We’ve just been to a university research conference, where academics and doctoral students from all disciplines get together for a couple of days and present papers on their current research. People asked each other what they thought of the conference. The most common response was, ‘I never knew!’ People were astonished at all the fascinating work, how it echoed with their own work even if it was from another discipline, and how there was so much enthusiasm for this aspect of the job. Why didn’t people know this already? Well, the value of conferences is precisely that it allows us to pause – pause from researching and pause from teaching and all the other jobs academics have – and to listen. This is a podcast about academic writing, but academic listening is crucial to the process of writing. Without that curious, enthusiastic listening, it will be all the harder for each of us to write, in turn, with enthusiasm and a sense of what future conference audiences will want to hear from us.

Boredom is a deadly sin, for academics. Boring writing is like boring talking, it is writing that keeps going long after people have stopped reading, talking that keeps going long after people have stopped listening. So practicing listening is a way of enlivening our own work and becoming more aware of the need to hold our own audiences. Conferences work like this, especially if – as with the conference we have just been at – they are not competitive and hierarchical. Research doesn’t have to be boring. I never knew that!

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