Seven pains of writing: The discomforts of academic becoming in a judgmental age

Abstract

Academic writing is a complex and often painful process, made more difficult by the alienating pressures placed on academics to publish. In this paper, we offer an analysis of this pain that is both phenomenological and realist. We draw on literatures from several disciplines and our own experiences as academic writers to identify seven ‘pains’, each of which represents a particular set of discomforts generated by the act of academic writing, especially in the humanities and social sciences. These discomforts arise from self-confrontation, visibility and external gaze, discursive complexity, struggle for authenticity and sincerity, ambiguities in the temporal horizons, external judgment, and loss of control. We argue that confronting and intentionally negotiating these discomforts provides opportunities for self-enhancement and even self-transformation. Writing is a space of continually becoming. We hold out the hope that academics might acknowledge the sources of their writing discomforts and recognise themselves as writers (as well as academics).

Introduction

In 1930, William Empson’s book, Seven Types of Ambiguity was published (a book that subsequently had much influence in shaping a new genre of literary criticism). Much in that vein, we offer an analysis of the work of writing undertaken by academics, identifying seven pains of academic writing. Just as Empson (1966) was not claiming that any text was characterised by the identified seven types of ambiguity, so we do not claim that any textual effort in the academic world is accompanied by the seven pains we identify; and nor do we claim that academic writing is filled out only as a painful experience. We do suggest, though, that the discomforts that we identify here are readily to be found across the academic world, especially in the humanities and social sciences, and we try to show that such discomforts are explicable.

Bringing such discomforts to the fore in this way may open avenues of reflection both for academics and also – and perhaps especially - for academic developers in assisting newer academics with their writing challenges. Academics may yet be able to see more deeply into their own labours as writers not least since, on the analysis here, the phenomenology of writing should be understood as bringing forth a multiple of discomforts (plural): writing discomfiture for academics is far from being a singular.

This paper addresses three questions in particular: How might discomforts of academic writing be understood? What are the sources of those discomforts? And: Against the horizon of discomforts of academic writing, why should academics write?

The authors of this paper are both academics in higher education. One is an experienced Emeritus Professor who has produced 35+ books (together with some hundreds of papers and articles) over a 40-year writing career. The other is an early career researcher, who has led and co-authored a growing list of journal articles, continuing to develop her research niche and her research voice. This paper germinated from a conversation between us at a research colloquium in May 2022. During a coffee break, we talked about writing: how writing is process, craft and thinking, how our interests in poetry and creative forms might feed into academic writing, and how writing has changed – and continues to change – who we are. Subsequently, we began a correspondence from which emerged the thesis of this paper: Academic writing is embodied and it can be discomforting and even painful. However, the process and experience of academic writing can also facilitate self-discovery and self-becoming, assisting one in finding a voice: academic writing can change the writer as a person. It can even generate a new identity. Writing can seep into the ecosystem that constitutes the writer and dislodge its assemblage into a new set of relationships (Delanda, 2013). The felt disturbance is a sign of this re-assembling taking place.

This paper, accordingly, is an attempt to scrutinise the sources of discomfort that can permeate academic writing (in all its widening genres), and to examine ways in which this discomfort can also be transformative. It contributes to discussions on academic writing, its nature and its purpose, advocating for an approach to writing by academics that embraces its discomforts and seeks to understand why it is important. (We used the term ‘writing by academics’ to separate it from ‘academic writing’ so as to focus attention on writing as such.) We view writing as acts of formations of meaning in written texts. It is an autobiographical, iterative, and socially-embedded process, which includes the actors, texts, practices, and situations that inform the writing (Bazerman and Prior, 2004; Pare, 2014).

We are alert to writing being a site of pleasure, desire and wellbeing (see Sword, 2023). We do not discount those aspects of writing: indeed, we shall tease out how it may be that a human activity that gives rise to discomfort may also usher in modes of satisfaction and self-encouragement. Sometimes, one is compelled to write despite its discomforts. We also do not overlook the necessity that is placed upon many academics to publish (albeit in certain outlets and in certain genres) or complain about the challenges of writing. However, we wish to dwell on the matter of discomfort that can accompany the writing undertaken by academics, perhaps especially in the arts, humanities and social sciences. We wish also to tease out challenges that accompany that writing, arguing that discomforts must be undergone if the writing is to change the writer.

In tackling the matter, this paper is conceptual, phenomenological, autobiographical, realist, theoretical, and practical in exploring frames of consciousness in academic writing. As well as being inspired by our experiences as academic writers, the paper draws on literatures on academic writing from multiple disciplines, including composition and rhetoric, applied linguistics, anthropology (ethnographic writing), higher education, and social theory.

We begin by situating written texts within the current academic publishing culture, and frame writing as a physical and potentially alienating experience, noting that bodily discomfort is inscribed into the academic writing process. We then identify seven ‘pains’ of academic writing, observing ways in which academic writing can summon writers to stretch themselves into new places, communicate with known and unknown readers, move across different surfaces, and position themselves within – and even on the fringes of – a literature. Finally, we consider the potential of writing as a process of self-transformation.

The matter of the text

Prompted by global academic rankings and modes of evaluating universities, academics are enjoined to produce papers for the academic literature and, increasingly, to reach policymakers, practitioners, and the public through books, blogs, reports, think pieces, articles in magazines and yet other genres. Publications are not only a means of validating one’s work within the academic community but are also a key criterion for promotion within academia (Mantai and Marrone, 2023) and a measurement of research impact (as in, for example, the H-index), so becoming a form of academic capital (Fogarty, 2009). In turn, the production of texts for publication may be viewed as a mode of oppression, in that the act of writing contains an element of compulsion. At the same time, academic publishing has developed as a major industry, often with a few massive publishing corporations subsuming niche smaller publishing houses and maximising their outputs via the internet (Lariviere et al., 2015; Szadkowski, 2023). In this milieu, written texts are a significant part of academic work in general, and for some academics, the major output of their work.

Given this pressure to publish, academic writing may take on a form of alienation: texts are produced to fulfil the demands of external masters (competitive global higher education, institutions, managers, the state). Writing lessens as an iterative process owned and imbued with personal investment and authenticity (Bazerman, 2004; Prior, 2006) within the writer’s autobiographical, disciplinary, and institutional contexts. The text comes to stand outside oneself, imposed from without and separate from the self. The messiness of the writing process and its physicality are easily overlooked: sitting, typing, standing, walking, thinking, drafting, deleting, redrafting, finessing, ‘concluding’. The darkness (Lysgaard et al., 2019) of writing is hidden from view.

Despite these elements of oppression, authentic writing possesses a power that lies in its processual ability to dislodge the writer: writing is entangled with an evolving identity, and the writing process gives rise to new possibilities of being (see Ivanič, 1998). The authentic writer takes on writerly agency. In part, the potential for transformation lies in paying attention to the minutiae of the writing process: the selection of words, the formation of sentences and paragraphs, the rhythms and progression of a narrative, the physical sensations, and the reading and juggling, while placed in wider epistemological and ontological contexts. These activities have aspects not of mere tasks or skills but allow the writer to discover and shape her own voice, not least in reaching out to an audience.

Academic writing as bodily pain

John Henry Newman – a prolific nineteenth century theologian, educator, essayist and poet – spoke more than once of the bodily pain that writing caused him: ‘I do not think that I ever thought out a question, or wrote my thoughts, without great pain, pain reaching to the body as well as to the mind’ (Ward, 1912: 637, quoting John Henry Newman). In his essay on ‘Why I write’, George Orwell – a hugely influential writer of the twentieth century - wrote ‘Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness’ (2005: 10). Newman would have written in longhand and Orwell (2005) wrote on a clattering typewriter while in the twenty-first century; it is manually easier to type on a keyboard attached to a word-processor. But how is it that pressing one’s fingers on a keyboard can induce bodily pain?

Writing is a coalescing of mind and body, in which thoughts are articulated and, through the physical action of writing, brought into public display. The etymology of ‘write’ points to this physicality and its accompanying discomfort. ‘Writing’ has Germanic origins, and initially referred to the action of scratching/carving/inscribing, while its cognates included meanings synonymous with pain. For instance: ‘West Frisian (write) to tear, to ache), Middle Dutch wrīten to twist (Dutch wrijten to cut down, to trim, to twist, to ache, to resist, to wrestle), Old Saxon wrītan to write, to lacerate’ (Oxford English Dictionary, 2023).

Thus, while we may think of writing as a cognitive, cerebral activity, at its etymological roots, the meaning of ‘write’ acknowledges both the physical action of writing and its inherent discomfort. The phenomenon of writer’s block also speaks to this physicality: sometimes we would prefer to do anything but write to avoid the discomfort of putting words on the page. The severity of such discomfort derives from its inscribing the body: it is an embodied process where ‘writers move ideas around as pieces of text and feel them’ (Kiriakos and Tienari, 2018: 269). There is a physical person located in time and space, in a particular cultural and social context, whose experiences influence what is brought to the page and who in turn is affected by the writing (Jordan, 2001).

The relationship between writing and discomfort has been explored in several areas, observing that the act of writing can cause physical pain due to posture, movements of wrists and fingers, furniture and keyboards (Haas and Witte, 2001; Hensley Owens & Van Ittersum, 2013). At the same time, writing is laden with affect (McLeod, 1987; Woodrow, 2011), and particularly for students, writing conceptions influence both how one approaches writing and the extent to which one struggles with writing and the accompanying cognitive discomfort (e.g. Castelló et al., 2013; Lavelle and Zuercher, 2001; Mateos and Sole, 2012).

The matter of the discomfort attached to academic writing is, however, far from straightforward. The demands on, and sources of discomfort for, academics are particular. As academic writers, we produce texts that open ourselves to critical gaze (from both the academic community and the state), a gaze on which future careers may depend. We would point to no less than seven interrelated ‘pains’ (to use Newman’s term) of academic writing, which speak to the complexity of writing and of publishing academic texts, namely pains of (1) self-confrontation; (2) visibility; (3) complexity; (4) authenticity; (5) time; (6) external judgment; and (7) loss of control.

Pain of self-confrontation

Writing is intimately linked to identity (Ivanič, 1998; Kiriakos and Tienari, 2018), both internal to a text (identity-as-felt), and as a quasi-public identity of the person who is responsible for the text (identity-as-conveyed through the narrator’s voice and as perceived). Writing is ‘identity work’ (Kamler and Thomson, 2014); in writing, we confront ourselves and shape who we are.

However, this confrontation is, in part, a reflection of the identity coming back to the writer from its reception beyond. This is an understanding of identity that aligns with approaches often used in applied linguistics, which assume that identities are constructed through discursive processes (Flowerdew and Wang, 2015; Matsuda, 2015).

Ivanič (1998) draws on social constructionism and Goffman’s theory of self-presentation (1959) to provide a useful framework for writer identity, which includes the autobiographical self, the discoursal self, the self as author, and possibilities for self-hood. The ‘autobiographical self’ refers to the writer’s sense of self within a particular social and cultural context, with a set of unique experiences, while the ‘discoursal self’ refers to the self that is conveyed through discursive choices in the text (voice). The ‘self as author’ is related to the discoursal self, but focuses on position(s), opinions, and how the author establishes authority. Finally, and perhaps most relevant here, Ivanič argues that writing is a way of ‘occupying a subject position,’ (p. 28) and so writers may construct new discoursal selves inspired by the ‘possibilities for self-hood’ that are available given their sociocultural contexts.

At the same time, ‘To some extent writers are positioned by the very act of writing: They are liable to change the way they see themselves, even if no one ever reads what they write’ (Ivanič, 1994: 6). In producing an argument that articulates their thinking, academics as writers reveal, on some level, who they are, and who they mean to become. As it is said, ‘We become what we write’ (Murray, 1991: 71). When we consider the literatures and audiences that are connected with our texts, we also learn about ourselves, our interests and our priorities. As we write (and read and think) we change as persons, incorporating new understandings that influence how we interpret the world and ourselves. We come to see the world differently – if just in a wider framing – and stand in a new place in the world and in ourselves.

The arts and humanities may be especially prone to this phenomenology of writing, for in many of those disciplines, human-ness, personhood and value positions are, at least, tacitly present; knowledge construction is often an individual endeavour, focusing on understanding and interpretation, or selecting theoretical approaches with which to align oneself (see Becher, 1989; Parry, 2007). Academics as writers therefore have ethical responsibilities towards the text being created, for they must confront not just their own thoughts but also their values. To what, in framing a sentence, does one give priority? Further, one is writing about human matters, at some level or other, and so is obliged to confront one’s own identity in relation to these matters. A disturbance is felt in this conflation of one’s subjectivity with the matters in the text. The writer cannot hide from the text that is appearing on the screen. As an academic writer, especially in these fields, there is a component of aloneness.

This aloneness is accompanied by a haunting sense of other’s perceptions. Writing is a necessarily relational activity. We glimpse ourselves as we sense others are seeing us in our writing. As we publish and receive feedback from academic communities, how our work is received and interpreted may influence how we view our place within our disciplines and academic networks. Over time, an academic identity begins to solidify, often in a particular intellectual field (Bourdieu, 1971), and bolstered by the external judgements and validation bestowed by readers. In writing, one projects oneself into the world and so must consider what is to be projected and what one wishes to hide: in writing, too, I arm myself with defences, warding off painful attacks. In confronting my critics, I confront myself. This is an ontologically stretching – and discomforting – process. While an academic identity is just one facet of who we are, for many in academia, academic work remains a significant part of one’s sheer being and personal development.

Lacking the succour of the overtly complex languages of the natural sciences, academics writing in the humanities may resort to linguistic ploys in part to recede into the background, since the risk of self-confrontation may be considerable. It is hardly surprising that critical voices can be heard as to the inaccessibility and cumbersome nature of the writing on view (Billig, 2013; Pinker, 2014; Sword, 2012). Unexplained abstractions, sentences that are both convoluted and unnecessarily elongated, and undue referencing and quotations become devices through which the author hides from self, even as the truth claims that emerge provide a mirror of oneself. Qualifying terms are added – ‘often’, ‘increasingly’, ‘on occasions’, ‘perhaps’, ‘characteristically’ – to hedge the claims being made (Crompton, 1997) and to deflect possible criticisms. The writing is anticipatory.

Writing discomfort, accordingly, arises from struggles in first confronting the self and second, in opening one’s identity with the reader. This discomfort is not easily dissolved – for the self is dissolving – and, yet, this discomfort must be managed; resources have to be found such that it can be lived with. When the anxiety can be mitigated – though hardly ever overcome completely – not only may the writing flow a little more easily, but the writing itself may be more authoritative and more self-developmental.

Pain of visibility

We write knowing that the text will soon be visible: my private act of writing and thinking will become public. In writing for publication, I expose myself. Ultimately, there is no hiding place. I make myself especially vulnerable as I project myself into and distribute myself across the world. Academic writing is an act of thinking, and knowing that one’s thinking will eventually be placed in the public arena can become a source of anxiety. It is hardly surprising that those new to academic writing find the process inherently troublesome (see Cameron et al., 2009).

An academic text enters increasingly public domains, with increasingly diffuse publics. Three issues emerge. First, it is not just that the responses of these publics are unpredictable but that their theoretical frames are unpredictable. As higher education has become massified and global, so it has become common for reviewers to differ fundamentally in their assessments, for they may approach the ‘same’ text from quite different perspectives. As texts reach ever-wider publics – especially authored books – so even the genres within which the readers are situated cannot be anticipated, for they are potentially located in markedly different discursive communities across society. What counts as the public domain for academic authorship in the twenty-first century is problematic.

Second, except in rare circumstances, action replay is impossible. Once the ‘enter’ key has been depressed, the text passes out of one’s control and is rendered into the external gaze, and it takes on a new identity. We pick up this matter about a loss of control more fully below (pain (6)) but here, the point concerns the public identity of the academic as a writer. In the publication of one’s texts, one’s identity itself becomes public, over which one has little control.

Third, in writing made public and especially amid globalised and digitalised academe, one’s identity becomes globally distributed. One’s texts are more or less immediately visible to the world, and so perceptions of a writer emerge and develop across the world. Through the texts that are published in one’s name, there is a global vulnerability. This is an identity that is literally lost to the world. The texts enter a perceptual field with its own flows and over which one has very little influence. This global exposure and vulnerability, with its own momentum and de-territorialisation (Deleuze and Guattari, 2007) is a source of destablisation, and so discomfort for the academic writer. Making oneself visible through one’s writing is a venture of risk.

Pain of complexity

Academic writing is complex. Thoughts must be presented in ways that are acceptable within academic communities and so work within norms that are particular – to some extent – to each discipline, and to each journal. This discursive complexity speaks to the intertwined aspects of writing to be navigated in producing a text: writing as meaning-making, writing as intertextual, and writing for a discourse community.

Academic writing requires stretching into new places as the writer struggles to make sense of data or to develop arguments or theories, when the ideas to hand are in tension or even in conflict. In qualitative traditions, writing is integral to the research process, as researchers must write throughout the research, taking notes, annotating data, writing case summaries, making sense of the data and the evolving research design before or alongside the text that emerges: inquiry as writing and writing as inquiry (Badley, 2009; Colyar, 2009; Richardson, 2002). Writing is inherently complex in being a space of creating new understandings not only for oneself but for the world.

Academic writing requires that we converse with at least a fair sample of the many texts with which our own text intersects; and – especially in a digital age – the tacit expectations concerning the bibliography has ever-lengthening tendencies. Academic writing is intertextual and dialogic (Bakhtin, 1986): the research we produce draws from and extends – or even combats – previous work in the field. We apply and develop theories, we generate research questions from an existing literature (or literatures), and we contribute to a larger conversation (Oakeshott, 1989), becoming part of a worldwide discourse community (Swales, 1990). We signal our engagement with the literature through citations, and referencing styles, and so enter a space for further commentary (Richardson, 1990). At the same time, academic writing requires consideration as to how data are presented, and how the people and places we write about are represented (Jordan, 2001).

Academic writing styles vary widely by discipline and methodological approach, and expectations for acceptable and publishable academic writing are influenced by the intellectual field. The nature of knowledge construction shapes the writing itself (Bazerman, 1988). Moreover, academic journals possess their own protocols and modes of scholarly conversation, all of which must be accommodated en route to submission. A journal will have its own epistemological footprint, characteristically with favoured luminaries or tropes to be referenced. Even in the same field, one journal might – for example – eschew diagrams while another will welcome them. There is a constant negotiation of meaning in being an academic author.

Academic writing is, accordingly, a fraught process (Colyar, 2009). Sentences are written and deleted. Words are reconsidered. Much time may be spent reworking a single paragraph, trying to discern an adequate articulation of one’s thoughts. Textual conventions slide, their boundaries becoming fuzzier, as diagrams, poetic-like constructions, the use of the first person, the injection of value elements, and a more declarative style become more permissible. The conventions of academic writing must be imbibed and adopted. Far from easing these challenges, the word-processor compounds them for, stretching before the academic writer, there is an infinity of possible variations in the text’s composition.

The pain of discursive complexity grows from these meta-cognitive challenges. Somehow, a coherent and intelligible narrative must be wrought out of incoherence, and indeed conflict, within the literature, the data, and a journal’s genre. A thesis – to be encapsulated in the abstract – has first to be discerned by the writer. It is widely acknowledged that language and thinking are connected (Colyar, 2009; Vygotsky, 1962). Translating thoughts into a text while navigating the many considerations involved is cognitively taxing and can be a discomforting process.

Pain of authenticity

A further form of writerly discomfort is that of the academic writer’s struggle for authenticity not least since the academic as writer is always on the edge of inauthenticity. Each genre and each writing situation carries its own intensity. Readers of journal articles are often a more discipline-specific population than readers of books, who may include policymakers, practitioners, and depending on the topic, the public. Holding such mixed audiences in mind, with their contrasting frames and expectations, presents an authenticity challenge: academic authors are now compelled to write for a multiplicity of communities simultaneously within and beyond the academic field. In such circumstances, authenticity must be in doubt as one presents one’s thoughts and so oneself slightly differently for particular audiences. Moreover, the prospect presents itself that, in the framing of a single paragraph intended to be accessible to multiple audiences, a degree of dissembling – and even self-censoring - may enter the creative process. In the social sciences, one may now expected to be candid about the self, one’s own positionality; but which is the self to which one is expected to be authentic?

Academics seeking publication are often required to satisfy external reviewers that what they are offering is not just original but significantly so, such that the text is felt to be making a worthwhile contribution to the literature. However, originality is not necessarily authenticity. Neither depends on the other. What is written and submitted for publication may be significantly original but lack authenticity; and a piece of writing that the author feels to be authentic may not possess the originality suitable for publication. Additionally, the suspicion may reasonably form that in a world of exploding journal production there is a lessening of authenticity (a suspicion that can only grow in the context of text-generating artificial intelligence platforms).

In striving to be authentic, one attempts to say what one means and to mean what one says. These are demanding obligations that one places upon oneself, and they differ profoundly. In striving to say what one means, one seeks for the text to be a fair representation of the presentiments that lurk within. In the act of writing, the writer is called to disentangle the mix of internal feelings and cognitions – of evidence, theories, concepts, reasoning, images and tacit sense of the expectations – such that the emerging text does justice to what is moving within (Van Manen, 2006).

In this way, the text that emerges and which will find its way to publication is authentically the writer’s. It is a text that arises from listening to those inner presentiments and allowing a text to emerge from within. As Donald M. Murray put it, ‘We are autobiographical in the way we write…I have my own peculiar way of looking at the world and my own way of using language to communicate what I see’ (1991: 67). In writing, ideas, concepts, and a new narrative emerge, using the words and rhythms adopted by the writer. The meaning lies not only in what is said but also in how it is said. The particularity of the text reflects the extraordinary human accomplishment of translating an array of presentiments into a coherent text.

From time to time, successful writers say, in effect, that a book or a paper emerged from within them. They were compelled to write, to heed the murmurings inside themselves and to draw out and form texts from disturbances within. As writers, they were mother-like, giving writerly birth to movements inside themselves. This is central to the struggle for authenticity, of sensing, of forming into textual patterns which lie within. In this act, one dis-embodies that which is embodied. It is hardly surprising that this struggle for authenticity gives rise to discomfort.

Second, in meaning what one says, one is called to commit to the resultant text. One declares that this is where one stands. This is an interweaving of ontology and epistemology, but they retain their separateness. The one prompts the other. The forming of the text, the epistemological effort in calling one forth pulls out the ontology; and the unfolding ontology of the writer’s subjectivity inflects the emerging text and its epistemological claims in the world. One then means it; one puts one’s weight behind it. One places oneself into it, despite its separateness. But then, the lurking question and discomfort must come: ‘Do I really mean it? Am I really committed to it?’

Meaning what I say, accordingly, is less a matter of authenticity and more a matter of sincerity. In meaning what I say I am tacitly declaring – in a text that bears my name – that I believe in what is being said; I commit to it; I inscribe myself in it and I place a personal stake on it. It is mine and mine alone. Whereas saying what I mean is testimony to the struggle for authenticity that is contemporaneously part of the writing act, meaning what I say is testimony to the act of ownership and authorship once the writing has been formed into a text. The text having been written, I own (up) to it and I assent to it. I am accountable for it. This dual responsibility – to authenticity and commitment – will be discomforting to many.

Pain of time

The timefulness of writing exerts a further unease. Academic writing lives in the past, present, and well into the future. The papers (and books) to be read, if only to produce a ‘literature review’, lie in the past, whether of yesterday or many decades past. And they refer to the past: past events, past research, past people, past frameworks of thought. Writing though, takes place in the here-and-now (see Yagelski, 2012). And this writing has not one but several futures; and all almost unknown, yet still to be negotiated, across reviewers, publishers, commentators, interpreters, and blog respondents and even in the wider media.

There may be an ‘if, then’ quality attaching to these futures: ‘if this paper is published in, say, a World of Science journal, this benefit will come my way’. But mostly, the futures are uncertain: the number of papers needed to secure a promotion or new position are all unpredictable. Nevertheless, this future-horizon is a frame in which writing may be undertaken with some – albeit external – purpose. It is a horizon plagued with many fearful uncertainties, as to the reviewers’ assessments and the editor’s judgements.

The temporal character of academic writing is elusive. The time envelope, from first half-thoughts to publication, is open and cannot be computed in advance, for it may take two or more years and, for a book, even longer. And the judgemental process continues over time and is subject to possible revision. Which is the public, therefore, to which one’s text might be addressed? What is to be its own longevity? A book or even a paper may be rescued from obscurity decades after its publication. Does one aim simply to pass muster with the border guards now or, hubristically, does one produce a text that might outlive the present regulatory regime and enjoy ‘a long shelf-life’?

This temporal openness may cause the writer to stutter. Why invest time and effort for elusive prizes (promotions, salary enhancement, recognition) which, if they come one’s way, may be far off? Why indeed write at all, the future of one’s text being so unpredictable? The academic writer, therefore, is caught in traps of time. Even the verbs of the text are difficult to get right: present, past, subjunctives, all rattle against the bars of their linguistic cages and in the same sentence.

How might the ‘principle of ripe time’ play here? In his classic 1920s guidance to the young academic administrator, F M Cornford implied one cannot only be too late in proffering one’s grand idea but one can be too early (reprinted in Johnson, 1998). Timing is a matter of catching the mood of the day, the currently circulating tropes, the intellectual fads that are generating academic papers. But the citations may be forthcoming over many years for a single text; and – with books – the royalties may be slight but may continue over decades. So does one write for the here and now, or for a much longer elapse of time? Might one’s academic texts constitute a form of immortality, outliving the author? If Nietzsche had been sure that his works would be read avidly over one hundred years after his death (clearly, he hoped for that), perhaps his psychological difficulties might not have been so intense (Perogamvros et al., 2013).

With the matter of time, therefore, arise matters of the interlocuters: to what extent might one have conversations with voices of the past? Today’s reviewers so frequently call for – and even insist on – more contemporary references. But might one try to anticipate future interlocuters? Perhaps one’s text will find its own ripe time, but in the current age, it does not pay to be a prophet. All the time, one is called into the present. This timefulness can be injurious not just to the author but to the text, as its temporal horizons are limited. Here lies the discomfort of determining the temporal horizon.

Pain of external judgment

We have touched on this matter already but it bears attention in its own right. In a judgemental age, the pain of external judgement is severe. Where one’s publication record is subject to external judgement, one’s career, one’s livelihood, and one’s whole life-world are, in principle, at stake. A rejection is felt as a judgement not only on the text but on the self.

It should be noted that ‘external’ judgement comes from a variety of sources. It may be that of a state evaluation system, the senior managers in one’s own institution, or one’s peers. Now, the academic is held amid – to draw on key Foucauldian concepts, with their differing orientations – a panoply of biopowers (plural) and forces of governmentality (Nadesan, 2008) that constitute presences with significant powers to affect one’s professional and economic situation.

In all this, it is not just one’s academic identity that is at stake, for frequently an individual’s academic identity becomes, in large part, one’s identity as such. The reviewers’ critiques, therefore, bite hard. Academics invest themselves in their writing; that writing is not separate from the self. As argued, writing is both self-confrontation and self-visibility, and so it is difficult not to interpret critical judgments as an assault on the self – particularly for early career researchers (Caffarella and Barnett, 2000).

This pain is multiple (there are multiples within the multiplicity that is the writing undertaken by academics). It is experienced in the moment of receipt of the judgement, and anticipated with some anxiety in advance. The act of writing, accordingly, has its place within a fearful phenomenology of academic writing. The writer perceives, albeit prematurely, the judgement: the judgement is present in the moment of writing. This writer’s block is intensified due to the externality of the judgement that hovers as one writes.

The writer may well have her own expectations of her writing. She has her standards. She has become ‘self-critical’. Nevertheless, the external judgement looms over the act of academic writing and diminishes writing, even as academia demands ever-more writing. ‘Publish or perish’ becomes ‘publish and perish’ (see Colpaert, 2012). Word-processors magnify this natural hesitancy for, in its wake, writing is always unfinished and decisions have to be made to let the writing go and await the world’s judgements.

In an academic life replete with judgement and even condemnation – with massive implications for one’s career and life chances – this writing pain is real in more than one sense. No one can feel this pain for the academic writer and it speaks to real situations, independent of the writing moment. The situation to which the pain of external judgement is testimony – and which is now internalised – cannot be willed away.

Pain of loss of control

The pain of loss of control is of two kinds. First is the pain of knowing that once published, the text cannot be recalled. As noted, once the ‘send’ button has been pressed on a set of proofs, there is normally no action replay. The published text cannot be revoked – except under special circumstances. By and large, once a text is in the public domain, there it sits and the author has to live with it and by it. For some, this exposure is a burden.

Second, there is the ‘death of the author’ syndrome (Barthes, 1977; Irwin, 2002), the phenomenon that, once published, a text is what the world makes of it. Once it is in the public domain, a text takes on a life of its own: the author dies (and/or swiftly moves onto the next publication), but the text is born, and finds its way in the world. In the process, the text dissolves into multiple readings of it. The text will be subjected to manifold interpretations. However carefully the text is crafted, and no matter with what nuance, subtlety and clarity, the text-as-intended may bear little resemblance to the text-as-interpreted.

All news, it is said, is good news. Perhaps this is especially so in the academic world, where so much is dependent on the elongation of one’s publications list. But this loss of control over the (plural) interpretations can bring near-paralysis. Just which audience(s) is a text intended to reach? How is it to be written given that it may be subjected to the gaze of multiple audiences, not least as it floats in the ether of the internet? And how is a paragraph to be constructed if there is no reliability as to how this text may be appropriated? The writer knows that she or he can at best please only some members of a paragraph’s potential audiences. What is the aim of this writing given such a loss of control? Its purpose is unclear, other than to add to one’s own academic capital.

This sense of a loss of control and its accompanying pain is (a) an endemic feature of writing and (b) likely to expand. Once the writer becomes sensitive to the difficulties of reaching out to and into a national and global set of audiences, this awareness is likely to enlarge over time. This writing awkwardness must be accommodated in some way.

The issue of multiple audiences appropriating a single text is especially present in relation to texts other than those intended for the specialist academic journals. Thus, we might speak of the purely academic text being closed – closed not only in terms of audience but more especially in its timbre and register. On the other hand, a book is a much more open text, being encountered by individuals in multiple communities and settings. Their ‘codes’ (Bernstein, 1996) may differ markedly. We may note that the tropes of engagement and impact which confront universities have phenomenological implications for they entail the production of open texts, which in turn can understandably heighten the writer’s anxiety, as the loss of control is heightened.

Sensing this loss of control, the temptation may be repeatedly to finesse the text before submission. Like one of Zeno’s paradoxes, the finite text lends itself to infinite etceterations. Or, the temptation may be the reverse, to submit prematurely, being aware that the text is deficient and to allow (to dare) the reviewers to take their turn with it. A yet further form of accommodation to the open-endedness of a text-as-interpreted – especially when subject to the gaze of multiple publics – is that of shrinking from public engagement entirely. Such are the ploys to mitigate the discomfort of a felt loss of control.

The ends of academic writing

Each of these seven pains of academic writing points to relationships between the writer and contexts that must be negotiated in the act of writing: language, academic literatures, journal-specific codes, publishers, varied audiences, public exposure, identity formation, the fear of criticism and even the fear of ownership. Navigating the many challenges of writing can be discomforting and even painful, both mentally and physically, as writing is cognitive, affective, physical, and ethical. The entire person is in question when one writes. Yet, it is precisely because of this complexity and sometimes painful process, that writing has potential to transform the writer. The writer’s being moves on.

As observed, writing is embodied and bound up with identity-development. Each of the seven pains – self-confrontation, visibility, discursive complexity, authenticity, external judgement, time, and loss of control – provides an opportunity for writers to clarify their thoughts and their modes of expression. Being aware of the discomforts of writing and their sources, new writerly selves may be fashioned through academic writing. In each moment, as writers, we are pulled out of ourselves into multiple and conflicting spaces and conversations. As stated, writing is an alone-process but it is also a relational process in which we reach out (increasingly) to multiple and varied audiences. We are stretched into conversations with hitherto unknown communities, and discomfort is likely; but a new space of self-becoming may invite.

Conclusions

Several conclusions are warranted here. First, writing discomfort is understandable and explicable, and perhaps expected in writing for publication (of any kind), but may be intensified in the domain of academic writing. This is due not only to the challenges of writing in the disciplines, and to the need to expose oneself to critical gaze, but also to the life-chances that are associated with academic publication and the difficulty of reaching unknown readers. The phenomenology of writing discomfort arises in large part from the structure of the world in which academics are placed. This world is real, with its audits, rankings, state steering, and global competitiveness that constitutes ‘generative mechanisms’ (Bhaskar, 2008), and which have their surface manifestations.

Second, as Michael Billig (2013: 12) argues, ‘By and large, academics today are not writing in answer to a higher calling or because they have dedicated themselves to pursuit of a higher truth.’ More formally, academic writing begins as an alienated process, imposed by external masters: the question is whether the academic writer has ploys through which a path to self-development may be found and, thereby, the alienating forces sublimated and the discomfort mitigated. Many academic writers develop weekly or even daily routines for writing work and have their own rituals to frame a writing home and so lessen these burdens.

There is here the basis for a self-reflexive and self-developmental process, which can bear on the writer’s being. In her work on agency, Margaret Archer (2003) has pointed to self-narratives as a basis for self-reflexivity. That is important, but our analysis suggests that such a self-narrative in the sphere of academic writing may helpfully be filled out by an appreciation not only of the complexity of writerly discomfort – the seven pains of academic writing identified here – but also the sources of those discomforts (plural).

If writing is viewed as mechanistic or as a means of adding to CVs or securing positions and promotions, rather than deliberately embracing and engaging with the often painful process of writing, the writing is turned into an alienating process and opportunities to grow as thinkers, writers, and academics are jeopardised. The risk, in succumbing to the pressure to produce writing for publication’s sake, is not only that the quality of writing and thinking is diminished, but also that the opportunity to grow from and through academic writing is jettisoned.

The considerations here point to the desirability of scholarly work being advanced in its being placed not only in the phenomenology of academic writing but also placed in the context of the real of academic writing. This paper has sought to excavate the structure of the phenomena both of consciousness and of the sub-consciousness, to uncover that which is dimly felt, and to disentangle the many academic, societal and global structures that frame academic writing. It is a set of structures that is in motion (Nail, 2019), as its elements wax and wane; and now especially with artificial intelligence and the temptations to resort to unique text-generating platforms. The text is always sliding away from the academic as writer.

There are two pools of darkness in this phenomenology of writerly pain; a ‘darkness’ that does not carry evaluative overtones but rather points up the hidden bases (plural) of the seven discomforts identified here. The sources of one’s discomforts normally remain hidden, even from oneself. As we have seen, these discomforts have their sources in deep-seated real structures of academic life, structures that reach into the wider world of the state, the economy, and epistemic and cultural formations. However, the discomforts are explicable and identifiable, and they may be brought into reflective consciousness and – once acknowledged – become a source of self-growth. What has become an alienated process may turn into an emancipated process.

No pain, no gain, it is said. Be that as it may, what perhaps should be said is that the journey of academic writing may both help to form the writer as a being, and is ‘an act of being’ in itself (Yagelski, 2012: 193). It is a mode of existence (Latour, 2013) in which writing is felt to be central to what it means to be an academic (in thinking, critiquing, attending to detail, contributing to knowledge, communicating ideas and engaging with the wider world). As well as being a researcher, scholar, teacher, mentor, adviser, institutional ambassador, and epistemic diplomat, the academic may come to see oneself even primarily as a writer. Ultimately, to be an academic who writes is to be a writer.