Academic Writing with Peter Thomas

Today we discussed academic writing with guest speaker Peter Thomas, who is part of the Learning Enhancement team at Middlesex University.

The talk was quite an eye opener, as I had not considered writing from an academic point of view before.  As a dancer, we use our bodies to communicate and very rarely use Witten text to converse.  

We started by doing a free-writing exercise where we had to write non-stop for five minutes.  Even if we ran out of things to say we had to write “I don’t know” or such like.  We were asked to answer the question “What is writing?”.  

An interesting question, my first thoughts were that writing is down to interpretation of the word.  It can mean a physical act of putting pen to paper (to write), but I can also be a creative process where you explain your thoughts through the medium of the written word.

I also realised that my mind goes blank!  Reflecting on this exercise alone, I believe I need time to think about the subject matter and have time to mentally map out a path for the conversation to follow.  This was the second part of the exercise, to review what I had written and my thoughts.

The final step was to “go public”, or publish my thoughts.  It was fascinating to see what other people had written.  Where as I had taken a (what I consider to be basic) thought pattern, others looked into the transferal of ideas and experiences.  One comment by Aisling was “adding colour to a blank canvas”, very poetic and a good visual representation.

Peter mentioned that he would put some quotes on screen to get the ball rolling on going public with our thoughts.  I feel that I am quite critical of my writing, and nervous to post about my ideas in fear of being judged.  It’s something that I have been thinking a great deal about recently and it has a lot to do with mental wellness.  We have these little “saboteurs” in our head telling us our thoughts aren’t good enough or not quite right.  This limits our creative brain and its ability to reach to new heights.  To improve, we need to remove these judging voices and be fearless in our growth.

"Writers choice" was another idea we discussed.  It is a concept which I subconsciously knew about however, it was interesting to look into the process.  How the text is used, what text is used and the conventions and expectations of what the final product will be.  Creatively, you should not feel this pressure to please everyone, but to advance your own personal line of enquiry.

Towards the end of the call Adesola talked about dance as a language and the difficulties of dancers expressing the written word as we have not really had to indulge that side of our practice.  But I believe that is a limitation set by our “saboteurs” and that even if we think we sound silly, we are creatively exploring new areas of text and developing our writing practice.