Donald A Fowler - Biologist

 “When are you writing up?” It’s a common question to hear around graduate students in science. The process of writing up subtly directs those addressed to see science and its insights as obvious, especially once you have the knowledge accrued in the course of earning a degree. The presumption is that the narrative is all in your head and that you simply need to place your fingertips on the keyboard and write it out. This perspective ignores the real skill it takes to write something and present it suitable for someone else’s consumption. It’s similar to how painting a still-life takes time and learned skill, despite the intuitive obviousness of the subject just being things on a table. Beyond the skill necessary to convey one’s ideas in writing is the interrogation of these ideas that occurs in the writing process. Just as art is more than simply an accurate representation of a scene, writing itself is a tool for thinking deeper and better about the subject of the writing.

One of my favorite passages on writing is by Michael Eric Dyson and describes the advantages of a scholarly writing approach. In his discussion on Cornell West, a prominent American public intellectual, he writes about this process as one that simply cannot be replaced, despite the laborious work that is required:

In Brother West, West admitted that he is “more a natural reader than natural writer,” adding that “writing requires a concerted effort and forced discipline,” but that he reads “as easily as I breathe.” I can say with certainty, as a college professor for the last quarter century, that most of my students feel the same way. What’s more, West’s off-the-cuff riffs and rants, spoken into a microphone and later transcribed to page, lack the discipline of the written word. West’s rhetorical genius is undeniable, but there are limits on what speaking can do for someone trying to wrestle angels or battle demons to the page. This is no biased preference for the written word over the spoken; I am far from a champion of a Eurocentric paradigm of literacy. This is about scholar versus talker. Improvisational speaking bears its wonders: the emergence on the spot of turns of thought and pathways of insight one hadn’t planned, and the rapturous discovery, in front of a live audience, of meanings that usually lie buried beneath the rubble of formal restrictions and literary conventions. Yet West’s inability to write is hugely confining. For scholars, there is a depth that can only be tapped through the rigorous reworking of the same sentences until the meaning comes clean—or as clean as one can make it.

The ecstasies of the spoken word, when scholarship is at stake, leave the deep reader and the long listener hungry for more. Writing is an often-painful task that can feel like the death of one’s past. Equally discomfiting is seeing one’s present commitments to truths crumble once one begins to tap away at the keyboard or scar the page with ink. Writing demands a different sort of apprenticeship to ideas than does speaking. It beckons one to revisit over an extended, or at least delayed, period the same material and to revise what one thinks. Revision is reading again and again what one writes so that one can think again and again about what one wants to say and in turn determine if better and deeper things can be said.

(https://newrepublic.com/article/121550/cornel-wests-rise-fall-our-most-exciting-black-scholar-ghost)           

Any reality has an enormous amount of things going on, from society's dealings with race to embryology to any other empirical subject of study, and our limited ability to understand all of this complicates the process of arranging information into an understandable narrative. Dealing with this reality requires the ability to organize a number of different and simultaneously true and real things into a cohesive linear narrative. This is difficult—first to capture the reality accurately, and second to wrestle non-linear simultaneous reality into a rigidly linear and sequential narrative.

The task might be easy enough to get a complicated reality in line if it weren’t for our own minds to get in the way of the process itself, as can be seen in the lack of rigor that often comes with spoken conversation. A number of  cognitive biases allow one to believe that their internal dialogue is accurate to reality and far more coherent than it actually is. We want to believe that we make sense, and our considered consciousness feels immediate, singular, real, and cohesive, which is reflected our thoughts and opinions. This can be especially seen in those who are socially rewarded for their knowledge-work, including PhD students and graduates, to whom it is implicitly reinforced that the ideas in their head are (or, perhaps, should be) good and worth-while. All these issues I recognize in myself and struggle in my work.

I have found writing in the manner of Michael Eric Dyson to be an invaluable tool in battling against these problems. This scholarly writing is a personal exploration of the topic, with the ability to piece things apart, as necessary for their composition, and then deal with each issue in turn. Doing so allows me to get to the core of what I'm writing about and to assess whether my internal ideas are coherent, or even whether they represent reality accurately. Scholarly writing is not about simply writing up: This process of writing is an incomparable means of exploring an idea or a reality with a focus and consideration that cannot be replicated in any other way. It is how I start a project instead of end it. This process of writing allows me to see from afar how I’ve decided to articulate my ideas about biology and to question whether this manner even seems right, so that I can set aside those areas which are more complete to focus directly on those that require more work. Scholarly writing, then, is a tool. Obviously, not everything that is written is true or is written in the best interest of the reader, and good, efficient writing can come to wrong, incomplete, or simple conclusions. However, the poor use or misuse of a tool is not an argument against the tool itself, and it is especially not an argument against developing the skill to use the tool.

The process of scholarly writing allows reality to be explored in a way that offers a path toward creating some piece of media that accurately reflects the reality it describes, even if the process is slow and torturous. Unfortunately, this arduous process cannot be substituted by casual work, no matter how much people try. Often people use the prestige of their position(s), or the busyness of their schedules in the manner of Cornell West, to excuse them from putting in this effort. There is an ongoing western idea of the “lone genius,” whose casual effort easily surpasses the long drudgery of mere mortals. However, when people, even “great” ones, stop putting effort into their ideas, that work tends towards the superficial and casual, just like anyone else who similarly approaches a problem. Good work, especially the communicated thought of academia, arises from a smart person spending time and working deliberately and dedicatedly on a problem.

Achieving a command of scholarly writing allows me to widen the possibilities of what my research means and the direction it takes. Without it, I am limited to styles and approaches that are intuitively “obvious.” Unfortunately, as demonstrated by my experience and reading, such as in the paragraphs by Michael Eric Dyson above, this tool is often not used, or is employed only limitedly and casually. A scholarly writing ability isn't the only mental tool with which to write, and it is certainly not a complete way to write. But it’s like a hammer in a woodshop: Lacking it doesn't mean nothing can get done, but it certainly restricts the quality and kind of its output.

If you want to discuss or contact me, Donald, regarding this essay, do so on my twitter: https://twitter.com/evodevodon

© Donald Alexander Fowler, PhD 2020: Text

Image is screenshot of cited article on tnr.com