Collage by Helen Sword

We were delighted to have Daniel Shea as our special guest for our WriteSPACE Special Event, “A Guide to the Style Guides,” on Monday 22nd November. Daniel is the Heidelberg-based host of Scholarly Communication, “the podcast about how knowledge gets known.” Daniel also has his own YouTube channel, Write your research.

I first met Daniel (virtually) when he interviewed me about my books Stylish Academic Writing and Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write. (There's also a New Books Network podcast about The Writer's Diet with interviewer Bede Haines).

Now it's my chance to turn the tables and interview the interviewer! In the first hour of this 2-hour WriteSPACE Special Event, I asked Daniel to share insights from his many interviews with editors and educators, writing professionals and professional writers, publishers and the published. Daniel spoke about four key areas of scholarly communication that he likes to “think in”:

1. science and social science;

2. the publishing process;

3. education (expression of knowledge - how to use the genres); and

4. writing guides (the study of writing).

We also discussed Open Access publishing, how to approach freedom of choice in various academic genres, the difference between imitation and adaptation for emerging academic writers, and the challenges of containing “writing sprawl.”

Quote of the hour: “Nothing is irrelevant in literature.”

In the second hour, Daniel and I ran a hands-on workshop designed to help participants navigate the wide and sometimes confusing world of self-help books for writers. Writing guides fill many shelves in any bookstore or library; but how do we know which guides are best for us at different times in our writing lives? Daniel offered some concrete strategies for choosing among the many available guides and spoke about the importance of knowing what stylistic conversations and trends are happening in your discipline. He also encouraged us to reflect on the strengths and shortcomings of our favorite writing guides by considering the following questions:

• When I pick up a new writing guide, am I looking for answers to specific questions, or do I hope to find general orientation in my writing?

• Do I want the guide to function like a DIY manual or more like a course on writing, with a structured set of exercises to follow?

• What are my expectations of the guide, and what are my expectations of myself?

• Which skills in writing have I learned through guides and which through my own experience?

• What kind of guides work best as conversation starters?

We concluded with a Q & A, and participants shared their favorite writing and style books. This thought-provoking session gave us all much to consider and a wonderful array of guides and resources to follow up.

Quote of the hour:

“Look outside your own area of work. Know that form follows function. What your writing can do is what you shape it to do.”

The full video of this inspiring session is now available in the WriteSPACE Library, and a list of the many books and other resources recommended by Daniel and the participants will be published in next week’s newsletter and blog post.

Resources discussed by Daniel Shea

Making Sense by Bill Cope & Mary Kalantzis.

Stylish Academic Writing by Helen Sword.

Several Short Sentences about Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg.

The Forest for the Trees by Betsy Lerner.

Writing Science: How to write papers that get cited and proposals that get funded by Josh Schimel. (An example of this is Josh Schimel's blog post entitled Writing Science Getting Started Group Exercise OCAR storytelling structure exercise - for science writers.)

Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace by Joseph Williams.

A book on Open Access: Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access by Martin Paul Eve.

How to Fix Your Academic Writing Trouble by Inger Mewburn.

Do I Make Myself Clear? Why Writing Well Matters by Harold Evans.

Grammar Choices for Graduate and Professional Writers by Nigel A. Caplan.

(Also see other titles in the Michigan Series in English for Academic & Professional Purposes.)

The Fine Art of Copyediting by Elsie Myers.

Other recommendations

Writing your journal article in 12 weeks: A guide to academic publishing success by Wendy Laura Belcher.

90 Days, 90 Ways: Inspiration, Tips & Strategies for Academic Writers by Patricia Goodson, Mina Beigi, and Melika Shirmohammadi.

Getting It Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books by William Germano.

On revision by William Germano.

Everyday I Write the Book by Amitava Kumar.

First You Write a Sentence by Joe Moran.

The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century by Steven Pinker.

The Writing Life by Annie Dillard.

The Clockwork Muse by Eviatar Zerubavel.

How to Use Storytelling in Your Academic Writing by Timothy G. Pollock.

Murder Your darlings by Roy Peter Clark.

Writing down the bones: Freeing the writer within by Nathalie Goldberg.

Reporting Qualitative Research in Psychology by Heidi Levitt.

Writing for Social Scientists by Howard Becker.

Tricks of the Trade by Howard Becker.

Words and Rules - and others titles by Steven Pinker.

WAC Clearinghouse – an open access publishing collaborative.

WAC Resources page and more specifically, see these WAC Writing Guides, Links for writing, and Open Access Textbooks.

Warm thanks to Nina Ginsberg for helping with this post!

A recording of this WriteSPACE Special Event is now available for members in the WriteSPACE Library.

Not yet a member? Join the WriteSPACE now with a free 30 day trial, and access our full Library of videos and other writing resources.

Subscribe here to Helen’s Word on Substack to access the full Substack archive and receive weekly subscriber-only newsletters (USD $5/month or $50/year).

WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership plan (USD $15/month or $150/year).

Helen's Blog RSS

Collage by Helen Sword

When you fantasize about writing freely and prolifically, what metaphors spring to mind? 

For many writers, those rare periods of effortless productivity when swirling ideas coalesce and perfect sentences appear as though by magic on the page can be summed up in a single word: flow.  

The opposite of flow is frustration, academic writers' most frequently mentioned emotion word.  (See Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write, Chapter 10).  Writers sometimes invoke intestinal blockages (“constipation”), plumbing blockages (“a feeling of being clogged”), and blocked waterways (“stuck in the quagmire of detail”) to describe their feelings of frustration when their sentences don’t flow.

The recent death of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi inspired me to revisit his classic book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, which I highly recommend to anyone wanting to deepen their creative practice.  Csikszentmihalyi defines flow as a state of utter absorption in a task that lies just beyond the limits of our abilities, neither so easy that we find it boring nor so challenging that we find it impossible:

• It is what the sailor holding a tight course feels when the wind whips through her hair, when the boat lunges through the waves like a colt—sails, hull, wind, and sea humming a harmony that vibrates in the sailor’s veins. It is what a painter feels when the colors on the canvas begin to set up a magnetic tension with each other, and a new thing, a living form, takes shape in front of the astonished creator. . . . The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost. (pp 3, 16)

According to Csikszentmihalyi, anyone can learn to enter the flow state more or less at will by setting up the right conditions, including an uninterrupted period of time in which to work and an attitude of willingness rather than resistance.  Yet even when all of these conditions are in place, the flow of writing can remain elusive, more like a magic spring guarded by a fickle muse than a steady stream of words to be turned on or off at will. 

The problem, I suspect, is that writers tend to conflate what Csikszentmihalyi calls “the flow state” with the easy flow of perfectly formed sentences onto the waiting page.  In fact, we can be "in flow" at any stage of the writing process: not just when our words are flowing freely but also when we are deeply absorbed in the pleasures of brainstorming, mind-mapping, pre-writing, or polishing. 

I created this week's collage while in a state of flow, happily immersed in the challenge of visually representing the concept of flow in all its beauty and complexity.  I started with an aerial photograph of a braided river, then layered meandering channels of marbled blue paper over hand-inked text and patterned paper invoking geological and botanic forms. 

The creative process, like a braided river, is a delicate ecosystem prone to both silting and flooding.  As writers, we can find flow in both the silt and the flood, in contemplative silence as well as in the headlong rush of new words.  

---

Subscribe here to Helen’s Word on Substack to access the full Substack archive and receive weekly subscriber-only newsletters (USD $5/month or $50/year).

WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership plan (USD $15/month or $150/year). Not a member? Join the WriteSPACE now and get your first 30 days free.

---

Helen's Blog RSS

What do penguins have to do with pleasure in writing?  Everything!  

Researchers have found that when we come to a writing task in a positive frame of mind, we are likely to perform it more skilfully, creatively, and with greater enjoyment than when we arrive at the task burdened by anxiety, anger, or doubt. Behavioral psychologist Barbara Fredrickson calls this phenomenon the broaden-and-build cycle of positivity: our successful performance of a task generates an ever broader base of confidence and enjoyment that we can build on, in turn, the next time we undertake that task. 

Crucially, we can access the broaden-and-build cycle even when the positive emotions that get us there have been externally rather that internally induced.  I call this the happy penguin effect, based on a study in which Fredrickson and her colleagues invited student volunteers to perform a simple writing task immediately after watching a short video calculated to induce either neutral emotions (autumn leaves gently falling), negative emotions (two people engaged in an escalating argument), or positive emotions (penguins at play). 

The researchers reported that the study participants who watched the playful penguin video went on to write significantly longer, livelier, and more inventive responses than those in the other two groups.  In other words, playful penguins can help you become a more productive writer -- not to mention a more creative and colorful one.  (The penguin study is described in Fredrickson's aptly titled book Positivity: Discover the Upward Spiral That Will Change Your Life).  

Here's what John Ruskin, the famously curmudgeonly Victorian art critic, had to say about the power of penguins to cheer up even the grumpiest of writers:  

• When I begin to think at all, I get into states of disgust and fury . . . and have to go to the British Museum and look at penguins till I get cool. I find penguins at present the only comfort in life. One feels everything in the world so sympathetically ridiculous. One can't be angry when one looks at a penguin. (John Ruskin, letter to Charles Eliot Norton, 4th November 1860)

The sooner we can hoist ourselves and our writing onto that upward spiral of positivity, the higher we will climb.  And penguins -- or any other stimulus that shifts our pre-writing mood from gloomy to joyful -- can help us get there.

To get started, check out my new Happy Penguin video, featuring the voice of my fabulous friend Caitlin Smith and a cameo appearance by my dog Freddie. (Freddie loves penguins too!) If Caitlin's soaring jazz vocals don't put you in the mood for writing, I hope they'll at least get you up and dancing. Check out my other YouTube videos while you're on the channel (especially the Purple Penguin), and please don't forget to subscribe.

What are your happy penguins?    

---

Subscribe here to Helen’s Word on Substack to access the full Substack archive and receive weekly subscriber-only newsletters (USD $5/month or $50/year).

WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership plan (USD $15/month or $150/year). Not a member? Join the WriteSPACE now and get your first 30 days free.

---

Helen's Blog RSS