From Habit to Ethic: Building Writing Commitments in Academia

post 5 in the Navigating Academic Publishing series

mmason39

11–16 minutes

For the fifth post of the series Navigating Academic Publishing, I cover the idea of developing commitments for yourself in your writing and research. These emphasize things you strive for your writing and research to always accomplish and/or the things you want to always strive to avoid.

How we come to write

Writing is a headspace, in my opinion, and we don’t ever just come to the act of writing. As we go through grad school, we tend to begin cultivating different academic, methodological, or other commitments. For instance, the differences in humanities versus fine arts versus soft sciences versus hard sciences predispose scholars to look at artifacts and perform research in fundamentally different ways. This also extends to our writing and sharing of that research.

However, we have written before graduate school. At the very least, we have been writing academically since undergrad, so we have ingrained habits and commitments that are entangled with our ethics, experiences, and ideologies beyond the page.

You don’t have to have them listed out, but it’s good to have a mental list of things you will always strive for and things you will always seek to avoid. I’ve listed mine below. These are not necessarily exhaustive, just the ones that are omnipresent as I write.

My commitments

for ease of navigating here are links to jump to individual entries.

Strive fors: Diverse References, Intersectional Analyses, Pretty Writing, Compelling Titles

Avoids: Pejoratives, Absolutes, Grammar Faux Pas, Do-not-cite list

Strive For:

Diverse reference lists. I cite widely in terms of disciplines, but beyond that, I am always striving to have diverse identities (particularly non-white for communication/rhetoric) represented in the references.
- At times, this can involve Googling people, which always feels somewhat icky, but as I mentioned in a previous post, once your scholarly persona coheres, there’s likely a list of folks you’ll use regularly and will know their various identities.
- Resist tokenizing scholars by only including either (1) only one or two people of a particular identity and/or (2) only based on that scholar’s identity. True engagement with a diverse range of scholarship goes beyond mere inclusion for diversity’s sake. The inclusion of diverse reference lists (especially for white writers) should be fundamentally re/shaping how you’re thinking and working through the research and writing.
- Thinking disciplinarily, having a diverse reference list is a somewhat tactical choice. Citing beyond my home discipline puts my work on a completely different audience’s radar. (Publishing is networking, remember.)
Intersectional Analyses. My work tends to take up the intersections of race and gender by virtue of the artifacts chosen, but I always try to bring in at least one other intersection to create a more nuanced and incisive analysis. For example, my BBQ Becky article deals with white (race) femininity (gender) and notions of property (settler-colonialism) to have a triangulation of the events in question.
- Sometimes, reviewers will push back on such a move. The most common critique/feedback is “this part/section/thread seems unrelated” or the closely related “this is a digression from the main argument.” Be sure to not only think through the reasons for including the identities you do, and put it in the essay. The resubmission letters can also be a powerful place to address that reviewer resistance.
“Pretty” writing. I attribute this to my English BA and my love of reading throughout my childhood. Essentially, I want my writing to be enjoyable to read.
- I recognize there’s a loaded history around writing and the academy with a preference for “Standard American English.” There’s a particular voice/tone that is expected in academic writing; I don’t necessarily try to emulate that. In other words, I bring in my own voice as a queer, working class, first-generation academic who grew up in diverse communities in the US South. Many of these identities are not compatible with “SAE,” and to me that enhances the voice and texture of writing to make it more enjoyable.
- Reviewers have called my writing “elegant” or “lyrical.” Past professors commented on the “voicey-ness” of my writing. Peers and others have just called it “really good” writing. No one thing makes it stand out, but it remains my goal to get to that “pretty” threshold.
- Ways I try to get there:
  - Read outside of academia. I stopped reading fiction when I entered grad school both from burn-out from a literature-dense undergrad and from the sheer amount of reading in grad school coursework. Once I finished my dissertation, I began reading fiction again (I blame BookTok) and it has made getting to that “pretty” threshold much easier lately.
  - Listen to music while writing. Particularly lyrical music and even more specifically lyrical rap. Even just instrumental or non-lyrical music can help give your writing a rhythm or flow. I particularly like lyric-based tracks because it helps stimulate wordplay, metaphor, and more that make writing “prettier.”
  - Vary sentence length. The various types of sentences in (American) English grammar are: simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex. To differentiate them, you look at the number and type of clauses that make up the individual sentences. (The Purdue OWL has a great explainer.) The simpler the sentence, the more staccato the rhythm of the prose. Longer sentences are more legato. If a someone says your writing is choppy, they’re likely saying you have too many simple sentences in quick succession. Varying the types of sentences will remedy that.
  - Vary the construction of the sentences. This advice applies to the non-simple sentence types, where you want to not fall into a rhythm of creating the sentences in the same formula. For example, the most common joiner for a compound sentence is comma + conjunction. Throw in a semi-colon; vary the conjunctions being used (I overuse “however,” personally); break some apart into simple sentences—something to offer variety. Introductory phrases are also a heavy crutch for new scholars and anyone of marginalized identities. In short, introductory phrases hedge the “meat” of the sentence, lessening the impact of the message. They can be helpful and aid in flow/rhythm but an overuse of them tends to sound hesitant or unsure.
  - Layer in the five senses—all five to avoid ableist bias. Even if you’re not talking about something visual or taste-based, etc., the connotation of words will still evoke and/or fall along the five senses. Color and brightness, for instance, are based in visual cues. Texture and proximity are touch-based. Spice, sweet, bitter, etc. are based on our sense of taste. Volume, pitch, tone get us to heard stimuli. All theses things will make your writing more tangible for the reader, which is crucial in academic writing that can often be dense.
Compelling Titles. Interesting, catchy, innovative titles can be a great place to integrate voice into your writing, from the article title to the section headers. You will still want to observe the generic conventions of academic titles, but you can play within that framework.
- I think it was Chuck Morris who told my cohort that you want to put the contribution before the academic colon (e.g., “Pink Herring and the Fourth Persona”). This ensures the thing the article gives to readers is upfront and always reproduced in citations. But this doesn’t have to be hard and fast. I try to signal three things with my titles: the contribution, the artifact/archive, and the literature/method/area.
- From an educator’s standpoint, articles with more interesting titles are more likely to garner students’ attention. If I can predispose a willingness of students to engage the ideas, why wouldn’t I?

Avoid:

Pejoratives. Regardless of antiquity, I try to avoid using any pejorative term for any group I’m not a part of, particularly around race. (The one exception in my work to date is “bitch” as it’s not being directed at/toward a person but to refer to a space: “we in this bitch.”)
- Given that my work is archival and interrogates race, it is not uncommon for me to encounter various “past” pejoratives for non-white individuals. If that part of an artifact is included in my essay I use brackets and hyphens to censor the word (e.g., n[—–] or n[—-]). This has encountered reviewer resistance for a handful of reasons.
  - “It’s not used anymore,” “Readers will know they’re not your words,” and related comments are common, but they ignore the historical and affective weight those words/signs have. Just because it’s antiquated doesn’t mean someone who shares the identity with those historic groups doesn’t feel wounded encountering it.
  - “It’s confusing for readers.” This is the one comment that led to the footnote in my “Establishing 911” article. Because the artifacts used “ne—” and not “ni—-,” a reviewer thought it would be confusing to readers. I still disagree because (1) both terms are meant to signal the same subhuman designation of Black folks and (2) having the “n” is, in my opinion, enough to signal an anti-Black pejorative. I deferred to the editor in the situation when the reviewer was persistent.
Absolute terms around research. There can be an impulse to say an essay’s contribution is to “begin” or “open” conversations that “have not yet been covered” in literature. How that wording unfolds can dangerously erase swathes of scholarship. Unless you have irrefutable proof something is the first, don’t discuss literature in absolute terms.
- Given the racist, sexist, queer-antagonistic, ableist, classist… past of academia, research from marginalized scholars is often pushed to the margins and not seen as often or engaged as often. It can be incredibly easy to miss an existing contribution by the mere bias academic research holds in circulating ideas.
- The only time (that’s coming to mind) where I say one of my contributions is the first is “Establishing 911,” because I had proof communication studies had not yet covered the history of 911. I only felt confident saying this after exhaustive searches, consulting with subject librarians, and more. Even then, I made the stipulation it’s the first in communication studies.
Grammar Faux Pas. These are some things that are just specific to me and how I like to write. Others are more broad-stroke advice.
- Using “you” or “one” for subjects in my writing. I don’t like to outright address the reader (you), and I prefer individual or person to “one” for a “generic” subject. Particularly given that I write about moments of (attempted) dehumanization, I like to recenter humanity of the subjects whenever possible.
  - If I do want to include the reader, I will use collective first person pronouns (we/our) so that I’m bringing the reader in at the same authority level as the author (me).
- “Ways in which” = “How” and saves you at least 2 words. Dana Cloud shared this tidbit with our grad class, and I have never been able to un-see it. Note: Word is becoming more attentive to recommendations of concise wording like this and will swap “ways in which” for you.
- Vague pronoun referents: this, that, it, those, these, etc. If using this/that/these/those make sure a noun immediately follows so that your reader knows specifically what you’re referring to. This mistake can be one of the hardest to spot and break because it’s how we speak so it feels correct or natural, but it can cause confusion for the reader in written text.
- Passive Voice. Caveat: something people don’t always recognize is that sometimes passive is the only way to phrase something to retain the right meaning. But always try to put it into an active voice. The easiest way to put a sentence in active voice is to ask yourself, “Who does what?”
  - Who is your subject; does is the verb; what is the object/result/etc. If you can identify these three pieces of a sentence, you can put them in active voice by ordering them as who does what. Also paring down the sentence to these pieces shows you all the extraneous information that can be causing the passivity.
- Saying titles in-text. I don’t know why, but this writing tic just really grinds my gears. (Example of what I mean: In their article, “Establishing 911: media infrastructures of aﬀective anti-Black, pro-police dispositions,” Myles W. Mason writes…) That structure just sounds so amateur or student-ish. Obviously, if you’re interrogating a specific artifact, you’ll like use the title (e.g., Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter). But where literature/research is concerned, I really just don’t like having all the titles in-text; that’s what works cited pages are for. Also, including the title eats up word counts.
- Em-dash versus hyphen. The easiest way to think about these is that hyphens (-) connect, like hyphenated last names, and em-dashes (—) set off, like “all five to avoid ableist bias” to the left.
  - An em-dash is not two hyphens together, but some word processors will auto-replace “–” with “—” in your text.
  - There are also no spaces around either of these punctuation marks. Beyoncé Knowles-Carter; senses—all.
  - Em-dashes are common in AI-generated text, so many people are becoming tepid about using them in their own, original writing. The difference is that AI will overuse em-dashes, putting one in every paragraph. Human-generated text typically uses em-dashes more sparingly, or at least with less consistency.
- Always say “essay” (not “paper”) during the review process; then, change to “article” after acceptance. Calling it a “paper” makes the author sound like a student, and I just personally feel hubristic if I call something an “article” before reviewers have given their feedback.
Do not cite/submit list. This one is personal and evolving, but as a product of my commitments in writing and beyond, there are certain scholars I do not and will not (as of now) cite. There is also a list of people I will not submit to their journal if they are editor. I don’t share these lists with anyone, but they are something I do keep a digital catalogue of. Some of it is based off academic differences (e.g. we approach something just too divergently) and others are based of interpersonal and/or public interactions. This is just part of my personal politic since citations and other metrics can aid those individuals in their careers.

How these help

I appreciate these commitments in my own writing because they help expedite the process in many ways. They don’t necessarily aid in producing the arguments, but they help focus me, especially throughout the revision process. For example, if I feel like the flow of a section is off (read: not pretty enough), I’ll know to look at the sentence structure. The Grammar Faux Pas work as a checklist for going through before submission; I will often do the Find function in word and search for buzzwords like “the ways in which” to quickly find and change them. However to make the process smoother (at first), I say seize it until the practice of producing scholarship becomes easier.

What are some commitments you hold in your writing? Or what are some of the things do you try to avoid as you draft an essay for publication?

The next post will jump back into the “process” side of publishing by going over some of the ins and outs of peer review. Any academic journal will send out a submission to at least one peer reviewer, and navigating their feedback through revisions is crucial to understanding how to reach press.

Myles W. Mason, PhD.