Today I’m inspired by an article published by Mariana Valverde (Professor Emeritus, Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies, University of Toronto) in The Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly (76.RS, 2025: 1-8, https://doi.org/10.53386/nilq.v76iRS.1195). The article is called “How the Academy Negatively Affects Writing Practice” and is part of an issue devoted entirely to writing (https://nilq.qub.ac.uk/index.php/nilq/issue/view/134). No, I’m not suddenly inclined to reading about law matters, I’ve just come across Prof. Valverde’s essay on the academic feed on @BlueSky (#AcademicSky). I would certainly recommend you to join this social network, and the feed itself to follow current debates.
Prof. Valverde’s essay begins with her recalling the times in the 1970s when she was a young student busy as a journalist in diverse university and community newspapers in Canada. “Well before I had a serious position in the academy, I did a great deal of writing that was published,” she writes. Tight deadlines, a hands-on approach to newspaper publication (she was often part of the team) and instant publication of her work freed her, relatively, “from the anxiety about printed texts that haunted so many of my graduate-school peers and, later, my academic colleagues.”
As a post-grad student in Toronto, Prof. Valverde continued publishing for activist, feminist newspapers and magazines, a habit which, again, made her far less afraid of “of meeting deadlines and coming up with quick pieces on timely topics,” unlike what usually is the case with PhD students. She attributes to her journalistic experience, then, her having eventually published “more books than most academics,” and adds that she continues “to love writing, so it’s likely I will keep doing it as long as my brain and my fingers cooperate.” I share her feelings, though I have no previous experience like her in journalism.
Lesson number one: the assessment exercises we demand from our students are insufficient to create a solid writing habit. Asking (forcing?) our students to read does not result in a solid reading habit either, as we know. If we have so many difficulties to turn our students into constant, proficient readers, why should we assume that all of them can also acquire minimally reliable writing skills? What is, indeed, the meaning of the phrase ‘good writing skills’ in the context of higher education?
Prof. Valverde’s article suggests that practice makes the (academic) writer, whether this practice is journalistic (as in her case), or, I would add, keeping a diary or, indeed, a blog. Writing on social networks is insufficient, as the word count is usually quite limited. However, very few young persons write substantial texts regularly, either for themselves or for publication, except for the papers and the pre-doctoral dissertations (BA, MA), which hardly prepare them to write a PhD dissertation. All the doctoral students I have supervised that have finally quitted have done so when faced with the daunting task (for them) of writing a first chapter.
Prof. Valverde’s article continues with a statement we hardly ever consider: our main medium of communication are written texts, yet, she writes, “most academics are not born writers, and some really aren’t suited to the task at all.” Some, she notes, try to solve this shortcoming by teaming up with a colleague, but usually collaborate with other pure researchers, “thus compounding the problem.” Others, Prof. Valverde observes, “can write, but only in the most wooden of prose styles” trying “to sound ‘serious’ and rigorous.”
Prof. Valverde complains that many academic papers sound as if they have been translated from German or French, when English is “actually a great language for what one might call ‘plain’ writing.” Recently, Catalan author and academic Borja Bagunyà complained that apart from recommendations and reviews, no engaging readings of literary texts circulate anywhere, meaning texts that common readers without a PhD can understand. This is sad, considering the avalanche of academic publications issued every day. Valverde’s and Bagunyà’s reflections should make us consider what we gain by closing our academic texts to wider audiences, whether we write about the law or about literature.
Prof. Valverde, and other scholars I’m reading (like adaptation theorist Kamilla Elliot), complain that academic publishers are churning out articles and books written following the exact same model. Given the pressure to publish, there is no room for innovation. Gaps in the research are being filled in, but there is no way to substantially alter how academic articles and books are written, by, for instance, making them more personal following a true essayistic style, or eschewing the need to overload the introductions with oceans of quotations and references to the extant literature.
Prof. Valverde protests that what might be called the ‘genre’ of the academic article is too static and too rigid, and has never been “properly reviewed,” which is ironic given the current obsession with peer reviewing. I’ll add that an obvious problem is that if you get reviewed by the kind of stern gatekeeping scholar that believes articles can only be written in one way, any attempt to try something different can hardly prosper. Like Prof. Valverde, I have a long list of rejections for that reason, but have refused to be silenced: quite a few of my rejected articles are now online as self-published work (and they get cited) or in my books as chapters.
Precisely, Prof. Valverde recommends that we “limit the value—including the salary increase value—of articles published in scholarly journals” and give greater value to books. As we know, journal articles are valued above books because most scientists don’t write books. Astonishingly, CNEAI, which runs the research assessment exercise for the Spanish agency ANECA, attributes the same value to articles as to books. Of the publications I submitted in my last ‘sexenio’, two were 300-page books and three were 20-page journal articles; it seems rational to think that a 300-page book should/could represent well enough six years of research, but that’s not how things work. From this point of view, writing books is a ridiculous waste of time, but I just love doing that.
On the other hand, Prof. Valverde suggests that, if a scholar doesn’t enjoy writing or lacks the skills to write books, they might experiment with other types of ‘text’ that could be likewise valid for assessment, including websites, films, podcasts, etc. It’s always easier, however, to judge scholars by their journal articles, possibly because a number of interested corporations have insisted that their metric systems be used to gauge our research (this has proven to be much harder to apply to books).
Prof. Valverde’s call “to think about style, genre and format—important dimensions of texts seeking publication that generally go ‘without saying’ in the academy,” is particularly relevant, I think, for the Humanities. I don’t think the scientists care so much about the quality of their prose, which possibly explains the proliferation of scientific articles written using AI. If you truly enjoy writing, you don’t use AI. A dislike of writing and lack of skills also explains, of course, why so many young students use AI: they just don’t like writing. I do use (revised) automatic translation for the Spanish version of this blog (I use Word’s own translator), but it has never crossed my mind to use ChatGPT because the whole point of publishing a weekly post, is that I do like writing. A philosopher friend of mine recently told me that writing (books, not articles!) is the centre of her academic life, and that teaching is just what provides a salary for her to write. This position used to be common in the past, when many scholars in the Humanities saw themselves primarily as writers, but it’s not so common today when journal articles define our CVs.
Given our disinterest or inability to discuss the conventions of the genres we practice, even to acknowledge that our work is part of specific non-fiction genres, can we call ourselves writers or not? If we’re not writers, despite the fact that the results of our research are always communicated in writing, then, what are we? Mere scribblers? Can a scholar who has published 100 articles be compared as a writer to an author who has published 100 short stories? If the reply is ‘no’, my question is ’why not’?
We sign contracts to publish, our work is subjected to the same copyright legislation, and we can register our texts as intellectual property (though often we give away property and copyright to greedy publishers). I used to believe that I am not a writer, until I saw myself described as one by a friend outside the university, which quite surprised me. Yet, it’s about time to proclaim that, yes, I am a writer, and because I am one, I feel constantly frustrated that the conventions of the genres I write and the rules of academia are so constricting. This is the very reason why I started this blog fifteen years ago. So, here’s a simple proposal. In the journal I co-edit with Mariano Martín, Hélice (https://www.revistahelice.com/en/main/), we have a section called ‘Miscelánea’ to which authors can submit essays in the non-academic style they prefer. Some other journals have similar sections, but it would be nice to see them grow in all journals. This might bring in much needed fresh air and might end up changing the way we write—for we, academics, are writers, right? Or aren’t we?