Was my book a Trojan horse?
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
On realizing that the teaching resource I meant to write is actually a manifesto
Dear Troublemakers,
The title in that screenshot [1] says what I have not previously been able to put into words. Anne Helen Petersen (a.k.a. AHP) interviewed me earlier this year—about the new book I have out with Stephen Heard—for her epic newsletter Culture Study. And wow, did I get some things off my chest that either didn’t fit in the book or I hadn’t fully synthesized ‘til she pushed me! She asked me things like:
What is most science writing like?
What sort of instruction do most people communicating about science (whether as scientists themselves or not) receive about writing?
Have people always been bad at communicating about science?
And then she hit a nerve by asking:
Why do I have this weird idea that the holistic liberal arts education created gentleman scholars like, I dunno, Darwin, who were doing all the science and doing all the writing? Do we feel it acutely because there’s so much public distrust in science right now? Have there been other moments when there’s been a push to communicate better?
While Steve and I actually do get into these topics in the book, we don’t spend a lot of time on history of science in its pages. After all, the point of the book is to help folks better mentor writers—while historical context is useful, it’s not the focus.
Between us, we’ve addressed some of these threads on our blogs/newsletters. But not fully, and not to the extent that I’ve long been thinking about them. So, it was a great pleasure (and cathartic!) to respond to AHP’s questions by diving deeeeep down the rabbit holes of:
Where “publish or perish” regimes in academia originated,
How long scientific writing has been an elite activity (always), and
What it would mean if we really tapped into existing knowledge (from Writing Studies, Rhetoric & Composition, Pedagogy, etc.) and actually *taught* people how to write in science degree and training programs. [2]
This interview is the first time I fully pulled all those threads together; they are the very important scraps left on the cutting floor after we refined our book to be action focused and as user-friendly as we could make it.
This interview is for the deep nerds!
How about you?
Have you written/created things that were ostensibly for one purpose, but ultimately served others? How and why? When did you realize? How has that informed your subsequent efforts?
NOTES
[1] There’s an interesting layer to this, which is that our book opens with something I initially labeled as a manifesto when I sent my first draft to Steve. It wasn’t a planned part of the book; in fact, I invented it after most of the rest of the book had been drafted and sent to beta readers. I sent it to Steve suggesting that we say directly and right up front what we considered non-negotiable about mentoring developing writers. We ultimately did not call it a manifesto—the word doesn’t even appear in the book except to cite it in another author’s title. Imagine my delight, then, when AHP aptly labeled the entire book as such!
[2] Spoiler: I actually think we could transform the world.
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