Writing for Research

Writing for Research

Research impacts. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

“research outputs”) take a long time to pass through the pipelines and appear in the
world.

The uses that readers make of them (in management’s weird military dialect, “research
impacts”) take even longer to emerge. There’s no instant gratification here! And it’s
always uncertain whether a given piece of research writing will find many readers and
users.

In the face of all this, three things make writing for research worthwhile. It meets a social
need. It’s a satisfying craft. And it involves a rare privilege.

Meeting a social need

I have emphasised that making organized knowledge is inherently a social process. It’s
not a matter of neural surges in isolated brains, and it’s not done by machinery.
Research is done by women and men working in cooperation, in sustained interaction,
linking over distance and time. The core of the communication that makes their
cooperation possible is, precisely, what we have been talking about: writing for
research.

Writing for research, then, is a key to the growth of knowledge as a social resource. It’s
worth doing because of the collective purpose it serves. That can go terribly wrong, I