- Email: [email protected]
Reflections on writing
REFLECTIONS ON WRITING W a n d a K. Mohr PhD, RN, FAAN
eing published rather extensively,
B I am accustomed to reviewers' comments, their conflicting suggestions,
and other idiosyncrasies. For the most part, like other scholars, I pick my battles and issues with care, being ever cognizant that taking oneself too seriously is a most unattractive attribute. However, recently I have been criticized by several reviewers for using first person pronouns in several research and expository papers. This puzzles me, particularly when I consider the two decades or more of literature written by several feminist, naturalistic, and postmodern scholars urging the social science community to find its voice.l-3 These scholars argue that scientific writers should abandon their fruitless search for "objectivity" and expose the limitations of the I/eye of the author, by writing in the first person and describing the interaction between what is being observed and who is doing the observing. Amid the widely recognized failure of the social sciences to ground themselves in methods and theoretical commitments that can share the scientificity of the natural sciences, many of our reviewers persist in promoting a traditional social science writing style. This traditional social science writing enhances the authority of the author by making the author disappear, leaving only the impersonal voice of "truth" speaking--usually in the passive voice. In nursing, as in the other social sciences, scholars have raised this form of
Wanda IC Mohr is an associateprofessorat Indiana UniversityPurdue University;Indianapolis. Nurs Outlook 1999;47:198-9. Copyright © 1999 by Mosby, Inc. 0029-6554/99/$8.00 + 0
198
Mohr
3511/101506
scientific language above all other styles of writing. The conventions that characterize this style have become the model for authoritarian utterances within what is considered scholarship. Method, evidence, documentation, and proof have become the blueprint from which writers dare not deviate if they wish to be published and taken seriously. To be sure, intellectual progress within this blueprint is achieved through an ongoing competition among opposing viewpoints, but those viewpoints are presented within a template of scientific conventions and scientific writing. Progress within this set of conventions has become a continual struggle for supremacy, for the intellectual goal of getting closer to "the truth," and for personal career enhancement. This view of the knowledge-building process in turn legitimates and reinforces this particular style of our writing. Our journals are full of articles that act as though the particular perspective presented is "the truth." Authors try to present highly polished "show-stopping" arguments that admit no weaknesses. Their style of writing tries to present itself as finished, impenetrable, not open to attack, except in the form of normal science extensions--that is, minor, empirically based adjustments in this one best way to see the world. They admit few uncertainties because the implicit goal is to score a point, beat the competition, and destroy opposing arguments. To make the situation even worse, our essays are strangling in pomposity, jargon, overinflated terms, and passivity of verb form at the same time that we steadfastly refuse to find our voice. Our essays and articles are full of bodiless constructions that read: "it is contended" or anthropomorphisms such as "this article
supports the notion..." as if an article was a living, breathing entity that speaks for itself. We hide behind the nobody, depersonalizing our discourse by completely purging the person pronouns from their rules of what is acceptable convention and grammar and what is not. It is seductive to think that our thought and our research is free of ideology, values, and moral or emotional foundations representing what philosopher Richard Rort~ calls "truth with a capital T" and "reality with a capital R." But we have long since been disabused of the notion of value-free research endeavors and we know that any social scientific perspective is in essence an interpretive framework that is subjectively imposed on the process of collecting and analyzing cultural data. A social scientific perspective is not a neutral objective description of empirical facts. Researchers studying the same phenomena and events with equal care, skill, and honesty may evaluate, recall, and interpret what happens differently. There is no outside, detached standpoint from which we gather and present data. When we try to understand the cultural worlds in which we live, we are dealing with interpretations and interpretations of interpretations. Thus the search for neutrality is futile, but the quest for a neutral objectivity has become an excuse to use the passive and disembodied voice, thereby distancing subject from object and hiding the identity of the speaker from the reader/ listener. This action effectively cancels the strength of an argument with the evasion of speech that is owned by no one and for whom no one takes responsibility. Dante Alighieri in his Divine Comedy posited that the chronicler and user of language "is the most centrally responsible moral agent of his time--a shaper of the moral life of civi-
VOLUME47 • NUMBER5 NURSING OUTLOOK
Reflections on Writing
Mohr
lization and an exemplar for future generations."5 When our journals forbid the use of the subjective, they mask the identity of the owners of those words and take away from them the responsibility for their words and their deeds. It is obvious that artides and papers are written by and that research is conducted by an 'T' or a "we." Our journal requirements must be open to invite us to take responsibility for our
work, avoid precluding us from speaking in the active voice, and desist in encouraging our scholars to continue to hide behind the false security and inauthenticity of the disembodied passive voice. • REFERENCES 1. Harding S. Whose science?Whose knowledge? Thinking from women's lives. Ithaca (NY): Cornell University Press; 1991.
2. IrigarayL. And the one doesn't stir without the other. Signs: J Women Culture Society 1981;7(1):60-7. 3. Van Maanen J. Tales of the field. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 1988. 4. Rorty R. Objectivity, relativism, and truth. New York: Cambridge University Press; 1991. 5. Smith S. Dante on writing, truth, and the power that counsels. Boston Book Rev 1995; December:l-26.
News From NINR
RESEARCH
Patricia A. Grady, P h D , R N , FAAN, Director, N I N R , N I H he column in the July/August issue of Nursing Outlook presented an overview of the various career options open to persons making the transition from new doctoral graduate to senior researcher. This column not only describes various funding options that assist in that transition, but also provides information about a valuable means of funding small-scale studies. Postdoctoral training is a vital part of a nursing research career path, and the federal government is committed to providing training opportunities. N I N R offers both individual and institutional postdoctoral training through National Research Service Awards. The institutional National Research Service Awards, known as T32 grants, enable schools of nursing with research programs to provide full-time postdoctoral research training to trainees it selects. Individual National Research Service Awards, or F32 grants, provide postdoctoral research training to nurses to broaden their scientific background and extend their potential for research in specified health-related areas related to the mission of NINR. At least two "K" awards are used for career training. The Mentored Research Scientist Development Awards (K01s) provide 3 years of sponsored research experience for persons to gain experience in new research areas. After this experience, candidates are expected to be able to pursue independent research careers. A relatively new K award is the N I N R Career Transition Award (K22). The K22 consists of an Intramural phase that provides a research training opportunity on the NIH campus within the N I N R or other intramural programs. This 2- to 3-year period is followed by an Extramural phase that provides research grant support at an extramural institution. It is important for developing researchers to work collaboratively with other investigators before applying for a traditional research grant, the R01. What best facilitates successful funding at an R01 level is establishing a track record in publications and some funding history as well as establishing an area of beginning scientific expertise. This program of research emerges incrementally and over time.
T
NURSING OUTLOOK
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER1999
When considering applying for investigator-initiated research and deciding between the 2 major research mechan i s m s - t h e R15 and the R01--we urge you to first consider the R15. The R15 Academic Research Enhancement Award is designed for qualified faculty to receive support for small-scale research projects at institutions that do not receive funding from NIH. This award is virtually a "small grants program" for NINR. Nearly all university schools of nursing are eligible. (The following schools of nursing are ineligible to receive Academic Research Enhancement Award grants: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; University of California, San Francisco; University of Washington; University of Pennsylvania; and Case Western Reserve University.) With a success rate nearly twice that of R01s, the Academic Research Enhancement Award is an exciting opportunity to conduct independent research to support the United States' biomedical and behavioral research effort. These awards are designed for small research projects, either for feasibility studies, pilot studies, or other small-scale projects that would provide data preliminary to a traditional research project grant (R01). Experience and skills gained while directing the scientific effort of an R15 award enable a person to carry Out early studies and be better positioned for success when the time 'comes to apply for an R01. The R01 award mechanism is a traditional research grant award. This competitive award supports researchers with considerable experience and training who are responsible for developing the research protocol, concept, method, and approach. A career in nursing research, similar to all research careers, is a long-term investment, requiring a long-term strategy. Persisting despite obstacles or setbacks, remaining flexible, and enjoying the research journey are ingredients for fulfillment in a career as a nurse researcher. N I N R continues in its mission to provide the training and research support needed to begin and sustain the journey. • NINR's Web site: www.nih.gov/ninr
Op-Ed
199
eing published rather extensively,
B I am accustomed to reviewers' comments, their conflicting suggestions,
and other idiosyncrasies. For the most part, like other scholars, I pick my battles and issues with care, being ever cognizant that taking oneself too seriously is a most unattractive attribute. However, recently I have been criticized by several reviewers for using first person pronouns in several research and expository papers. This puzzles me, particularly when I consider the two decades or more of literature written by several feminist, naturalistic, and postmodern scholars urging the social science community to find its voice.l-3 These scholars argue that scientific writers should abandon their fruitless search for "objectivity" and expose the limitations of the I/eye of the author, by writing in the first person and describing the interaction between what is being observed and who is doing the observing. Amid the widely recognized failure of the social sciences to ground themselves in methods and theoretical commitments that can share the scientificity of the natural sciences, many of our reviewers persist in promoting a traditional social science writing style. This traditional social science writing enhances the authority of the author by making the author disappear, leaving only the impersonal voice of "truth" speaking--usually in the passive voice. In nursing, as in the other social sciences, scholars have raised this form of
Wanda IC Mohr is an associateprofessorat Indiana UniversityPurdue University;Indianapolis. Nurs Outlook 1999;47:198-9. Copyright © 1999 by Mosby, Inc. 0029-6554/99/$8.00 + 0
198
Mohr
3511/101506
scientific language above all other styles of writing. The conventions that characterize this style have become the model for authoritarian utterances within what is considered scholarship. Method, evidence, documentation, and proof have become the blueprint from which writers dare not deviate if they wish to be published and taken seriously. To be sure, intellectual progress within this blueprint is achieved through an ongoing competition among opposing viewpoints, but those viewpoints are presented within a template of scientific conventions and scientific writing. Progress within this set of conventions has become a continual struggle for supremacy, for the intellectual goal of getting closer to "the truth," and for personal career enhancement. This view of the knowledge-building process in turn legitimates and reinforces this particular style of our writing. Our journals are full of articles that act as though the particular perspective presented is "the truth." Authors try to present highly polished "show-stopping" arguments that admit no weaknesses. Their style of writing tries to present itself as finished, impenetrable, not open to attack, except in the form of normal science extensions--that is, minor, empirically based adjustments in this one best way to see the world. They admit few uncertainties because the implicit goal is to score a point, beat the competition, and destroy opposing arguments. To make the situation even worse, our essays are strangling in pomposity, jargon, overinflated terms, and passivity of verb form at the same time that we steadfastly refuse to find our voice. Our essays and articles are full of bodiless constructions that read: "it is contended" or anthropomorphisms such as "this article
supports the notion..." as if an article was a living, breathing entity that speaks for itself. We hide behind the nobody, depersonalizing our discourse by completely purging the person pronouns from their rules of what is acceptable convention and grammar and what is not. It is seductive to think that our thought and our research is free of ideology, values, and moral or emotional foundations representing what philosopher Richard Rort~ calls "truth with a capital T" and "reality with a capital R." But we have long since been disabused of the notion of value-free research endeavors and we know that any social scientific perspective is in essence an interpretive framework that is subjectively imposed on the process of collecting and analyzing cultural data. A social scientific perspective is not a neutral objective description of empirical facts. Researchers studying the same phenomena and events with equal care, skill, and honesty may evaluate, recall, and interpret what happens differently. There is no outside, detached standpoint from which we gather and present data. When we try to understand the cultural worlds in which we live, we are dealing with interpretations and interpretations of interpretations. Thus the search for neutrality is futile, but the quest for a neutral objectivity has become an excuse to use the passive and disembodied voice, thereby distancing subject from object and hiding the identity of the speaker from the reader/ listener. This action effectively cancels the strength of an argument with the evasion of speech that is owned by no one and for whom no one takes responsibility. Dante Alighieri in his Divine Comedy posited that the chronicler and user of language "is the most centrally responsible moral agent of his time--a shaper of the moral life of civi-
VOLUME47 • NUMBER5 NURSING OUTLOOK
Reflections on Writing
Mohr
lization and an exemplar for future generations."5 When our journals forbid the use of the subjective, they mask the identity of the owners of those words and take away from them the responsibility for their words and their deeds. It is obvious that artides and papers are written by and that research is conducted by an 'T' or a "we." Our journal requirements must be open to invite us to take responsibility for our
work, avoid precluding us from speaking in the active voice, and desist in encouraging our scholars to continue to hide behind the false security and inauthenticity of the disembodied passive voice. • REFERENCES 1. Harding S. Whose science?Whose knowledge? Thinking from women's lives. Ithaca (NY): Cornell University Press; 1991.
2. IrigarayL. And the one doesn't stir without the other. Signs: J Women Culture Society 1981;7(1):60-7. 3. Van Maanen J. Tales of the field. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 1988. 4. Rorty R. Objectivity, relativism, and truth. New York: Cambridge University Press; 1991. 5. Smith S. Dante on writing, truth, and the power that counsels. Boston Book Rev 1995; December:l-26.
News From NINR
RESEARCH
Patricia A. Grady, P h D , R N , FAAN, Director, N I N R , N I H he column in the July/August issue of Nursing Outlook presented an overview of the various career options open to persons making the transition from new doctoral graduate to senior researcher. This column not only describes various funding options that assist in that transition, but also provides information about a valuable means of funding small-scale studies. Postdoctoral training is a vital part of a nursing research career path, and the federal government is committed to providing training opportunities. N I N R offers both individual and institutional postdoctoral training through National Research Service Awards. The institutional National Research Service Awards, known as T32 grants, enable schools of nursing with research programs to provide full-time postdoctoral research training to trainees it selects. Individual National Research Service Awards, or F32 grants, provide postdoctoral research training to nurses to broaden their scientific background and extend their potential for research in specified health-related areas related to the mission of NINR. At least two "K" awards are used for career training. The Mentored Research Scientist Development Awards (K01s) provide 3 years of sponsored research experience for persons to gain experience in new research areas. After this experience, candidates are expected to be able to pursue independent research careers. A relatively new K award is the N I N R Career Transition Award (K22). The K22 consists of an Intramural phase that provides a research training opportunity on the NIH campus within the N I N R or other intramural programs. This 2- to 3-year period is followed by an Extramural phase that provides research grant support at an extramural institution. It is important for developing researchers to work collaboratively with other investigators before applying for a traditional research grant, the R01. What best facilitates successful funding at an R01 level is establishing a track record in publications and some funding history as well as establishing an area of beginning scientific expertise. This program of research emerges incrementally and over time.
T
NURSING OUTLOOK
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER1999
When considering applying for investigator-initiated research and deciding between the 2 major research mechan i s m s - t h e R15 and the R01--we urge you to first consider the R15. The R15 Academic Research Enhancement Award is designed for qualified faculty to receive support for small-scale research projects at institutions that do not receive funding from NIH. This award is virtually a "small grants program" for NINR. Nearly all university schools of nursing are eligible. (The following schools of nursing are ineligible to receive Academic Research Enhancement Award grants: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; University of California, San Francisco; University of Washington; University of Pennsylvania; and Case Western Reserve University.) With a success rate nearly twice that of R01s, the Academic Research Enhancement Award is an exciting opportunity to conduct independent research to support the United States' biomedical and behavioral research effort. These awards are designed for small research projects, either for feasibility studies, pilot studies, or other small-scale projects that would provide data preliminary to a traditional research project grant (R01). Experience and skills gained while directing the scientific effort of an R15 award enable a person to carry Out early studies and be better positioned for success when the time 'comes to apply for an R01. The R01 award mechanism is a traditional research grant award. This competitive award supports researchers with considerable experience and training who are responsible for developing the research protocol, concept, method, and approach. A career in nursing research, similar to all research careers, is a long-term investment, requiring a long-term strategy. Persisting despite obstacles or setbacks, remaining flexible, and enjoying the research journey are ingredients for fulfillment in a career as a nurse researcher. N I N R continues in its mission to provide the training and research support needed to begin and sustain the journey. • NINR's Web site: www.nih.gov/ninr
Op-Ed
199