On Writing

Exhortations for those in the academic thick-of-it

Précis/TL;DR: in which we provide a little advice for those who trying to make a go of it in academia. The argument is simple: you should be writing more. I suggest a few reasons why this is the case. The newsletter concludes with newly published work from me, as always.

The other day I wrote up a Twitter thread on the topic of grad school and how to approach it. I’m reproducing it here because I think the advice is worth it, if perhaps unpopular. This advice is really targeted at people in the early to middle stages of a Ph.D program, or those who are planning on jumping into one in the near-term. Others may find it useful as an exhortation for other career paths as well, although with relevant modifications and distinct emphases.

The core bit of unsolicited advice I want to suggest is the following. If you are in a Ph.D program or are planning on doing one, you should plan on writing and publishing articles (essays, etc) while you are also dissertating. If you do this, you may have a fighting chance at being competitive for a job, either in academia or in a policy/government/advocacy field at least partially related to your research interests and Ph.D training. If you do not, your chances dwindle significantly.

Admittedly, this advice closely tracks with an internet meme in academic social media circles. The implication is that the ritualistic statement of ‘you should be writing’ is a sign of academic overwork and poor boundary-keeping. That may very well be true. Unfortunately, it is also important advice for those wishing to make a real go at an academic career, or anything related to it. So let me explain why writing and publishing (a lot) is nevertheless absolutely vital for your future scholarly career.

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Unsolicited Advice to Current Ph.D Students

My unsolicited advice to current (and prospective) Ph.D students is very direct and simple. Even though nobody wants to hear this… yes, you really do need to be writing and publishing as much as possible. And this means writing other papers, essays, and even short-form blog posts in addition to your dissertation work.

This is not how it used to be, at least so we are told. Back in the day, people could successfully get tenure-track jobs with just a good dissertation from a good institution and a good advisor. That claim was likely always a little naïve and overstated, but it’s certainly no longer true now, and competitive applicants now usually have multiple publications under their belt. What’s more, even uncompetitive Ph.D candidates need to have additional writing to show for themselves for other jobs outside of academia.

So that’s the key - and a very instrumentalist view of the profession. Your dissertation is a huge lift in and of itself (essentially writing a book that no one will read). But unfortunately, you need to do more. We can expand this advice out further, though. So here are seven reasons that in fact yes, you should be writing.

Seven Reasons to Write

First, because your writing probably sucks. And the only way to get better is to do it, over and over again, in various formats, for years on end. For social scientists, academic journal articles, policy essays, and short blog-style formats are all relevant and good practice.

I say this with experience. My writing is still clunky and often overcomplicated, but you should see what it was like a few years ago - or even worse, in my first few years of grad school! Writing regularly has made it better, and I guarantee that this is the case for most. Writing for different publication formats is also very useful, for the same reason of skill-development. Writing a dissertation is not the same as a tight academic article, which is not the same as a policy brief or an argumentative essay for wide readership. So practicing your writing through regular iteration is key.

Second, because ultimately the only data points anyone in the field will even look at when considering you as a potential junior colleague are 1) your institutional pedigree; 2) any language/method/quant skills you may have; and 3) the titles of things you’ve written. Then if you pass that initial screen someone may take a closer, more substantive look. And I don’t mean just tenure-track jobs here, I mean ‘alt-ac’ ones too. So you need to get through this first round of vetting somehow.

The problem is very simple - there are many more Ph.Ds produced every year than there are jobs available. Being smart or having interesting thoughts is not enough. So you need to distinguish yourself. Having a set of published papers is a core distinguishing feature. And for non-academic jobs, you are competing with people that did not spend 5-10 years in graduate school, but held real jobs in their respective fields. So you need a leg up on them as well.

Third, because it’s your job. You are a scholar-in-training and are supposed to have or be developing expertise in a set of topics in your field of interest. You should be applying that expertise to expand human knowledge. Someone is spending money for you to do this, after all. Often taxpayer money or those of a major private institution that has taken a bet on your aptitude to contribute to an academic mission.

This one is not often mentioned, but it is very true and central to the very profession of being a… professional… scholar. Even though university jobs are technically hiring for teaching, they are almost always judged based on research productivity. This is a deep norm in the profession, and shows no sign of changing. Publications are a primary status currency of the field, not how well one teaches or how many students were moved and shaped by your guidance. For that reason, you need to engage in the professional norms as they are. Which means writing.

Fourth, because as you write you will find out what you’re really, truly interested in, what you’re actually good at, and what you don’t know. Until you go through the motions of researching and then writing it up and sending it out, you may not realize who you are as a scholar.

This is a little unintuitive, because in principle you usually think you already know what you’re really interested in when you start a Ph.D program. But oftentimes, interests change over the course of your time in the program. And then more so afterwards. Your dissertation project, the other key touchstone which should communicate your scholarly interests, is a deep dive into one sub-component of one subject. But other writing on other things and in other formats allows you to organically explore the topic in a broader fashion. And you may end up going down different intellectual directions than those that you thought you were interested in initially. So doubling down on writing allows that process to get going, and get going at a useful pace.

Fifth, because you don’t really have a ‘research agenda’ until you have a published record to work off of. Aspirations and goals are not the same thing as sustained work that you can speak to. Also no one knows who you are until there’s a trail to follow. And of course, your arguments cannot be cited or contested or agreed with until they are down on paper somewhere. In important ways, your scholarly views and research findings simply don’t have impact until they are in print in some form.

Most people go into academic work because they have something to say about a research topic. Or they have a question or set of questions that they really want answered. Writing is how others observe what those are for you. This seems obvious (it is), but it needs to be emphasized nevertheless. Some people come out the other side of a Ph.D program knowing many things, but cannot necessarily communicate that knowledge well to others. Writing is the way to do that automatically, by dint of having your views actually out in the world.

Sixth, because as a scholar you need to pick productive academic fights and decide what is wrong in your field or in the relevant literature. Your grad school classes can help you identify what feels wrong, but only writing (and in exploratory ways teaching as well, if you are bold) will get you on the path to identifying truth.

This one is really important, and honestly not stressed enough. The entire meta-level project of scholarship is justified by the goal of improving our knowledge of the world in some way. Which implies that we have incomplete knowledge at present. And that some people and some conventional wisdoms are wrong, or mistaken, about it currently. Your job, at the highest level, is to fix that somehow. Or to work towards improving it. There is an inherently contestatory nature to research, even if you are the kindest, most collaborative person around. Writing is the way to intervene, correct the record, expand knowledge, and engage with academics and ideas you think are just plain wrong.

Seventh, because as noted above, there are just very few jobs to be had and you’re not actually competing in a meritocratic hiring ecosystem. Never were, never will be. The academic field is not a fair place, nor are alt-ac fields like government, think-tanks, or advocacy. You may not be looked at by a hiring committee for innumerable reasons, from your demographic profile to your lack of an effective network to the idiosyncrasies of the person or people compiling the short-list. That is what it is.

Therefore, a preponderance of writing is the closest thing to an egalitarian leg up you may get given these circumstances. There are many variables you cannot control, but publishing is one that you can. So you need to be making forward progress on the one variable you can regularly influence. Thus, writing.

On Advice Never Given

So those are some reasons to write in general terms. But we can be a little more specific about how to go about it. The advice that I wished I’d followed when I was in grad school was this: make sure every longform paper you write for your grad courses can become an academic article with a little more work.

Which means that the papers you write for professors should be targeted at interesting research questions that you are interested in yourself, and structured in such a way that you could revise them into a real journal article. And after you emerge from comps and your prospectus, start turning one a year into a journal submission while you are dissertating. This should start around year three or four of grad school, and continue until you defend.

In doing so, shoot for second- and third-tier journals, although feel free to humor your adviser with aspirations to submit to a top-three journal if you need. Find a blog or think-tank or some other outlet to place smaller analytic pieces on a topic you know or are exploring. Do at least two per year of those. If you can keep this up, you’ll end up with several big articles and a small welter of other pieces that you can point to as evidence of your quality and interests. Your CV will look full, instead of weak or weirdly padded with conference appearances and a short list of teaching assistanceships.

Remember, academic articles take forever to get published, and are often rejected at multiple places before landing. This process takes a stupidly long time. If you are only thinking about how your CV looks in your ultimate year of a doctoral program, you are too late and you may find yourself accidentally uncompetitive as the finish line looms and you need to find a postgraduate job. Starting the writing process while in the middle of your Ph.D candidacy ensures you have a track-record developing, far ahead of your defense date.

In the meantime, and over the course of this multiyear process, try to figure out your scholarly ‘brand.’ Pick three or four thematic labels fixing your research agenda(s). For me, I am ‘authoritarianism, ‘illiberalism,’ and ‘Russian/post-Soviet politics.’ Since the Ph.D, I've since added ‘Russian political-military affairs’ through my day-job at CNA, which was where I landed at the end of my time in the Ph.D program.

Branding yourself may feel a little cheap, perhaps, but think of it as the elevator pitch to someone at a party: ‘so what do you do’? You could talk in detail about your dissertation and bore the person to death in three minutes flat, or you could just say ‘Oh, I study x and y. I’m an x scholar.’ That’s where you want to be. You want to be legible to others, especially people that don’t and won’t care about the specifics of your deep research.

If you do all that, you may have a fighting chance at a tenure-track position and you will have good cache to transition to policy, government, or advocacy. A real skill like language or statistical/quantitative analysis is also incredibly helpful, but that’s a separate discussion.

For what it’s worth, I’m not actually a successful model for snagging a tenure-track position myself, but neither will the majority of people in a given grad program. I managed to get in the door at a research institution nevertheless. Having a real publication track-record helped a lot to legitimate me in general, and has opened doors that otherwise would have been closed, or simply not on even on my professional radar.

But for those with academic aspirations, it’s just not a mystery what is successful for getting a tenure-track job. Ivy degrees, publications, skills, and luck. We can add ‘a very good network’ too, but that overlaps with the others. All of my colleagues that managed to get academic jobs did the same thing. You should see their CVs - all very impressive! All a lot of hard work and additional writing for them to get in the door.

The variable you have the most control over (once you're already inside as a Ph.D student) is publications. And it also has the great benefit of making you a better scholar in the process. So go get writing!

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Further Reading

There’s not all that much to report in this newsletter, so I will remind about a few projects recently published:

• First, an article in the conservative-liberal FUSION online journal, which asked me to review a new book on American right-wing support for foreign dictators. You can find it here, “Understanding the Call of the Authoritarian.” I found the book interesting, but an account that only very partially captures a much broader phenomenon of American elite interest in non-democracies around the world.

• Second, the editors at the national security journal War on the Rocks asked me to review my article on Russia’s authoritarian public politics that I wrote for them last year (you can find it here). We did so in a back-and-forth written interview, “Rewind & Reconnoiter: Public Politics in the Wartime Russian Dictatorship with Julian Waller.” I claim that my argument at the beginning of 2023 held up quite well actually, although we now need to think differently as the ground has shifted notably.

• Third, an academic book chapter in the new Oxford Handbook of Illiberalism, edited by Marlene Laruelle. My entry is “Illiberalism and Authoritarianism,” and provides a systematic overview of different ways scholarship has conceptualized and defined ‘authoritarianism.’ I come down quite hard in favor of a political regime approach and very much so against variations on a psychological account of authoritarianism.

• Fourth, a relatively short analytic article in The National Interest titled “What Does Tucker Carlson’s Vladimir Putin Interview Mean for the Ukraine War?” which does what it says on the tin. Funnily enough, it is also a formalization of a Twitter thread I made at the time.

Finally, if you missed my latest Substack essays “On Navalny the Politician” (March) and “On Capturing ‘Fascism’” (April), you can find them below:

And finally, if you missed out on the news about our upcoming book’s preorder discount, check it out here:

- Julian