Published texts and prewriting

Academic writing is not what it appears to be. This is because we typically encounter it in the form of a published text. We read books and journal articles academics have spent years on writing. These texts have in various stages been commented on by colleagues. They have been criticized by anonymous reviewers and tightened up by editors. Furthermore, these texts have quite commonly been restructured at a late stage. Sometimes, the smart killer point was the very last thing to be added, perhaps based on the advice of an insightful reader. 

In our published texts, this slow and collective process is virtually invisible. Sure, we thank each other in prefaces and acknowledgements. But these short sentences hardly do justice to the actual writing process. Only the author him- or herself fully knows the winding road from research idea to published text. If he or she remembers, that is. Sometimes, you just want to forget and move on. 

Nevertheless, the fact that we are familiar with academic writing through published texts presents a risk for our own writing. It’s a breeding ground for destructive comparisons, not least with ourselves. Our imperfect Word documents are compared to our printed works. Our first project application in a new field is compared to end products from a recently completed project. These types of comparisons represent an effective means of paralyzing a writing process. They offer us good arguments to refrain from even trying. Or to postpone writing to another day, week, semester or year. 

But there are countermeasures. Several of these are presented in Joli Jensen’s Write No Matter What (2017), which I discussed last week. A technique that has served me well is so-called “prewriting.” For me, this is a way of separating writing into two phases: planning and execution. The former is about finding structure and content, while the latter is about finding words and effective ways of communicating. 

The first page of the introductory chapter of my second book may here serve as an example. The purpose of this page is to identify the problem in focus in the book – how environmental issues had their great breakthrough in Sweden. In a best-case scenario, this page should arouse interest and clearly demonstrate why my research is important. So, how to make this happen? Well, this is a difficult question with many possible answers. One good way of making it completely impossible to answer is to, at the same time, force myself to write elegant sentences ready to be published. I’m not capable of doing that. 

What I can do, however, is to spend a few 40-minute sessions on prewriting and testing different structures. What I finally ended up with was the following four paragraphs: 

1. Start with the 1972 UN Stockholm Conference. The photograph of Earth from space. The planet and humanity under threat. 

2. Emphasize that this was obvious to many people in 1972. The European Conservation Year in 1970, the term “Gröna vågen” (“the Green Wave”) was coined in the magazine Land in 1971. Knowledge regarding a global environmental crisis was circulating in society 

3. Five years earlier, things looked quite different. In the summer of 1967, the vast majority of people did not think along these lines. Nor did politicians and scientists. Knowledge was found in individuals and small groups, but it didn’t circulate. 

4. Battery of questions: How did the change transpire? When? What made it happen? Who played a role in the change occurring? This book focuses on these issues. I will… 

These four prewritten paragraphs are a far cry from a publishable text. However, I would argue that most of the writing, or at least the most difficult part, is done. This is a structure that may be converted into a logically coherent text about one page long. In addition, there is a natural bridge to the next page. 

Is it the best introduction ever written? No. Am I certain that it will stay the same all the way to the printed book? No. But is it sufficiently good for me to move along in the writing process? Yes. 

And that is all you can ask of yourself at this stage.

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