Writing Challenges: Stop My Book from Being Boring!
Boring academic books? We’ve all read them. Lots of them. Some of us have written them and knew it, but weren’t sure what to do about it. Truthfully, boring academic books can get you tenure. But they won’t truly interest readers who aren’t already interested in your topic, so they will mostly be read by scholars from closely related disciplines. That’s not bad in and of itself, but having our work read more widely increases its impact on the world, something many of us got into academia to do.
This post isn’t to make any of us (and I count myself as an academic writer who has produced boring writing) feel bad for finding it difficult to write in a compelling way. After all, most of us weren’t taught to write in graduate school. We were taught to refine arguments, write quickly, and address specific audiences (a professor, a committee). These skills can be very helpful when trying to publish scholarly writing, but they don’t really help us understand how to make our writing, well, readable.
This task is not easy! If you want to make your writing more interesting, you might consider taking nonfiction writing classes as well as reading compelling academic books and thinking through what makes them interesting to read. But in this post, I offer a possibility you can try right now. It’s known as the “Uneven U.” This idea is introduced by Eric Hayot in his book, The Elements of Academic Style. While this book is geared towards scholars in the humanities, scholars from many disciplines would find it useful. It provides helpful tips on many aspects of academic writing from what to put in an introduction to how to handle transitions to how the heck to get any writing done at all. So I highly recommend it, especially if you find this idea compelling.
For Hayot, the Uneven U describes a “pattern of development.” It’s a way to structure your writing within paragraphs, as well as within larger chunks, including sections, chapters, and across books as a whole. If you follow this method, paragraphs build within each other and upon each other, as do sections and chapters. It thus results in a tight argument with pieces that fit together well and build upon each other.
The general idea is to start any of these units of writing (paragraph, section, chapter) by making general claims or raising compelling questions. You then dive deeper into the topic, introducing evidence (a literary passage, a quote from an interview, archival materials) to support your argument. As you analyze this evidence and make connections between it and your broader argument, you ultimately end the paragraph (or section, chapter etc.) with a broader claim or new idea that builds upon what you’ve introduced within it. This propels you and the reader forward and sets you up to further develop your argument in your next paragraph, section, or chapter.
Hayot describes this strategy in this way: “It starts with a general statement of the problem, introduces evidence, provides evidence more fully, summarizes and interprets that evidence, and finally connects to a new idea whose endpoint lies beyond the paragraph itself” (63). He calls this method an Uneven U because you start out with a broad statement, dip down to introduce and analyze evidence, and then move back up to build to new arguments or ideas that take things beyond where you started. If you traced this development, it would look like a U, with one end longer than the other (hence, uneven!). Not every paragraph has to go through all of these levels (some paragraphs won’t introduce raw evidence, for example), but each paragraph should build in some way.
Here's an example from my own book. My book explored a group of women (Haratine) in Mauritania, most of whom were former slaves or the descendants of slaves. I explored their economic activities to try and understand how they were shaping their lives in this place, given that their status had changed relatively recently (slavery was legally abolished there in the early 1980s). So in applying the Uneven U structure to the book as a whole, the introduction helped set up questions like these: What is it like to be a slave descendant in a place that so recently abolished slavery and is ranked among the highest for its prevalence in the world? How do female slave descendants navigate their social positions while being disadvantaged in many ways by both their genealogies and gender? What role does work have in these processes? Hopefully, these questions helped draw the reader in and made them want to continue reading to learn the answers, but they also didn’t give everything away. Then through the book, I shared evidence, building chapter by chapter to start answering these questions. One chapter, for example, analyzed how joking publicly was a way through which women could state their views about gender and race, while remaining relatively protected from pushback (since they were only joking). Another explored about how expressing piety was an important way through which women claimed improved social positions. By the conclusion, I argued that women’s complex statuses (which I’d explored throughout the book) made it possible for them to maneuver in these ways (joking, asserting piety etc.) that let them adjust to shifting circumstances and assert power in creative ways. This argument was more advanced than where I started from and built on claims from the various chapters.
How does using this method make writing interesting? First, you aren’t showing all of your cards up front. This is something we often do in academic writing, but it can make readers stop reading if they get everything out of the book or article just by perusing the introduction. This method urges you to start with something that draws your reader in, but warns you not to give everything away. Second, it makes the reader care. By immediately raising important questions or making compelling claims, you gently nudge the reader to keep reading because you help make them want to learn the answers. Third, writing in this way helps you to start thinking through your arguments and ensuring that you provide enough evidence and analysis to build to a conclusion that matters. Finally, if you imagine the Uneven U (as Hayot urges you to do) as uneven because the final claims are a bigger and better developed than the initial claims, it pushes you to take your argument somewhere. Hayot emphasizes that this kind of writing is progressive: it builds paragraph by paragraph and chapter by chapter to the broader arguments that you are making in your article or book. As academics, it’s easy to avoid really thinking through the larger implications of our work, but not doing so can limit the impact of our writing. This method pushes you to take risks.
How do you start using the Uneven U? I’d suggest beginning by working out the questions your article or chapter is trying to answer. Then think through what the reader needs to know to answer them and work out how this information logically builds on itself. Finally, consider what this information tells us that we didn’t know before. What larger conclusions can you draw from it that will matter to your reader?
Again, if you find this idea compelling, read Hayot’s book, especially chapters 8 and 9. And, as with all academic writing, be gentle on yourself. There are moments when it makes sense to try and make your writing compelling and there are other moments when you may not have the time or energy to do so. But keeping this idea in your toolkit will be useful for when you really want to craft a piece of writing that will pull a reader along and help get your writing the attention that it deserves. Happy writing
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