11. Thank You for Letting Me Be Myself, or How (Not) to Write Like a Scientist

Audience, Genre, the Dead Bird Problem, and the Case Against "Best Practices"

[Previously]

[I’m struggling mightily these days with finding a good reason to keep this Substack experiment going given the chaos around us now. The only justification I can think of is that writing this stuff helps me by giving me a small break from everything else. I hope reading it, if you do, provides similar respite.]

In “How to Write Like a Scientist,” Adam Ruben recounts how his doctoral dissertation adviser told him, “You don’t write like a scientist.” One reason was that he used “lone” instead of “only.” Ruben had already used “only” several times and wanted to avoid overdoing it, but the adviser called it “flowery,” “lyrical,” and “non-scientific.” Reluctantly, Ruben changed it (he had no choice) but years later, he found it still irked him.

Sometimes, even the most useful aspects of writing can work against you. I used to quote Linda Flower and John R. Hayes to my students about their findings that “Good writers think about their readers.” I believe they are right. I also believe genre is an important related concept that makes you aware of the choices available to help you reach a target audience. Both are important and writing students need to learn about them. Like with all good things, however, there are drawbacks.

Ruben’s audience was his adviser. In school, the teacher is your true audience, despite whatever they may want you to imagine it might be, and that audience, through assessment, has inordinate power over you. From course to course, discipline to discipline, and teacher to teacher, what writing is and how it “should” be done can vary wildly. Students must develop the skills to recognize the quirks and whims of any particular instructor that they may have at any particular moment and then write accordingly.

On top of this, if your genre for most of your education has been the generic and somewhat made-up academic essay so often taught in English classes, it’s no easy thing to find your voice and sense of purpose when you write. You become someone else. Come to think of it, we were teaching students to write essays that sounded like AI long before AI existed or was even imagined. No wonder students think, What’s the big deal? This is what you want, isn’t it?

The biggest problem with the writing that these essays produce is that no one wants to write them and without a doubt, no one wants to read them (perhaps especially those who assign them). Even essays from top students can be deadly. It’s the dead-bird problem again. If you are writing to the teacher for a grade and have been doing this for years, this becomes yet another obstacle that keeps you from discovering how good a writer you might be. Also, it gets hard to shake. Your idea of audience becomes baked in. Same with that generic style and voice.

As we saw with Ruben, one of the dangers of genre is that sometimes the purveyors of a particular genre hold too narrow a view of it. Ruben exhibits what Don Koberg and Jim Bagnall call “constructive discontent” when, still smarting from not being allowed to use “lone” in his dissertation, he asks, “Why the hell not?”

Next, he lampoons the “dry,” dead-bird writing style of academic journals and their preference for passive voice (“Why must dryness be written by us?”), their habit of religiously avoiding first person (“Science succeeds in spite of human beings, not because of us, so you want to make it look like your results magically discovered themselves”), their tendency to pile on references to appear more scholarly (“Much work has been done in this field ^{1,3,6-27,29-50,58,61,62-65,78-315,952-Avogadro’s Number}”), and their built-in boot-licking qualities (“Your paper will be peer reviewed, so include flattering descriptions of all of your peers”). Writing for the teacher also inspires a fair amount of the latter.

Though the article is an example of the parody genre—one that exposes the pitfalls of strict genre adherence—the main point Ruben makes is even more serious. He thinks his discipline is doing a disservice to research by writing in a limiting and confining style. He says science “needs us, the people who understand its depth and its charm, to frame it and explain it in interesting ways.” He adds that scientists are the “advocates who get to construct and tell stories about our science” and that’s what they should be doing.

What Ruben says about genre connects with Calvino’s point in Mr. Palomar about the dangers of models. Mr. Palomar says, “What the models seek is always a system of power.” They become a “fortress whose thick walls conceal what is outside.” These walls conceal what is inside as well. Relying on the rulebook of a particular genre (or perhaps a distorted or short-sighted vision of that genre) can become a crutch and wall off the wonders of science and other fields from the general public and each other, making cross-disciplinary discoveries less likely while at the same time producing writing that ChatGPT can whip up in a flash.

Rob Kitchin is among those who argue for scientists and other academic writers to loosen up a bit, expand genre boundaries, and maybe even learn a few things from creative writers and their bags of tricks. In “Writing Fiction as Scholarly Work,” he acknowledges that the “aim” of academic writing “is to create a convincing, evidence-based argument in a neutral register that displays a strong degree of objectivity.” These are principles he understands but that can leave out something important—that something being most readers.

Creative writers use techniques to explore complex principles while drawing readers into the text. One example Kitchin mentions is science fiction, which “uses extrapolation,” and “employs tactics of estrangement (pushing readers outside of what they comfortably know) and defamiliarization (making the familiar strange) as a way of creating a distancing mirror and portraying a critical reflection on society. . .”

Because these writers challenge readers while engaging them, he says, “fiction and more creative forms of academic writing have the potential to open up new avenues to reach readers beyond academia.”

Many academic articles, even in my field, are written in that dead-bird style. It’s like an avian apocalypse. I think my field is fascinating, but almost nobody outside a small corner of academia even knows it exists. Even in English departments, it’s a bit of a mystery to the literature folks.

Call me crazy, and perhaps you’ll think I’m going off the rails here, but if your academic discipline is so fascinating, shouldn’t the way you write about it be fascinating as well? Shouldn’t it be engaging and able to reach beyond your discipline’s thick, thick walls?

This is why if I meet someone at a party, I dread the “What do you do?” question because my answer almost always results in a response like, “Oh, I’d better watch my grammar!” I should tell people I worked at the carnival, I guess.

What does all of this mean for students? If you haven’t picked up on it yet, I want students to have a chance to like writing. This came up in a committee I served on, and I still think it should be at the forefront when considering writing pedagogy. Historically, this has been at best an afterthought. Genre issues and the audience-of-one problem may have something to do with that.

Maybe we should teach students to have a little more Ruben-like constructive discontent—or at least acknowledge with them that audience and genre can be tricky, and how that trickiness makes things more interesting. Bring up the possibility that some of the so-called rules have a bit of a BS tinge about them occasionally. Why not allow students to experiment with the parameters and play around with the conventions before they need to buckle down and get serious? Why not reveal the complexities and teach students, as Berthoff says, how to “tolerate ambiguity.”

Yes, writers need to think about their readers and they need to be aware of what genre they are writing in and what choices are available to them within that discourse community. Still, they also need to recognize that some of the boundaries in their minds about such things may be like the ones people see in the 9-Dot Problem. Some could be imaginary. Even when those boundaries are real, they should be tested and pushed to the limit. After all, pushing things to their limits is kinda fun. Don’t we want to turn out those kinds of thinkers?

For students, if you find the demands of genre and audience are fencing you in when you write, you can experiment with different approaches. For instance, you could try writing informally in your own voice and style first. You can imagine an audience you feel more at home with than a teacher, like your best friend or grandmother. This allows you to give your own goals and purpose priority and will help you discover what you most want to say. After that, you can revise to meet your teacher’s guidelines.

I know that sounds like extra work, but the more formal version that gave you a bad case of writer’s block would have needed revising anyway if you wanted a decent grade. It wouldn’t be as good, even when revised, because you weren’t invested in it yet. Now, that you are invested, the necessary restrictions that your teacher requires, even if they seem unreasonably narrow, will be easier to apply because now you know what you want to say—something you discovered through writing more freely in early drafts. Next, you can translate your ideas into that particular genre’s (or professor’s) reality and maybe tweak things some.

Now, let me take this further. It’s not always just a tiff over differing writing styles as in Ruben’s case. Genre boundaries are sometimes used as an excuse to push conformity and a business-as-usual mindset. I swear, every time I heard someone say “best practices” in a meeting it made me lose the will to live. If you only focus on best practices, how will you discover better ones? How will you ever see beyond your fortress walls? It smacks of a power play, frankly. It’s corporate lingo, after all. Gotta keep those workers in line.

Academic writing strategies can be good tools but in the wrong hands, they can become templates for producing misinformation and propaganda. Maybe business as usual isn’t always the best choice, especially under fluctuating conditions, especially when new knowledge is desperately needed (which I think is always). Sometimes—like right now when our print and TV media seem so stuck inside the dots—the situation calls for pushback, change, and innovation. Why not teach these, too? Best practices played a role in putting us in our current predicament. Screw that. Look for better practices always.

Student writers face so many impediments that keep them from discovering their true writing selves and their potential as writers, and this keeps them from standing even the slightest chance to come away from the experience with a love (or even a like) of writing. How can we teach them what they need to know while still letting them be themselves?

In this vein, I’ve occasionally had my students write short parodies in class of the English essay genre. “Write the most boring, dead-bird essay possible on the most boring topic you can imagine. Make it sound as English paper-y as possible.” Trying to do a bad job, they find, is harder than you might think. This practice teaches many of the same things but with more laughs. It brings key writerly choices and their potential pitfalls into focus, making it a little easier to do a good job when it counts.

But those “bad” parody English essays, though? Some of them birds could fly.

Notes

Forgive me, I’m feeling feisty today. I must have accidentally added an extra spoonful of constructive discontent to my morning coffee. Thank you, though, for letting me be myself again.

Next, a science fiction writer will explain why creation is embarrassing.