Once upon a time I used to spend all the time I could reading and writing. For joy, expression and to think. Sometime along the way in full-time education, mandatory reading and writing took away some of that joy, or tainted reading and writing by association. Coupled with that, there’s a strange irony to the world of academia: disseminating research findings, or in some instances getting as many publications as possible, is venerated. Yet (to me at least) the pressure to produce the best quality paper/ thesis and to ‘save’ your thoughts and ideas for these works creates a bottleneck where I have more data than I could exhaust in analysing and discussing even if I spent a decade purely writing about it, but no papers published and a constant awareness of this ‘deficit’ or issue-that-needs-rectifying. The longer I go without publishing, the more pressure I feel (internally but somewhat externally too) to make sure that whatever I do publish is ‘the cream of the [idea/ findings] crop’. And I’m someone who easily has hundreds of ideas at a given time – they come, some go almost instantly, some linger a while and a few stay in my conscious memory (to use my Applied Linguistics learnings, I’m guessing it’s my working memory and I’m constrained by how much I can hold in working memory at the same time). It’s pretty frustrating to be a person with lots of ideas but not enough working memory to hold them all corralled neatly for dissemination. Of course, I’m confident some of them are terrible ideas and that they wouldn’t make a good paper. But I think there’s a value in giving some more ideas space and time to breathe and to work out what ideas are worth ‘properly disseminating’ and what is an errant thought that doesn’t hold up under scrutiny (my own or others’). And I think that’s what I hope to get out of this writing. Being able to release some of my ideas and feel less creatively stifled.
The debater in me wants to make a few more points, or ‘arguments’. The creative benefit isn’t the only attraction to writing like this. If it was purely for creativity, I could write and then save or delete the writing and keep it private. That would be a lot more comfortable and less vulnerable than risking putting my writing out there, where I risk exposing bad writing, ideas or worst of all, causing offence. But anyone who knows me knows that I live by demanding and stringent morals. (I get it all wrong plenty too. Of course). One of my moral beliefs is the idea that I’ve been blessed (in a non-religious sense) with a top tier education, an ability to read, think and write about the knowledge I’ve gathered and access to people’s stories and experiences through my research data: for me, I have a duty to repay those blessings. I’ve thought a lot over the years about how I could possibly repay my blessings and have paid attention to similar discussion in academia about a researcher’s duties to their participants, to society etc. One of the ideas that resonates with me is the idea of disseminating work, striving to ensure that knowledge, ideas and discussion (in my case about languages and Applied Linguistics) are spread not just in journals, academic books and conferences but also in our everyday channels of communication and learning (social media, podcasts, blogs etc.).
Finally (for my 3rd point!), I’ve often been wary of being ‘that PhD student’ who takes over a conversation at a party and monologues for too-many-minutes about something extremely niche, without pausing to see if anyone is actually interested in hearing more. But I’ve been very lucky in being surrounded by people who have asked me to tell them more, who’ve asked questions and who’ve said that they find my research and my field of study really interesting. When I dipped my toe in the water to gauge the temperature for starting a blog, I was blown away by the support, but what excited me more was the feedback on things I’ve discussed with people at parties over the years that they’d like to know more about, things that they thought would make a good blog post. Please keep sending me those ideas. Firstly because I’ve usually forgotten them so without the reminder they will definitely not make it into a blog post! And secondly because the reason I’m taking the risk of creating something public rather than writing privately is because I want to be able to share some of the fascinating things I’ve learned over the years. I want to point out how Applied Linguistics is all around us (and in us) and how cool it is! And there are some things I want to share because I think they have such profound impacts on people around us: how we think about language has an underestimated, often invisible, impact on so many aspects of our lives, cultures, societies.
Before I finish up this introductory post, I would like to try and flag some caveats. While I have aspirations for this blog to be informative, I’m writing it in a personal capacity rather than a professional one. If I was writing as Caitríona, Applied Linguist, I would go back and double check facts, stats, references etc. That’s all very valuable, but like mandatory reading, I know myself well enough to know it would suck all the joy out of this for me. So I’ll be writing as Caitríona (person who happens to be doing a PhD in Applied Linguistics). Sometimes I’ll be writing about things that I’ve read in academic sources where all the stats, facts, references etc. were double checked, sometimes I’ll write about my lived experiences or my opinions and those are only as good as the experiences and opinions of the next person. If (when) I get things wrong, I’m open to feedback/ correction etc. Of course, I won’t be writing about any unpublished data/ findings etc. Research ethics is very important so some ideas will have to sit on the back burner until data has been published (I’ve started an ideas notebook so hopefully that might free up some working memory to hang on to some more ideas). And I’m sure I’ve forgotten some crucially important points. When they inevitably come to me at three in the morning some night, or someone points them out to me in conversation, I’ll either add them in here or do a follow up post. Most importantly, thank you for reading: let me know what you think and let me know what you’d like to know more about (language related, PhD related or (almost) anything)!
Le grá1,
Caitríona
1 Le grá: Irish, ‘with love’
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Caitríona O' Brien 