Anne Carson, the Canadian writer, has written an article about writing, since she developed Parkinson’s Disease. Embarrassed by how her handwriting has got so much worse, the title of her article, quoting Confucius, apparently, was ‘Beware the Man Whose Handwriting Sways Like a Reed in the Wind’. We may be embarrassed by our handwriting because we’re embarrassed by our actual personalities. And typing has a ‘handwriting’, just like pen and paper. Lesley Smith’s 2023 book ‘Handwritten: Remarkable People on the Page’, gives us a chance to look at the handwriting of some famous figures. Is it unfair to judge their personalities from their handwriting?

Is this an issue worth exploring for academic writers, embarrassed by ‘revealing’ their own personalities through their writing? Or should we ignore it, as one of the most trusted professions – doctors – seem to have terrible handwriting?

What we say and how we say it may of course tell two stories rather than one. Rom Harré noted how a handwritten sign may seem to mean the same as a printed one, but a handwritten sign saying ‘warning – nuclear power station’ would be worrying, wouldn’t it?

Handwriting that ‘sways in the wind’ might represent a person who sways in the wind too. The politician Tony Benn said there were two kinds of politician: signposts (who always pointed in one direction or another) and weather vanes (who swayed with the wind). As academics, we shouldn’t sway too much, but then again, as the climate changes, shouldn’t we be prepared to change? Perhaps we should be climate vanes?

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Pleasure and academic writing? Really? Yes, really. This podcast is about enjoyment, even if – in fact, precisely because – a lot of academics, when you mention academic writing, sigh, their shoulders drop. So let’s try to find the moments of joy in writing, and if you do (if we do), then the reader will pick up on that, too. Writing carries emotions.

Thinking about the process of writing, we can think about mountaineering or, if your knees are not so good, hill-walking. Buying your new walking boots, and all the other equipment you need, and getting to base camp is the first stage. (For the less adventurous one of us, getting to the car park near the hill.) That’s something like a literature review. Start climbing, with all the uncertainties of the weather, is like doing the empirical research or building your own argument. Getting to the summit is like completing the empirical research – and finding there’s still a long way to go. And going down hill is enjoyable and may seem easy, like writing a conclusion, but it's got its own dangers. After the climbing is complete, you might be home and looking at photos of the adventure. That is like having had a piece of writing published, and seeing it in a journal or a book. Sharing your photos with others is like being cited and people asking about your writing. All stages have their pleasures as well as their pains, and we should find the pleasures and celebrate them. Enjoy.

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Gill Simpson studied English at Leeds, and after another career, studied for a master’s degree in theology and then taught theology and religious studies in a university. She is now completing a doctorate, using autoethnography, and she talks with us about her earlier experience of academic writing as a visceral, physical experience – using handwriting rather than a word-processor. The French philosopher Derrida praises handwriting too, as ‘with the computer, everything is rapid and so easy; you get to thinking that you can go on revising for ever’. Recently, Gill has rediscovered the value of handwriting in academic writing, as it makes it more personal and engaging. That is also related to her doctoral work on how the ‘personal’ is often driven out of higher education, through focus on structures and other minutiae. Writing freely should not, however, be a luxury.

In an even more visceral metaphor, Gill talks about academic writing as being too often just about the head, with the body, like a headless horseman, allowed to gallop away into the distance. Academic writers need to focus on ‘how to’ issues, but these should include ‘how to be’ issues. In the future, Gill hopes to do more work encouraging freewriting, and encouraging joy in academic writing.

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What do you write about, when you don’t have anything to write about? Three starting points for what to write about: Oneself, perhaps, in the form of a journal, or using autoethnography/autobiography. Work, and what is important to that. Something you’ve read, or something in the world, that annoys (or that pleases) you.

But ‘not having anything to write about’ might be the result of demons. The ‘you can’t write anything of value’ demon, and the ‘last word’ demon. How do you get rid of those demons? Start bad and work your way up to good. In other words, start with gibberish – embrace the gibberish demon.

What’s the danger of not writing at all? What is means, is giving your agency to others. We really don’t want to be doing that!

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Adam talked about his teaching, which ranged from more didactic (with the Foundation Year students) to more autonomous (with the Master’s students), and said much the same could be said of his academic writing. His doctoral thesis was more didactic, a book chapter he wrote – related to the thesis – which was more relaxed and left room for the reader to engage more autonomously. Writing the thesis, Adam felt obliged to use a specific ‘official’ style, that attempted to show off how clever the author is, and attempted to prove something. And yet earlier work on his own master’s dissertation was guided by advice on clarity: clarity is clever because it makes your cleverness clear. So the doctoral thesis sits alone, and Adam would like to write academic texts in the future that also speak to the general public beyond the academy, including, perhaps, something on the theology of football. And more in the more open style that leaves readers more autonomous – free to engage in their own way.

In the book on the theology of football, and in other writing, Adam likes to write collaboratively, as that too opens up spaces for the reader to be more engaged. And what about the Green Children of Woolpit? You’ll have to listen to this podcast to find out.

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Today we have a guest: Bob (Helen) Bushell-Thornalley. Her specialism is physical education and sport and her approach to academic writing is similar to her approach to physical activity: being in the moment, considering it a long game. It all started with her involvement in the 2012 Olympic Games in London. Looking back to the origin of the modern Olympic movement in Victorian times, which was stimulated by a concern about sedentariness, and a lack of military fitness. Bob’s doctorate involved spending a lot of time in the archives, not conversing with people (despite her supervisor saying she should) – or should we say ‘conversing with dead people’? She focused on the meetings and correspondence between Baron Pierre de Coubertin, a French educator and philosopher, and Dr William Penny Brookes, a GP in Much Wenlock, Shropshire, England, who was concerned with what would now be called ‘public health’ and (again, the newly-discovered) ‘social prescribing’.

Working in the archives, Bob had to isolate herself – not her usual way of being – and read the documents, especially the correspondence between these two key figures in the development of the modern Olympics. Not only reading the text, but reading between the lines, the white spaces telling her what had not been said. Bob became a better writer by becoming a better reader, listening to missing or excluded voices. Even so, academic writing still seems to Bob as indulgent, as is reading and thinking – and yet she, like all of us on this podcast, works in a university. How strange.

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