible in both formats), some write like they are not communicating at all but just writing down stuff (perhaps for their own benefit). If we can have two real, communicating, voices – one spoken, one written – then we are using our powers positively.

There is a temptation in writing to be cautious rather than careful. A hermeneutic of suspicion can make for negativity, too. So it is worth thinking about how stories can be useful in academic writing. Stories are popular starting points for academic books, and can transform one’s thinking. Examples include Laurence Smith’s The New North (with a story about a polar-grizzly bear cross), Eve Kosofsky Sedwick’s Touching Feeling (a story about a cat bringing a ‘gift’ of a bird to its own, or is it?), Claude Steele’s Whistling Vivaldi (a story about an African American man being ‘accepted’ in a white community because he whistled tune popular with white people), or – for a general audience – Banksy’s Kissing Coppers (a picture of police officers kissing).

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Include Me Out

Sun, 27 Aug 2023 18:19:57 GMT

Academic writing can exclude readers and can include readers. One piece of writing can do both. Sometimes the exclusion is intentional, sometimes unintentional. How do we include (and who do we want to include), and how, if at all, do we exclude?

We include and exclude by what we say, and by how we say it. We also exclude and include by what we don’t say, and how we don’t say it. Language is one of the most important ways of including and excluding – the style and ‘accent’ of the language as well as whether it is English or Polish or Mandarin Chinese. And when we talk, who do we ‘bring in’ the conversation, and who do we leave out? It may be surprising – it is surprising, once you start listing the people brought in and left out – who gets on the list, and who doesn’t. Do we want to be a part of that ‘club’, the people we bring in to the conversation? Groucho Marx famously said that he didn’t want to be a member of any club that would let him join. That was a bitter joke about being Jewish in twentieth century USA, but it may apply to plenty of groups. Include me in? Include me out, sometimes.

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Dogged by the Minutia

Sun, 23 Jul 2023 10:18:01 GMT

Far from being a grand announcement of brilliant ideas and findings, academic writing can end up being a frustrating experience. An experience, all too often, of being dogged by the minutia. We need to hold on to the joy of writing, whilst recognising all the minutia nipping at our ankles. Referencing comes to mind, or publisher style guides and journal requirements. There are strict word-counts, too, or different spelling conventions in different places. The minutia can act like a small stone in your shoe – such a small thing that stops you walking altogether. Try to sort out the minutia, therefore, and even take some comfort in them as almost-contemplative activities helping you re-read your work. There may even be a god of small things, and, as the Scottish saying goes, many a mickle mak a muckle: many small things make a big thing.

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Book ’Em Danno

Sun, 02 Jul 2023 09:59:48 GMT

Getting ‘booked’ can be good or bad. If the police catch you and book you, that is bad. ‘Book ’em Danno’ was a catch-phrase from Hawaii Five-O, I think. Bad. But if you are a musician or entertainer, getting booked is a good thing.

For academics, books should be seen as good, not bad. But many academics fear writing books, and think they can’t do it. We think it more possible than you might think. In this podcast, we go through some of the tricks and hints that may help. How do publishers think? How do you find a publisher? How is a book proposal written? What about contracts? The final result – your book – makes it all worthwhile. Get booked.

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Confession and Profession

Sun, 25 Jun 2023 15:19:19 GMT

Confess and profess. A bit of both. The need to have someone to support your academic writing – someone who is your ‘confessor’, if you like – is rarely mentioned, but it has been important for us. What does it take to be such a ‘confessor’? Trust is the first quality, but there are more. And academic writing has to be personal, has to be ‘of the self’. As a ‘professor’ and as a ‘professional’, we are expected to ‘profess’: to have some values, a position that is worth defending. This should come into our writing. So confession and profession, confessing and professing, are both central to academic writing, and both allow us to continue, to develop, to change over time.

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Is Honesty the Best Policy?

Sun, 18 Jun 2023 13:38:37 GMT

Is honesty the best policy? There are some pressures in academic writing to be less than perfectly honest, perhaps. For example, the chronology indicated in academic writing usually gives the impression that literature comes first, then methodology and methods, then empirical data, then analysis and conclusions. But often these all grow alongside each other, sometimes with methodology coming last. So we give a false, or an unreasonably ‘neat’ picture of research. Geoffrey Walford edited a book on educational research, which showed some of the reality of educational research: that was an eye-opener for me, but I still give the ‘traditional’ impression. It’s a bit like holiday photos and those on social media: everyone looks happier than they do in real life, making the observer think their own life is less good. We also talk about how our uses of interview transcripts tend to push the speakers to say what we want them to: we have become ventriloquists, rather than conversationalists. Would it help to be more honest? Well, we explore the importance of intention, and of trying to describe the real world. In the end, we come to the idea that honesty is a good policy, but sincerity is a better policy.

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Rhetoric and Reality

Tue, 30 May 2023 07:18:57 GMT

When it comes to academic writing, is there a difference between rhetoric and reality? There’s certainly a few differences between what people say and what is actually expected. One surprise for me was a journal editor saying to me ‘we like “think pieces” in our journal’: the surprise was that I thought thinking was what we all did. Similarly, we are told to be clear in our writing, but sometimes clarity is seen as simplistic, and journals reward obscurity. Peer review rarely feels like it is coming from a ‘peer’: more often if feels like it is coming from a predator. And we tell ourselves (e.g. through the UK’s Research Excellence Framework) that we are mostly ‘world-leading’, when we’re not: really, we’re not. However, the origin of ‘rhetoric’ is not flim-flam and dishonesty, but the language of persuasion, the language of leadership. So good rhetoric is, it has to be, tied to reality.

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Courageous diversity

Sun, 14 May 2023 14:04:42 GMT

Diversity’s big and popular. That’s good. In academic writing, it’s big, as it is in the rest of life. Sometimes, though, diversity is a rather thin concept. Celebrating diversity by sharing some food or music or clothing is good, but it is not very substantial. Significant diversity – related, for example, to gender, or class, or ethnicity, or ‘race’ – is associated with inequalities, and if we celebrate diversity without addressing, overcoming, or at least mitigating those inequalities, we will be demonstrating ‘thin’ diversity. What we’d like to do is to practice courageous diversity, the diversity that recognises and tries to overcome inequalities. That’s hard to do. It takes courage. Courage is not often talked about in academic writing, other than the courage simply to write, or the courage to submit a piece of writing to peer review. (That does indeed take courage!) But the bigger courage is the courage to get stuck in to real inequalities, and real diversity, in our writing.

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Firsts

Sun, 07 May 2023 08:57:53 GMT

There’s always a first. A first bit of writing that someone likes, a first piece of writing in a school magazine, a first assignment completed and handed in, a first article, a first book. What are our firsts, and what does that tell us about academic writing? Firsts and the response to them (including our own responses) make for a good career in academic writing. The firsts lead on to the seconds. However, oddly, the things that we think of a ‘wrong’ with the firsts may also help get us to write the seconds.

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We don’t have favourites (but we do)

Tue, 11 Apr 2023 14:53:58 GMT

Having a favourite book is like having a favourite child. It’s horrible to the other books/children, but most of us still have favourites, at least, favourites just now. So, as this podcast is about just writing, we’ll allow ourselves some favourites. Favourites of our own academic writing (either for the content, the title, the influence, or anything else) and favourite academic writing by other people. It’s a motley collection, and one that helps us understand what is important to each of us, whether the writing itself, its influence, its value, how often we return to it, or the pleasure of individual sentences. And we’ve never come across two people who have exactly the same favourites.

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The Bash Street Kids

Thu, 30 Mar 2023 16:48:06 GMT

Both of us read the Beano when we were young, and both of us enjoyed the Bash Street Kids and other heroines and heroes of that comic. What lessons did we learn, that have influenced our careers and lives since then? A surprising number. And there are even links back to William Blake (who combined visual art with poetry) and forward to Shaun Tan’s The Arrival.

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In and Out of Focus

Sun, 19 Mar 2023 17:20:57 GMT

When long-term prisoners leave prison, they usually find they have lost their long-sight. Years of looking at cell walls and not at distant objects means the muscles in their eyes no longer work for long sight. The same can happen to us as researchers. We can spend so much time focusing on a very narrow topic that we lose the ability to see further. To keep the research – and life – fresh and in proper perspective, we need to be able to keep re-focusing. Sometimes it is important to focus on nearby things, at other times it is more important to engage with other topics and even other disciplines. Good academic writing should keep going in and out of focus, and we need to keep exercising these refocusing muscles.

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On not being boring

Fri, 10 Mar 2023 17:44:29 GMT

Being boring – in spoken conversation or in writing (which is also a part of a conversation) – is something familiar to us. We’ve all felt trapped by a boring conversationalist at an event, and have all been bored by a particular article or book. If we’re honest, we’ve probably also managed to be boring ourselves, sometimes, on a bad day What does it mean to be a boring speaker or – for this podcast – writer? Usually, being boring means carrying on conversing after the other person has stopped listening or concentrating. It therefore isn’t the topic or the person being boring, on their own: it is a result of the relationship between the two people in the conversation. This is why we need to listen, as writers. Listen to our (hoped-for) readers, listen to what questions readers might come up with: we need to see our writing as part of a conversation, and one in which we show as much interest in our readers as we do in the topic and in how much we know.

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Pausing, listening and surprises

Fri, 03 Mar 2023 17:40:54 GMT

Surprises. Every conversation, every lesson, every book is characterised by surprise. We need to pause now and again, and listen for the surprise. Whereas articles are a bit like puzzles or games, with a strict set of rules and a ‘solution’ in terms of a rather fixed genre, books are much more open-textured and varied and much more conversational, in the sense of being in a conversation with the reader. That leads to more surprises. One surprise Julian had was finding that he had written a book, without any intention to write a book. ‘Just write’ is about the idea that we do just write, all the time, as academics (and as teachers, and so on), and a book is ‘just writing’. Of course, it’s more than that, too.

In a conversation – a real, surprising, conversation – we have to pause now and again, to let things sink in, and to listen to what the other person says. (Perhaps to listen to ourselves, too!) The ‘pause’ is as important in academic writing as it is in music. That’s why the musical symbol for a pause is the icon of these podcasts. It is in the pause that insights can appear. As Leonard Cohen says, everything is cracked: that’s how the light gets in. For me, a course in listening, after I’d been a schoolteacher for several years, was a turning point in understanding the profession. Instead of thinking of the teacher as a professional talker, I understood it instead as being a professional listener.

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Essays and articles: what would Darwin say?

Fri, 09 Dec 2022 16:51:39 GMT

In this show, we are talking about the origins of our own academic writing. Starting with ‘essays’ in school, and ‘assignments’ at university, this carries on to articles. Books sometimes come out of these products, but often, a book comes from other places. One of the principles of writing essays and articles is to plan, plan, plan. But some people don’t plan. What would Darwin say?

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The magic of writing: you’re alive!

Fri, 21 Oct 2022 14:34:17 GMT

In this show, we start a conversation on academic writing. There is something magical about writing, with the written word having a life of its own, separate from the writer. Children learn this, and find it magical, and academic writers learn it again - and should find it almost as magical. Academic writing lives between the author and the reader, and brings people together in conversation.

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