Many of us compartmentalise different types of writing. Creative writing is for novelists, poets, playwrights, and so on. Research writing is done by people who are not creative writers. It consists of monographs, journal articles, book chapters, reports, and so on. Then there are a bunch of research tasks we don’t really think of as writing, even though they usually involve a lot of written words: from field notes to grant applications, emails to qualitative analysis.

My argument is that creative writing techniques can be useful in all forms of writing. This is not to say that everyone should use creative writing techniques all the time. If someone sends you a message saying, “Are you free on Thursday at 3 pm?”, it’s perfectly fine to simply say “Yes”, or “No, but I’m free at 4 pm”, or some other equally straightforward answer. Even so, if you know a less conventional response would be welcome, you might choose a different answer – perhaps something gently humorous such as “I’m very expensive on Thursdays”, or “For you, I’m free on any day ending in ‘y’”.

Writing is relational. That relationship may be with ourselves, if we’re doing experimental or cathartic writing for our own purposes. It may be for our future selves, if we’re writing a shopping list or a diary. But mostly the relationship is with our readers. Sometimes others too, such as reviewers and publishers – but readers are a constant, and we always need to keep in mind the people we are writing for.

As writers it is our responsibility to treat our readers as well as we can. Creatively written work is more engaging for readers because it engages not only their brains but also their emotions and memories. And this is why we need to consider writing creatively more often than we do: because it will help our readers to understand better, and remember more of, what we are telling them. We can’t all write a full-length novel or screenplay or sequence of poems, but we can all tell stories – and storytelling is the bedrock of communication.

There is an ethical angle here, too. I sometimes ask the question: Is it ethical to bore people? This question makes some of my colleagues quite cross! It’s true that researchers are not entertainers (or at least most of us aren’t). Even so, we can try to create work that will hold our readers’ attention. Evoking readers’ memories and emotions is a tried-and-tested way to do this.

Creative content is not the whole story (pun intended), there are also creative formats to consider. Stories are one such format, and writing from life is another, used by autoethnographers and other researchers. Every time we need to outline our positionality we are writing from life. Then there are poems, which some people find daunting, though poetry is all around us: in greeting cards, advertising slogans, and song lyrics. Cartoons, comics, graphic novels and zines offer great creative potential, as do play scripts, screen plays, and comedic writing. Epistolary writing – letters, messages and so on – has more potential than people sometimes realise, as does digital writing (e.g. social media posts and comments and writing for the web).

These formats are not mutually exclusive. Shakespeare wrote plays in iambic pentameter, which is a type of poetry. These days, there are overlaps between epistolary and digital writing, such as emails. And a story can contain any other format, or be made up of one or more other formats. The Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vuong wrote his first novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, in the form of a letter from the semi-autobiographical protagonist to his illiterate mother. There are many other examples. Here are three from academia:

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis was the first doctoral thesis to be submitted as a graphic novel (later published by Harvard University Press) – and there have been several more postgraduate theses and dissertations presented as graphic novels since then.

So Fi Zine, founded and edited by Ash Watson, is an open access digital indie zine for sociological fiction, poetry, and visual art.

Evocative Autoethnography by Arthur Bochner and Carolyn Ellis is a textbook written in the style of a novel, with characterisation and dialogue, telling the story of an autoethnography workshop.

These are examples of ‘macro’ creativity. We are not all able to be creative at the macro level – but we can all write creatively at the micro level, at least some of the time. This involves using the techniques of “creative writing” (stupid phrase; all writing is creative) for our academic writing. Those techniques include careful word choice, use of sensory language, devising new metaphors, repetition, recapitulation, alliteration, creating tension through the use of conflict and delay, dialogue, characterisation and so on.

‘But, Helen,’ I hear you say, ‘that’s not proper academic writing! Proper academic writing means using very long words in extremely long sentences to show how clever we are, yes? And all in the passive voice, of course. Right?’

Wrong.

That is an old-fashioned approach. We know now that it is actually much cleverer to explain complex concepts in simple language. Even reputable science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) journals such as Science and Nature are asking for writing in the first person these days, because they have realised it is much more engaging to read.

Of course, we can’t use these techniques exactly like, say, novelists or screenplay writers would. Conflict in a novel or a film can mean an actual punch-up or shoot-out between two or more characters, and that is unlikely to belong in a piece of academic writing. But we can set up a conflict between two academic arguments – and then not resolve that conflict straight away, thereby creating tension for the reader. Granted, it’s not edge-of-the-seat tension, but it is enough to do the job.

The job here – and the point of all this – is to communicate effectively with readers, by prodding their emotions and activating their memories. Research shows that this helps readers to understand better and remember more of what we are telling them. Surely that is in everyone’s interests?

I have been teaching creative academic writing and running creative academic writing retreats for 10 years now. I could say a lot more about this if I had the space, which I don’t in this post. Luckily for you I have written a whole book on the subject: Writing Creatively For Work Or Study: Easy Techniques to Engage Your Readers, which has just been published by Manchester University Press. We are holding two free online book launches on Tuesday 10 June, one at 9 am BST and one at 6 pm BST. Also, New Zealand poet and academic Helen Sword has very kindly invited me to be a guest at a WriteSPACE special event at 9 am BST on Tuesday 17 June. So, if you have any questions or would simply like to know more, please register for one of those free events, or leave your questions in the comments below.

Best of luck with all your academic writing!

Author Bio: Helen Kara FAcSS has been an independent researcher since 1999 and an independent scholar since 2011