I absorbed all their tricks and hacks into my own practice over the four years we worked together.
THE WHISPERER BOOK HOW TO
We wrote two books on writing together: How to fix your academic writing trouble and Level up your essays. Moving on.Ī big shout out here to Katherine Firth from the Research Degree Insiders blog and Shaun Lehmann, who taught me a lot about how to unfuck writing. I think I got as much out of that boat/barnacle metaphor as I could. My teaching is directed at helping people scrape off the barnacles so their writing boat carries the reader speedily to their destination. The more barnacles you carry, the lower in the water your boat sits and the harder it becomes to steer. The boat stays afloat, but it doesn’t sail as well as it could. Little problems with syntax (the arrangements of words) and lack of precision in word choice creates text that looks like a boat covered in barnacles. Strictly speaking, I don’t teach: I draw people’s attention to small, fixable problems in their text. I work with highly trained researchers who are already good writers. Thought about this way, unfucking sums up my whole approach to teaching writing. Unfucking is about fixing what’s wrong AND changing the way you do things so you don’t keep fucking up. Unfucking does not have a formal dictionary definition (yet!) but, to me, it means more than just stopping or reversing.
It’s very nice to have my weekends back to write blog posts and stuff, but the message of this sticker has stayed with me. I had a six vodka hangover by Sunday, but it was TOTALLY worth it. It was amazing to celebrate this win for everyone at the Greens after party. A lot of work was done by thousands of people just like me, on the left and the right side of politics, to convince voters that the lack of government action on climate change is a real threat to our future. The election is over and, from my point of view, Australia did the right thing and voted to unfuck the future. This sticker made me chuckle each time I opened the office during this long election campaign. On the back door of the Greens office in Braddon, where I’ve been spending a lot of time lately, there’s a sticker with ‘unfuck the future’ right at eye height.
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