Rondalyn: I am so excited to talk with you about writing and especially writing research. Hopefully, today we will demystify it. I think there is so much important information that we hold within our field and within the clinical work that we do. It both makes me both sad and a little crazy that we do not disseminate it more broadly. Today is really an effort to encourage more people to share knowledge and wisdom in the service of helping people. Let's dive in and talk about how can we get a grip on research writing and scholarship.
What is Writing?
Writing and scholarship tells a story. I have been a creative writer for a long time, but it had never occurred to me to think about research as a story. We are going to start today by talking about research as a story and about scholars as storytellers. Writing helps us to:
- Discover ideas,
- Make connections,
- Create new perspectives,
- Demand something new from a reader,
- Create a new world through transcribed ideas, and
- Empower thought through the written word
Writing is the process of discovering your ideas. Putting them down on paper helps us look at them and helps us edit them and hone in on what we are trying to understand, either for ourselves or in order to communicate with others. It helps us make connections.
We are in the 100th anniversary of our profession. I can read the words of Eleanor Clarke Slagle that she wrote down a hundred years ago. That is profound. I am so grateful for people who took the time to write something down years ago. It is a way of making connections across time, across space, and across concepts and ideologies. It helps us create new perspectives because we can share things with people that we might not ever meet otherwise, and it demands something new from the reader. I am sure you have had the experience where you read something and you are like, "Wait, what?" You have to really struggle with it to understand, and from that struggle you grow into a new thinker, a new person, really. It helps us create a new world through that transcription of ideas. We have newness all the time when we read new ideas and take in new information that is delivered to our doorsteps. It also helps to empower us and empower our thoughts through the written word. I love it when I read something and think, "Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking."
Writing is a very powerful process. They talk about the pen is indeed mightier than the sword, it really is. I read when there is a takeover, like a dictatorship or some kind of a change in regime, one of the first groups that they round up and try to get rid of are the writers, as they are the ones that translate ideologies and keep ideas and concepts alive. They also document things in a way that others really cannot.
Writing is a very unique tool that we have. Throughout history, writers have really invoked our passion, and as I said, revolutionized ideas. These ideas can sometimes be dangerous. They can bring up something new. Perhaps they say the concept that you understood before is not true. It is very dangerous to put some of those ideas out there, even in our research. We will discuss this more. If all writing tells a story, then scholarly writing is going to narrate the story of your research, so we are going to spend today talking about that.
Structure Matters
Like all stories, good stories have a structure. They have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Great stories really change you when you read them, but truly, the most powerful change happens when we write them. Suzanne Peloquin is one of my writing heroes. I think her Eleanor Clarke Slagle lecture was transformative to me personally. They really changed my life in many ways. It changed the way I think and a lot of the habits, routines and rituals that I engage in on a day-to-day basis. Her words gave me permission to write not only as a scholar, but also with my heart, and to strive to figure out how to put those things together. She also introduced me to a history of our profession that I had not understood before, and I am forever grateful. How many of you are familiar with this particular quote: "occupational therapists reach for the heart as well as the hands, for indeed, it's the heart that does the healing?" We know that quote because Suzanne Peloquin found it, interpreted it, translated it, and gave it back to us. That quote is by Ora Ruggles, the first reconstruction aid, and perhaps the first clinical occupational therapist in our history, a hundred years ago. Yet, without Suzanne Peloquin's work, she may have been forgotten during the centennial.
Charlotte Royeen, also in her Eleanor Clarke Slagle lecture, gave us a way of thinking about chaos within occupational therapy. We look at chaos every single day. The work we do is to be willing to step into chaos, and come up with some kind of meaning or organization in behalf on others' function/This particular Eleanor Clarke Slagle lecture put that together. It took us on a journey and told us a story about chaos theory; how complex it is, nonlinear dynamics, and then the end of the story when we can use that to be transformative in the lives of the people that we care for on a day-to-day basis. To me, that is real power. Another great piece is Prevalence of Sensory Characteristics in the General Population: A Person-Centered Approach by Winnie Dunn. I could go on and on about people and their transformative writings, but I wanted to just give you a few examples to show you how people have written in scholastic work in such a way that they have told us a story. They have taken scholarship and translated it into a story.
When we think first about scholarship or reading research, some of us think, "boring." However, that is not what great writing does. Again, great writing really takes us on a journey and tells a story. Let's talk about how that happens. Where does it come from? What are the tools? Do these authors just make that up?
Hero's Journey
There is a structure that we can look to that helps us understand how to construct a story in such a way that it has that power, and one of the most widely recognized way of doing that is the Hero's Journey, which was given to us by our scholar Joseph Campbell. In his work he talks about the adventure of a hero, the archetype, the person who sets out to make a change, and the structures of that. Once you understand the hero's journey, you will be able to see this over and over. I just watched the movie, Rogue One.
