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This is the 50th episode of Just Writing, and I guess it’s time to introduce ourselves. Well, to talk about ‘introductions’ in academic writing. How to set out your stall, how to get people excited or at least emotionally-engaged in your writing. You never get a second chance to make a first impression.

An introduction to a piece of academic writing will vary from a paragraph or two in an article, to a whole chapter in a book. But we usually start with who we are and why we are here. The ‘who?’ might include personal details: it has become more popular to describe the author’s identity, in order to clarify what biases or advantages they may have, but the personal details may simply refer to previous research on the theme. And the ‘why?’ may include why the research came about, what the intentions of the author are, and so on. Most introductions are written after the rest of the article, chapter or book, but some writers see the introduction as their motivation for the rest of the task, and in that case it may be written first.

What do we include in the introduction? A guide to the writing to come, and at least a hint at the writing’s conclusion and hoped-for significance – what comes next. What do we leave out? We should avoid over-claiming, or writing condescendingly about other authors or our readers.

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We want to talk about writing in other languages. The majority of journal articles in the journals we’re involved with, and two of the books we’ve edited, have had the majority of chapters written by authors for whom English is an additional language. Julian’s own father was German, who wrote his doctorate in his fourth language (French) and then worked and published in his fifth language, English. Some of the greatest writers in English have been writing in an additional language: Joseph Conrad, who was Polish and born in Ukraine, is an excellent example. So we don’t get all high and mighty when it comes to writers in languages other than their mother tongues.

In a previous podcast, we talked about how ‘academic’ is itself an additional language, so all writers, whatever their home language is, will have to learn to write ‘academic’. AI does a good job of converting text (from any language, including non-academic English) into ‘academic English’, but it is a very bland style. We prefer the character in writing by real people, with the distinctive features of their own culture, including their other languages. As readers, that is, we are interested in the core of the work, and the surface features just give it more character and more authenticity. We have to remember this, when marking student work or reviewing professional academic work. There is honey at the core.

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We want to talk about civil disagreement. We don’t always agree, and we need to know how to disagree well, in academic writing. (If we all agreed, there would be no need to write anything more.) Being disagreeable is a skill, perhaps an art, and it is better to have a creative disagreement than to have a feud.

What about starting and ending disagreements? To start a disagreement, we first need to understand, to be receptive to, to appreciate, the view that we will be disagreeing with. That gives us a licence to disagree. Like James Bond has a licence to kill: that sort of licence. And how do we end a disagreement (in a piece of academic writing)? We can either end it with a resolution. That is like the dialectics of the Ancient Greeks, or the 19th century Germans, where every thesis has an antithesis, ending in a synthesis. If that’s possible, that’s fine. But the more common way to end a disagreement is to leave room for it to continue, even if that is a little uncomfortable. That is an example of dialogue or conversation: deciding that we’ve tried to understand and appreciate the other point of view, and saying there’s more to be said. As there usually is, if we keep on thinking.

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We’ve just been to a university research conference, where academics and doctoral students from all disciplines get together for a couple of days and present papers on their current research. People asked each other what they thought of the conference. The most common response was, ‘I never knew!’ People were astonished at all the fascinating work, how it echoed with their own work even if it was from another discipline, and how there was so much enthusiasm for this aspect of the job. Why didn’t people know this already? Well, the value of conferences is precisely that it allows us to pause – pause from researching and pause from teaching and all the other jobs academics have – and to listen. This is a podcast about academic writing, but academic listening is crucial to the process of writing. Without that curious, enthusiastic listening, it will be all the harder for each of us to write, in turn, with enthusiasm and a sense of what future conference audiences will want to hear from us.

Boredom is a deadly sin, for academics. Boring writing is like boring talking, it is writing that keeps going long after people have stopped reading, talking that keeps going long after people have stopped listening. So practicing listening is a way of enlivening our own work and becoming more aware of the need to hold our own audiences. Conferences work like this, especially if – as with the conference we have just been at – they are not competitive and hierarchical. Research doesn’t have to be boring. I never knew that!

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