All around the world, there is a curious breed of human being inhabiting the corridors of universities, research institutes, and laboratories. They can be identified by their slightly tousled appearance, their tendency to carry seventeen USB sticks containing different versions of the same document, and their absolute, unwavering insistence that they are not – under any circumstances – writers. This is despite the fact that they spend a copious amountof their waking hours doing precisely that: writing.
I find this fascinating. Not in the academic sense where ‘fascinating’ means ‘I’ve received funding to investigate this,’ but in the genuine, eyebrow-raising sense of encountering something so magnificently absurd that one simply must sit down with a cup of tea and a few custard creams, and think about it properly.
National Writing Day arrives each year as a celebration of writing in all its forms, and yet, if you were to wander into any research department on this particular day and announce, ‘Happy National Writing Day, fellow writers!’ you would be met with a choir of protestations so vigorous that nearby seismographs might register the disturbance.
‘Oh no,’ the researchers would say, backing away as if you’d just offered them a suspicious prawn canapé at a conference reception. ‘I’m not a writer. I’m a scientist.’ Or a historian. Or an economist. Or a sociologist. The specific discipline varies, but the sentiment remains remarkably consistent: writing is something that other people do. Writers write. Researchers merely… document. Transcribe. Record. Annotate.
This is, of course, complete and utter nonsense of the highest order, and I say this with tremendous affection for researchers, having encountered many of them in their natural habitats, both in my academic role and as an academic copyeditor. The researcher who claims not to write is rather like a fish insisting it doesn’t swim. ‘No, no,’ the fish would say, if fish could speak (which they cannot – not in human terms anyway, which is probably for the best given how crowded the world’s oceans already are).
‘I don’t swim. I merely propel myself through an aqueous medium using rhythmic fin movements. It’s a completely different thing.’
Yet the average researcher writes grant applications, which are essentially very expensive forms of creative fiction in which one must convincingly pretend to know exactly how a three-year project will unfold, despite the fact that research, by its very nature, involves discovering things one didn’t previously know. They write literature reviews, which require synthesising hundreds of sources into coherent narratives. They write methodology sections, results sections, and discussion sections. They write emails to collaborators, feedback for students, reports for funders, and the occasional strongly worded note about the state of the department kitchen.
They write constantly. They write in the evenings and on weekends and during holidays when they really should be doing literally anything else. And yet somehow, mysteriously, they remain convinced that they are not writers.
I have a theory about this, and like all good theories, it involves a certain amount of speculation and at least one questionable metaphor. I believe that researchers have developed what might be called Writer’s Identity Dysmorphia: a condition in which perfectly competent writers look in the mirror and see someone who simply cannot string a sentence together. This condition appears to be endemic in academic environments, passed down from supervisor to student like a particularly unhelpful heirloom.
Somewhere along the line, a great many researchers absorbed the idea that writing is an art, practised by artists, involving inspiration and creativity and possibly a small attic room and almost certainly a significant amount of emotional suffering. Real writers, according to this mythology, sit down at mahogany desks with fountain pens and produce deathless prose in a single, elegant draft. Real writers have muses. Real writers experience the kind of creative torment that makes for excellent biographical films starring someone with cheekbones.
Researchers, by contrast, sit down at cluttered desks with laptops and produce awkward first drafts that are subsequently revised seventeen times before being rejected by a journal and revised another twelve times. They do not have muses; they have deadlines. They do not experience creative torment; they experience reviewer two, which is arguably worse.
Because of this perceived gap between the glamorous Writer and the workaday researcher, academics have constructed an alternative vocabulary to describe what they do. They don’t write papers; they ‘put together’ papers, as if academic articles were flat-pack furniture. They don’t compose arguments; they ‘set out’ findings, like placing cups on a table. They don’t craft prose; they merely ‘present data,’ as if they were game show assistants rather than authors of their own work.
This linguistic sleight of hand allows researchers to spend their entire careers writing without ever having to identify as writers – and without ever having to confront the terrifying possibility that they might benefit from thinking about their writing as, well, writing.
Nobody tells researchers this during their training. Possibly because nobody told their supervisors, and we have thus created an infinite regress of people who don’t know that they don’t know: writing is thinking. Not just the recording of thoughts that have already occurred, but the actual process of figuring out what one thinks. The reason that first draft was so awful is not that we failed to properly transcribe the brilliant ideas in our heads; it’s that we hadn’t actually had the ideas yet. We were using writing to generate them, which is exactly what writing is for.
Realising this can be enormously relieving. It turns out that struggling with writing is not evidence of incompetence but simply evidence of thinking. It can also be mildly alarming. If writing is thinking, and we’ve been avoiding writing, then we’ve also been avoiding… well, let’s not follow that thought to its logical conclusion. It’s National Writing Day, and we’re trying to be celebratory.
When we don’t see ourselves as writers, we don’t read books about writing. We don’t practice writing deliberately. We don’t seek feedback on our writing as writing, only on our content, our methodology, and our conclusions. We improve our research skills systematically, through courses and workshops and careful study, while assuming that writing is either something we can do or something we can’t, a fixed trait rather than a learnable skill.
This is a bit like deciding that because you’re a chef, you don’t need to concern yourself with knife skills. Technically, you’re there for the recipes, the flavour combinations, the gastronomic vision. The actual chopping is merely a means to an end. And yet, mysteriously, the chef who practises their knife skills tends to produce better meals more efficiently than the chef who regards chopping as beneath them.
Researchers who think of themselves as writers – who approach their craft with curiosity and purpose, who read widely and notice what works, who revise not just for accuracy but for clarity and even, dare I say it, elegance – tend to produce work that gets read. And being read is rather the point of the whole enterprise, unless we’re planning to keep our groundbreaking discoveries in a locked drawer, which seems inefficient.
There is another dimension to this phenomenon – the curious snobbery that sometimes attaches to academic writing. In certain quarters, there exists an unstated assumption that writing clearly is somehow suspicious, that accessibility is evidence of superficiality, that if your grandmother could understand your paper, you probably haven’t thought hard enough.
This is backwards in almost every conceivable way. Clear writing is not easy writing; it’s hard writing that has been revised until it appears effortless. The most complex ideas in the world can be communicated clearly if one is willing to do the work, and that work is the work of writing. Einstein managed to explain relativity to general audiences. Darwin wrote for educated readers, not just specialists. The notion that obscurity equals profundity is one of academia’s more unfortunate collective delusions.
And yet the researcher who writes clearly sometimes faces questions about their rigour, their authority… their right to be taken seriously by colleagues who express their findings through sentences that require a machete and a compass to navigate. This creates a perverse incentive to write badly, or at least to write in a way that signals membership in the scholarly club through its very impenetrability. It is difficult to imagine a worse outcome for human knowledge than making insights deliberately harder to understand, and yet here we are.
On National Writing Day, it seems worth recognising a simple fact: researchers are already writers. Prolific, dedicated, occasionally frustrated writers who happen to write about specialised topics rather than fiction or poetry or magazine articles about home renovation.
Recognising that fact does not magically improve anyone’s prose, reduce reviewer comments, or make deadlines more forgiving. What changes, interestingly, is not necessarily the writing itself but the way researchers think about it…
The researchers I know who have embraced the idea that writing is part of the work rather than something that happens after the work often describe a subtle shift in perspective. The awkward first draft remains awkward. Reviewer two remains reviewer two. Deadlines remain deadlines. But the writing stops feeling like an administrative hurdle standing between them and the interesting part. It becomes part of the interesting part.
Perhaps that is the real value of recognising researchers as writers. Not because it transforms them into novelists or poets, but because it acknowledges what they have been doing all along. The hours spent shaping an argument, finding the right structure, revising a stubborn paragraph, or searching for a clearer explanation are not separate from the intellectual work. They are the intellectual work.
On this National Writing Day, then, I would like to extend a particular greeting to the researchers. You, with your literature reviews and your grant applications and your carefully formatted reference lists. You, whose working lives are built around words, whether you acknowledge it or not. You, who have revised the same paragraph nine times because the transition still wasn’t quite right, even though nobody asked you to, even though probably nobody would have noticed, but it mattered to you because you have standards.
You are writers. You have always been writers. The evidence is sitting in your drafts folder.
So happy National Writing Day to you. May your sentences be clear, your paragraphs well-structured, and your reviewer two inexplicably reasonable.
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