Ep 2. Playgrounds for Revolution: Helen Sword on Structure, Pleasure, and Innovation in Academic Wri Margy Thomas - ScholarShape 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 Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify 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 fuel her innovations? Today, we'll hear directly from Helen all about her writing process and how these paradoxes play out for her. And we'll think through what all this might mean for us as writers. From Helen, the Oracle we receive is the question, where is your playground for revolution? Helen: “The structure gives the scaffolding for play and pleasure. So it's not an inhibiting structure. It's a freeing structure. In this episode of Oracles of Academia, I bring you a conversation with Helen Sword and my reflections on what I learned from it. I'm your host, Margy Thomas, founder of ScholarShape. May this oracle help you find your way into the future of scholarship. [OPENING CREDITS] In Stylish Academic Writing, Helen Sword's classic text from 2012, she calls for a style revolution that banishes lifeless and obscure academic prose forever. I first read Stylish Academic Writing back in 2013, when I was founding ScholarShape, my business, which supports scholars in writing creatively. Helen is the person who helped me see that it was possible to be human in the process of creating scholarship. Over the past decade, Helen has written several academic writing guidebooks that map out a new universe of possibilities for creating scholarship from our own perspectives, in our own living voices. In this conversation, Helen shares how she structures her own scholarly writing process and how she plays and explores within this structure. Helen's perspective on writing is threaded through with the paradox of structure and play, constraint and creativity. The two sides of a paradox seem at odds with each other, and yet they are integral to one another. As you listen to this episode, consider the question, where is your playground for revolution? What structures have you devised to work within, to explore and invent and take risks within? And what structures do you have no choice but to work within, but you still find ways to exercise your agency? Your playground could be a physical place or object, like a computer full of your files and sources, or a wall of your office covered in post-it notes. Your playground could be a conceptual framework that guides your thinking and writing. Your playground could be a genre that you're trying to reinvent, or the institution where you work, or a scholarly community that you engage with. Maybe your playground is an aesthetic structure, like symmetry or rhythm. Most likely, your playground combines all four kinds of structures: tangible structures, conceptual structures, social structures, and aesthetic structures. In this episode of Oracles of Academia, we'll see how balancing structure and play in our writing enables us to create and communicate revolutionary ideas. On the day that Helen and I spoke, the playground that she was in the middle of was a book in progress, entitled Writing With Pleasure. Helen was physically located in Auckland, New Zealand, where she is a professor at the University of Auckland, as well as the Director of their Center for Learning and Research in Higher Education. But in spirit, Helen was immersed in her book project. The idea for her book, Writing with Pleasure, grew out of research that she conducted with her research assistant, Madeline Ballard. They studied 90 academic writing guidebooks and noticed that something critical was missing. Helen: Discussions of pleasure in academic writing are almost non-existent. It was less than 1% of the page count in the 90 academic writing guidebooks. So, I ran workshops around the world and asked people to write a narrative of a time in their lives when writing gave them pleasure. I've got these 600 wonderful narratives. I found pleasure is everywhere. People have memories of pleasure from their childhood. Pleasure from work on their PhD. Some get pleasure in the cognitive processes of working on a computer; some get pleasure from writing by hand. So, I want to write the book that puts pleasure back on the map and gives people strategies for pleasure. Helen is aware that her message in this book is rather revolutionary. Helen: This is the book where I'm just saying to hell with it. I'm going to write about pleasure. I'm going to fill it with metaphor. And I love this fact -- it's being published by Princeton University Press as part of their new Skills for Scholars series. So, this is Princeton saying, finding pleasure in writing and pleasure through metaphor and color and everything else -- those are essential skills for scholars. What does a revolutionary book about pleasure look like while it is in the middle of being written? With such a wild and creative idea at the heart of it, does the work process look wild and creative too? Helen and I were on a video call, and she shared her screen and opened up her Scrivener file so that I could see all of her notes and rough drafts and images that she's working with. Scrivener is a word processing software designed for developing large creative projects. Helen: So, what you can see is I have three sections to my book. I have five chapters; three in each section. And when you unfold them, you see that I have an introduction and then three sections within each chapter. And then within each section, you can open it up and see my notes. What's striking here is how orderly Helen's project materials are. Most of the book isn't drafted yet, but Helen already knows how many chapters and sections and subsections the book will have and what each one of these pieces will be about. And she's filed away all of her notes and data and sources and interview transcripts into their
