Liz opened this session by asking us to "trust her" in the following
exercise: we were to write continuously for seven minutes, without
editing, on the topic "drum." (She explained
later that she had intentionally selected a "neutral" word, one that
was not "located" in any of our disciplines.) Liz then asked us to
attend as others read their passages aloud, not anticipating our own
upcoming reading. Afterwards, we discussed the passages we had heard
(see what participants wrote):
We noticed various qualities of writing that might have resulted
from disciplinary positioning (two chemists wrote about resonance
of wave functions, for instance). But many of us found this exercise
very different from disciplinary writing, which "always starts
with a structure." Writing for publication involves a consideration
of audience, and an awareness of the tension around the role of
the observer in the observations being recorded: Is she out there
or a part of the record? Is the account one of a subject or a process
of perception? There is, in disciplinary work, more of an anxiety
about audience reaction, more of a fear of "not doing it well." But
this exercise did capture for some of us our resistence to writing.
When we write for publication, we have an investment in the product,
and a passion for the subject; it is driven by our own interests,
rather than externally assigned, as this exercise was. (For others,
the opposite was true: this assignment felt "freer" and internally
motivated, disciplinary writing more externally driven.)
We agreed that we learned more about the writers than about the
assigned topic in this exercise, and more about the writers as
people outside their disciplines (those who were musicians, for
instance) than about the discipline-specific quality of their writing.
We learned that for some of us writing is a joyful experience,
for others not. We speculated about whether writing a paper not
as a report that occurs at the end of a process of discovery, but
considering it instead as part of the process of creation itself,
might make writing more enjoyable. If we are constructing as we
go, interpreting as we go, if we are writing papers that are always "beyond" us,
if the process of writing is one of creating knowledge, and we
need to go deep within to do that, then some of the excitement
of conducting an experiment might find its way into our writing
as well.
There was considerable discussion of what it means to write as
an historian: the attempt to tell the story, to "get to how it
felt" in the archives, to give the history of the discovery. There
was conversation about the anxiety of putting all the pieces together
to make the story, and of seeing where it fits with the stories
of others. There is anxiety about knowing the audience, the venue,
the larger terrain. It is hard for an historian to write "along
the way," when he doesn't have all the data; there is also a problem
of knowing when you have "enough."
Liz ended the conversation by tracing a spectrum of writing,
from the diary through the reporting and scholarly modes. She also
suggested that we can transform the sort of writing anxiety that
is disabling into something productive, by thinking of it as the
expression of a tension. We are nervous about "making a commitment
to one narrative" (when we connect the dots between A and B, for
instance, we are not connecting C to D). But the ability to construct
such an account can also be the source of enjoyment in the process.
Liz suggested that we might learn to be more effective writers
by learning more about how different disciplines write. She also
said that remembering that our brains are always at work "in the
background," getting ideas, might help us relax, be less judgmental,
open up and use ourselves as a source of data in our writing.
Our discussion of "science's audiences" will pick up again in
person next Friday. October 1, @ 1:15, when Tamara Davis of the
Biology Department will speak about "Presenting Science Within
and Outside of the Lab." In the interim, the conversation is invited
to continue online.