Make Boring Not Boring

Be a writerly academic.

Academic writers are almost always passionate about what they write. They have to be to keep going.

The academic world, despite a general perception that is only beginning to be adjusted, is not lucrative. The likelihood of becoming rich as a professor or researcher is low. It wasn’t always this way, but it is now. According to the American Association of University Professors, over 70% of instructors in higher education are contingent, meaning their institutions place them in a status that blocks their access to the lives we often think of when we hear the word “professor.”

A quarter of that contingent faculty, far from living the life of the mind one might see portrayed in movies set in old, ivy-covered buildings full of tweed suits and hands that haven’t seen a day of “real” work in their lives, in fact, rely on social services to survive. This comes after sacrificing financial security, and in many cases, a solid decade of their lives, the decade their nonacademic friends were establishing lives, experiencing young adulthood, and laying the groundwork for security.

“Publish or perish,” that dated principle compelling even the most dedicated academics to toil in research—not for the good of the world or for scientific value, but for the lengthening of a CV—has sapped some of my clients’ joy in the pursuits they have committed their lives to. Priorities may be out of whack, but I’m afraid we live in the world we live in, even while we try to improve it. All is not lost, though.

Writers seeking my help are often working on projects that are related to their passions, but only tangentially or tediously. Papers in academic journals often sink into the esoteric, and a clear-eyed reader can tell when an article has been written grudgingly and largely for the sake of career advancement. This doesn’t mean these writers do not care about the writing. They are just uncomfortably shaping their loved ideas to fit an artificial mode which, despite our claims of equal access, peer review, objectivity, and so on, is dictated in part by arbitrary structures of tradition.

As a writing coach, I am gutted when thinking about the psychological pain these clients simply have to keep quiet about if they have a reasonable chance of maintaining their careers. Add to this the nonsensical claim that writing (not scientific concepts, but the communicating of them) can and must be objective, and the ivory tower can become a self-sustaining house of torture.

I am one of those contingent faculty members, so I know how that feels. I also know we are not supposed to talk about it because, despite the clear economic data, much of the world thinks our lives are cushy, even decadent. I refuse, however, to quietly accept the dissolution of the joy of academic life. Part of that joy is writing passionately about things you were passionate enough about to sacrifice what many people consider a normal life.

Through Calamus Writing and Editing I often advise scholars in the social sciences to avoid symbolic language, adverbs, and indefinable terminology. That initially feels stunting. It is limiting. But data can still convey emotive meaning.

For example, the achievement gap is destructive, terrible, sad, immoral, et cetera. These are true statements, but an academic publication reporting the data that prove them will generally avoid those kinds of words. However, laying out the logic of the destructive nature can still convey the significance.

When writing in the social sciences, we need to adhere to particular standards, but the way in which we view them can change how effective that writing is. The structures are either limiting or liberating. The adherence to straightforward reporting of data can feel stifling, but it also has power. Maintaining an authoritative tone is not the same as squashing emotion.

Aristotle’s three persuasive appeals are logos, pathos, and ethos. The last one often gets lost in the mix. Lean into your ethos, the credibility and the plausibility of your claims. The pathos matters too, but the academic work is only one part of a larger process. The emotion comes when action is taken. The paper provides the evidence. It does not solve the problem. It does not, by itself, spur action.

That’s your next job.