I want to scream: Pleasures, problems and pitfalls of writing

No, this isn’t me trying to be creative and coming up with a ‘sexy’ title for my blog entry – this was the title of a seminar I attended today hosted by the Social Science Postgraduate Students Forum. It was interesting for a number of reasons. Firstly, the facilitator (yes it was facilitated – lots of introspective, reflective, participation required) insisted that in order to complete a PhD one of the most important things you need are friends. He raised the very privatized nature of writing and the importance of understanding the ‘social relations of production’ i.e. writing production – that demanded, for your sanity, good interpersonal and social relations with friends who could bring you out of this very private experience. Secondly, it was interesting to me as an ‘academic literacies expert’ (so named by the facilitator, after my little reflective blurb about what writing means to me and what my problems with writing might be) someone who wears two hats – one where I have ‘studied’ academic writing from a perspective that is really critical of the power and ideological dynamics that perpetuate the status quo through the recognition and legitimisation of particular kinds of writing in higher education – the other where I am the ‘student’, the ‘novice’ writer, trying to get in to the academic world and my discipline and be acknowledged through my own writing. And I have realised that understanding that there are power dynamics and structural aspects at play in the game of academic writing, does not make it any easier to write, as many of my blog entry have attested to.



So from the point of view of the academic literacies expert me, I found the whole seminar fascinating on many levels, even though some of them I didn’t really understand. At a meta-analytical level – the seminar seems like what I might have imagined a writers’ circle could be like. People talking about their problems with writing and wiser, ‘older’, more experienced writers offering supportive advice; acknowledging the difficulty that EVERYONE experiences with writing. But also very much a tips and tricks kind-of-approach, what my supervisor Mary Lea might say was a combination of a academic literacy skills and socialisation approach to writing in higher education. Such approaches aren’t necessarily bad – it’s a useful exercise to know what the structure of a PhD should looks like, to be aware of your audience, to understand the disciplinary requirements and stylistic requirements and the value of good structure and coherence in your thesis. But, and I guess there the “literacy as social practice” me kept thinking so what? Someone in their final year of the PhD, in what everyone here likes to call the ‘write-up stage’, when commenting about the audience of her PhD said that she wanted the examiner to find her work (aka writing) interesting and well written. My response was – but what’s interesting to you, might not be interesting to someone else, how you define good writing, might not be someone else’s definition – how do you know that your examine will share your views? I also kept thinking…as this academic literacies ‘expert’ was I really able to view the whole event using an academic literacies framework? So was I able to pick up the subtleties and dislocations of different frameworks of writing operating in the room? Was I being true to my conceptual home and would I make my fellow academic literacies comrades proud by asking particular questions or raising particular points?

What I do realise from the whole experience, identity positioning excluded, is that nobody challenged the way things are in academic writing in higher education. Nobody was challenging the status quo and saying but surely 'they' should accommodate the way I write. The session was more about; tell me what they want and how I can make sure I give it to them in exactly the way they want it– while providing a supportive platform for expressing the pain, agony and total despair the writing process invokes. It was about the process, without challenging the validity of that process, assuming that the process itself was value free and all that was required to make it through the other side was the necessary cognitive ability to grasp some core skills (oh and of course friends). Maybe I did do my comrades proud!