Writing for ResearchWhen you practice, don’t stick to just one genre. Try your hand at haiku, heroic
couplets, epistolatory romances, lines of computer code. Once when I was a graduate
student I wrote a poem in Fortran 4, a now-obsolete programming language. It was a
dreadful poem but started me thinking about possibilities and limits in language.
The privilege
We live in an age when the public sphere is drenched in disinformation and distortion.
We joke about “spin doctors” being consulted, but the normal speech of politicians,
governments and corporations is spin – emotional manipulation (“War on Terror”),
oversimplification (“Tax Cuts”), tendentious selections of data (“50% Less Fat!”), or just
outright lies (“Coal is Good for Humanity”). On a vast scale, the fashion industry, the
porn industry and the drug industry peddle fantasies about human bodies.
As a university worker, I am deeply ashamed by the way universities, during the last
twenty years, have joined the pack. Neoliberal university managements now routinely
spend tens of millions of dollars on campaigns of seductive misrepresentation to attract
fee-paying students. When their senior executives open their mouths, out comes the
familiar corporate spin – excellence, efficiency, “leadership”, customer satisfaction.
In such a world, it is a privilege to speak the truth. And that’s what we are trying to do, in
writing for research. Heaven knows, truth can be hard to establish. All researchers
understand that, if they know their trade. Building our collective knowledge involves
many false starts and failed hypotheses, much uncertainty and debate, and a lot of plain
hard work.
But as Galileo Galilei is supposed to have said in another context, “ eppur si muove ” –
still, it does move! In writing for research, we do have the chance to speak truth – as it is
emerging, and as it is already known. That allows us to speak truth to power, in the
classic role of the intellectual. But the privilege also allows us to speak truth among the
people without power - for whom accurate knowledge and deeper understanding matter
most of all.
3 : SOME RESOURCES
George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language" (1946), is reprinted in almost all
collections of Orwell’s writing. It has a powerful argument for clear writing as democratic
politics. It also gives practical do’s and don’ts for writers, including the immortal bad
sentence: “A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen
field”. Orwell’s essay gave rise to a whole school of criticism, such as Don Watson,
Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language , Knopf, 2003, which skewers hideous
Australian examples of bad speech and writing under neoliberalism.