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 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 appropriate compartments within her Scrivener dashboard, like clean laundry folded and put away in dresser drawers. This little universe is a container for Helen's book project to emerge within. It makes me think of a three-dimensional version of an outline. It's all organized around her central idea, her working thesis, and it's structured in accordance with her chapter strategy, or at least her current chapter strategy.
Helen tells me that in the course of developing this book, she's changed her mind about how many chapters she'll have and how all of the chapters will fit together. But this little universe that she's built gives her a way to make these big structural changes without getting lost or overwhelmed. She can shift the structure to accommodate shifts in her overall vision for the project. Helen maintains her sense of play and pleasure by making her workspace as beautiful and delightful as possible.
Helen: My post-it notes are all in a book of wrapping paper. Each one has a beautiful background. This kind of tactile pleasure helps me think differently, a kind of mind-mapping structural thinking, but it also just makes the whole process more joyful.
For Helen, the play and the struggle of the writing process are inextricable.
Helen: One of the things that I've learned from my research on pleasure is that the academics who really enjoy their writing -- most of what they enjoy is the challenge of the craft. So, if I can see even the hard parts as a joyful challenge, I know that's going to get me through. The structure gives the scaffolding for play and pleasure. So it's not an inhibiting structure. It's a freeing structure because it kind of gives those big boundaries that allow me then to cut loose within.
So how does Helen play within this structure she's created? How does she actually go about bringing order to all of her materials? What processes does she follow? What habits of mind does she rely on?
In this next part, she refers to me, Margy, in the third person, because we're actually holding this conversation in front of a live audience.
Helen: After reading some of Margy's material on structure, I went through and for every chapter, I did a collection post-it notes. For each section, I say, okay, what's my big idea? What's my evidence? How am I going to interpret that evidence? Why is this interesting to people? And what's the revelation that I want people to go away with? And so, I've done that for every one of the 15 chapters, and for every one of the three sections within those 15 chapters. So that's a lot of post-it notes.
What Helen is talking about here is structuring her new book, Writing With Pleasure, as a fractal. This is an approach to scholarship design that I discuss in the materials Helen's referencing here. Helen and I have discovered that we both find it useful to visualize scholarship as having a fractal structure. A fractal is a structure that we see all over nature, whenever a self-similar pattern repeats across scales. Like the way the tiniest twig on a tree mirrors the structure of the whole tree, or the way the shell of a snail mirrors the structure of the spiral galaxy that that snail exists within.
When we understand books as having a fractal structure, we mean that a book conveys one central idea, and it's made up of other, smaller, mini ideas. And each of those mini ideas are made up of even smaller ideas. All of these units of meaning -- the macro unit of meaning, which is the whole book, the meso unit of meaning, which are the chapters or parts of the book, and the micro units of meaning that are individual sections and paragraphs -- all of these units of meaning are subject to the same laws of logic. Which means that we can design each individual part of the book the same way that we design the whole book, and vice versa.
We'll talk more about this fractal model later in this episode. I call it the Story-Argument model. But for now, what's important to know is that our mental models give us ways to coach ourselves through the writing process.
When we have in mind an abstract picture of what scholarship looks like, how it is structured at the most abstract level, then we know what questions to ask ourselves to coach ourselves through the process of developing a work of scholarship that fits that structure. From the model, we can derive questions that we use, like writing prompts, to focus our attention on what's most important as we navigate the writing process.
In talking with Helen about her writing process, I noticed two major strategies that she uses for balancing structure and play.
Strategy number one: the tangible playground. Helen has a physical form for expressing the structure of her book as it currently exists and for supporting the emergence of the finished book product. For Helen, this tangible form is found in her Scrivener file and in her beautiful notebooks that are full of printed paper and post-it notes.
Strategy number two: the conceptual playground. Helen has a mental model of scholarship, an image in her mind of the architecture of a work of scholarship, a knowledge product. She puts this mental model to work by translating it into questions that she asks herself to guide her thinking and writing.
These two playgrounds, the tangible and the conceptual, are central to Helen's innovations as a stylish academic writer. She consciously designs her own writing process as a structure for exploration. This structure helps Helen channel her imagination into creating work that will be coherent and useful to readers, even as it transcends conventions.
So how about you? Where is your playground? What tangible structure are you developing your project within? And what conceptual structure or mental model is guiding you as you work with your tangible materials. Ideally, the playground is stable enough to support your process, but flexible enough to evolve as your ideas evolve.
After our break, we'll dig deeper into mental models for writing, and we'll look at how Helen's mental model has evolved over the years.
[MID-ROLL]
In the first part of this episode, we heard from Helen Sword about the containers that she is working within -- the tangible form of her project materials and the conceptual form of her mental model of scholarship. And we heard how these physical and conceptual structures are places where Helen can experiment and bring new ideas into being. They are playgrounds for revolution.
In the second part of the episode, we're going to dig deeper into Helen's mental model for writing. We're going to look at how that mental model has evolved over the years. Helen has become increasingly conscious of structure in her writing over the years as she has thought more and more deeply about reader experience.
Helen: If you went back and looked at the two books that I published as a literary scholar, before I started writing books on writing, they're much more free-flowing. The structure was an afterthought. Whereas now I'm much more thinking of the book as a whole, from the very beginning, thinking about the symmetry. I want this sense of balance. And it's comforting to me, but I think it's comforting to the reader as well, partly because I'm often making arguments that are outside the box.
Helen's shift to a more rigorous approach to structure is what enabled her to start making more unconventional arguments. It's like that line from Flaubert about how he was regular and orderly in his life so that he could be violently original in his work.
Helen's first great experiment with manuscript structure was Stylish Academic Writing, which was published in 2012 by Harvard University Press. The goal that she set herself in writing this book was twofold. First, to persuade academic writers that it is possible and desirable to write stylishly. And second, to give them the tools and strategies for doing so. This two-part goal was difficult because it required her to blend two very different genres, each with their own structural conventions.
First, books that present empirical research on how academic discourse works. And second, how-to books, which tend to be written by individual academics, sharing insights and recommendations based on their own experience with writing and anecdotes from other academic writers. Both of these are worthy genres. But neither one was a fitting model for Helen's project.
When Helen couldn't find any other academic books that combined empirical research with how-to, she decided to use logic and instinct to figure out a structure that just made sense to her and that she thought would make sense to her readers.
She ended up dividing the book into two parts. Part one is the empirical section, consisting of several chapters that present Helen's background research on academic style across the disciplines. And part two is the how-to section, 11 chapters with each one explaining one specific aspect of writing stylishly -- sentence structure, voice titles, hooks, abstracts, et cetera.
Those how-to chapters progress from foundational aspects of style, to stylizing specific parts of a manuscript, to some chapters that look at different academic genres, to a final body chapter that explores the intangibles of style.
Helen: It seems like a really obvious structure. I can't tell you how long it took me to get there because I couldn't find another book like it.
In order to design the structure of Stylish Academic Writing, Helen imagined her reader's journey through the material and plotted a course for them, point by point, from beginning to end. And the structure is rhetorical, meaning that it's dictated by Helen's imagined relationship with her reader.
The rhetorical logic of Stylish Academic Writing holds up. If you read the book straight through from the first page to the last, you don't encounter any jarring moments where the logical links are broken. When the book was published, the overall reader response validated Helen's approach. The book quickly became a modern classic.
But for her next book, Air and Light and Time and Space, Helen would choose to take a radically different approach. Her conceptual playground shifted significantly because of a reader named Janet, who wrote Helen a letter in response to Stylish Academic Writing.
Helen: A retired law professor called Janet wrote to me this letter about how she read the book. She said, "I looked at your table of contents. I looked in your index to see if you written about people that I find interesting. I went into some of the chapters that had the most interesting-sounding topics and read them. It was not linear." And she said, "I really wish that in your introduction, you had given me a map, and some sense of how I could read the book if I didn't choose to go in a linear way." And I honestly had never thought of it this way, even though I think of readers all the time. I had never thought of a non- linear reader coming to this book, even though of course that's how you might address a how-to book. You go to the chapter that speaks to where you are. So, with my next book, I did things a bit differently.
Janet's critique strengthens Helen's mental model by deepening her understanding of the reader experience. Our relationship with our readers, real or imagined, can be yet another generative structure, a constraint around our writing that can focus us on what's important and propel us forward. This perspective on critical feedback is a big reason why Helen is able to keep innovating and breaking new ground in her scholarship.
So now let's hear about the book that Helen wrote next, influenced by Janet's feedback. The book is Air and Light and Time and Space, and it was published in 2017 by Harvard University Press.
Helen: This book is about the writing habits of successful academics, with success very broadly defined. I interviewed a hundred academics about their writing, how they write, their emotions around writing. I also got 1200 questionnaires from writers.
Helen realized that all of her data about successful writers' practices fit into four categories, four sets of habits: behavioral, artisanal, social, and emotional. Behavioral habits govern how you carve out time and space for your writing. Artisanal habits govern how you pursue ever-greater mastery of the skills involved in writing. Your social habits govern how you engage in relationships around your writing, how you give and receive support and feedback with the people around you. And then finally, your emotional habits. These govern how you manage your subjective experience of the writing process. Different writers may vary in which types of habits they're really strong in, or that they emphasize. And any writer can choose to become more consciously aware of their habits and cultivate areas where they feel like they're lacking.
So, let's get to the question of structure. How could Helen make this practical book as user-friendly as possible? Helen knew that she needed to figure out a way to structure Air and Light and Time and Space so that readers could dip in and out of it, according to their own needs and interests. She wanted readers to be able to navigate the book in a nonlinear way.
The answer turned out to lie in those four categories of habits that we mentioned earlier: behavioral, artisanal, social, and emotional. These four categories gave her the acronym BASE: B-A-S-E. And then this BASE acronym gave Helen the structuring device for the whole book. It's an architectural metaphor.
Helen: The idea is that this is the four-sided base on which you are building your writing practice. You need all sides of the base to be operating together.
One glance at the table of contents and you can easily see the structure of the entire book. The body of the book is organized into four parts, one for each corner of the base. Within each part, Helen gives us three chapters elaborating on that element of a writing practice. These chapters are full of examples and stories and quotes and exercises based on Helen's in-depth research on hundreds of academic writers around the world. The body of the book is then bookended with two long conceptual chapters: the Introduction, setting up the framework, and the Conclusion, integrating the framework. At the very beginning and very end of the book are two short lyrical passages, a Preface and an Afterward.
Helen: In the Preface, thanks to Janet, I said, "You should read the Introduction first, because that will help you understand where I'm coming from. After that, you can enter this book by any door."
The Afterward that comes at the end of the book feels like the opening of a door back out to the world, beyond the book. The Afterward evokes how we can apply the concepts from the book beyond our own writing practices in our communities and institutions. There's a real logic and symmetry to the overall organization of the book that enables the reader to immediately grasp and remember the whole structure.
Because the reader can hold the entire book in mind at once, they're able to navigate the book in a non-linear way without getting lost. On any given day, the reader can pick up the book, flip to the table of contents or skim the headings and chapter titles, and the reader can know immediately which section is going to be most helpful to them in that moment. That table of contents is especially close to Helen's heart.
Helen: The book designer centered the table of contents. Normally, a table of contents would be left flush, but they centered it because they recognized that the symmetry was an important part of this book structure. Which I just loved. That was a nice, you know, form and content speaking together. And the best book review I ever got -- the one that I cherish most -- was a reviewer who pointed to my table of contents and said that it should be framed the way you frame architectural drawings of stately homes.
What makes this table of contents so powerful is that it's not just a list of chapter titles and topics. It's a microcosm of the book as a whole. And it's a point of entry into the world of the book. The table of contents is a device that helps the reader hold the entire fractal structure of the book in mind so that they can navigate the book according to their own needs and interests, rather than having to follow one set linear course.
Another point of entry to the book is an online quiz that Helen created, a diagnostic tool that readers can use to assess where they might focus their efforts at improvement. This quiz is like a personalized invitation guiding readers to the spot in the book that they might find most useful at that moment. The quiz is linked in the show notes and is also on Helen's website@helensword.com slash writing tools.
Air and Light and Time and Space doesn't just feel revolutionary for its substance -- its point about how much variety there is in successful academic writers' practices. Air and Light and Time and Space also feels revolutionary for its structure. Helen doesn't design it as a linear journey for readers. Instead, she designs it more like a universe for readers to immerse themselves in. She invites us into this universe and then she trusts us to chart our own course.
Helen: I'm very conscious of the pleasure for the reader of not getting lost, of knowing where they are, knowing where they're going. I like giving the structural handhold that gives you a way into it.
Helen's approach to designing reader experiences has evolved over the years. First, in her early literary scholarship, she designed free-flowing structures that were less about providing a particular kind of reader experience than about delivering her literary analyses. Then came Stylish Academic Writing, her first radically unconventional argument about academic writing, where she used logic and intuition to develop a linear structure. Next came Air and Light and Time and Space, which she designed to function like an immersive universe for readers to navigate in their own way.
As Helen's understanding of the reader experience evolved, so did her mental model of scholarship. She's incorporated various new structures into her mental model over the years -- social structures like genres and institutions and scholarly communities, and aesthetic structures like symmetry and fractals, which capture something about how humans experience pleasure and coherence. Both kinds of structures, the social and the aesthetic, can inform how we as scholars imagine our readers and how we design experiences for them.
In the book that Helen is currently working on, entitled Writing With Pleasure, she's continuing in the vein of Air and Light and Time and Space, designing this new book to also be an immersive universe for the reader. A space that they can navigate in their own non-linear way, rather than having to follow just one set path.
Helen: I've become increasingly balanced and structural and fractal -- to use Margy's term -- as I've gone along. What I've learned from Margy is looking at not just the book itself, but each chapter, each section within each chapter, and to some extent, even each paragraph to say, "Okay, what is it is my Story-Argument here? What's the claim I'm making? Why should I care?"
Helen's ever-evolving mental model of scholarship is her secret weapon as a writer. That model is what she uses to shape her project materials into powerful books that her readers find fascinating and transformative.
When you become conscious of your mental model, as Helen is, you can use it to notice the structure of your own thoughts and navigate your thinking and writing more deliberately.
Before I knew Helen personally, when I was just admiring her work from afar, I would always wonder about this. How does her mind work? What thought processes guide her in creating her books? What questions does she ask herself in order to make sense of all of her data and find a shape for it that feels right?
I would ask myself these questions any time I read a book by any writer that rearranged my mental landscape. What is it about the writers who produce the work that leaves us transformed?
It turns out that there are patterns to how we humans make meaning, common threads to how we seek coherence. To find these patterns and common threads, we have to zoom out to a higher level of abstraction, outside of specific academic genres and disciplines. And we have to think about how humans in general make meaning. This is what Helen was doing when she broke out of conventional academic genres to design the structures of Stylish Academic Writing and Air and Light and Time and Space. She was writing for humans, not just for academics.
So, when we zoom out, what do we see? Well, what I see after many, many years of studying scholarship and scholars and the scholarly process, is, I see two patterns of meaning, intertwined: story and argument.
Humans have been using these two methods of meaning-making -- storytelling and argumentation -- for millennia. When we want to communicate with each other about not just the facts of our experience, but the meaning of it, we tell stories that distill experiences into causal sequences that illustrate themes. And we process data into claims that capture the essence of what the data means.
We can understand, at an intuitive level, how great scholarship uses both of these strategies. We know that great scholarship draws readers into stories that matter and makes persuasive arguments about what the data means.
I really wanted to surface this intuitive understanding and explicate it and hone it. I wanted us to have a more rigorous structure to articulate how story and argument work together in scholarship. And that's why I spent years developing the Story-Argument model as a conceptual framework to describe how this works.
This quest to find the Story-Argument model has been my playground for revolution for many years.
But let's get back to you, and to the question that we began with.
Where is your playground for revolution? What structures have you devised to work within, to explore and invent and take risks within? How do you structure your project materials, your time and attention, your space, your world? How do the very constraints that you have to work within elevate your creativity and expand your sense of what's possible?
We often think of revolutions on the broadest scales -- the sun revolving in the middle of our solar system, radiating all of the energy that powers our world; the mass uprising in the streets where thousands of people coordinate their movements in order to revise an entire society at once.
But revolutions are fractal too. As surely as the sun spins, as surely as empires rise and fall, we revolve at the center of our own lives. We are revolutions in miniature.
And our playgrounds -- our structures for inventing the future -- are wherever we happen to be.
[CLOSING CREDITS]