Storytelling and academic writing. Part 1

Two weeks ago I started a storytelling course with approximately 60 000 students from all over the world. The first week we had lectures to teach us about some basic elements in story building. Now it is already the second week, and we are talking about TV series - a topic not exactly in the very heart of my interest in storytelling...

Instead, I would like to investigate storytelling in academic writing, because I believe it can bring science much closer to the "ordinary" people, or even, to the researchers themselves. Statistics show, that most of the articles published, only have one single reader. That means we have to learn some new ways of telling people about our work.

One good example of popular science´s success is TED-talks project. Everyone can listen to these talks, and experience, how complicated stuff are made short interesting chunks for global audiences. They even have a special section about storytelling, containing 6 talks. I would like to share with you the first one of these, presented by a Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. She is talking about "the danger of a single story".

Another way of sharing, is using graphic storytelling. Ken Robinson´s Ted-talk about Changes in Education Paradigms, was drawn on a whiteboard by graphic facilitator, and become viral. Today more than 10 million people have seen the clip in youtube. Simple picture, and few selected words make a very powerful combination.

These two examples make it clear, that using the possibilities of storytelling can make a difference. But how to bring the elements of storytelling into academic writing? 

I will give you a great example of an academic article published in 2009 by professor Rosalind Gill from UK. 

How are you? 

I am totally stressed at the moment, to be honest. Work is piling up and I'm just drowning. I don't know when I'm going to have time to start on that secrecy and silence book chapter – I’m so, so late with it now, and I feel really bad that I'm letting Roisin down, but I literally never have a second. 

I know, I know exactly what you mean. 

I mean, I had 115 e-mails yesterday and they all needed answering. I'm doing 16 hour days just trying to keep on top of it. I feel like I'm always late with everything, and my 'to do' list grows faster than I can cross things off it. It’s like one of those fungi in a horror movie that doubles in size every few hours! (Laughter)And I never ever have chance to do any of my own work. I’m sleeping really badly and it all just feels completely out of control… 

It's the same for me. Reading? What that? Thinking? No chance! And you feel awful, don’t you. With me I feel like I’m constantly stealing time from the kids too- I’ll go off to check messages in the middle of a game of Monopoly or something. Sometimes I just feel like quitting. 

Yeah I know. It just gets worse. Still hoping to win the lottery, then?(laughter) But how are you? 

Do you really want to know?! (laughter) (Yeh) well, awful actually. I’m really fed up. I heard yesterday that my article for x journal was turned down. (Oh no!) You know, the one I worked on for ages and ages.I poured so much of myself into that piece (I know). And one of the referee's comments was vile – it said something like "my first year undergraduates have a better understanding of the field than this author does -- why are they wasting all of our time". When I read it it was like a slap in the face, Ros. It was all I could do not to burst out crying in the postroom, but I had a lecture right afterwards so I somehow managed to pull myself together and go and do that. But last night, I just didn't sleep (poor you) I just kept on going over and over with all these negative comments ringing round my head. And you know the worst thing is, they are right: I am useless (no you're not), I'm a complete fraud, and I should have realised that I was going to be found out if I sent my work to a top journal like that. 

This is the way how she starts her article "Breaking the silence: The hidden injuries of neo-liberal academia". I love her beginning! You just cannot help, but to feel sympathy, to find mirroring elements of your own personal academic struggles, you want to be connected, and find out more of the lives of these people. She goes on changing the gear to a more of an academic approach, explaining the context, analysing, but still keeping her personal voice, the I in the discussion...

This is a transcript of a conversation I had with a female friend in the few days before
(finally) beginning work on this chapter. Both speakers are white, both work in ‘old’ (pre-1992) British Universities, and both are employed on ‘continuing’ contracts - thus are already marked as ‘privileged’ in multiple ways in the contemporary academy. Mine is easily recognizable as the voice which worries about how late this article is! Some readers may find this fragment of conversation rather odd, but I suspect for many more it will appear familiar and may strike deep chords of recognition. It speaks of many things: exhaustion, stress, overload, insomnia, anxiety, shame,
aggression, hurt, guilt and feelings of out-of-placeness, fraudulence and fear of exposure within the contemporary academy. These feelings, these affective embodied experiences, occupy a strange position in relation to questions of secrecy and silence. 

Professor Gill is breaking the traditional rules of academia, and sharing her own academic life, her personal effort to create this piece of writing, and connecting it to the wider problematics of neo-liberal society, and its academia. Partly literature, partly research. Touching the borders, and inviting to think together... 

What would it mean to turn our lens upon our own labour processes, organisational governance and conditions of production? What would we find if, instead of studying others, we focussed our gaze upon our own community, and took as our data not the polished publication or the beautifully crafted talk, but the unending flow of communications and practices in which we are all embedded and enmeshed, often reluctantly: the proliferating e-mails, the minutes of meetings, the job applications, the peer reviews, the promotion assessments, the drafts of the RAE narrative, the committee papers, the student feedback forms, even the after-seminar chats?

Don´t you just want to hug her? On my computer I do have more examples of this storytelling kind of academic writing. Unfortunately not all of it is publicly available. Perhaps I will share some more already next time... 

Taking your writing to the next level: Storytelling #storymooc

Well, it has been quite a while since I was sharing some new ideas or materials about writing on this page. Now I am back from holidays, creating writing workshops, and a small poetry festival, reading and writing myself.  The autumn has arrived in Sweden. It feels that I am ready now to continue my journey in English writing.

Besides grammar, academic argumentation, and rhetorics, one must also learn to built up a living connection between yourself as a writer, your topic, and your readers. It is one thing to know what to say, but knowing how to say it so that people get engaged in what ever you have to say, is the most important part of your writing.

Just few days back, I discovered an interesting webinar "Researcher, write to be read!". Swedish researcher Jenny Helin was talking online about the research texts that are killing the audiences with their boring stereotyped lines. She asks for the ethics of writing: What kind of reality are we creating with our boring academic texts that no one wishes to read? 

I totally agree with her suggestions to think of an academic text as a meeting place for a discussion. Instead of purely informing, open a dialogue, invite your reader to participate, and collaborate. It is of course much easier to say than to do. Especially, because of the traditionally very strict academic publishing rules that allow very little creativity, and experimentation in forms.

Something has to be done, because already today, Jenny Helin says, there is an average less than one reader per academic article. Isn´t that alarming? Why to write about your research in the first place, when no one is actually reading it? What greater meaning will our thousands of hours of serious work have, if nothing grows out of it in the future?

During my personal academic career, I have come across some pretty good examples about communicative scientific texts. One of my favourite being Susan Engel´s "Children´s need to know: Curiosity in Schools". She twines the elements of storytelling with research facts, and creates an argumentation that is much more appealing than in most other cases.

In order to take my own writing further, and break the mainstream trend of boring texts, I decided to participate in the online course about the future of storytelling. I will learn how to bring stories to my writing, and make it more alive.

The course starts in few days. See you there!


You might also be interested in:

The Beginning
Discussions with an Apple Tree
Creative imagination in writing
Research plan guidelines
My creative writing blog in English

Coming This Year: A MOOC for English Language Learners

The University of California, Berkeley will offer another free online course in writing under the title College Writing 2x: Principles of Written Communication.

College Writing 2x is a writing course designed specially for learners of English. It will be offered through edX.org, and will be completely free. It will use some of the most advanced tools in online writing instruction. Students will have meaningful ways to practice their writing and get feedback on how well they are doing.

The course will be taught by Maggie Sokolik. Dr. Sokolik received her Ph.D. in applied linguistics from UCLA. She has taught writing and technical communication at UC Berkeley since 1992. She is the author of over twenty ESL and composition textbooks, including Sound Ideas, co-authored with Michael Krasny. She has also written for and been featured in several educational video projects in Japan. She travels frequently to speak about grammar, writing, and instructor education.

The course plan includes:

 - 5 weeks studies of Written English (A review of basic grammar terminology and understanding; writing effective sentences and paragraphs; introductions and conclusions; strategies for writing longer texts; thesis statements);

 - 5 weeks studies of Techniques in Editing and Revision (Proofreading and self-editing; revision vs. editing; common errors in grammar, punctuation, and spelling; understanding tone and diction; vocabulary development.)

- 5 weeks studies of Modes of Written Communication (Formal and informal writing; effective email communication; academic writing; memos; project proposals; creative writing; technical writing)

The initial plan is to make the course available twice a year. The first course starts in September 2013.

Source: http://writing.berkeley.edu/classes-and-awp/mooc

Creative imagination in writing #artofeducation

I am at this point now, where there is a deadline coming closer and closer, but I have nothing to deliver. The usual student syndrome. How to find the creative side in myself despite the stress?

Hours are passing. I am writing nothing. But instead reading, small talking, chatting, skyping, blogging, reading again...

What is the flow?

First I am in the  #slowtwitter discussion @tammevelin with a Swedish educational scientist (Bertil Törestad) about the meaning of "flow" and unconscious in our behaviour. That keeps developing. What is creativity and how does it occur? I am very creative here, flow is the main mood of working for me.

Bertil Törestad ‏@makeras

5h

@tammevelin I think flow is when you are unconsciously processing what you are up to and everything just flows....

 View conversation 

•  Reply 
•  Retweet 
•  Favorite 
 

Törestad has a PhD in psychology. I disagree because I have a book called "Flow" from Csikszentmihalyi (I´ll never learn to write the name correct! I guess that is not so special.):

Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. In essence, flow is characterized by complete absorption in what one does. Proposed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, this positive psychology concept has been widely referenced across a variety of fields. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

I think that the flow means that you are fully present and conscious of what you are doing, the senses are wide open but you stay focused. It is exactly the opposite of unconscious mood. The psychology PhD says nothing after a while, I guess he did not know about the flow so much. So I am all alone and getting back to my previous topic which was to write something for coursera.com.

Word is the beginning of intelligent design

A moment later I am sitting here watching videos with David Dennett about "Intuition pumps" and "intelligent design", again getting into a discussion. Now I am disagreeing with some of his arguments. Dennett talks about his newest book "Intuition pumps and other tools for thinking", there are 77 thinking tools he is sharing in the book, he presents some of them to this audience. Interesting, he calls it the App-s for the brain. Sounds like something you would like to download: "rhetorical question" we should try to answer these anyway (!), "surely-alarm" being usually the weakest link in argumentation and "rathering-signals" that very often present a false dichotomy. These are nice little tools that are used regularly, start noticing it and you are able to avoid at least some of the classical "white men´s traps".

Dennett himself is a nice old man, little bit like a grandfather or a Santa Claus figure for a mankind. Sweet and innocent. I have a good relationship with old men with white beards, at least usually I have. Perhaps that is changing now because  recently I wrote a blog post "Mom, watch me, I am doing the impossible" questioning "their" real expertise in a most straightforward manner. That, of course, is nothing personal, I am just exercising my rights to think and question the world as perceived by our grandfathers, turning off some of the common "fixed points" or "intuition pumps", to use Dennett´s vocabulary.

Dennett´s discussion and claims were actually quite interesting, until he mentioned Stalin "treating" people instead of "punishing" and asking if we want Stalin`s methods back. That is a tricky road, specially from a person talking about thinking tools while standing in front of an admiring global audience... Hearing that sentence, made my my eyeballs want to jump off, and roll away to opposite directions. What a naive approach from an old educated man, especially if you want to advocate for punishment, as Dennett did! I guess he has not heard of Gulag prison camps in Siberia and millions sent there to die. Punishment was the favourite thinking tool for Stalin, he exercised it on millions and millions of people. It was no way a therapy or a treatment machinery that put 10 016 persons (June 1941) and 20 701 people (March 1949) in Estonia on animal wagons and send them to Siberia (Estonian population all together was about 1 million or even less back then). They were innocent people sent to die of hunger and cold, 90% of them never returned (women, men, children, old people). Calling that treatment, is an obvious misstatement.

I find it interesting how people build up their claims, it is a kind of emotional ladder, very often there is no rational explanations behind the ideas. These old men with their beautiful Santa beards are probably one of the cleverest people on Earth, they are used to people just staring at them. This admiration does not mean that we are stupid, we just love the Santas. I have the feeling that real discussions are not posted online because clever people sometimes underestimate their audiences, they underestimate us, ordinary people. I love to meet these men every now and then and talk face-to-face because they are just so sweet and lovely. It always feels like Christmas then.

IMAGINATION. Am I becoming the Sherlock Holmes of the www?

How to write new meaningful texts for wider audiences? Maria Konnikova says: "Imagination takes the stuff of observation and experience and recombines them into something new." She advises people to step back and take a wider view on the topic they would like to write about, because "one of the most important ways to facilitate imaginative thinking is through distance." The Sherlock Holmes´ view reveals details left unnoticed, enables us to combine our knowledge in a new way, create and innovate.  When I moved to Sweden then I slowly discovered much more about Estonia and Estonian culture, the ways of being there. That 300 kilometres distance changed my view tremendously.

It is easy to be creative and write if you are passionate about your topic. I could write books about Estonian history for example. I have collected materials, stories, pictures etc through many years. This is a way how to get your imagination going! The hardest thing for me to manage is discipline, it is not so easy to keep the focus, when distractions are everywhere...  

Time is passing, the lines are here, but still I have nothing to deliver. @tammevelin in #slowtwitter mood.

Online handbooks about scientific writing

There are loads of online material available for everyone who would like to write and publish something. The more I am getting into it, the more links I am finding with tips and pieces of advice. It seems to me that the reason for poor writing cannot not be the lack of online materials to support your writing process. It must be something else... yet to be figured out...

Before you can start your scientific writing, you need to do a lot of reading. That comes first, nothing can replace that  (not even a great editor). And then, before starting with your writing process, it is important to think about the audiences and language you are using and many other aspects in writing. There are so many things to consider before the actual writing, not to mention of course that there is so much to think while writing. Thinking, thinking, thinking...

- Where to find support then?  And be short!

For example there is a useful free online journal that helps you through the process of getting your scientific article published created by Elsevier writers with the title " Understanding the Publishing Process: how to Publish in scientific and medical journals". Perhaps that will give you some firsthand assistance?


All the upcoming findings about writing in English and the future of education in my #slowtwitter account @tammevelin.