The Writing Guides Walk

Transcript of Helen Sword’s podcast episode The Writing Guides Walk

Hi, I am Helen Sword from helensword.com and this is SwordSwings, my podcast series for writers in motion. Whether you are driving or riding a train or going for a walk or just pottering around in your kitchen, this recording will help you move yourself and your writing someplace new. Today's episode is all about style guides.

Why are they useful? How do we know which guides are best for us at different times in our writing lives? How can they help us? Push boundaries in our writing. I asked Daniel Shea these questions in a WriteSpace special event conversation back in November, 2021. Daniel is the founder of Scholarly Communication, the podcast about ‘how knowledge gets known’ and has his own YouTube channel called Write Your Research, formerly based in Heidelberg, Germany. He's now a professional at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Let's tune in to hear Daniel's advice on how to make style guides work for you.

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Helen: So Daniel, can you give us a bit of an intellectual autobiography here? How you got to where you are…To Heidelberg!

Daniel: Yeah, Massachusetts is where I come from, Worcester, as we say it, or Wista, if you are in the local dialect. I went to the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and always wanted to go abroad. I went to England for a year and a half of my studies while I was there and really enjoyed it. But something happened while I was in England, and I met my current wife, and that brought me to Germany. Germany had never been a destination for me, but it has been great because it's put me in contact with European culture, and I feel as European as American.

Equal parts. Equal parts. And I've lived in Greece for a year. I've been living in Germany now for close to half my life. Yeah. So the multicultural multilinguality, in particular, of Europe has always sort of fascinated me, and it's always brought me back to writing in a way, and in a sense, I have to say it's odd, but all these different languages and cultures always brought me back to English. Showing me English from outside new angles. And I think in a weird way it helped my understanding of English text and English writing. Yeah. I did my PhD here at Heidelberg University and work at the language centre here, where I also teach writing and, in particular, scientists. A year ago, I'm sure we're going to talk about that in more detail. But a year ago, I started the podcast Scholarly Communication and that brings us pretty much up to the present, I'd say.

Helen: What did you do your PhD in?

Daniel: I did an Irish theatre / Irish drama. Yeah.

Helen: Wonderful.

Daniel: I mean, it had different parts to it, involving also exams and German studies. So it was a Doctor of Philosophy, as they call it, although I never studied philosophy.

Helen: Yeah. That's the PhD, right? Yeah. And then how did the interest in, well I guess teaching writing, but also interviewing people about writing, how did that come about?

Daniel: That was because I had stumbled upon the New Books Network about six months prior. So September, 2020 is when I started. So early 2020. I had stumbled upon the New Books Network and was listening to interviews and was just also blown away by the variety. Every area of scholarship is covered there. And I started listening to, you know, Islamic studies, things like that I'd never really considered before.

And was really interested in the breadth of it. And then as I started teaching scientists in writing, it just sort of was like one of those outside inspirations. I thought, well, wouldn't it be best since this is an area that's also new to me, if I really talked to the people who are writing about science, who are writing guides for scientists who are in writing studies and composition and rhetoric.

And, I wrote to Marshall Poe asking to become a host. And after a short negotiation, I was on board. And off it went!

Helen: And anybody who's not familiar with the New Books Network, and you go and look on there, there's just this massive number of different topics and things, isn't there? I mean, there are people all over the world doing these interviews, and as I think, you know, I got approached by a guy doing the Australian and New Zealand studies, he approached me about doing the Writer's Diet, and I said, ‘Oh, a new Books Network. I've done a couple of interviews there!’ And so things come from different directions, and then they get cross-listed with each other, and it's just a fantastic resource. So who was the person you interviewed, and what was that like, even making those choices and approaching people?

Daniel: Well, in the beginning, I had this scholarly communication idea right away. I really wanted to figure out, as the motto of the podcast goes, how it is that knowledge gets known. I also had a foot in language, because of my linguistic background. I felt if this whole thing doesn't work out well, then I can at least continue there.

And, my first few interviews were, let's say, a bit linguistic, or at least semiotic in their approach. I mean, my first interview was a real stoker to begin with, Bill Cope and Mary Collan! I spoke with them and then a second time because of their website, New Learning online.

But they have written a grammar guide that actually just literally blew me away. Making sense and adding senses to companion volumes. And that was my very first interview. And it's one of the interviews that has, let's say, it’s one of the books that in the last 10 years has really changed what I see when I look out the window.

Helen: Wow.

Daniel: Put it that way. I mean, it's really amazing. They come from the school of Michael Halliday and his systemic functional grammar. But what they did was they took the whole systemic, functional approach, which is basically saying that language is there to do something. And when it's doing something, it fits into an entire system.

So you can see that you've got this choice, that choice, the other choice to achieve this particular end. And they took that from language and they just applied it to everything. Literally from objects, bodies, sounds, text, speech, and they had felt that Halladay had reached the sort of ceiling. Yeah, because he was only focusing on language.

And what they did was they said, ‘well, why don't we just open it up and say, the way that an object stands in a room, the way that a body moves through space.’ One of the most brilliant findings I found was that they sort of give these different forms that meaning can occur in. That's essentially what the grammar is about.

How does meaning occur? How is it made? They gave these forms that are there, from text all the way over to speech, and that's really one of the most interesting things that they spend a lot of time on. But the two ends of the sets of forms from text, image, object, body, sound, speech, text, and speech are on the opposite ends.

And most times when people say language, they think, either of writing or spoken and a lot of intuitions of mine just found expression in what they were saying. I just found…of course spoken and written language are far enough apart, just so different that they deserve different analyses.

Helen: Fascinating. And so we've ended up calling this session A Guide to the Style Guides, talking about writing guides. Would you classify that as being in any form a style guide? Or is it something completely different? The work that they do?

Daniel: This is obviously something that we're going to be getting into, what a style guide is, and I dutifully put together a list of the style guides. I know you wanted me to say which ones have influenced you. And when I look at the list, it's right here at my left. I noted seven, and I would say the top four are solidly style guides. Any bookstore would sort them there.

Helen: Yeah,

Daniel: The bottom three. Probably not. So, to answer your question, I would say [the books] Making Sense and Adding Sense are for me, style guides. But no, they wouldn't be conventionally considered that way. I mean, let me put it this way, for my scientists here in Heidelberg, I wrote my own sort of manuscript book that is a style guide for them that was based almost entirely on Making Sense and Adding Sense.

Helen: Ah, how interesting. So is that a bit of a translation project in a way? Translating that grammar to something useful for the scientists, for the science writers….How would you classify writing guides? You've probably thought about this more than other people. You have a classifying brain I sense. Do you have a taxonomy of writing guides?

Daniel: Taxonomy! [Laughs] I have a taxonomy of research, but not of writing guides. Interesting. How do I classify writing guides? I suppose what I would make as an initial separation would be the ones that are rehashing and the ones that are really stepping out into new territory. I mean, that classification probably works in a lot of areas of scholarship, research and even literature, and god knows where else.

But that's the first thing that jumps to my mind. Yeah. Because having gone through quite a few guides, it becomes frustrating at times when you open up the contents and then you see, you know, style and then it says, you know, choose your words, clear sentences, how to make a topic sentence in a paragraph, and you just think, we really don't need that again.

Helen: And then, you know, it's so challenging to innovate. To do anything new. Right. You know, so, I mean, it's always a repackaging to some extent of things other people have done. But, yes. So innovative writing guides. Can you give us a few examples of ones that have stood out for you and what's about them?

Daniel: When I think of innovative style guides that did something new… I would say that this one probably will fall traditionally into the category, even at a bookstore or under Google, into a writing guide or reference: Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences About Writing.

He just redid everything, really. It's quite amazing. I mean, he even redid what prose looks like. It looks like poetry. I mean, if you open the book, you think he is a master of prose and he decided actually to use line breaks that we would recognise from poetry. And I just thought it seems so natural. It's by no means a gimmick. In fact, he's illustrating line for line exactly the sorts of units of thoughts and prose that he's talking about as he's talking about it. So he is showing and doing at the same time. I mean “show don't tell” is one of those sort of basic mantras. But he shows and tells.

Helen: Well, “show don't tell” is a mantra of the creative writer, isn't it? And I sometimes feel like the mantra of the academic, or what we're sort of unconsciously taught, is “tell, don't show”.

Daniel: Right.

Helen: So the “Show Don't Tell” is kind of a corrective to a lot of that really abstract writing, but it's really a “show and tell” ideally, I mean that's, I guess that's how I think…

Daniel: No, I would agree entirely. And yet it's funny that it came up. For instance, Josh Schimel, who wrote Writing Science, is also one of my interviewees. He has that mantra in his book, and tries to give scientists, just as you're saying, this feeling that it's also okay to show, to illustrate, to be in your sentences, not merely abstract, you know?But reach out if you must, maybe for a metaphor, and try to encapsulate this entire idea.

Helen: But the reality in most academic writing is that if you only showed and didn't tell, you know, then you get stomped on by the peer reviewers. Like, “where's your analysis?” Right? Yeah. I mean, it depends on the discipline, of course.

But you're not right. Just, yeah. You're never just demonstrating or giving examples. You are abstracting from it, aren't you? To try to make ….

Daniel: Yeah. But, but in science, the irony of it is that they actually show. I mean, biology is a good example. Yeah. Pretty much every (and I've been told this from many different corners), every article starts as a list of figures. So, I mean, the basic knowledge is what happened during the experiment. This is a painful word for us, people working in writing, but then in a sense, they really do write it up. They really do work from the visual into the abstract.

And it's interesting to see that there is a base of demonstration that's involved in expressing knowledge that gets sort of, let's say, covered over at times or lost in the abstraction.

Helen: Yeah, I mean, I think it would be a fascinating book to even talk about different kinds of academics and how their minds work. And I think on the one hand, what I've learned from my research is that you can't typecast people. I mean, you can typecast people, but you shouldn't typecast people. But you're as likely to have the physicist who's also a poet as you are to have the literary scholar who's completely logical and prosaic in their thinking, you know? There are all kinds of interesting crossovers and how these things work. But having said that, I have had people tell me that certain kinds of chemists… for example, to be a good chemist, you need to be able to visualise in a certain very three-dimensional way. And if you don't have that ability, you're never really going to succeed in that particular field. You know, and I imagine many of us would have disciplinary sort of biases that way, where we feel like there are certain things that if you haven't got them, you're never gonna quite get the discipline. And maybe that's why we all talk past each other quite a lot from our different disciplinary silos.

Daniel: And that's what really fascinates me with working with scientists, because I come from a strong humanities background. I'm not a scientist. I hope I made that clear with the doctor of philosophy!

Helen: It stands for phony doctor. Right? The PhD. That's what I was told. [Laughs]

Daniel: Yeah. Yeah. And, and that's, that's the fascinating thing for me is like you just said, so this thinking as a scholar of humanities is so normal. In fact, our basis is texts. You know, we work from text to text. And in a sense, you are required to abstract in a way because, what's the best way to deal with a poem? What's the best way to deal with a Dickinson poem? It's actually just to recopy the poem into your text, isn't it? I mean, that's the best version of that poem. And then if you think of the scientist, the scientist is literally not in the text. The scientist is really, and I've noticed that with working with them, that they do translate their work into text, whereas we transfer our work into our text. And there I already noticed such a huge difference in the knowledge base and how it affects the communication of that knowledge; it just fascinates me.

And of course there are huge individual differences here and there, but I would say that those are sort of disciplinary foundations, in a sense.

Helen: And it goes right down to things like all kinds of conventions, including citation styles, right? I think it was one of the things that shocked me the most when I moved out of humanities into higher education research, so that I was exposed for the first time to a more social-science mode and the way that PA citations work, where you don't actually, as far as I can tell, have to have read a text in order to cite it! And you very seldom cite anything with the full name of the author. It's always just the last name. And you certainly don't quote from the text part. And in literary studies, it's the exact opposite! You name the author in the text, you always quote from them because the value we place on how scholars express themselves is so high that we would never just paraphrase them or you know, just dump their last name and a page number at the end of a sentence. And that's just, that takes you right down. I've written about this a little bit in Stylish Academic Writing, and I'm certainly not the only person who's made this observation, but there are ways in which the humanities scholars are being much more rigorous in their citation conventions than the social scientists, who often are playing quite fast and loose with their citations.

Daniel: You see that. Yeah. And there again you see that difference, I mean, I always felt very much the same as you when scientists quote, they just quote the article, the whole article. In the humanities, that's like scattershot, you know? Yeah, yeah. It could be anywhere in the article.

Helen: Yeah. How can you do that? Where? What do you mean, what page? What paragraph? What was the line? What word, what verb did they use? I need to know exactly which verb.

Daniel: But the thing is, that they just don't see it that way. They see the literature —and it's another irony that they call it the literature. We just have literature, and they call it the literature as that for them, it's a series of reports from the lab, let's say. And that's really the key, you know, it's from the lab. So they look back and they're not necessarily seeing a huge line of texts. They're seeing beyond the text into the results. You know, that's what they care about. And then again, you notice that, well, of course they're looking past the text then, whereas we look into the text, in the text.

Helen: So the reason you and I are able to have this discussion is not just because we both come from a literary scholar's background, so we have that in common, but we're actually having a meta conversation right now because we both have read widely, worked widely, and worked widely with people in different disciplines. So we have that kind of meta view or helicopter view of the disciplines that, in fact, most academics never get in their whole lives. It's one of the things I love about the WriteSpace, actually, is that you'll get people from every discipline. We don't have so many scientists, but we certainly have a mix of social scientists and humanists. And then kind of arts-based people. And you'll get somebody who comes in with a poem and you get somebody who comes in with a personal essay and they're all looking at each other's work. And you start to have this really cross-disciplinary conversation about writing and knowledge and all these different things.

But inside the disciplines, we often don't get that. And I guess one of the critiques I've had of other writing other people's writing guides, I guess, while working on my own, has been the ways in which the writing guides often come from within that particular kind of knowledge right? Come from within a disciplinary knowledge, and often aren't even aware of the narrowness of being in that.

So I guess I'm interested in asking you, going back to this question of writing guides that you found particularly interesting or influential. You know, within science, I mean, somebody like Josh Schimel really is writing as a scientist for other scientists. Do you feel that somebody like him, though, is also on some level taking a kind of meta view, or are they writing very much for the discipline?

Daniel: He could teach, I think, a non-scientist things about writing. He is addressing himself clearly, though, to his fellow scientists and the unique thing about his book is that he took on inspiration from a number of sources that are entirely humanities. Beginning with his wife, who was apparently a creative writer.

And I'm not sure if she's published or not, but she was taking classes, at least a master's class in creative writing and was trying to work on a novel—as far as I understood from the book and my conversations with Josh. And he said that itself was instrumental, just to hear her talking daily about the way that she saw writing and the exercises that she was doing.

Helen: Yeah. And the craft, thinking about writing as a craft.

Daniel: Exactly. And that comes out in the book. In fact, I do believe he even mentions that explicitly. But you can see that a story is an entirely important narrative, is an entirely important sort of technique for the way he would have a research article. I mean, that's what he is essentially trying to teach people how to write a research article. He also comes back to Joseph Williams, who's also clearly coming from his book style. In all its many different variations over the years…

Helen: A different subtitle, Yeah.

Daniel: Exactly. Joseph Williams was an inveterate reediter.

Helen: I always liked, I think it was the first one, the lessons in…well, they kept changing the number, didn't they? But it was the Lessons in Clarity and Grace, and I still come back to that phrase again and again. It's hard to beat clarity and grace as a good expression of what he is trying to achieve.

Daniel: Yeah. Oh, he has just some, some fantastic words in his gut. Also, sprawl, I just thought was one of the best ways to put all the sort of residue that ends up at the bottom of a sentence that you know, he calls it sprawl, which to me looked like, you know, a messy room…

Helen: Thank you for reminding me of that word. I'd forgotten that, because we talk a lot about clutter in writing, but sprawl is something entirely different, isn't it? And yet, part of the same thing. Yeah. You have the clutter and then it sprawls into the corners. Right?

Daniel: But he also located it at the end of a sentence, which I found wonderful. You know, because by that time in the book, he had neatened up the front end of your sentence. But that of course pushes a whole thing, a whole bunch of things backwards into the section toward the period.

Helen: yeah.

Daniel: And things sprawl in that area. I think Josh is wonderful example of someone who had that meta view. I'm trying to think of a guide with a name, that has inside of science, not that view...But let me just say I've certainly run across such…and that's where you really have the feeling that someone is just sort of going through the motions of write clear sentences in your introduction, introduce the context and make sure that you pick up the reason for your particular study design at the right moments, which is really the entire question, what is the right moment?

Helen: Well, that's right, but I think sometimes I mean, often people write these guides, first of all, because nobody told them this stuff. So it's a revelation to them that there's even a set of principles that they could have followed. Then they'll be, “I'm gonna write that book!” You know, or they'll find that nobody's put it quite the way that they've put it together. But one of my kind of pet peeves, I think, with writing guides is the ones where it's less the style guides than more the productivity guides, where somebody will say: “Gosh, I'm a really productive writer. Because I have this set of habits that I follow or these rules, and so I'm just gonna write those down and then other people can be as productive as I am!” And they haven't actually done any research beyond their own experience. Or maybe they've, you know, the graduate students that they trained to be exactly like them. And so they have no sense that there might be other people out there who write differently. You know who might thrive on a different set of principles or rules.

But we're coming kind of up towards the top of the hour, and I wanted to give a few minutes for anybody to put in questions. Does anybody have any burning questions for Daniel?

Nina: I have a quick question, it's Nina. Hi Daniel! Where do you sit in regard to, “these are the conventions, this is the style guide to follow” versus “you have free expression to be creative and push boundaries and try new things?” What's the sticky…where does a rubber hit the road in that regard for you?

Daniel: Hmm. That's a great question. I'll start at the very restricted, constricted end of say, a scientific journal and writing a research article where pretty much anyone would say you've got no wiggle room. I was speaking with Joshua Schimel and Karl Ritz, who is the Editor-in-Chief of [the journal] Soil Biology and Biochemistry.

And even there, they said “We want there also to be voice”. This was a soil biologist. They said, “of course the science comes first. But the science through the voice is entirely acceptable.” That they're willing to read that. In fact, they want to. Now, that's the restricted end. If you move your way down through economics and into anthropology and arrive at some point in drama studies—that restriction opens and opens, and opens and opens! I mean, there are ethnographies that are literally the style that opens a new view onto the knowledge that is being transferred there in that particular study. So I think that the message I would give is a message that Helen herself has given in many of her different books—I am thinking Stylish Academic Writing, for one—the encouragement to try. Yeah, to motivate from your style what it is that you actually want to say. Let's say it's particular roles, stereotypical roles in a novel that you are trying to, analyze, as a sort of a random example. Then if you give each of the chapter titles a role's name —the role of, let's say, a typical Irishman, a typical British person, a typical this or that, and you gave them even sort of like comic names or whatever. And that was important to the sorts of masks that you were then following as you analyzed, the novel.

In literary study, there's plenty of room for that. In fact, that could be part of your structure! So I hope that answers it. I suppose what I'm trying to say is look for the place to come into your research that will enhance your research and go there.

Helen: And I think I would just add to that, that when I was researching Stylish Academic Writing, that was really one of the ‘ahas’ for me, certainly that in most disciplines, things were less restricted in terms of the conventions than most of the writers in those disciplines believe.

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That's the end of today's podcast episode. I hope that both your body and your mind have moved someplace new, and that you'll be inspired to look up some of Daniel's favorite guides and to explore some innovative approaches to writing in your own discipline. For our full conversation, including Daniel's Hands-on workshop, looking at self-help books for writers, watch the two-hour video of my Write Space special event in the video section of the WriteSpace library@helensword.com.

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