Book Review
Professors as Writers by Robert Boice
Review written by Dr. Catherine Riordan, Vice Provost

There has been a lot of writing going on at our house this summer.  Phil attended the FaCIT workshop by Tara Gray in April, and has been following her advice religiously, including joining a group of faculty who meet every Friday to share and talk about their writing—products and process.  My writing is much more solitary and focused not on my own voice, but conveying the positions of others or an institution.  Our eldest daughter’s writing is of cards and thank you notes—much less stressful than the college essays she was writing six months ago.  During that time she had at least a touch of every writing ailment summarized in Robert Boice’s book on writing:  Professors as Writers: A Self Help Guide to Writing (1990).  In comparison, Phil and I are doing much better—we suffer from only two or three of the common problems writers face. 

Boice’s book, Professors as Writers, is a prescription for troubled writers:  “a self-help manual for colleagues who want to write more productively, painlessly and successfully (vii).”  Through exercises, personal anecdotes and summaries of the relevant research, Boice begins with helping faculty get started writing (i.e., ‘unstuck’) and then moves on to structured ways to make writing time more productive.  I used some of his strategies in writing this review and saw how they were overkill for a short process like this, but could be helpful for particularly difficult or important writing projects.

One of my struggles in writing is weaving my ideas into a coherent narrative.  From Boice I learned the technique of clustering in which diagrams are superimposed on a free form generative writing exercise.  Key words are circled and lines connect words as they tap common themes.  This reveals graphically the thread of ideas and can be used to reorganize them, reveal areas that need further development or suggest redundancies. 

Another of my struggles is finishing writing—what Boice calls perfectionism, but which I prefer to think of as ongoing and tireless inspiration.  Regardless of the label, we are talking about the same results—long delays in moving pieces from draft form to finished and submitted report, manuscript or proposal.  Boice has some good ideas to address this challenge, one of which has been a successful strategy for me:  Get a co-author who doesn’t suffer from the same tendency.  A co-author who became a dear friend over the course of three books was this person for me.  When I tell you that if it weren’t for Paul, I would not have a publication over 40 pages, I am only half kidding. 

Another idea Boice discusses is finding the right time and place to write—probably everyone has heard this before.  In fact some of us may have invested more time in creating the time and place than actually writing!  Boice himself was very good at creating private time for himself.  When I was in graduate school at SUNY-Albany, Boice had the office right next to my major professor.  He was one of the few professors whose door was almost always closed and who didn’t necessarily answer to a knock.  At the time I was startled by this behavior—now I understand it much better.  Balancing responsibilities for teaching, thesis advising and service with those of writing is very, very tough,  usually requiring much more dedication and management than I realized in graduate school.   While I am hard pressed to think of any CMU position for which a door closed most of the time would be acceptable, the idea of a regular period of one or two hours daily for those who need to be productive writers seems reasonable.

An idea of Boice’s I wish I had known to share with our daughter last fall was the idea of focusing on what you ARE ready to write, and not on what you are not able/ready to do or what it is that is keeping/blocking your writing.  The thinking and written narrative this generates can be very helpful in launching the more difficult projects according to Boice’s experience.

Over the years because I was teaching writing intensive courses of various types, I tried to stay up on at least some of the research on what makes a successful writer.  This book is a comprehensive summary of that literature, at the same time it is a workbook that could be very helpful to those in the early stages of writing projects, or who just want to strengthen their skills.  Its intended audience is faculty members, with strategies and examples faculty can relate to drawn from Boice’s years of coaching faculty in writing. Boice’s use of excerpts from previous narratives about writing is exceptional and powerfully conveys his point that the challenges of writing well, productively and without too much pain has been a dominant desire for many across the centuries.

I recommend this quick read for writers or prospective writers, for its potential to be a useful tool and ongoing source of motivation.

Title: Professors as Writers
Authors: Robert Boice
Price: $ 19.95 (Paperback)
Publisher: New Forums Press, Stillwater, OK
Year: 1990
Pages: 186 pages