On writing…

Recently we’ve been thinking a lot about writing. We’ve just began working on our very first paper from the project (it’s looking at the role of ‘hard work’ in young people’s talk about celebrity).  But writing goes beyond formal academic publications: this is the first research study where we’ve been writing in public via this blog almost from day one, whether collecting together our first impressions from the group interviews, describing our methodology in action, or beginning to look at patterns in our data. We’ve also had a chance to reflect on how this ‘faster’ form of academic communication is changing our scholarship. This all got us round to sharing our favourite quotations about writing and in this blog we share these words from bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Stuart Hall and Ole Skovesmose.

“I am driven to write, compelled by a constant longing to choreograph, to bring words together in patterns and configurations that move the spirit.” (bell hooks)

“We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.”  (Audre Lorde)

“Language is part of an infinite semiosis of meaning. To say anything, I have got to shut up. I have to construct a single sentence. I know that the next sentence will open the infinite semiosis of meaning again, so I will take it back. So each stop is not a natural break. It does not say, ‘I’m about to end a sentence and that will be the truth.’ It understands that it is contingency. It is a positioning. It is the cut of ideology which, across the semiosis of language constitutes meaning. But you have to get into that game or you will never say anything at all.” (Stuart Hall)

“Meaning is an offer, not a claim.” (Ole Skovsmose)