You say that Adam Smith “famously” said something or he has a “well-known” concept. Academic writing, I find, is more like Anxiety Writing. Anxiety of influence or anxiety of lack or anxiety of banal. Anyway, I don’t know anything about Adam smith, and this essay really helped. Thanks.
I meant to come back to this: ever since you commented about this, I have seen it all over academic writing. I don’t know that it’s Anxiety of Influence so much as a weird signal that the author knows that you already know this, they’re not so gauche as to pretend that they were the first to realize that, for example, David Hume describe the reception of his Treatise as it having come “stillborn off the press.” So it’s anxiety, but anxiety that the audience will assume that they are naive or unsophisticated. It reinforces how insular academic writing is—which suggests that I need to avoid doing that in these essay!
I've never read this book but it sounds interesting. I have also always admired your restraint in the way you treat your student evaluations—I wish I were able to wait until the summer to read them. I read them as soon as they are available after each semester, no matter what, so I know exactly what students said, and this is the case even though I know that they're pretty meaningless.
I have written a couple novels and am working on another one now and when I tell people the first thing they always ask is things like, who is the publisher? Do you have an agent? Have you sent a query letter? Things like that. But I've not done any of those things and don't feel any motivation to. I have thought a lot about why this is, and I think it is part out of fear of criticism (I do not hope they are good, or fear they are bad; I know they aren't good), but also it's just from a general apathy toward the whole process. I have seen a lot of fiction writers get really enamored with being *PUBLISHED*, but having published many things in academia, I am crystal clear about the fact that being published does not mean you have produced a quality piece of work; it just means that you found someone willing to publish what you wrote.
I also had an experience recently where I walked into the library with my kids and looked at all the books and thought, the vast majority of people will never read the vast majority of books. Of course this is obvious but that fact impacted me for the first time and I thought of my own writing and I thought, if I'm not doing this for myself, then I'm doing it wrong. I need to be writing this stuff for me, and not for anyone else.
That last paragraph has always been the greatest obstacle to feeling motivated to write for an academic audience: there are just so few, percentage-wise, academic works worth reading that adding to the pile never feels especially meaningful--unless, that is, it is something I find personally valuable to write. Then when I consider time spent writing is time lost from reading....I want that writing to be worthwhile. I don't know if this Substack counts, but it does require me to think more carefully, and to hone my writing skills, and I appreciate that.
There's obviously a bigger audience for fiction, but even then, the supply far exceeds the demand. Still, I'm impressed at people who can write a novel--that seems like a feat in and of itself (not to mention 3!)
Oh it's absolutely killed my desire to write for academic audiences. At least in my field, even work that is highly impactful now is almost entirely forgotten in less than a decade, and then definitely is forgotten after that. What's the point?
You say that Adam Smith “famously” said something or he has a “well-known” concept. Academic writing, I find, is more like Anxiety Writing. Anxiety of influence or anxiety of lack or anxiety of banal. Anyway, I don’t know anything about Adam smith, and this essay really helped. Thanks.
I meant to come back to this: ever since you commented about this, I have seen it all over academic writing. I don’t know that it’s Anxiety of Influence so much as a weird signal that the author knows that you already know this, they’re not so gauche as to pretend that they were the first to realize that, for example, David Hume describe the reception of his Treatise as it having come “stillborn off the press.” So it’s anxiety, but anxiety that the audience will assume that they are naive or unsophisticated. It reinforces how insular academic writing is—which suggests that I need to avoid doing that in these essay!
I've never read this book but it sounds interesting. I have also always admired your restraint in the way you treat your student evaluations—I wish I were able to wait until the summer to read them. I read them as soon as they are available after each semester, no matter what, so I know exactly what students said, and this is the case even though I know that they're pretty meaningless.
I have written a couple novels and am working on another one now and when I tell people the first thing they always ask is things like, who is the publisher? Do you have an agent? Have you sent a query letter? Things like that. But I've not done any of those things and don't feel any motivation to. I have thought a lot about why this is, and I think it is part out of fear of criticism (I do not hope they are good, or fear they are bad; I know they aren't good), but also it's just from a general apathy toward the whole process. I have seen a lot of fiction writers get really enamored with being *PUBLISHED*, but having published many things in academia, I am crystal clear about the fact that being published does not mean you have produced a quality piece of work; it just means that you found someone willing to publish what you wrote.
I also had an experience recently where I walked into the library with my kids and looked at all the books and thought, the vast majority of people will never read the vast majority of books. Of course this is obvious but that fact impacted me for the first time and I thought of my own writing and I thought, if I'm not doing this for myself, then I'm doing it wrong. I need to be writing this stuff for me, and not for anyone else.
That last paragraph has always been the greatest obstacle to feeling motivated to write for an academic audience: there are just so few, percentage-wise, academic works worth reading that adding to the pile never feels especially meaningful--unless, that is, it is something I find personally valuable to write. Then when I consider time spent writing is time lost from reading....I want that writing to be worthwhile. I don't know if this Substack counts, but it does require me to think more carefully, and to hone my writing skills, and I appreciate that.
There's obviously a bigger audience for fiction, but even then, the supply far exceeds the demand. Still, I'm impressed at people who can write a novel--that seems like a feat in and of itself (not to mention 3!)
Oh it's absolutely killed my desire to write for academic audiences. At least in my field, even work that is highly impactful now is almost entirely forgotten in less than a decade, and then definitely is forgotten after that. What's the point?