Writer’s block in academic writing as a psychosocial issue

Abstract

The psychological unease surrounding the practice of academic writing is a widespread phenomenon in the current university landscape, with significant implications for students’ and professors’ trajectories across all knowledge areas. Despite the collective nature of the problem, the thematic analysis has been guided by individualist perspectives of the phenomenon. Considering this landscape, I argue that the unease with academic writing derives from the modern process of naturalization of writing, through Romantic and Realist ideologies of literary composition. Likewise, I argue that such processes create their more nefarious effects in countries such as Brazil, as the singularities of colonization in peripheral countries enhance the effects of those ideologies by maintaining linguistic prejudice and a constant sense of academic bovarism.

Keywords
Academic writing; Brazilian university; Knowledge colonization

Resumo

O mal-estar psicológico com a prática da escrita acadêmica é um fenômeno generalizado no cotidiano universitário atual, com implicações significativas na trajetória de estudantes e docentes de todas as áreas do conhecimento. A despeito do caráter coletivo do problema, a análise da temática tem sido orientada por perspectivas individualistas do fenômeno. Tendo em vista tal quadro, meu propósito é argumentar que o mal-estar com a escrita acadêmica resulta de processos modernos de naturalização da escrita, via ideologias românticas e realistas da composição literária. Igualmente, argumento que tais processos geram seus efeitos mais nefastos em países como o Brasil, uma vez que as singularidades da colonização em países periféricos potencializam as consequências daquelas ideologias por meio da manutenção do preconceito linguístico e do constante senso de bovarismo acadêmico.

Palavras-chave
Escrita acadêmica; Universidade brasileira; Colonização do conhecimento

Resumen

El malestar psicológico asociado a la escritura académica es un fenómeno generalizado en la vida universitaria contemporánea, con implicaciones significativas para las trayectorias de estudiantes y docentes en todas las áreas del conocimiento. A pesar de la naturaleza colectiva del problema, los análisis sobre el tema se han guiado mayoritariamente por perspectivas individualistas. En este contexto, sostengo que el malestar relacionado con la escritura académica deriva de procesos modernos que naturalizan la escritura: procesos arraigados en las ideologías románticas y realistas de la composición literaria. Asimismo, planteo que estos procesos tienen efectos particularmente perjudiciales en países como Brasil, donde las características singulares de la colonización en naciones periféricas amplifican el impacto de tales ideologías al perpetuar el prejuicio lingüístico y una persistente sensación de «bovarismo académico».

Palabras clave
Escritura académica; universidad brasileña; colonización del conocimiento

1. The inherent unease when starting to write

To those attentive of the neoliberalism advances in global higher education, it is no news that the psychological suffering to write is one of the main symptoms of contemporary academic life, as publican, mainly of scientific articles, has become the main exchange currency in an academic market increasingly competitive and lacking economic, material, and human resources (Brambila, 2019; Davies & Bansel, 2005; Lopes, 2017a, 2017b; Pinheiro-Machado, 2016; Rezende & Sallas, 2019; Richardson, 2019a, 2019b). Despite this scenario, the psychological malaise with the practice of academic writing as a psychosocial phenomenon remains an undertheorized theme (Birk, 2013; Boice, 1993), at most, it is analyzed through individualist psychological conceptions of the problem (Birk, 2013; Cayton, 1990) or reduced to a humorous language that softens the seriousness and the impacts of psychological suffering in the practice of academic writing among university population (Didden et al., 2007; Mclean & Thomas, 2014; Skinner & Perlini, 1996).

Considering the epidemic scenario – or, who knows, a pandemic one – of psychological suffering towards the craft of academic writing, my aim is to analyze the phenomenon beyond the teaching and learning of formal rules for such ability and individualist explanations about the problem, also situating it as a consequence of modern psychosocial arrangements responsible for disseminating powerful writing ideologies that maintain it, to this day, as a natural ability, disconnected with the social conditions of its production, mainly in contexts which writing has a high symbolic and economic value, as in higher education scenario.

To do so, I evaluate the process of writing naturalization as a modern device to halt the equalitarian and democratic distribution of this ability. Afterward, I assess how ideologies arising from the Romantic and Idealist movements, within the scope of fictional European writing, are silently present in academic everyday life, leading to a specific form of psychological suffering in writing. Finally, I raise the hypothesis that the effects of those ideologies produce their more harmful impacts in peripheral countries, such as Brazil, considering the characteristics and aftereffects of our colonial regime, which also impact the practice of academic writing, through the maintenance of two inherent problems in our society: linguistic prejudice and academic bovarism.

2. The continous naturalization of writing

In the early 1970s, in his well-known article in the field of composition theory, Teach writing as a process, not product, Donald Murray (1972) denounces the serious problems in writing teaching in the United States: the exaggerated focus on the product rather than on the writing process. Murray’s denouncement became, in the last five decades, a type of manifesto, disseminated in different geographical contexts, against the insisting and conservative emphasis on the teaching of writing, at all levels of academic formation, as a finalized product (Adsit, 2017; Pinto, 2016; Ramirez & Guillén Cuamatzi, 2018). The tendency to focus on writing as a product rather than a process is not a recent phenomenon in the history of literate society and is even less restricted to a single geographical context. Its origin dates back to the mid-18th century, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and when literacy became, for the first time, a State policy in the more developed countries in modern Europe (Vincent, 2014).

At that moment, when mastering writing as a cultural good of high economic and symbolic value is no longer partially exclusive to European elites, the belief that any person, after a basic process of literacy, would be able to read and write with fluency and confidence is established. Hence, it shapes, in the beginning of the writing democratization process, the concept that the ability of a literate adult to write would be a natural, static, direct process, and mainly one that is disconnected from the material, economic, and social conditions responsible for distributing writing in society (Williams, 2014). In other words, in modern Europe, it has become commonplace to assume that if a person has gone through the basic process of reading and writing in childhood, the issue in adult age is only to have what to write about.

A naturalized perception of writing practices in modern societies took place despite the observation that, unlike orality, learning about writing necessarily depends on a complex social structure (Faraco & Tezza, 2016). Writing does not emerge as a result of the development expected of a child based on the information relationships held within the linguistic communities responsible for teaching how to speak, as is the case with orality. Writing depends on formal artifices defined by a political, institutional, educational, and economic organization, which defines how teaching this ability is distributed among different people, groups, and social classes. Certainly, as with any cultural item capable of generating social mobility, the distribution of writing has never been equal in any society (Williams, 2014).

The contemporary maintenance of modern premises that naturalize writing is notable in the context of higher education, even in countries considered developed and guided by a pragmatic, less essentialist view of writing, as is the case in the United States. Evidence of the phenomenon can be seen in the intense demand on university students, in the first undergraduate years in that country, to fluently master levels of academic writing that were never previously developed in their school trajectories (Moore, 2003; Thonney, 2016). That is, once higher education is achieved, the expectation is that students are apt to write at any moment what is demanded from them (Blaxter et al., 1998). However, this expectation has been invalidated by findings showing that the difficulties in mastering the formal rules of writing, as well as the psychological unease about writing, intensify as people advance in their academic trajectory (Hjortshoj, 2001). Hence, the premise that higher education students would be apt to write according to the level demanded of them is true only for a small part of this population (Blaxter et al., 1998) because reality points to something very different: a substantial part of students feel they lack the experience to write a good- quality academic manuscript (Murray, 2001).

So that a naturalized conceptualization of academic writing can still remain nowadays, we have to presume that, among other things, powerful writing ideologies are at play. Later, I evaluate this hypothesis through the interpretation of the impacts of two ideologies in writing from two of the most important modern literary movements: Romanticism and Realism.

3. Lurking Romanticism

Even though Romanticism is traditionally perceived as a critical movement of rationalist intentions in philosophy, politics, arts, and literature, this does not exempt it from producing conservative conceptions of literary creation. In fact, the romantic discourse is a central artifice in disseminating the ideal of writing as a natural ability that only a few people, endowed with a peculiar sensibility, would possess (Boice, 1997; McGann, 1985).

The image of the genius disseminated at the beginning of Romanticism, in the second half of the 19th century, summarizes the qualities that would reveal the few and rare individuals prone to grand literary works (Acocella, 2014; Jefferson, 2015). At least five characteristics define the essential attributes of the real literary genius: the experience of a previous phase of creative block, necessary and inevitable to create an authentic literary work; the need for social isolation; the passive wait for inspiration; the lack of any planning and learning of what one intends to write; and the vehement refusal to any process of editing in writing (Boice, 1994; Jefferson, 2015; Leader, 1996, 1991).

The epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), by writer Johan Wolfgang Von Goethe, the seminal work of German Romanticism, delineates, in a way, what is currently designated as the singular conditions for creating or halting a true literary creation. The trajectory of the young and wealthy Werther in a bucolic German community and the emergence of an unrequited love that leads him to increasing despair and, finally, to suicide, create the plot of one of the most iconic figures of the Romantic aesthetic. The Romantic ideal of psychological suffering as a necessary phase for artistic creativity stands out in the first pages of the book, when Werther confesses to his interlocutor, his friend Wilhelm, the incompatibility between the serenity that took him at that moment and the real possibility of an artistic feat. In his words: “I am so happy, my dear friend, so absorbed in the exquisite sense of mere tranquil existence, that I neglect my talents” (Goethe, 1774/2005, p. 14).

Despite the nuances that romantic discourse introduced over the last three centuries, the containment of suffering, waiting for spontaneity, isolation, and a lack of planning in writing remained criteria of the romantic ideal in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. In his famous romantic manifesto, A Defense of Poetry, written in 1821 and published in 1840, the English poet David Shelley continues the romantic tradition when preaching the value of naturalness in writing as a type of special call from nature over which the poet would have no control. In his words:

A man cannot say, ―I will compose poetry. The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the color of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure.

(Shelley, 1840/2001, p. 11)

In the same direction, now in the early 20th century, Raine Maria Rilke redefines the value of solitude as an imperative moral and behavioral guide for legitimate literary creation in Letters to a Young Poet. Not only solitude, but a natural call for writing, the uninterest, and the warning to any form of external induction, or secondary processes of writing, are advice given by Rilke (1929/1989, p. 27) to his young and insecure interlocutor with still embryonic literary intentions. In Brazil, in the early 21st century, the poet Ferreira Goulart (2014), when questioned about his poetic writing process, likewise assumes the posture of an authentic heir to the ideal of spontaneity in literary writing. In his words: “ I do not plan things. My poetry simply happens. I have never imagined something like ‘I’m going to write about this theme’. Never! This does not mean that acting this way is something wrong. But it is different with me [my highlight]” (p. 52-53).

What is at stake in maintaining the Romantic ideals is much more than simply the definition of legitimate inventive writing; it is the definition of authorship itself as a psychological state that cannot be planned or taught (Jefferson, 2015). Conception from which originates one of the most common feelings in the everyday practice of writing different literary genres: the feeling of inferiority when faced with the need for textual review. Zachary Leader, one of the few literary critics to dedicate himself to the theme of writer’s block, draws the genesis of such feeling to the romanticism movement, when the main names of German and English poetry in the 18th and 19th centuries found a new morality of authorship as the result of spontaneity and total lack of edition, because, for the romantics, “chief among these attitudes is a preference for what comes naturally (as the leaves to a tree, says Keats)” (Leader, 1996, p. 3).

One of the main pieces of evidence that these notions of spointainety and lack of editing make up a writing ideology is that many of the main names of German and English romantic poetry have used in their private and routinely writing practices exactly what they have preached as totally incompatible with legitimate literary creation: they planned their writings, they shared their texts with a broad network of readers, and they revised them intensively and sophisticatedly, sometimes for long periods of time (Leader, 1996). They were equally concerned with the arrangement of their environmental and material conditions for writing so as to kindle motivation and reach their writing goals, such as the number of pages or words written daily. Similarly, they had high expectations of the public recognition of their works (Leader, 1991; Wallace, 1977).

When evaluating facts such as these, Leader (1996) reminds us, however, that those ideals of writing were not homogeneous in the very core of the romantic movement, as many of its members defended the role of review as central in literary creation, as well as questioned the ideal of spontaneity as a way of artistic creation. To Leader (1996), this meant that the romantic ideal of writing, which was disseminated during the last three centuries, was part of a single version of the romantic discourse about literary creation: its more caricatural and less critical.

3.1. Romanticism in academic writing

The silence around the psychological demands of composition, the isolation of writing, and the aversion to the inevitable recursive dimension of writing are premises easily identified in the everyday life of academic writing. About the silence of the psychological difficulties of writing, we may say that some level of public display of the problem is allowed in the university routine, and is, in fact, even part of the socialization of undergraduate and graduate students (Boice, 1994; 1996). There would be, however, a more intense level of psychological suffering, related to the self-deprecating and individualist form of how students and professors self-identify as writers, rarely assumed in public and generally associated with more severe forms of psychological malaise, such as anxiety and depression. Behind this silence would be embarrassment, guilt, and, possibly at the same time, the supposition that this suffering of writing is an inevitable phase of the process of authentic academic writing. That is what Boice (1990; 1996), the only psychologist who dedicated his whole career to writing block, found out when observing that young academics, from different knowledge areas, adopt more strictly than other professionals, who depend on writing in their lives, the belief that the emotionally burdened work would indicate the propensity to unexpected literary accomplishments and of high intellectual level. Reasons why they would adhere to one of the most harmful writing practices: marathons to write texts with deadlines about to finish or already finished.

The psychological concern with the need to review academic texts is another remarkable romantic heritage evident in the university routine, especially when students are asked to make substantial changes to their texts under development. On these occasions, the psychological unease is almost always guaranteed, often resulting in severe forms of writer’s block, even when advisors are assertive and didactic with demands to change and correct their monographs, dissertations, and theses. For a significant part of university students, the demand to review their own texts is experienced as irrefutable proof of intellectual inability and not as an essential process in the practice of academic writing (Caffarela & Barnett, 2009).

Finally, many students and professors assume that isolation is the only way for writing to naturally emerge. In the academic universe, adherence to isolation is seen as an essential phase in completing undergraduate theses, dissertations, and theses. This position is evident in the unquestioning defense of this behavior, even among experienced academic researchers. Thus, they ignore that isolation is more a part of what causes writers’ block than its solution, mainly among those with high levels of psychological suffering to write their texts (Boice & Jones, 1984; Boice, 1996). As a consequence, many university students isolate themselves to write exactly at the moments when they need more technical, intellectual, and emotional support to keep them involved in the writing process. Furthermore, literature has indicated a direct relationship between isolation to write and the increase in the suffering to finalize academic texts, as well as a direct relation between writing fluency and the sharing of academic texts in collective spaces that allow the expression of writing difficulties and of under-construction texts (Elbow, 2012; Hjortshoj, 2001).

4. Lurking realism

Despite the cultural dissemination of Romantic conceptions of writing to the present day, the hegemony of the Romantic ideal in writing has been mitigated since the mid-19th century with the advent of Realism in fiction. One of the seminal works of realism, Madame Bovary (1856), by French writer Gustave Flaubert, plays an essential role in this movement. When showing the tragic effects of the lack of correspondence between the Romantic fantasies subjectivized by a petty-bourgeois woman from a French province and her social reality, Flaubert’s book inaugurates what would later be seen as the start of the criticism against Romanticism as an ideology of social reproduction. However, in the literary field, Realism, like Romanticism, does not break away from the idea of writing naturalization. Flaubert reproduces, as the Romantic did, the defense of art for art's sake, as if the writers were completely uninterested subjects (Bourdieu, 1996). At the same time, however, the French author, differently from the Romantics, unveils his writing process as an activity that results from external motivations, such as newspaper articles that influenced the choice of a book theme, as well as the result of intense and continuous editing work employed during five years of hard work in composing his most famous book. The Flaubertian metaphor of writing as a “construction site” and the preservation of his drafts for posterity, something also practically nonexistent among the Romantics, shows an antagonist image to any attempt to defend spontaneity and the naturalness of writing as fundamental criteria for literary composition (Simon, 2013).

Even so, as in Romanticism, the Realist movement ends up creating an idealized image of authorship as the result of the authors’ unique ability to represent with impeccable precision the reality narrated, as a painting painted without a draft and the need for retouches (Prelorentzou, 2016). In fact, in the realist tradition, the writing crisis is erased and works such as those from Flaubert and Tolstoy “give the false impression that they were the results of a discovery, that their authors wrote them in an easy and objective way, with no crisis. But this, of course, is nothing more than a rhetorical and stylistic effect” (Prelorentzou, 2016, p. 21). Therefore, if, on the one hand, the Romantic discourse delineates the capacity of meaningful literary accomplishments as the result of a deep creative block as a presage for the author’s genius, on the other hand, Realism makes it seem as though authentic creative writing is a direct representation of the acute, calm, and clear mind of those writing it.

4.1. Realism in the practice of academic writing

Among the practices of academic writing consonant with the ideals derived from realism in fictional writing is the belief that there is a single way to write; the assumption that true writing takes place linearly and orderly; the opinion that this writing represents the totality of reality about which one writes; and, finally, the expectation that to write the writers should feel completely safe in the plan it delineated for their literary endeavor.

At first, natural scientists would be more likely to adhere to realist ideals of writing than human and social scientists, as the former would tend to represent writing in the same way they tend to represent the phenomena they study, that is, as a split reality, while the latter would tend to conceive the text as a social construction (Hjortshoj, 2001). This conception, however, represents more a caricature that human and social scientists often make of natural scientists than the way they truly write. Specially because the analysis of classic articles, from different knowledge areas, has shows that natural scientists from areas such as biology and physics use linguistic resources, such as the use of first person, which show more the constructive nature of their studies than the way articles on psychology and history has been written, in an impersonal way, so as to create an aesthetic of scientific neutrality (Sword, 2012). Therefore, the most plausible would be to assume that Romantic and Realist practices and discourses are equally part of the craft of writing in natural sciences, as well as human and social sciences.

Contrary to a Romantic perspective of academic writing, in which the singularity of the author’s personality is taken as essential to the occurrence of really inventive writing, the Realist practices of academic writing claim the contrary: the real academic writers have a unique way of writing. One of the psychological consequences of the unrestricted adherence to this image of academic writing is the greatly shared sensation among academics that there would be a correct way of writing and that this way is never the one employed in their composition processes. The testimonies of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz and the sociologist Norbert Elias about their psychological difficulties with writing show that not even the main names of human and social sciences are exempt from the Realist trap. Geertz states, for example, that he would write slowly and always a paragraph at a time, until it was completely acceptable for publication. However, he constantly felt that something was inadequate about his writing and knew that, in one way or another, some deep psychological problem prevented him from writing as true authors did (Olson, 1991). Norbert Elias (2001), in turn, claimed that the main reason that led him to submit himself to the psychotherapy process as an adult was also the belief that he was too slow to write, due to some psychological problem, though he had already published some of his most important books and countless other texts that made him one of the most fruitful sociologists of his generation.

To Rose (1980), one of the main predictors of writing fluency is the ability of writers to loosen the composition plans of their ongoing texts, allowing themselves approximative and non-linear forms of writing organization. On the other hand, those struggling with their writing practice would be the most inflexible in changing their composition plans. Even though Rose (1980) places the inflexibility with the writing plans in composition classes of elementary, middle, and high school students, his findings have been generalized for the context of higher education academic writing (Al-Shboul & Huwari, 2015), with the difference that, at university, it is accentuated due to the high level of social control over the academic writing and the low level of explanations of the tactic rules that underline the textual genre (Boice, 1994). This scenario leads, at the same time, to a common practice among many experienced researchers: the assumption that they are ideal models of writers to be transmitted to their students, even though they are often unable to explain their styles of writing practice (Hjortshoj, 2001).

5. Bovarism and academic writing in Brazil

During the second half of the 20th century, at least in fiction, a new writing conception emerged – if not in full opposition, at least in clear dissonance with romantic and idealist ideals. Since then, the so-called hybrid crisis in fictional writing has raised doubts about the discourses of romantic inspiration and the representation of reality, while approaching the hardships of writing as increasingly mundane and the result of hard work (Prelorentzou, 2016). Names such as Stephen King (2015), Philip Roth (Lee, 1992), Karl Knausgård (2017), Haruki Murakami (2017), Chico Buarque (2019), and Rubem Fonseca (2003), to cite some, express the hybrid crisis of writing when narrating the sufferings of their characters regarding their writing practice and when narrating their own psychological dilemmas to write. The practical concerns of everyday life with money, with writing formation, with the failures and conflicts in the editorial universe, as well as the dilemmas of class, gender, ethnicity, race, and the entanglements between politics and writing show, in these authors’ discourses, a perception about literary creation in which the waiting for a muse of the capacity to represent reality through writing holds a secondary place, at most. On the other hand, though tributary to Romanticism and Realist ideals of writing, non-fictional genres, such as academic writing, kept themselves immune to analyses that place them as inevitable heirs to those views on writing practice (Prelorentzou, 2016).

The implications of these assumptions become even more serious when we place them as part of a geopolitical problem with implications for the social organization of writing. The possibility of analyzing academic writing from this point of view was undertaken by Canagarajah (2002), who situates this type of writing dilemma as the result of relations of extreme social, educational, economic, and political inequality between center and periphery. According to this author, academic writing in the periphery would be marked by the imposition of an old relationship of dependence and linguistic submission between dominant and dominated countries, often masked, as is the very palpable case nowadays, by discourses of complete positivity regarding the internationalization of science, as if the scientific communities had, in fact, abolished any logic of political and economic domination just because “anyone and everyone” write and publish in English or French (Ouriques, 2015).

When including these questions in a more panoramic analysis of suffering with the practice of academic writing, in contexts such as the Brazilian one, feelings of unease when writing in the academic context, mainly aiming to be published, can be also interpreted as a result of conflicts between the center and the periphery, experienced by Brazilian academics as, for example, the constant feeling that, regardless of the efforts employed to write, the texts are always far from being deep and complex as the foreign texts used as obligatory references. Consequently, we can suppose that the psychological unease to write in the Brazilian academic context results from a form of academic bovarism intrinsic to university life in the country.

The expression bovarism emerges at the end of the 19th century as a psychosocial category that represents the alienated wish of the provincial and European petty bourgeois that, wishing to be the other, the cosmopolitan elite, does everything to seem like those they want to be. Nevertheless, this search is always unsuccessful because it is based on forms of social reproduction that alienate more than free the individuals from a system that keeps them stuck in the social structure (Kehl, 2018). Indications of the establishment of a bovarism impetus in the practice of Brazilian academic writing can be perceived as a result of the country’s university structure itself, whose foundation and institutionalization were grounded, to a certain extent, in the relationship of subordination to the thought and culture of dominant countries in the intellectual scenario worldwide, such as the United States and France. About this, Ouriques (2015, pp. 12-13) describes how the foundation of the main Brazilian universities, in the first half of the 20th century, which served as a model for the rest of the country, is marked by the adherence to research programs that did not contemplate the deeper problems of countries like Brazil, as as well as the deliberate downgrading of the national culture. Thus, hoping that, when “dressing up in French costume”, Brazilian intellectuals would become “them”, a deep oblivion of national traumas was established, in exchange for an alienated desire that will never be fulfilled. To Ouriques (2015), the historical reverberation of those problems would remain nowadays because

before intellectual curiosity and the commitment to overcome underdevelopment (the sole reasons to have universities in Latin America) we have undergone an academic lobotomy and the same reproduction of programs than the immense majority would never even phantom to master, because the “empire of ephemeral” throws into our students – and mainly into the professors the colonial need to be updated with the last academic fashion emanated from Paris or New York, a movement that, due to its nature, does not enable an accumulation of knowledge and research experience, but mere reproducers of a research program they will never master.

(Ouriques, 2015, p. 13)

Transposing this interpretative framework for the context of academic writing hardships involves assuming that such hardships are also, to some extent, the results of a social organization of writing, in a country in which such ability was never even close to being distributed in a minimally equalitarian way to the whole population (Ferraro, 2009). Likewise, it involves assuming that an analysis of suffering in academic writing only makes sense when contextualized by the dilemmas inherent in Brazilian society and its more serious social problems. For example, it would be impossible to talk about the psychological problems of academic writing and exclude the debate on the impacts of symbolic violences that are deeply rooted in our society, as is the case of linguistic prejudice. A prejudice whose workings are rarely analyzed in the university, but that is equally present, through paragrammatical discourses in manuals of academic writing. Something perceptible, for example, in the discourse of Volpato (2013, p. 23), who, when criticizing the difficulties of academic writing in Brazil, reproduces many myths about Brazilianness: that Brazilians have “ways” to deal with rules and formal social relations. In his words:

The rules of international science are dictated by the strongest countries; they follow their cultural biases. Joining this fight means following these rules. It is a cultural struggle. In science, we have to be objective, direct, and logical, but this is not our background. Brazilians are prolix, coming from a prolix formation. Science does not admit our “ways”, improvisations, superficialities, but this is also not the background of our society. Joining the international science requires more, much more.

(Volpato, 2013, p. 23)

According to Bagno (2003), linguistic prejudice is clear in historically negative images and statements about the Brazilian people, mainly the poorest groups. Many of these statements and images seem to have good intentions and presumably critical positions; however, they reproduce impeditive prejudices of a truly reflexive gaze on reality.

Analysis of linguistic variation in academic writing, as well as the working of editorial rules in journals from the center and the periphery, also enables us to advance the argument that the crisis in academic writing in countries such as Brazil is even more serious than in the so-called developed countries. Sword’s (2012) detailed work on the formal and stylistic dimensions of classic articles published in the most respected US-American and European journals provides evidence for an initial interpretation of the issue. One of her main findings is that classic articles across all knowledge areas share some characteristics, among which is the fact that the quality of writing in those articles mostly results from a high level of metacognitive investment. In other words, the authors of those classic articles invested time not only in the original research but also in the conception of the style to be used to impact readers. They have also often received significant technical assistance from writing professionals in preparing their texts. At the same time, Sword (2012) identified that classic articles from several areas of knowledge break away from, or do not fully adhere to, the rules imposed by the communication vehicles in which they are published.

When we compare only these findings with the academic editorial reality in Brazil, some initial remarks deserve to be commented upon. First, in Brazil, there is a significant and strict adherence to the editorial norms, for example, regarding the size, format, and writing styles in the articles, supposing that, hence, we would be writing like the best journals worldwide, when, in fact, those have a substantial openness to linguistic variations of style and form. Therefore, it is plausible to suppose that, to some level, we reproduce in the Brazilian academic editorial system and analogous to social reproduction found in what differentiates, even if generically, the elites from the middle classes. That is, to a certain degree, Brazilian academic publishing system follows and imposes rules by supposing that, by doing so, we would be writing like the academic elite of countries such as the United States or France while, in fact, the academic elite to which all of us are, willingly or unwillingly, tributaries, write with the permission to transgress the writing rules preached in the journals and books they publish. If, up to now, the argument might sound invalid, we do not need to go far to argue. We just have to perceive how many of our main bibliographical references were allowed to adopt literary styles that, to some extent, would be accepted in our human and social sciences journals. And certainly, justifying this by claiming that these authors write this way because they have reached intellectual levels we have yet not reached is only one facet of the problem.

In some way, this means that social reproduction and alienation characterize national literature. Nonetheless, I presume that this is a problem that, in one way or another, permeates our writing and publishing practice and, consequently, has nefarious effects on the possibilities of theoretical innovation in peripheral contexts, as writing style, form, and content are intrinsically related as part of the conditions for the emergence of new thoughts. In other words, the permission for linguistic variation in academic writing is also a permission to think about innovative forms.

6. Final remarks

Students, mainly in strictu sensu graduate school, in the final phases of writing their dissertations and theses, often hear an uncomfortable question from their peers: “How is your research going?”. The generic answer for the question is often simply a laconic and embarrassed “Things are working, I just have to write…”. Apparently prosaic and harmless, this answer symbolizes the secondary and naturalized place reserved for academic writing in the routine of Brazilian universities. That is, what , to a great extent, defines students' lives, their future career, and the social organization of knowledge itself has been conceptualized by many of us as something that is done in the end, as if writing were not a central part of the research process and the university formation as a whole.

The lack of continuous education for academic writing in higher education or the existence of a training guided only to apply the formal rules through paragrammatical discourses reveal an academic environment in which the performance of the written ability is subjected to assumptions that consider it as a result of a mere adherence to the rules or, just as negative, as the result of some individual disposition that very subjects would have and other would not.

Understanding writing as something that ourselves and our students should naturally do is to maintain a premise about writing that remains for, at least two centuries and a half, as a vigorous ideology of European elite when the writing ability started, even if unequally, to be democratized for the working class in formation in that context (would something analogous be happening now when the working class has reached Brazilian university?). Therefore, consciously or not, dealing with academic writing as something that our students should fluently master because they have reached higher education is to be complicit with the maintenance of an unequal distribution of writing as a highly valuable cultural good. If this assumption makes sense, the silence surrounding the psychological difficulties of academic writing lends itself to the perpetuation of social hierarchies sedimented within and outside Brazilian universities, as the movement of writing through the academic structure is directly related to the accumulation and circulation of writing. Thus, it is surprising that so little attention is paid to the psychological hardships faced in the practice of writing as a means of halting social mobility.

Making explicit that academic writing is a capital unequally distributed and that the psychological suffering related to such ability result from psychosocial conditions, which greatly surpass the moment of writing, is a way to denounce and to raise an alert mainly for human and social sciences as, in these fields, fluency and inventiveness in writing are essential for the formation and reception of a thought, as well as for the distribution of social recognition among their practitioners. Similarly, situating the unease regarding the practice of academic writing in the field of human and social sciences as a psychosocial problem is a way to protect ourselves from an always lurking elitism and move towards solutions for a problem that is serious, pandemic, and far from being solved through romantic and realist practices and discourses about writing, which are so easily found in our university routine, often even among the defenders of a progressive and democratic education.

• A.I. Use:
  The author states that he did not use A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) resources in any phase of the process to prepare or write the manuscript, including, among other things, resources for generating text, images, codes, summaries, translations, or analyses.
• Text review:
  Bibliographic normalization (APA 7ª Ed.), preparation and text review in Portuguese: Maria Theresa de Sampaio [e-mail]
  English Version: Viviane Ramos [e-mail]
• A.I. Use:
  The author states that he did not use A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) resources in any phase of the process to prepare or write the manuscript, including, among other things, resources for generating text, images, codes, summaries, translations, or analyses.

Data availability:

The content subjacent to the research text is contained in the manuscript.

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Edited by

• Responsible editors:
  Associated editor: Vanessa Fonseca Barbosa https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2901-015X
  Editor-in-chief: Chantal Medaets https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7834-3834

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  24 Aug 2026
• Date of issue
  2026

History

• Received
  11 Dec 2025
• Reviewed
  14 May 2026
• Accepted
  24 May 2026