The Skills for Scholars Walk

Transcript of Helen Sword’s podcast episode The Skills for Scholars Walk

Hi, I am Helen Sword from helen sword.com, and this is SwordSwings, my podcast series for writers in motion. Whether you are driving a car, riding a train, out for a walk, or just pottering around in your kitchen, this recording will help you move yourself and you're riding to someplace new. In today's episode, we're talking about skills for scholars.

In 2023, I invited three experts to tell us about their recently published books on workplace writing, grant writing, and book proposal writing respectively. We'll hear from Martha b Coven about her book Writing on the Job: A Compact Guide to professional Writing from emails and slide decks to proposals and cover letters.

We'll hear from Laura Portwood-Stacer about The Book Proposal Book, which is essential for crafting a compelling scholarly book proposal. And finally, we'll hear from Betty Lai about her book, the Grant Writing Guide, for researchers at all stages of their academic careers. And we'll also hear from Matt Roal, the acquisitions editor for Princeton University press’ Skills for Scholars Series, the publisher of these wonderful books, and also incidentally of my 2023 book, Writing with Pleasure. And I love the fact that writing with pleasure is seen by Princeton University Press as an essential skill for scholars. So let's tune in now to hear each writer's advice on how to sharpen your prose across various writing genres.

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Helen: Martha Coven, welcome! Lovely to have you here as well, and your book on Writing on the Job. As I said, I think it's for everyone. Because of who doesn't have to write an email, who doesn't have to take wooly ideas in their head and think about how to present them to somebody else clearly, and having somebody just tell you how to use bullet points, correct me, it's really useful.

So I find that it's a book to come back to again and again. Just on really the most basic things and presentations too, and things like that. Martha, how did you get to where you are? Can you give us just a quick kind of intellectual autobiography of yourself before we start talking about the book?

Martha: I love that phrase, intellectual biography, autobiography.

My background is working in public policy arenas. I have worked mostly in government and some in nonprofits in Washington. My training is in economics and in law. But at some point, about eight years ago, I started teaching at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, teaching graduate students there.

Realising that they didn't all know how to write in a way that a policymaker, like a member of Congress or a cabinet official, could absorb easily…the bullet points you referenced and all of that. So in addition to teaching subject matter courses, I suggested to Princeton and they readily agreed that I might start teaching writing courses and workshops.

And I did that for a few years. And at some point, I think this is true for a lot of authors, you realize no one else has written this up, so maybe I could or should?! And it turned, a journey later, it turned into this quite slim little volume that is a combination of basics on how to get going on a piece of writing, how to edit something, and then short chapters on lots of different forms, as you said: presentations, speeches, press releases, lots of different things people might have to write.

Helen: So it started with things that you were passing on to your students and probably a few end outs and those sorts of things. And then as you were working on the book, did you then actively go looking for formats that maybe you hadn't been thinking about before? I did. And what would those have been?

Martha: Yeah, so a couple different things.

One is I started reading, I read stylish academic writing, which I valued very much. I've read lots. I have two bookshelves full of writing books that others had written because I wanted to glean the wisdom that was out there, but in terms of formats that I might not have been as familiar with, Yes to that too.

And in fact, Peter, who was my editor in this book, encouraged me to reach out to people in different industry sectors, right? People I know often, just through my personal uh, connections. What does a pitch deck look like when you're trying to pitch to get venture capital for your firm? I talked to people in the tech sector. I have a friend in the hospitality industry. What does their writing look like? And talk to lots of people and many of those folks then review my manuscript to give me advice on whether it was hitting the mark in their industry so that I wasn't just speaking to ‘what does it mean to write for a government official?’, I was making sure I was covering. Many varieties of private sector communications as well.

Helen: That's great. And so that kind of research base of getting other people contributing to it then makes for much more rich and varied book one. One sort of beef I've had with a lot of writing guides over the years is that so many of them are written out of one author's experience. “oh, I'm really productive. I'll write a book about how to be productive”— without actually having a sense that maybe other people might respond to other forms of productivity. So it's clear that what you've done there has both that really deep basis in your own experience, but then you know, really opening up and then learning a whole lot, I presume, from other people.

So anything you can point to that you learned as part of the process of writing the book?

Martha: Oh gosh, so many things. One of the things I learned…probably as much in the classroom as through writing the book, but it was steepened writing the book is…Building off of what you said, that different things work for different people.

So one of the, I have a little chapter I think I mentioned on getting started, and so I have five different ways or so to get started in there because some people like to work off of an outliner and I've discovered that lots of other people are not out outlines or the business process inside their organization is such, that's not the first thing they're asked for.

I did a talk for a group of Amazon employees. Learning about how they do writing, and that's a very writing-intensive culture. The corporate culture. So they go about things differently, and I learned how they go about pitching ideas internally, which is by writing a version of a press release. So just figuring out that they're different… there's no right answer.

The right answer is what works for you to get you on a journey to a piece of writing that is effective for the audience you're trying to reach.

Helen: That's so important. And yet at the same time, people want guides, don't they? Yes. So they want the exercises, they want the advice, they want the magic formula that's going to get them there.

So this is certainly something that I've had to grapple with in all my books on writing, and it sounds like you have as well. How do you find that balance between saying “Here's something to try. Here's an exercise, here's something you'll find useful.” And, “oh, but by the way, this might not be the best way for you.”

Are there any things that you would, putting you on the spot a little bit here, that you would say are the non-negotiables? Everybody needs to know how to do them in a particular way.

Martha: Oh, that's a good question. So I do have a non-negotiable, I'll just say briefly on the, ‘how did I strike the balance?’ I did include some templates and some things literally with blanks in them that you could follow.

And that was partly inspired by a conversation with Marilyn Mahler at Norton, who published, They Say, I Say, I think it's called, it's an English language composition book that's very popular, that's very template-based. And the reason it's popular, I think, is that they show you how to do things. And I thought people do want models.

So you are right. It's a balance. I do have one non-negotiable for just about any piece of writing, and it's a theme throughout the book, which is a pr, a communications practice that actually came from the US military bottom line up front, BLUF, which is in any communication, an email you mentioned. The first paragraph should say what I'm actually trying to get you to understand or read.

You can unpack it afterwards. Same for a slide deck. Don't wait till the 10th slide to tell people what the takeaway message is because: A, they'll be curious, and you're not writing a mystery novel. You're writing a business communication. But B, they might be called away. You never know if somebody has to step away, and if you had a captive audience and you didn't use that time to tell them what you wanted to get across, you've missed your opportunity.

So the book says, in any kind of writing, short form, long form: bottom line, up front is critical.

Helen: That's great. I will start using that. I tend, I find myself using the phrase a lot when I'm working with people in our Writespace, virtual writing studio. Don't bury the lead. Right? It's the journalistic thing.

And in fact, I've learned a ton of about writing from journalist friends because they do learn those sort of snippets. So another favorite that I learned from a journalist friend was. If you watch a documentary or you read a good piece of long form journalism, you'll often have both the hand shot, the closeup detail and the panning shot, and you can start with the panning shot or you can start with the hand shot.

But it's just good to be aware of moving back and forth between them. And I found that so useful in thinking about writing too. It'd be interesting to plug that into the bottom line up front, because in a way, the bottom line could be either the hand shot or the, or the panning shot. I think I'm getting a bit too mixed metaphors.

You excited too? Getting excited about thinking about all these things. Gosh, I was gonna ask if there's one takeaway from your book, but I think you've already given us that. Can you tell us maybe just really quickly, what would be one way in which, let's say an academic writer, PhD student, or faculty member would benefit from your book.

Martha: So certainly there's a chapter on resumes and cover letters, and while in academia, the CV has a certain format, sometimes you do have to communicate your work experience to different audiences differently. So that might be a chapter that people could take a look at. Probably actually for people who are interested in getting their ideas out into the world, there's a chapter on commentary, which is about op-eds, but other kinds of opinion writing. And it actually feeds into what you said about camera shots because op-eds, you don't have to have the bottom line literally upfront. The first paragraph does not have to have the takeaway message. It has to come early on.

But you could first pan in and show, have a vignette, a story as something that grabs people's attention because your gaze is on it. And then pull back to situate it in the world of, okay, what do we do about this thing that we just saw up close? And in your second or third paragraph up in op-ed. You could have then the takeaway message.

So there are chapters on forms like that academics do as well as email. There's a chapter on email and messaging, and let me tell you, I receive a lot of emails from university administrators. They do not adhere to the bottom line, up front principle. They do not make good use of their subject lines. The lead is often 12 paragraphs in! So I think there are people employed by universities who could also use the advice in the book.

Helen: Fantastic. Thank you so much. So that was Martha Coven, Writing on the Job, and we'll let you go off to teach, I believe?

Martha: That's right. Thank you!

Helen: All right. Our next guest is Laura Portwood-Stacer, who is the author of a book that I think wins the prize for having the very best title ever pretty much: The Book Proposal Book. How great is that? Very meta, Laura. Isn't it lovely to have you!

Laura: Thank you. Thanks for having me. Yeah. The title came to us late, surprisingly, it seems like the most obvious title, but it struck me after I had turned in the manuscript and it just..finally, we figured it out.

Helen: Oh, that's great. And so Laura runs manuscriptworks.com. Can you just tell us a little bit about that and what you do there?

Martha: Yeah. I started out as a self-employed developmental editor, so I would just help people on their book manuscripts, get them ready for peer review or publication. So I started that business to do that and it's evolved over the last.

Few years I've specialized in book proposals and expanded beyond working with authors one-to-one. So now I do mostly group programs where I guide people through the process of writing a proposal and navigating that whole publishing process, which can be really anxiety-provoking, and there's a lot of uncertainty around it.

So I do as much as I can to take that uncertainty out for the people who work with me.

Helen: I presume that you identified over time that particular need, that book proposals were something that people were struggling with. Would that be right?

Martha: Yeah, absolutely. So I had clients who came to me to work on their book, but then they were asking questions about how do they pitch it, how do they get a publisher interested?

And I was saying the same things over and over again, and realizing people really didn't know how the process worked. And having been through it myself as an author, I didn't know how it worked. Even after I'd been through it, a lot of it was really still opaque. So yeah, so I identified that need and tried to serve it.

Helen: So if we wheel back a bit, um, I'd be really interested in just hearing, essentially (there's Freddie back there!)… Hearing about your, just your intellectual autobiography. What got you to the point of being a developmental editor?

Laura: Yeah. I trained as an academic. I spent six years in a PhD program in communication, so I did have some kind of scholarly training in…I wouldn't say writing, but in how ideas land with other people and how we represent ourselves to others. And so that sort of informs a lot of what I do now, which is to help people represent themselves to publishers and represent their work to publishers. While I was on that academic track, I was fortunate to work at a scholarly journal as a co-editor of the essay section of the journal.

My job with my co-editor was to write calls for papers essentially, but they were short essays. And then we would get dozens of submissions for each issue. And we had to work with the authors pretty quickly 'cause it wasn't a peer reviewed section. So we would work with them pretty quickly to identify their argument, pull it out, make it engaging for our readers because this was like sort of short essays. And we had to do that six to eight times a year. So it was a quick turnaround. So that was a crash course in learning how to help scholars sharpen their ideas, express them, give feedback that people could hear non defensively, and that would really motivate them to want to improve the text.

And I found that, I really found that rewarding. That part of my academic career. And so when I was deciding what I was gonna do, I shifted out of teaching and into just full-time editing and working with authors directly. Not affiliated with the journal, but just through my own business.

Helen: I love the way you talk about the whole feedback process because that's something I've thought about a lot in the context of writing with pleasure.

One of the most painful things for authors is peer review. Because it's often so nasty and it takes quite a lot of work, I've found, both with academics and with undergraduate students to turn around their mindset so that they're not defensive, they're not terrified, they actually see good feedback as a gift, as the most powerful way to move forward.

So that must have been quite an art to develop that. And must help you with your business now, I imagine, make you a very empathetic person to work with.

Laura: Yes. I think that's probably the number one personality trait that I think makes me successful in my business. And I completely agree. Even as someone who has continued to publish books, peer review is the scariest part 'cause it's the most unpredictable. You just don't know what people will say. So yeah, like trying to get to a place where you feel okay, regardless of what that feedback ends up being.

Helen: So it's one thing to work with a lot of authors, start thinking about what makes for a good book proposal. It's another to formulate all that into a book yourself.

And I imagine the proposal for The Book Proposal Book, even if you didn't have that title, that's very meta. You must have really sweated over that one.

Laura: Yes, it was very high pressure. I was like, I better get this right if I'm gonna sell myself as an expert on this. But it worked out.

Helen: Can I ask you. If somebody is not a scholar, but working on a book proposal, perhaps, would this book be useful to them as well?

Laura: I think so, and I've gotten that feedback from people who work with trade authors—and by trade, I mean people who aren't necessarily trying to reach just scholarly readers. And so might even be reaching out to presses that are not just scholarly presses. So the advice in the book proposal book will work for a university press, for sure. I have also heard that most of it is applicable to other kinds of nonfiction books 'cause it's really about how to make your complex ideas translate to people who are not experts at your level, which is almost everyone. 'cause if you're the one writing the book about it, you probably know more about it than almost anybody.

And that's a skill that all writers can benefit from, I think.

Helen: And that also translates to genres other than writing a book. Like writing a promotion application.

Laura: Absolutely. And I have several people who have come through my program who have then gotten competitive national grants to support writing their book because they have that experience of understanding how to pitch the book as important.

Helen: Great. Believe it or not, we're already up to time, so I'm gonna just ask one final question, which is: One takeaway. Just one thing. If somebody came to you and said, “I'm time poor. What's one skill I could develop to help me present myself better or start thinking about writing a book proposal?”

Laura: Yeah. I feel like maybe I already gave it away, but I think it's learning to talk about your work in that meta way, in addition to talking like through the work or to being like sitting in the content of it.

Think about the presentation of it and that I'm always telling people, a proposal is its own genre. It's not the actual article or book. It's really…it's a marketing document and you're marketing your work to a publisher who's going to invest in it or to, like you said, a tenure committee or some other evaluating kind of entity.

So that's a skill that people are not really taught in graduate school or anywhere else really. So that's, I think, where I'm stepping in and trying to show people that there's a certain way of talking about your work that is the most effective, and you can still have your own style to it. You don't lose your scholarly voice or your scholarly rigor in it, but it is a, it's a new way of thinking about your work and what makes it valuable to other people.

Helen: So it's that shift from what I'm interested in, what I'm working on, what I'm discovering, and what's in it for you, the reader. And you, the publisher, as well. Thank you so much, Laura.

Laura: You're welcome.

Helen: Lucky last is Betty Lai a who has written another book with a very punchy title, the grant writing guide. So welcome Betty. Great to see you.

Betty: Thank you so much, Helen. So happy to be here.

Helen: So same question that I've been asking others. How did you get to where you are now as an academic and as well as the author of this book?

Betty: So I actually never invested in learning how to write a grant as a graduate student, as a postdoc. People said, oh, you should learn how to write a grant, but I always thought it was a waste of time.

I felt I know how to write papers, and I know that those will eventually get published. But grant writing is so much more of an unknown. The success rates of grants are very low, from 10 to 20% at most funders around the world. So it just seemed like a bad use of my time. And it really wasn't until I got into my first assistant professor position where an administrator said to me, “look, if you wanna be promoted, you have to secure a federal grant.”

It wasn't until that moment that I said, “Oh I need to learn how to do this skill.” And what was so scary about that moment for me was the fact that what my administrator was really saying was coded language, that I would be fired if I didn't get a grant. 'cause that's what it means in that kind of a job. If you don't get promoted, it means you won't have a job in several years.

Even scarier in that moment was the fact that I had no idea what they meant when they said federal grant. I didn't know what they were trying to indicate to me with that term federal, what was different about a federal grant versus other grants. And so I set out to learn about grant writing. I really struggled for a good two years, just not even knowing where to start, what to turn to, how to find resources, how I should invest my time.

So even though I knew I was under extreme time pressure to figure this out, I never wrote a single grant word for a good two years until I found mentors who taught me where to focus my time and what to look at and how to develop this skill of grant writing. I actually ended up in a fellowship program where they broke down skills, but I remember being in the room at the time and saying, “wow! This is everything I needed to know, but look at everybody who's not in the room. We are such a privileged group to get access to this knowledge, and yet I can name 20 other scholars who would love to be in this room with me and learn what I know.” And so I really waited all through my assistant professorship to find this book.

I kept waiting for this book to come out and for someone to share all these ideas. Finally, as soon as I submitted my tenure packet, I said, “this book isn't out yet. But I feel so strongly that we're missing voices because we're not sharing these skills widely, that I'm gonna do this now.” And I was so lucky to meet Peter and eventually Matt, and get to be a part of this series.

And so that's where this book came from.

Helen: It's such a different trajectory in some ways from Laura’s, for example, who got into editing very early on while still in grad school, and made that decision then to basically strike out on her own, first as an editor, and then actually running a company where she's helping others with their book proposals, which is amazing, which is to even think that there's an entire career in doing that. Who knew? But you've had quite a different academic track because you've done, you are still doing your teaching, presumably your own grant writing for your research, and then writing a book about grant writing on the side. Amazing. How can you give us a bit of insight into how you've managed that?

Betty: I, it's a good question. I just felt so strongly that I wanted to see a way for us to share these skills widely. So I'm so grateful for this opportunity, and it was just such a joy. You talk about writing with pleasure. It was such a joy to get to wake up every morning and think about this idea. And to the point that you were making earlier, Helen and that Martha was making too, it wasn't that I felt like I was the only one who understood grant writing and that I wanted to share with others how to write grants the way I do. What I did in this project is I interviewed a hundred people to really understand: how did they approach grant writing? What was their best advice? How did they approach this same idea of getting support for ideas?

Because I think that is truly what distinguishes us as scholars in terms of our grant writing. We are trying to get support for ideas, and that is a really unique goal and it shapes how we write grants. So it was so much fun to get to interview people throughout this process. And so I just…it was the first thing I wanted to do in the morning.

And so I would focus on this first, and once I got tired, I'd switch to my next piece of work.

Helen: Which is a great kind of testimony to the importance of writing with pleasure. If you're excited about something, it's the thing you want to do and then you get it done. 100 people. That's a lot of people to talk to.

As you were talking, I was thinking about Michelle Lamont, is that right? The book on how academics think… I'm sure you're. Very familiar with which she did as her sociological research, but actually sitting in on grant committees and things as they talked to find out How Professors Think, that's what it's called. Yes. So did you do anything like that as well? Actually talking to people or being part of decision making processes about grants as a way of getting insight?

Betty: Yes. So I talked to a lot of people who review, but also during my writing time, I said yes to every review panel that came my way, which really created a huge workload for me.

But I did it with the understanding that making sure to sit on both sides would really be helpful for the book and in helping people understand grant writing skills.

Helen: Yeah, that's so true. I ended up on my university's sort of top level, the equivalent of a tenure committee, but the one that has oversight for the entire university for like professorial hires.

And you think you, you're learning stuff by being on that kind of committee that you really need to know when you put in your first promotion application, but you don't get the opportunities to get that insight until you've got through the hoops. It's a real kind of conundrum, so you're demystifying as much of that as possible as you can.

Just looking at your introduction, you talk about the importance of this book and this work for people who are underrepresented in the academy, in the grant success. Do you wanna talk about that a little bit? That was clearly sort of a driving motivation for you as well.

Betty: Yes, absolutely. Thank you for raising that. When we look at funders around the world, we have clear biases, both by race, gender, age, and this has been documented at funders around the world. The National Institutes of Health, the world's largest funder of biomedical research in the world, they apologized for racism in the system and they're working hard to correct it.

But I know, being a scholar myself and submitting grants, that this affects all of us. It affects who submits, why they submit, but also who gets access to information about how to actually write a grant. I. And that felt really important to me because if we're seeing biases that funders around the world, it means we're not funding the best ideas. And we're not creating opportunities for our best scholars.

It means we are going to lose talent because we are systemically not supporting certain groups, and I wanted us to rethink that. That we have an opportunity to make sure that everybody gets the chance to get support for important ideas. And it means we'll hear better ideas and we'll get chances to think more clearly about problems that affect all of us.

Helen: So you're supporting the people applying for those things, but coming through a bit in the chat here—Here we go: “There's also an art to feedback. Perhaps the owner should be on reviewers and editors to shape feedback so writers have a better experience”. Now, that comment came through during my conversation with Laura about how painful feedback can be, but it feeds right into this question and also of unconscious bias for one thing, but also all the things that happen behind closed doors and that reviewers either say about other people to their face, so to speak, through reviews or in these committee sort of contexts. So Matt, I think we have a new book for your series that is badly needed. I don’t know who's gonna write it! On being on the other side of the table. So from Laura about, and I've got a section about this in Writing with Pleasure, but it's very short. There's so much more work to be done here about the art of giving feedback, which is another one of those things that all academics do, but we don't learn to do.

And then the art of, or the art, the politics, the ethics, the everything of being a decision maker on a grant committee, massive. I did a workshop one time as a participant on unconscious bias and oh my God, it opened my list. Once you have in your head that we are all biased, it's not a bad thing in the sense that we can't control it.

We are all biased. Every, the world's done that to us. So that means we have to work that much harder when we're on these committees to be conscious of the bias and to, to undo the bias that is already there. That, that for me was just a game-changing way of shifting my thinking to admit to the problems. Then actively look for a solution instead of saying, “oh, it's all good. All good”. Thoughts from either of you? Matt?

Matt: It's definitely something I've thought about and it's come up a little bit. Worked on some proposals on being an ethical and thoughtful journal editor, series editor, developmental editor. And certainly the idea of the art of receiving feedback, that's giving thoughtful, respectful feedback. And also on the receiving side, that's a lot of my job. How can we be receptive to this while still articulating what we're trying to accomplish? So it's a great idea for the series. Yeah, I love that that came up.

Helen: Yeah, and we've got another comment: Are these volumes, the art of giving feedback and possibly also the tenure dossier guidebook, are these being considered by the Princeton Skills series?

We've got a lot of suggestions for you here.

Matt: Yeah, these are great!

Helen: Anybody out there who wants to write them. I think Betty's a real inspiration for us to show how you actually can write a book like this without it being detrimental to, and in fact, it sounds like it's been quite beneficial in some ways to your career, Betty.

Betty: Sure. But I do think that it's a good question to be posing early on because I'm definitely not from a book field, so I am a psychologist and we primarily publish papers. But I was talking to someone about this issue of could people understand a book and a scholarly book as a scholarly endeavor? Would they understand this work as being a part of that work?

And the advice they gave me was such a good reminder. They said, it's your job to make that case. You need to put that into your dossier and you need to compile the evidence that shows why it is a scholarly work that has an impact.

Helen: Yeah, that's a great point. I've been doing that of course, to the last 15 years or so since moving into writing about writing. Which is, how we situate ourselves as research-based scholars doing this work and not as people who are writing just a guidebook, therefore not “real” academic work.

Matt: I was gonna say, I think you both are great examples of working on something that you really want to work on that you, you find a lot of purpose and meaning in.

As Betty says, find that rationale for what you're working on. Find the way. Maybe it's not writing a book, maybe it's it's article writing or some other kind of thing, but finding the thing that you really care about. I think that's so important.

Helen: The passion, the pleasure. That comes from passion, and sometimes it's a passion for something that is not itself an intrinsically pleasurable topic.

If you're bringing that kind of energy to it, then you want to be there.

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That's the end of today's podcast episode. I hope that both your body and your mind have moved to someplace new and that you'll feel inspired to pick up one of these books in your local library or bookstore. If you'd like to try some exercises to help you market your writing project, pitch your ideas, or just to write more clearly and succinctly, you'll find the full two-hour video of my special event in the video section of the WriteSpace library at helensword.com.

Thanks for listening, and I look forward to walking with you again soon.