Oracles of Academia by ScholarShape ScholarShape

The hero of a quest travels far from home in search of some powerful, significant object. The journey is long and difficult, fraught with mysteries and monsters. But ultimately, the quest culminates in a narrative that matters for the hero’s community. The epic quest plot persists across millennia and cultures because it captures how humans experience the process of life. As this episode of Oracles of Academia reveals, the quest is also how we scholars experience the process of creating new knowledge. Listen to this episode to learn how Margy Thomas, Ph.D., founder of ScholarShape, uses the frame of the epic quest to manage the challenges of academic writing. She focuses on four key features of an epic quest: the hero’s mental image of the object being pursued; the hero’s awareness of the environment and its resources and climate; the hero’s encounters with guides, enemies, and mysteries along the way; and finally, the way the hero’s quest matters beyond itself. When we apply this epic quest framing to our scholarly lives, we can start to see all of the challenges of academic writing as integral parts of our story. In this episode, our Oracle is the question, “What happens if you frame your scholarly life as an epic quest?” (Length: 15:21)





























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TRANSCRIPT
Oracles of Academia, Episode 3. Your Writing Process as Epic Quest: How to Frame the Challenges of Scholarship as Fascinating Plot Twists
If we're going to do the hard work of creating new knowledge and communicating it to the world, we're going to encounter obstacles, and we're going to come up against our own internal limitations and growth edges.
We're going to grapple with the inherent difficulty of creating something that has never existed before, the difficulty of knowing something that no one else knows and trying to persuade people to believe it and care about it.
We can't expect to remove these challenges from our scholarly lives, but we can find a way to frame these challenges so that they make a certain sense to us. What we need is a narrative that helps us see each challenging moment as just one part of a larger story. A narrative that helps us navigate our experience with purpose and courage.
I'm Margy Thomas, founder of ScholarShape. In this episode of Oracles of Academia, our Oracle is the question, “What happens if you frame your scholarly life as an epic quest?”
[OPENING CREDITS]
For as long as humans have been telling stories, we've been drawn to tales of heroes who journey far from home in search of some powerful, significant object.
The genre of the epic quest is ancient and perennial. For thousands of years, we humans have told stories of heroes who pursue elusive, sacred treasures; who persist through obstacles; who are transformed by their journeys; and whose stories knit together their communities.
The epic quest story persists across millennia and cultures because it captures something fundamental about the human experience. It captures how we as individual humans experience the process of life. We're all searching for something. And we're all hoping that our lives will matter beyond ourselves. We each encounter our own combination of mysteries and monsters along the way.
I want to highlight four key features of an epic quest and how these four features show up in your scholarly process.
When we can apply this epic quest framing to our scholarly lives, we can start to see all of the challenges as integral parts of our story. Different people have various ways to define what an epic quest is, but I fi

Just as the container of a playground frees a child to explore and grow, the containers that we do our writing in -- containers of time and space and genre and institutions -- are the spaces where we can experiment, and improvise, and take risks, and invent the ideas of the future. In Helen Sword’s 2012 Stylish Academic Writing, she made the case that academics across disciplines and around the world want a style revolution. We’re all craving the freedom to write more creatively, more like human beings. The key to the style revolution is not to overthrow all structures, genres, and conventions. Instead, the key is to re-imagine how we work within existing structures and how we create new worlds from the inside out. How does Helen herself navigate this paradox of structure and freedom, constraint and playfulness, in her writing process? How do these tensions fuel her innovations? Listen to this episode to learn how Helen integrates structure and play in her writing, and how her innovations as a scholar have centered on the evolution of her mental model of scholarship. From Helen, the Oracle we receive is the question, “Where is your playground for revolution?” (Length: 36: 31)“The structure gives the scaffolding for play and pleasure. So it's not an inhibiting structure. It's a freeing structure.” — Helen Sword






























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Helen’s links:
Join Helen’s WriteSPACE!: https://www.helensword.com/writespace
Website: https://www.helensword.com/
Writing tools: https://www.helensword.com/writing-tools
Stylish Academic Writing: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674064485
Air and Light and Time and Space: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674737709
TRANSCRIPT
Oracles of Academia, Episode 2. Playgrounds for Revolution: Helen Sword on Structure, Pleasure, and Innovation in Academic Writing
Think about how the container of a playground frees a child to explore and grow. The containers that we do our writing in -- containers of time and space and genre and institutions -- are the spaces where we can experiment and improvise and take risks and invent the ideas of the future. 
Constraints can feel limiting. The containers that we're in define where we can't go and what we can't do.   But constraints can also be liberating. Once we accept what isn't possible, we are free to find out what is possible. And we're free to find out who we really are, and what we have to offer the world that no one else can.
Back in 2012, Helen Sword published Stylish Academic Writing, a book where she made the case that we -- academics scholars, researchers -- all want a style revolution.
Helen showed through meta-analysis and original research that academics across disciplines and around the world are all craving the freedom to write more creatively, more like human beings. We just all think that nobody else wants us to.
Helen has devoted much of the past 10 years to giving us tools for this style revolution.  In Stylish Academic Writing. And before that in the Writer's Diet, and then later in Air and Light and Time and Space.
The key to the style revolution is not to overthrow all structures or reject all genres and conventions.  Instead, the key to the style revolution is to re-imagine how we work within existing structures and how we create new worlds from the inside out.
I have loved Helen's books for years, and I've been curious about how she lives within her writing process.
How does she navigate this paradox of structure and freedom, constraint and playfulness? Do these tensions

Writing is hard in the same ways that being a human is hard. There's no template to tell us the one, proven, correct way to do it. And in writing, as in life, we're operating within constraints that we didn't choose. Our guest today is Michelle Boyd, and her oracle for us is the question: "What metaphor describes your experience of the writing process?" When we identify a writing metaphor, it becomes a mental model, a navigation tool, that we can use to locate ourselves within our writing process and move through it with purpose. A metaphor works for the same reason that metaphors are useful in any human context: because we make meaning through comparison, connection, and relationship. Listen to this episode to learn why academic writing is so hard, how to recognize when we're stuck, and how to use a writing metaphor to see our process holistically and get ourselves moving forward again. (length: 37:03)





























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Michelle’s links:
InkWell Writing Retreats website: https://www.inkwellretreats.org/
Article by Michelle Boyd: “How We Write: Understanding Scholarly Writing Through Metaphor” (2012): http://www.michelleboyd.net/uploads/3/8/7/8/3878615/boyd_2012.pdf
Additional Resource:
Article by Helen Sword: “Snowflakes, Splinters, and Cobblestones: Metaphors for Writing” (2019): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331366415_Snowflakes_Splinters_and_Cobblestones_Metaphors_for_Writing_Methodologies_and_Practices

Create your most fascinating scholarship yet using the tools, puzzles, exercises, and thought experiments from the Oracles of Academia podcast. When you recognize the unique genius you bring to your academic writing, you can find your place in the future of scholarship. Hosted by Margy Thomas, Ph.D., founder of ScholarShape.


























Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify



























Episode 0. Welcome to the Oracles of Academia Podcast! TRANSCRIPT
Scholarly life often feels bewildering, like wandering through an unmapped realm, just hoping to get somewhere eventually.
How do we even frame the choices in front of us, much less decide what to do?
We're surrounded by information and advice on how to write, how to think, how to work, how to be -- but what we really need are sacred moments to connect with our own genius.
When the ancients needed a way to cut through the confusion and make a decision, they'd seek out oracles -- the cryptic speeches of a priestess in a mountain temple.
Today, an oracle can be any conceptual device that helps us perceive something of how the universe works, so that we can orient ourselves and discern what to do next.
A heuristic, a koan, a paradox, a parable, a thought experiment -- or even a mathematical pattern or scientific theory.
The magic of an oracle is that it is not a concrete, specific instruction telling you exactly and unambiguously what to do.
Its abstractness or obliqueness is what makes an oracle practically useful.
In the Oracles of Academia podcast, each episode will bring you a story or conversation from which we can distill a conceptual tool that helps you imagine your way into the future of scholarship.
You'll hear from a scholar who developed a powerful metaphor as a navigation device for her writing process and now shows other scholars how to use this technique.
You'll hear from a scholar who's leading a style revolution, helping us see how much agency we have to put our own voice on the page.
In some episodes, you'll hear directly from me. I'll share memories and learnings to inspire you on your scholarly journey.
The truth is, the Oracles of Academia are all of us who are imagining the future of scholarship into being.
I'm your host, Margy Thomas, founder of ScholarShape, an incubator where scholars gather to support each other in creating the most fascinating scholarship of tomorrow. Subscribe to the Oracles of Academia podcast to get every episode in your feed wherever you listen to your podcasts.