On re-imagining academic writing as an act of love

In his book about literary beginnings, Edward Said proposed that writing originates in an author’s intention to break in some fashion from the tradition they are steeped in, whether or not they sense their own powerlessness to control how their intention will be received by others. Such was Julia Molinari’s surprise to find that she had readers of her own iconoclastic work on academic writing in MET. As inquisitive and for the most part descriptivist language professionals in love with words and their worldly peregrinations, we have long been an audience hungry to broaden what we think we know about writing. No wonder, then, that her keynote on what love has to do with academic writing struck a chord of recognition at MET.

Julia’s point of departure was her intention to “trouble” the publish-or-perish culture that both sustains unequal participation in global knowledge production and “zombifies” writing into paint-by-number performances of accepted convention. It is the focus in academic writing lore on clarity and genre, she told us, that makes us “fall out of love” when we write, edit and translate, resulting in artless prose that brings little joy or wonder. Julia reminded us that there is no such thing as Standard English: digressive one-sentence paragraphs and two-page footnotes abound, genres and the worlds where texts are written change, and the identities and intentions of academic writers diversify. Successful doctoral theses have been written as graphic arguments, multimedia disquisitions and personal reflections on the struggle to reach mathematical proofs. As with languages and the worlds they inhabit, the forms writing takes are always in flux.

To meet the challenge of this constantly shifting reality, Julia enjoined us to stop viewing writing as a script to follow – Cocteau’s deadened pen-to-paper noun, écriture – and begin to see it for the quintessentially human activity that it is – écrire. Understood as a verb, writing becomes an act of creative struggle in the face of “the difficulty of being”. No more an inanimate “product” manufactured by an impersonal or algorithmic machine à écrire, writing as an act of love becomes a humanizing force. And when combined with an awareness of the global systems that work to tame linguistic and textual diversity, it can become a democratizing force as well.

Julia seemed to want us to understand that how we think about writing matters. Is the act of writing a means to an end, an instrument for (uncomplicatedly) beaming information and intention? If so, then it can likely be done by Roland Barthes’ écrivant(e): a writer who uses words without questioning them, such as our modern-day machine à écrire, the large language model. Or is writing itself the goal, an art practiced by an écrivain(e) who understands that form and meaning emerge together through inquisitive dialogue with the writing? For that, we will need humans who can arrive at knowledge via not just a few, but multiple representations.

Given our marginal place in global academic publishing, how can editors and translators support such a re-imagining of writing as love? Here, Julia came ready with a list of strategies for providing what Les Back calls “companionship for further thought”. Among them, encouraging multilingual and multimodal expression, accompanying writers through recursive revisions, building equitable shared communities devoted to artful academic writing practice, and staying knowledgeable on new publishing forms and alternatives.

By cultivating “intellectual love” – love of words, of the Babel of languages, of sudden turns of thought – and partnering with writers who love to write, we can support slower, more thoughtful scholarly processes and alternative ways to be, write, and publish in academia.

This METM24 keynote was chronicled by Theresa Truax-Gischler.

Featured photo courtesy of MET.