A search on writing, dressing and style, revealed a rather humorous, unrelated article on styling and dressing, in the sense of, you guessed it, fashion! What resonated with me, however, was the implied message in the article. Irrespective of the designer style or label, the height of the wearer has an impact on the overall impression of the garment. Much like the stage we are at in our research career, has an influence on the liberty we have to make bold statements with our writing. This post is very much a reflection of my own writing journey, not research writing per se but writing in general.

Much to my surprise, what I encountered in higher education did not create the comfortable place I had as a Scientific researcher and writer. The rungs of the Scientific publishing ladder are solid and well defined as opposed to the suspended clouds of the higher education sphere. What’s greatly amusing in this experience is that Scientific writing is highly structured and formulaic or unimaginative as stylish writers of higher education may claim. Yet, I found the formula quite appropriate and useful to me as a beginner writer. What scared me about moving into higher education was the option to publish with flair, any chain of thought I had. However, as Sword (2009) points out, most higher education writers may still have such anxieties as their published works generally lack imagination and creative flair. Good news-I am not alone.

Writing for the web, with its norms such as making the writing short and succinct so it’s accessible to the reader was a good middle ground for me. I started to build that structure in the fluff-the rungs in the clouds. I came to a realisation that higher education is broad and can tap into “a wide range of intellectual interests” (Sword, 2009, p1) as opposed to the specialist field of Scientific writing. A quick question to clarify this-have you recently read an article on plant sterols? Maybe not, but there are chances you’ve heard of the association between research and teaching.

I am yet to become a creative writer who has the best interest of higher education at heart. My enthusiasm and strong sense of commitment which can be classed as ambition has produced two major outputs. It has certainly taken more time than usual but now I have the growing confidence of writing more. I will let you decide whether I have much of a creative flair to present my original work in an imaginative fashion-see my paper on leveraging technology for engaging learning designs. Now, I have failed on a creative title, haven’t I? I have been slowly working on it…the next paper is titled Tiramisu or just a plain sponge-tiered approach to elearning professional development.

Reference
Sword, H. (2009). Writing higher education differently: A manifesto of style. Studies in Higher Education, 34(3), 319-336. [Online]