Fifteen Eighty Four

Can Writing Academic Papers be Fun?

Here’s a questionnaire for beginning and mid-career academics:

1. Have you ever felt like giving up on academe and doing something useful, like opening a cheese shop?
2. Have you ever had any questions about the process of writing in academe, but no-one to ask?
3. Have you ever felt dread, fear, or actual physical pain when sitting down to write?
4. Do you ever feel like you will fail to write a paper/book/report and will be exposed as a fraud?
5. Have you ever taken a questionnaire on a blog to avoid writing your book?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you are the target audience of Academic Writing Demystified: Publish and Thrive. If you are the owner of a cheese shop, well, perhaps not, but who knows, you may be wanting to write an exposé on the struggle of independent cheese shops against big cheese… Seriously, though, if you are an academic, chances are that you’ve experienced any (or some) of the above. We know we have (perhaps not all the time, and definitely not collectively, but certainly occasionally).

The impetus for writing this book came precisely from the realization that there was a lot of “implicit knowledge,” and just as much about “occluded genres” that was a significant part of what keeps academic writers from writing. So, putting it out there would help. A significant part of the book is dedicated to explaining, for example, how to submit a book proposal, or a grant application. We also realized that writing was all too often perceived as a difficult, if not painful, task. However, a lot of the problems stem from lack of understanding of how to tackle the tasks. For example, and this is one of the central points that we make in the book, the myth that writing is necessarily a solitary, isolating activity. We recommend joining or starting a writing group, precisely because having the support of a community helps “normalize” the labor of writing.

Another central tenet of the book is that the author must find what works for them: there is no one-size-fits-all panacea, no silver bullet for writing. We offer some help on how to identify and, most importantly, turn the “props” that facilitate writing into routines. Finally, we think that cultivating a positive outlook toward the task, or what we call “finding joy” in writing, can really help a writer not only to be more productive but also to write better and more effectively. For example, we argue that celebrating, especially in a group setting, one’s little accomplishments or milestones (“I finished a chapter”; “I am halfway through the book”) helps to both build confidence and also keep the momentum going. As they say, you can only finish a book by writing.

Taken together, we, the authors, have about a century of writing experience, with some of the best publishers and journals out there. The method we describe applies generally to all disciplines, in the humanities and out. We have an email account publishandthrive@gmail.com and a blog https://joyouswriting.substack.com/ where you can contact us and ask questions. We will answer (eventually—we all have jobs…) all questions.