All you wanted to know about academic writing

Czech students are divided by their teachers into two groups. Those who can write well and those who cannot. The first group does not need any further guidance, the second group does not deserve any time to be wasted on them.

Regardless of what group you belong to, this post will tell you all you wanted to know about academic writing. My impression is that this side of becoming an academic is rather underestimated at Czech universities. There are suspiciously too many students who dislike writing and a considerable amount of those who are compulsive writers. This is too bad for the discipline. Either you have nothing to say, or you speak too much so that by the time you finish reading your paper, half of the lecture room is away and the other half deep asleep.

I cannot deny myself a small comparison from my current work in domain-name dispute-resolution. While foreign panellists produce short, yet explicit decisions where nothing important is missing, Czech panellists like to be very lengthy and verbose. A lawyer or an anthropologist? It does not really matter if both of you attended a Czech university.

By Jean Le Tavernier - Philipp der Gute, Herzog von Burgund,
Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25419242

So if your courses are less writing-oriented and you have a feeling that your professors could do more to help you improve your writing skills, I have one tip. What you have to do is to do the exact opposite of writing - you should read. I mean read a lot. And from the very beginning it is essential to pick some good authors.

I have a list of authors whose writings somehow influenced my own style. By no means I want to compare myself to them, but I am certain that reading them is no waste of time. In my all-time list of best writers are: the philosopher-anthropologist Ernest Gellner, the Wittgensteinian philosopher Peter Winch, the once famous British philosopher and public intellectual Isaiah Berlin, the anthropologist Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, the American post-analytic philosopher Donald Davidson or British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper (I admit it is a shame that there are no female writers). Not only are their writings perfect, they are entertaining and fun to read as well.

You might say that imitating someone else’s style prevents your inner personality from speaking and expressing yourself and that imitating other people equals mutilating your self. Sorry to say this, but social sciences convinced me that we are products of our societies. So do not worry about your self and imitate. For example, Bryan Magee in his Confessions of a Philosopher wrote that K. R. Popper emulated Bertrand Russell’s style of writing. Popper came from Vienna and imagine how hard for him it had to be to become a famous philosopher writing in another language! I think that James Clifford wrote something similar about Malinowski.

If you were brave enough to read it all, I have a loyalty gift for you. It is a video of Alan Macfarlane (the guy who went through archives to map all the witchcraft prosecutions in Essex between 1560 and 1680) giving very valuable advice to all who want to improve your proficiency in writing.

And do YOU like writing? Let me know!