When I started this blog thirteen years ago I wanted to provide advice and resources about academic writing and doctoral research. Along the way I sometimes meandered into more general academic issues and occasionally things that were more about me. Sometimes I shared what I was writing. As in the last post where I posted about a metaphor for writing for publication.  But Patter is not the only place I give advice. I do that in my writing books too.

However, offering advice is tricky.

A long time ago Barbara and I wrote a paper about dissertation writing advice. We gathered together a collection of academic writing advice books and looked at what they had in common, and whether there were different types of advice. There were. We did find important differences one of which was whether the advice book had any basis in research, as opposed to being written on the basis of limited personal experience.

Another key difference was whether the person offering advice acknowledged that those seeking advice may already know stuff – they weren’t a blank page – and recognised that advice-seekers were smart people either doing a doctorate or already in possession of one. In other words, advice receivers were capable of understanding and choosing.

A final difference was whether the advice giver understood that there is no one best way to write – or indeed do anything academically. There are of course conventions. They are preferred approaches. And there are people who behave as if there are hard and fast rules. But there is no one best way for people to learn. Rather, different people learn in different ways, and at different times, and depending on what they are trying to do at the time.

Barbara and I suggested that advice giving is actually a pedagogy – it is about teaching and learning. So advice givers have a choice to make – they can be the kind of teacher who instructs and expects that everyone in the class will do the same thing at the same time, or they can assume that the job of teaching often involves offering a range of resources, in various ways, to different people.  Advice seekers take up the resources on offer and adapt and extend them, as is useful to them.

OK. So this is why my book on revising and rewriting offers a range of possibilities as well as a framework. And pedagogy is what I’m thinking about as I’m writing a second edition of  Writing for peer reviewed journals . What pedagogy do I use? How I can avoid being the worst kind of advice giver? How I can make sure I address the reader as an already capable writer and thinker?

In order to help me do this, I’ve revisited two sources of inspiration. Well, inspiration about what not to do.

The first source of inspiration is a podcast called If Books Could Kill. A podcast about the airport best sellers we can’t escape.Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri get stuck into the dodgy logics, randomly accumulated evidence and cliches that somehow generate massive sales, and create myths which are then taken as fact. The second source of inspiration is a youtube channel called Savy Writes Books where Savie Leiser, a writer and editor, tackles influencers and reviews  books, films and popular culture. Savie delivers a mix of fact checking, developmental editing and exposure of illogicalities.

Check Savie out here – just scroll to somewhere half way through and you’ll get the picture.

If you know one or all of these broadcasters then you know that they are ruthless about bad writing, crappy advice and stupidity. Unforgiving and funny about scammers and grifters.

So why do I listen and watch these two while I am writing? You can probably guess that I use these as a reminder of what I don’t want to write. One of my writing and revising tactics is to pretend that my advice has been given to Savie or Hobbes and Shamshiri and they have gone to town. I imagine my words in their mouths. How do they sound? Is the text laughable? Is it ridiculous? Does it just sound like a sales pitch? What is the absolute worst they could each say about what I’ve written, how I’ve written?

Well yes, imagining being reviewed by this lot is a bit of a nightmare tactic. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to anyone else. But it does work for me.  The very last thing I want to do is to write something that sounds like disconnected airport slogans and empty instructions which have no basis in any kind of reason or research.  So I use them to help me avoid this prospect.

And what might you take from my very peculiar practice? Well clearly nothing if you don’t want to. Or perhaps you might consider the idea that it can be helpful to have an idea of what you don’t want to do when you’re writing. As well as what you do. To have a sense of how readers might respond negatively. To have some pointers to things you want to avoid. These can help you draft and also to read diagnostically and to rewrite.