‘On form’, 14th January, 2025

Academic writing is generally accompanied by certain and specific expectations of structure and from. These expectations often vary between disciplines, journals, publishers, and even between specific institutions. Yet, even where these conventions of genre and industry are recognised as problematic or counterproductive, they remain remarkably difficult to disrupt. One end of this spectrum is perhaps represented by Eric Hayot’s Elements of Academic Style, an influential academic writing guide first published in 2014. The, laudable, purpose of this guide is to encourage and facilitate clearer academic writing, not only as a question of practice but as one of psychology and strategy. There is no question that Hayot’s work has been of benefit to many seasoned scholars and postgraduate researchers alike, especially those frustrated by the insistence that good writing cannot be taught but should be somehow intuited. However, if we look to one of the more notable chapters of the book, chapter eight on ‘The Uneven U’, we find a highly systematised approach to academic writing—one which, at times, even approaches the mathematical (p. 73).

This is certainly not an ‘incorrect’ way of writing. Nor is it, as Hayot himself emphasises, the only useful framework for decoding or constructing an academic sentence, paragraph, article, or monograph. However, it stands in stark contrast to Rebecca Hazleton’s 2014 article for the Poetry Foundation, ‘Learning the Poetic Line’. In this piece, Hazleton tackles one of the fundamental, and one of the most elusive, elements of poetry: the line break. Perhaps as far removed from typical academic writing as is possible, the poetic line does not clarify, justify, or elaborate. It is a structural element, a stylistic one even, but it disrupts, it challenges—it refracts and pluralises meaning instead of condensing it by adding a spatial quality to the act of interpretation. Not only are the words themselves vectors of meaning, but so is their physical interrelation and their relationship to the page. This is especially evident in the experimental poem, ‘The Death of Your Son: A Flowchart’ by Alex McElroy, which instrumentalises the intuitive logic of flowcharts to offer the illusion of choice and escape while inevitably creating a sense of fatalistic progression, leading the reader to its inevitable conclusion.

What does the poetic line have to tell us about academic writing? Perhaps relatively little. It’s insistence on plurality is antithetical to many of the stated aims of ‘good’ academic writing, which favours the clear and unambiguous communication of ideas. However, poetry and its use of form does invite further exploration into how academics conceive of their own writing practice and the production of academic work in general. What do you learn about your work—and the work of others—when your expectations of genre and form are deconstructed and interrupted? If you draw instead of write? If someone else draws your work for you? If you do not ‘produce’ the language you use, but ‘excavate’ or ‘discover’ it, from magazines, newspapers, or catalogues? If such experiments to not produce a revolution in academic writing, they nevertheless encourage the exploration of material in innovative ways, and a reconsideration of the current formal constraints under which academics write.