On Academic Writing

Mostly informed by my own practices, these are my current thoughts about academic writing specific to humanities. I believe that the way we write is connected very much to what we want to accomplish by our writing. There are few simple ways of looking at it:

* Some of us write to effect change in the world of flesh and blood.
* Some of us write to prove to ourselves the degree of our own theoretical expertise and to prove to others how erudite and smart we are.
* Some of us combine the theoretical expertise and the desire to effect a change in the world.

Of course, the way we view our scholarly work, keeping in mind the three tentative frames above, determines, to some extent, how we write and what we write about. Personally, I like the third approach listed above: a combination of theory and the real world, for good theory, afterall, is or should be about the real world. But to employ theory only for its own sake or to just make our work sound "scholarly" is, in my opinion a waste of time. An important function of theory is that it provides us the tools to decipher a text but also all the constitutive elements of the text. Theory also provides us the vocabulary, which, if aptly used, allows us to say things succinctly and enables us to engage in a conversation with others who are privy to this specialized vocabulary.

There are many ways to write an academic paper just as there are numerous theories of textual analysis. Some major figures in the field of literary theory suggest that we as academics should just teach the mechanics of the texts and should avoid direct engagement with the current politics. I find this approach to be simplistic and counterproductive: for if texts, the writers, and the readers are all caught in a complex web of the lived experience that constitute them, then writing apolitically and focusing only on the text itself is a political choice. But I do understand this disavowal of politics; it enables the critic and the scholar to maintain a sort of Arnoldian detachment from the world and also enables them ascribe to themselves a kind of fictional objectivity.

But we all live in the world of now, and our experience of this world is also through the theories that constitute our worldview. This is the world of flesh and blood, of contingencies, of immediacies where children still die of hunger and billions live in abject poverty. Can we afford the kind of Arnoldian detachment that must wait and work in silence to change the epochal thought so that ultimately the world becomes what we hope for it to become. Certainly, one could assume this long-term view of change and then keep working toward that kind of change. But how much of this way of thinking is just another subterfuge to hide and avoid any deep engagement with questions of justice and equity.

For me an academic work can be deeply layered: one can write a paper that deals only with the mechanics of the text itself. One could also go beyond that and write about what constitutes a text: what kind of material conditions, authorial choices inform the text. One could also go beyond that and trace what does a text make the reader feel, or think; in short what is the affective value of the text. All these approaches are valid and established, but to write on the edge of theory, to speculate beyond the text and connect the text with a certain liberatory politics can be more rewarding and ultimately more useful to the world we live in.

We are not only academics but also humans who share the globe with other human beings. We need to find a way to connect our work with this world of flesh and blood. If we keep producing esoteric works that only five or six people in our respective fields could read or comprehend, then we will really become completely useless to the world, like court jesters in a kingdom with 24/7 comedy channel.

So what I try to teach my students is simple: Don't try to write like Deleuze or Derrida, even when using their theory, but write your own self into your paper. And ask yourself this questions: Am I writing this to just sound erudite and smart or am writing with a hope that this essay would make a difference in the world? In the end, of course, what we write can hardly change the world, but why should that stop us from trying?

(Source URL: http://postcoloniality.org/2010/05/23/on-academic-writing/)