Academic writing scares many people who have lots of good things and ideas to put forward. Others have been told they should write better without being helped to understand how. But it's not magic and it's not rocket science; it's a set of skills, and you can learn them. Through my first year as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Goldsmiths, I've been shaking out and clarifying my ideas of how academic writing does and should work, with a little - or rather, a lot - of help from the RLF's own resources. Not everyone will agree on which are more important, and disciplines do vary, in both their nature, and their traditions and current forms: an account of an astronomical observation is different from a reflective essay on dance therapy casework. But there are plenty of overall, general ideas which it helps immensely to understand and, suitably adjusted, many of them will help with other kinds of non-fiction writing: reports, articles and talks. So here are the things I find myself exploring with students over and over again; I hope they help you.

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A writer friend says that her MA tutor described her writing as "lyrical", and she asked what he meant. He said "something about lyrical writing remaking the world & making the world appear anew", but what does that mean in practice? At the basic level, "lyrical" means that it shares something with poetry: a certain intensity, perhaps, though it might be interior, emotional intensity, or an outward-looking evocation of time and place. It needn't necessarily be about beautiful things: as Sebastian Salgado's photographs of miners show, it's possible to make beautiful art out of ugly things, or out of frightening things as Elizabeth Bowen does here.

It needn't be about strange things or people or settings either, though of course it might be.

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The Royal Literary Fund Fellow's job is simple, on paper. We are paid by the RLF to spend two days a week, in term time, for a year, supporting academic writing across the whole of an academic institution. Most are universities, but conservatoires and art schools also have RLF Fellows, and the students who come range from first years who've never written an essay to postgrads in the very middle of the PhD muddle. Their problems can be anything from "What does 'critically analyse' mean?" to "I need a Distinction or I won't get funding". I am cooking up a post of my Ten Top Tips for Academic Writing but, meanwhile, here's a tweaked version of a piece I wrote for the RLF Fellow's own forum, about my first impressions of the post.

Unlike some brand-new, nervous RLF Fellows, I was already familiar with the institution: Goldsmith’s is a small, compact campus three urban miles from home. It’s only concerned with the arts, humanities and social sciences, and I did my own PhD in Creative Writing there not so long ago. I also taught there for a year, so today’s undergraduates, from those who live and breathe Theory, to those whose sentences would be impressive in a nine year old, aren’t too much of a shock.

But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t brand new and nervous about the post.

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There’s an old joke about a teacher berating a pupil: “Boy, don’t look at me in that tone of voice.” And it’s funny because it’s true, of course. My parents used to make a point of getting me to say sorry, for all kinds of things I didn’t feel sorry about. I would eventually say it – ‘Sorry’ – but in a tone as if firing it out of my sphincter. It didn’t matter, though, because for them it was just the word that counted.

But for an author tone is everything. And yet it’s not an easy quality to dissect. You know when it’s right and you know when it’s wrong or muddled or absent. I don’t think it necessarily has to be smooth and suave, by the way – the correct tone can be choppy, long-winded or even boring, as long as it’s serving the job the reader expects it to do, or at least is surprised by in the right way.

When I was at art college, they got us to do an exercise to improve our ability to differentiate tones. Most of us are not so good at this because we’re subjected constantly to such a huge range of different colours which are already clearly differentiated. So, at college we used to paint a picture but only using one colour. This automatically made us focus more strongly on tone. I believe the key to establishing effective tone in writing is similar: not to restrict your writing to say one word but more to become adept at expressing a multitude of emotions and characteristics through a single approach to the story.

So, I’m going to try to break tone down into five constituents that hopefully will make it easier to get hold of:

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I can't quite believe that This Itch of Writing has being going for 500 posts - and five and a half years, come to that - but it's true. To celebrate, I thought it would be fun to have a competition, and some of my favourite writerly places have kindly offered prizes.

TO ENTER: Write a blog post, 500 words at most, which is helpful, interesting or illuminating for other writers. Of course this will stem from your own experience of writing, but the focus of This Itch of Writing is outwards, towards other writers, not inwards towards yourself. If you're new to This Itch of Writing, have a look here, to get an idea of the range of topics across the whole blog. If you want to include links or images that add real value to your post then please do, bearing in mind that This Itch is all about the words on the page.

THE PRIZES: In the spirit of This Itch that every writer is different and so wants and needs different things, the first prize is to be able to choose whichever of these three will be most useful and pleasurable for you:

A two-night Writers Retreat at Retreats for You in Sheepwash, North Devon, where full board and friendly writerly company come as standard, and total silence and lunch-on-a-tray are offered with equal generosity.

One year's Full Membership of WriteWords, which apart from anything else in the way of Groups, Jobs&Opps, Directory and so on, is the place that about 50% of all my posts here started out, as thinking-aloud-in-the-forum.

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Behind me I heard a man with a foreign accent ask about a group of elderly men in dark red berets, gathered in the Circus. ‘Paras,’ someone told him. ‘Oh, I thought they hated her.’ Then, ‘Why are there Parisians here?’

‘Paratroopers!’ someone growled.
A woman in front of me turned round. ’And they didn’t hate her- they admired her. They wished she was on their side to negotiate with the Common Market.’ After this, silence for about half an hour.


I could hear protesters on the north side of the Circus: a single voice shouted ‘Maggie. Maggie. Maggie’ and a chorus answered, ‘Dead. Dead. Dead’.


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Everyone knows about the terror of the blank page that you've just written Chapter One at the top of. Some writers spend weeks approaching it, dabbing a couple of words on, and deleting them. Others research for a decade in order to avoid getting to the blank page moment at all. And one of the chief reasons that the crazy/shitty first draft principle works for so many people is that suddenly the cost of failure isn't so high: this was only a crazy first draft, after all. Anything goes to get words on the page; we'll turn them into the right words later.

But what if you're fine with starting, and with finishing that draft, but are terrified of revising? Some feel uneasily that their punctuation/grammar/spelling aren't up to scratch, but that's relatively easy to learn - and you may not be nearly as bad as you think. Others just don't know where to start eating this elephant: some suggestions here. But what if what worries you is revising the bigger and more intangible things? What if you're terrified you won't know if you're making it worse, not better? For some, that fear can be paralysing. First, here are some thoughts about how to keep in touch with the shore as you launch out into the unknown.

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Stephen Sondheim , at 50, was the leading composer/lyricist of his generation, but 'Merrily We Roll Along', famously flopped on Broadway in 1981. However, Sondheim didn't give up, and thirty years on Michael Grandage's Donmar Warehouse production won the Olivier 'Best Musical' award.

Friday night's crowd at The Harold Pinter Theatre seemed to like this new production, but it was one of those audiences that seemed to be top-heavy with friends of the cast. Not that the cast weren’t good –they were- but the play still has its flaws.


A major weakness is that the story's told backwards, spanning two decades from the protagonists' washed-up middle age back to their early optimism ; it lacks the, ‘What happens next?' that normally drives a plot.


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“How come quality doesn’t really sell?” I say.

I’m not sure Nige has heard me, since he continues frowning at the three pints of lager lined up before him in a dead straight row. He’s not feeling comfortable, I know, since I insisted we sit at a table tonight, instead of his preferred position, leaning at the bar. I think he believes that the bar offers some protection against possible public criticism of his drinking methods. Which is, essentially, to wait until it’s almost closing time, then down all three pints in a minute or two, thereby, I suspect, feeling he’s had a really good night out. That and receiving a hefty alcohol kick. Three pints on the bar might just comprise two that the barman has temporarily placed there for other customers. In a dead straight row.

But my legs are aching from cycling to work most of this week and I need to sit.

“Because, Tel,” he says eventually, pushing the base of one of the glasses slightly, straightening the straightness of the line. “The extra time, money and sheer bleedin’ effort required to make something a hundred per cent good is disproportionate to what’s needed to make it eighty per cent good.”

“You sound like you’re quoting from an instruction manual.”

He looks up. “I am. But it’s one that ain’t never been published.” He taps the side of his head. “Every builder has it burnt into his brain cells. These days, you learn the hard way through experience, but in ancient times, apprentices would be brainwashed at a very early stage by their masters. A young, keen guy would for instance take ages making sure he got some door painted perfect: no brush strokes showing, nice even application. But the gaffer would say, ‘No, no, no; you have to do it like this.’ And he’d show him how to paint it much faster. If the apprentice was conscientious, he’d notice that the final quality of the gaffer’s work weren’t actually as good as his own.”

He stops speaking, nods at me knowingly, waiting for me to put the pieces of his quality puzzle together.

Fact is, he and I know that I’ve raised this subject in relation to writing. And lately I’ve been trying to figure out a certain mystery where authors are concerned.

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A while ago I blogged about what's going on, intuitively, when you're reading a really good book, using Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. But, of course, many of us do read a really good book for a conscious, specific purpose. And if you have to write at length about it then you have to read even more clear-headedly. In my case, the first time I did that was for my MPhil dissertation, and the book was A S Byatt's Possession.
I was writing a novel which wasn't, then, called The Mathematics of Love, and there were things I wanted to say about my first, 1819, story that couldn't be said until a 1976 world. I balked at the all too well-used letters-in-the-attic scenario, but it didn't matter: I invented my planning grid, and used it to track and pattern themes, images, ideas and places, and one mysterious child. Then my squirming, half-formed novel was rejected by an agent on the grounds that parallel narratives don't work. Aha! What I was trying to do had a name, had it?

With not a little sense of thumbing my nose at her I decided to write the critical paper for my Masters about a parallel narrative novel which does work. I needed novel with two stories with wholly different casts, set in wholly different eras and well-enough written to stand up to critical scrutiny: A. S. Byatt's Possession was the obvious candidate, with Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin as runner-up.

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