Helen Sword

Writing higher education differently: a manifesto on style

According to a recent survey of colleagues across the disciplines, the most effective and engaging academic writers are those who express complex ideas clearly and succinctly; write with originality, imagination and creative flair; convey enthusiasm, commitment and a strong sense of self; tap into a wide range of intellectual interests; avoid excessive jargon; employ plenty of concrete examples and illustrations; demonstrate care for their readers; and know how to tell a good story. Yet an analysis of 100 peer‐reviewed articles in six top‐ranked higher education journals (including 50 articles from Studies in Higher Education) reveals no more than a handful of academic authors who exhibit any, much less all, of those characteristics. This article offers a spirited manifesto on academic writing, arguing that educationalists have both a practical incentive and an ethical imperative to write higher education differently. There is no satisfactory explanation of style, no infallible guide to good writing, no assurance that a person who thinks clearly will be able to write clearly, no key that unlocks the door, no inflexible rule by which the young writer may shape his course. He will often find himself steering by stars that are disturbingly in motion. (Strunk and White 1979, 66)

Pacific Rim modernisms

The Pacific Rim is a geographical region made up of all areas bordered by the Pacific Ocean, its span reaching countries as diverse as the Canada, Korea, China, Mexico, and Australia. Tracing vectors of appropriation, migration, and exchange, Pacific Rim Modernisms explores the complex ways that writers, artists, and intellectuals of the Pacific Rim have contributed to modernist culture, literature, and identity. Appropriately, given their wide geographical and temporal sweep, the fourteen essays gathered in this volume reflect a range of scholarly perspectives and methodologies, expressing varied viewpoints, divergent voices, and even contradictory definitions of Modernism itself. By placing geographical rather than political boundaries at the centre of academic inquiry, Pacific Rim Modernisms seeks not only to redraw old boundaries but to open up the modernist landscape to new mappings and new debates.

‘Write every day!’: a mantra dismantled

Abstract Numerous books, blogs, and articles on research productivity exhort academics to ‘write every day’ even during the busiest of teaching times. Ironically, however, this research-boosting advice hangs from a perilously thin research thread. This article scrutinises the key findings of Robert Boice, whose pioneering studies of ‘professors as writers’ in the 1980s and 1990s are still widely cited today, and offers new empirical evidence to suggest that the writing practices of successful academics are in fact far more varied and individualistic than has generally been acknowledged in the literature.

Dancing on the bottom line: an unruly cost–benefit analysis of three academic development initiatives

This article offers an unconventional cost–benefit analysis of three academic development initiatives at a large Australasian university: a three-day foundation course for new academics, a series of one-on-one teaching consultations and a two-year postgraduate certificate program. Weaving together qualitative, quantitative and arts-based methodologies, I examine the pros and cons of each mode, arguing that higher education research is enriched rather than diminished by hybrid strategies that challenge the status quo.

4. Rewriting the Literary History of Japanese Modernism

By adopting an open, multidisciplinary, and transnational approach, this book sheds new light both on the specific achievements and on the often-unexpected interrelationships of the writers, artists and thinkers who helped to define the Japanese version of modernism and modernity.

Seven Ways of Looking at a Data Set

A literary theorist, a biologist, an historian, a writing studies scholar, and a poet walk into a wine bar. The poet says, “I’ve got a stack of 1,223 handwritten questionnaire responses here in my bag; would you like to have a look?” The others reply, “Sure. Let’s see what we can learn here.” Descending from their respective disciplinary perches, they all gather around a table and start sifting through the questionnaires, which chronicle the writing background, habits, and emotions of PhD students and faculty in 15 countries. In this single corpus of data, each researcher sees something different, and from the other researchers’ responses, each learns new ways of seeing. What counts as an appropriate data analysis? What, for that matter, counts as data? We invite you to grab a drink and join our conversation.

Frustrated academic writers

ABSTRACT This paper aims to start a conversation about a common yet under-examined emotion experienced by academic writers worldwide: frustration. What is frustration, exactly? What are its causes and effects, its symptoms and its cures? Is frustration an impediment to writing or a motivational impetus? Can academic writers vanquish frustration, or must we merely learn to live with it? Mirroring rather than mastering the complexities of this multifaceted emotion, we have structured our inquiry as a multiple-entry maze where frustration unfolds beyond each threshold as uncharted terrain: a place of neurological explanations, playful etymological twists and metaphorical metamorphoses. The paper re-enacts our own collaborative journey through the maze, meditating on and modelling some of the frustration-easing strategies that we developed along the way.

13. Pacific Rim Digital Modernism: The Electronic Literature of Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries

Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries (YHCHI) is the name of the collaborative duo responsible for some of the most innovative electronic literature online. Situated in Seoul, South Korea, Young-hae Chang and Marc Voge push the boundaries of their art form and our expectations of it. But why should they be included in a collection on modernism? As previous essays in this volume have shown, modernism is an assemblage of pluralities that spans geographic and temporal boundaries. This fact is made vitally and visually evident by the latest iteration of modernism: the contemporary movement I call ‘digital modernism.’1 In this essay, I introduce digital modernism by way of the example provided by YHCHI, arguing that the work of these Korea-based writers exemplifi es digital modernism because it consciously challenges assumptions about electronic literature and promotes reconsideration of how modernism operates in contemporary culture. The result is an opportunity to read both contemporary and canonical literature through a digitally informed lens. Digital modernism is a strategy shared by writers across literary genres and programming platforms, writers who adopt and allude to literary modernism; they adapt aesthetic techniques and seminal works from the modernist canon to construct immanent critiques about a contemporary culture that privileges images, navigation, and interactivity over narrative, reading, and textuality. The result: works of predominantly textual web-based literature that are aesthetically diffi cult and ambivalent in their relationship to mass media and popular readership. Digital modernism is not just an example of postmodern pastiche or retro-remixing but, rather, part of a larger cultural project that produces serious literature and promotes critical reading practices both online and in our digital culture at large.