The Duchess of Cambridge’s Guide to Essay-Writing

Posted on 23/04/2014 by clembeauvais

Summer’s coming, undergradate and MPhil dissertations are due soon, and it’s time to get articles sent to journals before the August and September lethargy gives peer-readers even more excuses to take 6 months over reviewing our 7000-word pieces of genius research.

It’s also the right weather for the sempiternally worshipped Duchess of Cambridge (DoC) to properly dazzle the world with her impeccable figure and flawless sense of style, so I thought I’d corner her for an interview about how we can transfer her otherworldly sartorial perfection to our academic writing.

CB. Hello, Your Cantabrigian Highness! How was Australia?

DoC. It was ever so interesting. Among other things, I discovered that giraffes have even longer tongues than the men who watched the slow oscillation of my sister’s derriere at my wedding.

CB. Right… Tell us, pray, o eternal empress of chic – what tips from your wardrobe and attitude can we apply to academic essay- and article-writing?

DoC. Well, to begin with, we must all agree that the ideal outfit is perfectly fitted, but of a lovely bright or pastel colour.

CB. Indeed, you are not a fan of baggy tops and maxiskirts in fifty shades of browns and greys. What’s the tip here?

DoC. My dear, the ideal article is carefully trimmed to fit exactly the subject matter – no fluffy extras, no bits of fabric hanging out here and there, and rigorously no asymmetry. Be scissor-happy: as close to the body of the essay as you can be. No blurry tulle or misty gauze: use honest, clear, tangible fabrics. But to counteract this rather severe tailoring, allow yourself a generally bold, bright, youthful, sharp tone of voice. White and black are to be kept for important occasions: black for paradigm-shifting articles, and pretty, lacy white lies for academic reviews of your friends or colleagues’ latest books.

CB. All of this should be monochromatic ?

DoC. Well, I do like monochrome, but accessories will help you ensure it doesn’t end up being monochord. Allow yourself little deviations from the overall tone – but only where it matters. A nice little controversial quotation to top your introduction like a curly fascinator, an interesting clutch to set off a dull paragraph towards the middle of the essay.

CB. And a grand, lyrical, flashy conclusion?

DoC. My goodness, no! It would attract attention solely onto itself, to the detriment of the body of work. Conclusions should be like my shoes: very bland, distanced enough from the ground that they’re not flat, but certainly no platforms. Let the essay speak for itself and end sensibly.

CB. That’s helpful, Your Highness, but some people would accuse you of taking too few risks. Aren’t we going to end up with a rather classical style?

DoC. This is where another rule comes into play: hair should be down unless absolutely necessary. This will add unexpectedness, a sense of welcome playfulness, a certain je ne sais quoi of unpredictability. Structure and plan everything, but always leave something unprepared – something for the winds of inspiration to frolic around with.

CB. Erm what? Your hair is unprepared?

DoC. *coughs* Well, it’s prepared in a special way that makes it feel natural and unexpected when the breeze plays around with it. Think of it as your scholarly background – all that knowledge that you’ve accumulated over the years. Some of it is already present in your structure – you’re consciously integrated those sources, you know you’ll mention them at some stage. But the rest is still there, maintained, curled and trimmed by years of taking notes, rereading them, forgetting them. Not exactly unprepared, but let’s say, artistically free-floating. A flick of the wind and ta-dah! who knows which idea might come and kiss your cheek when you think you’ve got your whole argument sorted?

CB. What is it with knees? Why do you rarely show your knees?

DoC. Knees are like transitions between subparts. They do all the hard work, but they are aesthetically displeasing and lack grace. Try to conceal them whenever possible. That said, should an impolite gust of wind ruffle your skirt as you get down from an airplane, the effect can be quite alluring; use this tip sparsely, to showcase, for a brief moment, the strength of those solid hinges of yours.

CB. What can you tell us about handling our ideas?

DoC. Take inspiration from the way in which I artfully handle little Prince George to show him around to my people: from all different angles, and apparently effortlessly. It looks like a nine-month-old healthy baby isn’t at all too heavy for my impossibly delicate arms. Cultivate that style. Show all the facets of your ideas, trying to make it sound like it’s very easy to hold them for a long time in improbable positions.

CB. Is it always necessary to remind everyone of your status by constantly flashing your tacky diamond and sapphire engagement ring?

DoC. Yes, dear. It’s called a self-citation. You’ll see when you’ve got actual work to show for your importance in the field: you’ll refer to it absolutely all the time. You’ll find, in fact, that I’m being quite restrained, only alluding to my status in one place per outfit. Of course, you can’t do that yet, because you’re a nobody who hasn’t yet done anything worthy of unsubtle allusions.

‘I refer you to my previous work in the field’

CB. Thanks for that. A final question, Your Royal Youness. People like me have days when they have pimples, or scruffy hair, or really no wish to squeeze our feet into high heels. For some of us, it’s every single day. What can we do if we really can’t follow your example, o grand guru of demure fashion?

DoC. I’m not interested in such people. I’m sure they can find their own style guide to follow. Go ask Lady Gaga, I heard she coached Slavoj Zizek.

Thank you, tabloidal deity, for granting us half an hour of your busy schedule. She has now returned to the hyperactive nothingness of her royal duties, leaving us with some hope that we shall one day find true love, in the form of a permanent and salaried position, within some academic establishment. And perhaps we will soon parade, in front of a crowd of ~~excited journalists~~ politely complimentary colleagues, a cuboid baby freshly delivered by an academic press.

PowerPoint in academic conferences (from abstinence to incontinence)

Posted on 06/11/2013 by clembeauvais

This isn’t a blog post on ‘how to use PowerPoint’. I’m no PowerPoint expert, and anyway I’m often too lazy to put together properly thought-through PowerPoint presentations for conferences. But I’ve been pondering about the different uses of PowerPoint I’ve witnessed and/or tried, so here are some brief thoughts on their strengths and weaknesses.

1) No PowerPoint

If you’re not over a hundred years old, then not using PowerPoint means either you think you’re God, or you actually are. I’ve listened to exceptional presentations not using PowerPoint. I’ve also listened to atrocious ones. I think it attracts both ends of the spectrum: outstanding people and terrible ones; the brightest and the laziest; the most captivating and the dullest.

Weaknesses:

The correct reaction to a presenter saying, ‘I don’t have a PowerPoint for you today…’

Not having a PowerPoint immediately gets you some negative karma from 90% of the audience.
Such presentations can be a pretext for reading an article tailored for publication rather than a paper tailored for a conference, which is a terrible idea.

Strengths:

If you do it well, it’s extremely impressive.
If you do it well, we’ll all remember your ideas.

People whose non-PowerPointed presentations I like are those who go the extra mile to structure and signpost their talk very carefully, compensating for the lack of visual anchoring. People whose non-PowerPointed presentations I hate are those who take it as a pretext for endless digression. You must be über-rigorous and have some seriously good ideas if you want to convince the audience that they wouldn’t have benefited from any slideshow. (You must also be prepared to see some people closing their eyes or doodling – which probably means they’re much more focused than if you were flashing lots of pretty pictures.)

2) The (almost-)all-pictures PowerPoint

Some people use PowerPoint as visual stimulus, but don’t want to distract from the verbal content of their talk by providing words or sentences on the screen. Their PowerPoint shows a book cover while they discuss the book, or a painting of a reading child while they discuss children’s literature.

While not necessary in any way, those decorative PowerPoints provide staring material.

Weaknesses:

Like number 1, they can be a pretext for people to read off an article to which they’ve added some pictures, rather than a proper conference paper.

Strengths:

With a bit of imagination, it can become extremely interesting.

Yes: it’s wonderful when this type of presentation – with a little help from picturebook theory! – offers the opportunity to have interesting gaps between the verbal and the visual – between the text you read and the pictures you show. This can create surprise and laughter, and tremendously increase audience interest.

A good example is Scott McCloud’s Ted Talk on comics – obviously, as a comic artist and theorist himself, McCloud knows better than anyone how to take advantage of the gap between words and pictures.

The trick to get a laugh is to avoid mentioning the picture. Pretend it doesn’t exist and has a life of its own. In a talk I did a while ago, I was saying that adults don’t read children’s books like children do, and meanwhile the picture on the screen was this one.

The hope is that the part of the audience that’s asleep will be woken up by the part of the audience that sniggers.

3) The ‘hybrid’ PowerPoint: where words and pictures meet

This is the type of PowerPoint I usually do: more pictures than words, but still a healthy dose of verbal signposting – which stage I’m at, which concept I’m discussing. If I read an important quote, I will have it written too so the audience can follow. This type of PowerPoint is pretty good, I think, for people who, like me, have a problem with speaking a bit too fast (that’s an understatement in my case). The PowerPoint ‘underlines’, so to speak, some important concepts and quotations from the presentation.

Weaknesses:

It can feel like it’s just ‘crumbs’ of the presentation, keywords and key pictures but not much around them.

Strengths:

Personally, I feel this is the Goldilocks of PowerPoint: just enough visual stimulation in the form of pictures, just enough handpicked information from the verbal material. It seems to be the type most people go for, too, which creates a feeling of familiarity from the audience.

4) More words than pictures: the verbose PowerPoint

This is the PowerPoint strategy adopted by ~~overcontrolling~~ people who really don’t want their audience to miss anything. This type can go from the relatively word-heavy to the frankly verbose, and it’s generally a lot of quotations, bullet points with the central information of each paragraph, complete references for every sentence cited, etc. Generally the structure of the presentation will also be part of this, so everything is full of Roman and Arabic numerals fighting for every last bit of blank space. It is likely that there will be a slide for acknowledgements listing every funding body, anyone who once approached the presenter while s/he was preparing for the talk, and almost everyone else.

The presenter is generally a former or future schoolteacher, or should be one. S/he is certainly very pedagogical.

Strengths:

The PowerPoint can easily be put online as is, since it will work essentially as a paper in its own right.
You don’t have to listen to the presenter, you can just do what you usually do very well, i.e. read by yourself.

Weaknesses:

See strengths.

As you can tell, I’m not a huge fan of those.

5) The psychedelic PowerPoint of the person who should be working for Pixar.

Also known as the Prezi user, but some PowerPoint presentations I’ve seen have been so full of whirls and twirls and unidentified flying objects that they do just as well. These are the kind of presentations that give you proper vertigo, emit stroboscopic light, trigger three-day migraines if not epileptic fits, and make the scene of the destruction of the Death Star by Luke Skywalker feel a bit slow and lazy in comparison.

Those PowerPoints seem to be implying that a book cover that doesn’t reach its dedicated part on the screen by first dancing the Macarena for ten seconds will not fully imprint itself on the minds of the viewers. They are often full of videos which will rarely play as the presenter intends it, and will require two technicians to be called from the other side of the faculty while everyone in the audience is checking Facebook on Eduroam.

Strengths:

You will amuse and entertain.
It’s a fun reason to procrastinate actually working on the paper.
At least some people will be seeing a presentation like this for the first time.

Weaknesses:

Statistically speaking, I have observed that these are rarely accompanied by good papers, but I’m willing to be challenged on this.
So much distraction that the audience might be more interested in the next somersault of the Papyrus subtitle than by what you have to say.

Here are my thoughts on the matter. Feel free to share your own strategies and preferences.

My Boyfriend Ate My Homework

Posted on 25/07/2013 by clembeauvais

Or: ‘Emotional Proximity in the Ivory Tower: Between Emulation and Rivalry.’

(academia-related post = academic-souding title)

I am endowed with a boyfriend who’s also trying out this whole academia thing that I’m sort of into as well. In other words: we both want to be researchers and lecturers when we grow up. Granted, he’s in another corridor of the Ivory Tower, but not very far from mine – he’s in the English Literature and Theory office, as opposed to Literature for Nanohumans and Philosophy Thereof, which is where I currently occupy a cubicle. He’s also slightly younger than me, because I’m a cougar like that, so we’re not (yet) on the jobmarket at the same time. And finally, we’re not leaning on the same theoretical frameworks – in fact our favourite thinkers couldn’t be more diametrically opposed.

Although someone wrote a very good book on how they're actually on the same wavelength (BF doesn't agree)

Although someone wrote a very good book on the connections between their works (BF doesn’t agree)

But of course these differences don’t mean that the comingling of the personal and the professional doesn’t happen. It happens all the time, and it’s mostly wonderfully enriching and stimulating, because we’re exactly on the same wavelength re: what we think research should be about, and how ambitiously we should aim to Transform the Whole of Intellectual History. And yet there’s much more than stimulating debates and mutual encouragement in this kind of relationship, as I’m sure the 99% of academics who are going out with other academics already know.

The individual in question would hate me to ramble on about his greatness, but in all objectivity, I have never met anyone at this stage of their PhD who is as knowledgeable, intellectually sophisticated and ambitious, who’s achieved so much already, and who writes so well. Furthermore – it shouldn’t matter, but it does – he’s doing a Proper Discipline, not one with Nanohumans in it. One that makes people go ‘blimey, it sounds difficult’ rather than ‘whoa, you read Spot the Dog all day?’

‘Having discovered the haunting presence of nothingness in being, Spot undergoes an existential crisis’ (Beauvais, 2013)

We’re in the same sort of area – so I can judge what he does as well as he can judge what I do. And if it’s doing wonders for the evolution of my thoughts, and constantly pushing me further, it’s sometimes at the cost of a good chunk of self-esteem. Because it’s not the same when your supervisor, or the anonymous peer-reviewer of Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, or your mother declares that your latest textual analysis is ridiculously overgeneralising, and when it’s your boyfriend who says so. In the first three cases, you get back to work. The fourth one sounds like you are running the risk of never being loved again. Ok, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but you get the idea.

Some people say that the face of 20th-century French philosophy would have been different if Simone de Beauvoir had been ranked first at the Agrégation of Philosophy, the highest academic distinction in France. Jean-Paul Sartre was ranked first, she came second. It doesn’t matter that he was taking the exam for the second time as he’d failed it the first time; it doesn’t matter that she was coming from a much less privileged background, and the youngest candidate that year. In some people’s minds, Beauvoir was condemned to remain Sartre’s follower, to expand on his work, but never to develop a system of her own. What if she’d been first?

She got her own back by dying second as well. C. Le Grand Portage

I think that question is actually counterproductive. I’m not going to get into everything that Beauvoir did far better than Sartre, but they’re not quite the right people to bring into that debate. It’s not them, the controversial superstars, who highlight the dangers of erotico-academic relationships – it’s the others, the ones we never hear about. Or rather, the ones with the partner we never hear about. The couples with the superstar professor and the mid-level lecturer. The ones with the genius theorist/radical thinker with the partner who writes textbooks and does a lot of teaching, even though s/he seemed to enjoy theory too, once upon a time (more often she than he, judging from what I see around me…)

Academic couples who regularly read each other’s work are, I think (I think!), always engaged in that precarious tightrope-walking exercise of offering constructive criticism that doesn’t end up ruining the mood of the whole Sunday afternoon, spotting when the other is really asking for punctilious peer-reading or if they simply need reassurance, and above all, making sure that whatever successes one encounters don’t lead the other one to think, ‘That’s it, I’ll be the one who’s the footnote in his/her biography a century onwards, I might as well give up now.’

So yes, there’s always a risk that the one with the lower self-esteem might not survive the peer-reviewing pillow talk and that all embryonic ideas conceived in that bed might end up on the CV of only one of the two. And not necessarily in an evil, ‘Every consciousness wills the death of the other‘ way, either. Just as many bright people gradually overshadow their beloved sibling just by being themselves and there, despite all the love and sincere admiration they can have towards them, it’s sometimes a quiet, tender, unconscious battle of assertiveness that takes place in academic couples.

It’s mysterious, that anguish you get when you give your latest chapter to read to someone who will be enthralled only by Hegel, and the crushing disappointment when you realise that your own writing still doesn’t have the same effect on him. And the moments when you say ruefully, ‘You don’t like my ideas as much as you used to!’ as if there was something about your theorisation that’s become as routine as that dimple in your cheek that first caught his eye.

‘And my subpart, do you like it too? And my transition to chapter 3? And my literature review?’

But mostly the intimacy of bodies and ideas is glorious and neat, a dangerously far-reaching, all-in-one package, like having a research diary that responds to you with reading suggestions, annoying-but-terribly-useful counterarguments, and encouragements; that makes you tea when you’re struggling with a paragraph; that rereads your damn post-doc applications thirty times; that knows you so well that it can tell you exactly which traumatic episode of your childhood is responsible for the fact that the literary analysis you just did makes no sense at all. All that nicely tied-in with the typical comfortable monogamous relationship of two child-free people in their mid-twenties with little disposable income but no taste for luxuries.

So I don’t know who’s Socrates and who’s Alcibiades, or who’s Sartre and who’s Beauvoir (I’d rather do away with the extran bisexual affairs, though, if you don’t mind), or who’s Arendt and who’s Heidegger (erm, hopefully neither), but I know there’s always more seductive potential in my monograph-writing than in my shopping at Ann Summers, and that I don’t care about the early white hairs as long as I can see his serious concentrated face listening to Bernstein’s lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit.

Harry Potter and the Ivory Tower: Conference Report

Posted on 21/05/2012 by clembeauvais

Of course any press release with the words ‘Harry’ and ‘Potter’ next to each other in the headline is sure to catch the attention of journalists – and they struck gold last week with the announcement of an international academic conference, organised at the University of St Andrews, on the study of J.K. Rowling’s series ‘as literature’.

The beautiful city of St Andrews… much better weather than when I was there!

Predictably, they found a couple of irate (and probably partly misquoted) academics from another office in the Ivory Tower, who expressed indignation at the squandering of thousands of Sickles and Galleons on such worthless endeavours.

I’d personally tend to think that in these dark days when studying the Arts & Humanities is getting more and more difficult for everyone, we should all stick together and support each other rather than deplore the fact that other academics are thinking about things that we think are not worth thinking about. But maybe that’s a very Potterish sort of altruistic attitude which you don’t cultivate if you spend all your time studying Ulysses. Ok, enough sarcasm.

I was there. The conference was a great success, because it managed to strike the right balance between true, heartfelt, endearing passion for the subject matter, and the respect, academic precision and intellectual rigour which such passion can lead to. I have to say I was a little bit worried about the potential geekiness of it all. As an unashamed potterhead, I’m more than happy to sport round glasses and hand-drawn scars at midnight releases – but that’s not what I want academic conferences to be like. Quantum physicists and Kantian scholars can make geeky jokes all they like and dress up as waves and particles if they want to – everyone takes them seriously anyway. But when your subject actually is a Mickey Mouse subject, you can’t afford to be self-deprecating about it. You have to defend it non-stop. You have to be as ~~Sirius~~ serious about it as it deserves.

And thankfully, despite a few Ravenclaw scarves and Gryffindor backpacks, the St Andrews conference did exactly that. Of all the presentations I went to, none were parochial, anecdotal, expected. Some were truly mind-blowing, and masterfully delivered: a jaw-dropping analysis of paternal atonement with the figure of Snape, a critique of pedagogical strategies in Hogwarts and their potential influence on the perception of learning and teaching by young readers, two sophisticated and subtle analyses of racial stereotyping using the representation of Goblins and House-Elves. In short, it was inspiring, rigorous, and not, as I’d feared, a self-indulgent gathering of fans marveling at Jo Rowling’s incontestable storytelling genius.

If it makes people smile, that’s great – but I hope it also makes them think. It isn’t just careless, or uninformed, to dismiss the Harry Potter series as a serious object of analysis; it is intellectually dishonest. I’m sure – well, I hope – that in forty years’ time, when I nostalgically browse through my past blog posts stored in a chip directly implanted in my brain, I’ll laugh that such a conference was ever laughed at. Meanwhile, I look forward to the proceedings and thank the St Andrews people for organising such a successful event in spite of all the Rita Skeeters in the world.

Clem x