Six writing habits I reckon you ought to avoid in grant applications…..

There are lots of mistakes to avoid in writing grant applications, and I’ve written a bit about some of them in some previous posts (see “advice on grant applications” link above).  This one is more about writing habits.  I read a lot of draft grant applications, and as a result I’ve got an increasingly long list of writing quirks, ticks, habits, styles and affectations that Get On My Nerves.

Imagine I’m a reviewer… Okay, I’ll start again.. imagine I’m a proper reviewer with some kind of power and influence…. imagine further that I’ve got a pile of applications to review that’s as high as a high pile of applications.  Imagine how well disposed I’d feel towards anyone who makes reading their writing easier, clearer, or in the least bit more pleasant.  Remember how the really well-written essays make your own personal marking hell a little bit less sulphurous for a short time.  That.  Whatever that tiny burst of goodwill – or antibadwill – is worth, you want it.

The passive voice is excessively used

I didn’t know the difference between active and passive voice until relatively recently, and if you’re also from a generation where grammar wasn’t really teached in schools then you might not either.  Google is your friend for a proper explanation by people who actually know what they’re talking about, and you should probably read that first, but my favourite explanation is from Rebecca Johnson – if you can add “by zombies”, then it’s passive voice. I’ve also got the beginnings of a theory that the Borg from Star Trek use the passive voice, and that’s one of the things that makes them creepy (“resistance is futile” and “you will be assimilated”)  but I don’t know enough about grammar or Star Trek to make a case for this.   Sometimes the use of the passive voice (by zombies) is appropriate, but often it makes for distant and slightly tepid writing.  Consider:

A one day workshop will be held (by zombies) at which the research findings will be disseminated (by zombies).  A recording of the event will be made (bz) and posted on our blog (bz).  Relevant professional bodies will be approached (bz)…

This will be done, that will be done.  Yawn.  Although, to be fair, a workshop with that many zombies probably won’t be a tepid affair.  But much better, I think, to take ownership… we will do these things, co-Is A and B will lead on X.  Academic writing seems to encourage depersonalisation and formality and distancing (which is why politicians love it – “mistakes were made [perhaps by zombies, but not by me]”.

I think there are three reasons why I don’t like it.  One is that it’s just dull.  A second is that I think it can read like a way of avoiding detail or specifics or responsibility for precisely the reasons that politicians use it, so it can subconsciously undermine the credibility of what’s being proposed.  The third reason is that I think for at least some kinds of projects, who the research team are – and in particular who the PI is – really matters.  I can understand the temptation to be distant and objective and sciency as if the research speaks entirely for itself.  But this is your grant application, it’s something that you ought to be excited and enthused by, and that should come across. If you’re not, don’t even bother applying.

First Person singular, First Person plural, Third Person

Pat Thomson’s blog Patter has a much fuller and better discussion about the use of  “we” and “I” in academic writing that I can’t really add much to. But I think the key thing is to be consistent – don’t be calling yourself Dr Referstoherselfinthethirdperson in one part of the application, “I” in another, “the applicant” somewhere else, and “your humble servant”/ “our man in Havana” elsewhere.  Whatever you choose will feel awkward, but choose a consistent method of awkwardness and have done with it. Oh, and don’t use “we” if you’re the sole applicant.  Unless you’re Windsor (ii), E.

And don’t use first names for female team members and surnames for male team members.  Or, worse, first names for women, titles and surnames for men. I’ve not seen this myself, but I read about it in a tweet with the hashtag #everydaysexism

Furthermore and Moreover…

Is anyone willing to mount a defence for the utility of either of these words, other than (1) general diversity of language and (2) padding out undergraduate essays to the required word count? I’m just not sure what either of these words actually means or adds, other than perhaps as an attempted rhetorical flourish, or, more likely, a way of bridging non-sequiturs or propping up poor structuring.

“However” and “Yet”…. I’ll grudgingly allow to live.  For now.

Massive (Right Justified) Wall-o-Text Few things make my heart sink more than having to read a draft application that regards the use of paragraphs and other formatting devices as illustrative of a lack of seriousness and rigour. There is a distinction between densely argued and just dense.  Please make it easier to read… and that means not using right hand justification.  Yes, it has a kind of superficial neatness, but it makes the text much less readable.

Superabundance of Polysyllabic  Terminology

Too many long words. It’s not academic language and (entirely necessary) technical terms and jargon that I particularly object to – apart from in the lay summary, of course.  It’s a general inflation of linguistic complexity – using a dozen words where one will do, never using a simple word where a complex one will do, never making your point twice when a rhetorically-pleasing triple is on offer.

I guess this is all done in an attempt to make the application or the text seem as scholarly and intellectually rigorous as possible, and I think students may make similar mistakes.  As an undergraduate I think I went through a deeply regrettable phase of trying to ape the style of academic papers in my essay writing, and probably made myself sound like one of the most pompous nineteen year olds on the planet.

If you find yourself using words like “effectuate”, you might want to think about whether you might be guilty of this.

Sta. Cca. To. Sen. Ten. Ces.

Varying and manipulating sentence length can be done deliberately to produce certain effects.  Language has a natural rhythm and pace.  Most people probably have some awareness of what that is.  They are aware that sentences which are one paced can be very dull.  They are aware that this is something tepid about this paragraph.  But not everyone can feel the music in language.  I think it is a lack of commas that is killing this paragraph.  Probably there is a technical term for this.

So… anyone willing to defend “moreover” or “furthermore”? Any particularly irritating habits I’ve missed?  Anyone actually know any grammar or linguistics provide any technical terms for any of these habits?

ESRC success rates by discipline for 2012-13

Update: 2013/14 figures here.

WA pot of gold at the end of a rainbowith all of the fanfare of a cat-burglar slipping in through a first floor window in back office of a diamond museum, the ESRC has published its Vital Statistics for 2012-13, including the success rates by academic discipline.  I’ve been looking forward to seeing these figures to see if there’s been any change since last year’s figures, which showed huge variations in success rates between different disciplines, with success rates varying from 1 in 68 for Business and Management and 2 in 62 for Education compared to 7 of 18 for socio-legal studies.

The headline news, as trumpeted in the Times Higher, is that success rates are indeed up, and that “demand management” appears to be working.  Their table shows how applications, amount of money distributed, and success rates have varied over the last few years, and has figures for all of the research councils.  For the ESRC, the numbers in their Vital Statistics document are slightly different (315 applications, 27% success rate) to those in the Times Higher table (310, 26%) , possibly because some non-university recipients have been excluded.  The overall picture is hugely encouraging and is a great improvement on 14% success rates last year.  And it’s also worth repeating that these figures don’t seem to include the Knowledge Exchange scheme, which now has a 52% success rate.  This success rate is apparently too high, as the scheme is going to end in March next year to be replaced with a scheme of passing funding directly to institutions based on their ESRC funding record – similar to the EPSRC scheme which also delegates responsibility for running impact/knowledge exchange schemes to universities.

For the ESRC, “demand management” measures so far have largely consisted of:
(i) Telling universities to stop submitting crap applications (I paraphrase, obviously…..)
(ii) Telling universities that they have to have some kind of internal peer review process
(iii) Threatening some kind of researcher sanctions if (i) and (ii) don’t do the trick.

And the message appears to have been getting through.  Though I do wonder how much of this gain is through eliminating “small” research grants – up to £100k – which I think in recent times had a worse success rate than Standard Grants, though that wasn’t always the case historically.  Although it’s more work to process and review applications for four pots of 100k than for one of 400k, the loss of Standard Grants is to be regretted, as it’s now very difficult indeed to get funding for social science projects with a natural size of £20k-£199k.

But what you’re probably wondering is how your academic discipline got on this time round.  Well, you can find this year’s and last year’s Vital Statistics documents hidden away in a part of the ESRC’s website that even I struggle to find, and I’ve collated them for easy comparison purposes here.  But the figures aren’t comparing like with like – the 2011/12 figures included the last six months of the old Small Grants Scheme, which distorts things.  It’s also difficult (obviously) to make judgements based on small numbers which probably aren’t statistically significant. Also, in the 2011-12 figures there were 43 applications (about 6% of the total) which were flagged as “no lead discipline”, which isn’t a category this year.  But some overall trends have emerged:

  • Socio-legal Studies (7 from 18, 3 from 8), Linguistics (6 from 27, 5 from 15) and Social Anthropology (5 from 18, 4 from 5) have done significantly better than the average for the last two years
  • Business and Management (1 from 68, 2 from 17) and Education (2 from 62, 2 from 19) continue to do very poorly.
  • Economics and Economics and Social History did very well the year before last, but much less well this year.
  • Psychology got one-third of all the successes last year, and over a quarter the year before, though the success rate is only very slightly above average in both years.
  • No projects in the last two years funded from Environmental Planning or Science and Technology Studies
  • Demography (2 from 2) and Social Work (3 from 6) have their first projects funded since 2009/10.

Last year I speculated briefly about what the causes of these differences might be and looked at success rates in previous years, and much of that is still relevant.  Although we should welcome the overall rise in success rates, it’s still the case that some academic subjects do consistently better than others with the ESRC.  While we shouldn’t expect to see exactly even success rates, when some consistently outperform the average, and some under-perform, we ought to wonder why that is.

On strike again, and why you should join a union

"Freedom for the University of Tooting!"
“Freedom for the University of Tooting!”

Last time I took strike action was almost two years ago, and I didn’t like it then and I don’t like it now. Nevertheless, then  (as now) I think strike action is justified, and that if you’re not already in a union, then you really ought to be.  It’s in your own narrow personal interest, and it’s in the general interest.

I think the facts are pretty well established. University staff have had a pay cut in real terms of 13% since October 2008, and what’s on offer – 1% – is still well below the rate of inflation. While I’m sure it’s accurate to point to the large surpluses that many universities have been generating, I suspect that their existence is largely due to understandable caution in what has been a period of tremendous change – undergraduate fees, real terms reductions in research income, the new REF, fluctuations in overseas student numbers etc.  It would be weird if institutions hadn’t built up something of a financial buffer as an insurance policy.  But they can surely do better than 1%, especially now that we (apparently) in economic recovery and many of the recent changes are starting to bed in.

I hesitate to complain about my own pay. I regard it as a privilege to work where I do, and to do the job I do.  When I go to bed on a Sunday night, I don’t do so dreading Monday morning.  And the fact that I don’t dread Monday morning means I’m probably better off than the majority of people who either do dread it or who have no job to go to.  My salary is more than adequate for my relatively modest needs, especially with no dependants.  A 13% pay cut in real terms isn’t – I think – particularly unusual in the current climate, and
I’m sure other sectors could tell a similar story.  Another reason I hesitate to complain about my own pay is that the kind of society I’d like to live in is one that would be more equal – more Rawlsian – and I suspect that a more equal society is one in which I’d probably be less well off in brute financial terms, but would be better off in all kinds of other ways.

But inequality in higher education is getting worse.  While there’s apparently no money for pay rises at the rate of inflation for everyone else, there is apparently money for pay rises for those off the official salary scales – vice chancellors, and other senior professors.  I understand that the REF has distorted labour markets with big names attracting big bucks.  I know that it’s not the case that not paying the best paid even more will save sufficient money to pay everyone else better, but if there is money to spare, it should surely be targeted – in these times of austerity – at those in our sector who are the least well paid.

So although I can’t back a below inflation offer of 1% all round, I would be personally be prepared to vote to accept below-inflation at my grade for a short while longer if it meant above inflation for the least well paid.  At inflation to keep pace with soaring living costs, above inflation to claw back some of the lost ground.  I don’t have the details to hand, but I believe similar deals have been struck before, and this might be a sensible thing to look at.  If the employers were interested in negotiating.  Which they don’t appear to be.

However, even for the better paid there’s only so long we can accept below inflation pay rises.  A point often made is that academic staff (and many academic related staff) are often late starters in terms of pensions and mortgages.  Graduates at 21, Masters graduates at 22, PhD graduates at 25 or 26, permanent employment at 26 or 27.  Although in many disciplines the norm is several years of post-doc fixed term contracts first.  So five or six extra years as a student, during which time it’s very unlikely that any pension contributions will be made or much saving done for a mortgage deposit.

So why should you join a union? Because if you don’t, and you work in the HE sector, and you went to work today, what you are is a free rider.  You didn’t lose a day’s pay, but if and when (I suspect when), we get a better pay settlement, you’ll get it too.  Union members don’t get that money back, or get any extra.  When the unions negotiate on your behalf about various local issues (from parking to disciplinary procedures), you benefit too. I guess one response to this is to congratulate yourself on your cleverness in getting the benefits without any of the responsibilities, but personally I’d be embarrassed and ashamed to be in that position. I accept that some may have principled objections to a particular union (and I agree that UCU did not cover itself in glory over discussions about an academic boycott of Israel) or have negative experiences in the past, but in general terms I think the onus is on those not in a union to explain why not.

But even if your moral compass is orientated in such a way that you don’t see any problem with being a free rider, it’s still fairly clear that it’s in your own best interests to be in a union. Because my experience at least one institution (not where I work at the moment) and what I hear and read about many other places is that there’s a de facto two tier system in place in terms of how people are treated.  Put simply, if you in a union and have union representation, or if you’re fortunate enough to have a friend/colleague who you can take to meetings to help you fight your corner who can be similarly effective, you will be treated better than if you go without union or equivalent representation.  I’ve seen it myself when asked to accompany friends who weren’t in the union to meetings.  I’ve seen attempts to pull stunts that break internal procedures, very probably employment law, and very definitely the principles of natural justice.  They don’t do it to union members, or those who have equivalent representation.  Maybe not all institutions are like that, but everything I’ve heard indicates that we should all assume that ours is exactly like that unless we have strong evidence to the contrary.

You may think that you’ll never need the union’s help, never need union representation.  But if you’re in an academic-related or administrative/technical/managerial role, then the fact is that restructures and change and cost savings are a fact of life.  I’ve worked in Higher Education for twelve years now, and on average there’s been a restructure that’s affected me every four years.  In the first two, my job either disappeared or would ultimately disappear.  The third passed me by, and arguably left me in a stronger position, but was a worrying time.  In neither of the first two cases did the restructures have anything to do with me or my performance in my role – it was just a case of someone looking at an organogram, looking at costs, and deciding they wanted to make their mark by moving the pieces around a bit.  Anyone in the way was collateral damage.

You might also think that if you behave yourself, keep your head down, and do a good job, you’ll never end up needing union support in a dispute with your employer or with a senior colleague.  Again, I think that’s naive.  My own experience was doing my job too well, and having the temerity to apply to have my job regraded, only to find that a shadow system was being used that bore little relation to the published criteria.  It’s tremendously stressful to be in dispute with your employer and/or colleagues, and having union support gives you someone to rant at, someone to advise you, to set your expectations, and to speak up for you at meetings which can end up – by accident or design – being very intimidating.

Ultimately, union membership won’t save you if you’re in the way of a restructure, or if management wants you out for whatever reason.  But what they will do is make sure that the rules are followed, that your rights are respected, and that you have access to sensible and timely advice about the situation you’re in.  Maybe you’re the kind of person who would back yourself to do all this for yourself, but my advice would be not to underestimate just how stressful these situations can be, and how useful having someone from the union in your corner can be, even if you conduct most of the meeting yourself.

So… back to work tomorrow, and back to dealing with the work left undone today.  As we’re now withdrawing goodwill and working to contract, I’ve got less time than normal to get everything done….

Meanwhile, over at the ESRC…

There have been a few noteworthy developments at the ESRC over the summer months which I think are probably worth drawing together into a single blog post for those (like me) who’ve made the tactical error of choosing to have some time off over the summer.

1.  The annual report

I’ve been looking forward to this (I know, I know….) to see whether there’s been any substantial change to the huge differences in success rates between different academic disciplines.  I wrote a post about this back in October and it’s by some distance the most read article on my blog. Has there been any improvements since 2011/12, when Business and Management had 1 of 68 applications funded and Education 2 of 62, compared to Socio-Legal Studies (39%, 7 of 18), and Social Anthropology (28%, 5 from 18).

Sadly, we still don’t know, because this information is nowhere to be found in the annual report. We know the expenditure by region and the top 11 (sic) recipients of research expenditure, research and training expenditure, and the two combined.  But we don’t know how this breaks down by subject.  To be fair, that information wasn’t published until October last year, and so presumably it will be forthcoming.  And presumably the picture will be better this year.

That’s not to say that there’s no useful information in the annual report. We learn that the ESRC Knowledge Exchange Scheme has a very healthy success rate of 52%, though I think I’m right in saying that the scheme will have been through a number of variations in the period in question. Historically it’s not been an easy scheme to apply for, partly because of the need for co-funding from research partners, and partly because of a number of very grey areas around costing rules.

For the main Research Grants Scheme success rates are also up, though by how much is unclear.  The text of the report (p. 18) states that

After a period where rates plummeted to as low as 11 per cent, they have now risen to 35 per cent, in part because we have committed additional funding to the scheme [presumably through reallocation, rather than new money] but also because application volume has decreased. This shows the effects of our demand management strategy, with HEIs now systematically quality assuring their applications and filtering out those which are not ready for submission. We would encourage HEIs to continue to develop their demand management strategies as this means academics and administrators in both HEIs and the ESRC have been able to focus efforts on processing and peer-reviewing a smaller number of good quality applications, rather than spending time on poor quality proposals which have no chance of being funded.

Oddly the accompanying table gives a 27% success rate, and unfortunately (at the time of writing) the document with success rates for individual panel meetings hasn’t been updated since April 2012, and the individual panel meeting documents only list funded projects, not success rates. But whatever the success rate is, it does appear to be a sign that “demand management” is working and that institutions are practising restraint in their application habits.  Success rates of between a quarter and a third sound about right to me – enough applications to allow choice, but not so many as to be a criminal waste of time and effort.

The report also contains statistics about the attendance of members at Council and Audit Committee Meetings, but you’ll have to look them up for yourself as I have a strict “no spoilers” policy on this blog.

I very much look forward – and I think the research community is too – to seeing the success rates by academic discipline at a later date.

2. A new Urgency Grants Mechanism

More good news…. a means by which research funding decisions can be taken quickly in response to the unexpected and significant.  The example given is the Riots of summer 2011, and I remember thinking that someone would get a grant out of all this as I watched TV pictures my former stomping ground of Croydon burn.  But presumably less… explosive unexpected opportunities might arise too.  All this seems only sensible, and allows a way for urgent requests to be considered in a timely and transparent manner.

3. ESRC Future Research Leaders call

But “sensible” isn’t a word I’d apply to the timing of this latest call.  First you’ve heard of it?  Well, better get your skates on because the deadline is the 24th September. Outline applications?  Expressions of interest?  Nope, a full application.  And in all likelihood, you should probably take your skates off again because chances are that your institution’s internal deadlines for internal peer review have already been and gone.

The call came out on or about the 23rd July, with a deadline of 24th September. Notwithstanding what I’ve said previously about no time of the academic year being a good time to get anything done, it’s very hard to understand why this happened.  Surely the ESRC know that August/September is when a lot of academic staff (and therefore research support) are away from the university on a mixture of annual leave and undertaking research.  Somehow, institutions are expected to cobble together a process of internal review and institutional support, and individuals are expected to find time to write the application.  It’s hard enough for the academics to write the applications, but if we take the demand management agenda seriously, we should be looking at both the track record and the proposed project of potential applicants, thinking seriously about mentoring and support, and having difficult conversations with people we don’t think are ready.  That needs a lot of senior time, and a lot of research management time.

This scheme is a substantial investment.  Effectively 70 projects worth up to £250k (at 80% fEC).  This is a major investment, and given that the Small Grants scheme and British Academy Fellowship success rates are tiny, this is really the major opportunity to be PI on a substantial project.  This scheme is overtly picking research leaders of the future, but the timetable means that it’s picking those leaders from those who didn’t have holiday booked in the wrong couple of weeks, or who could clear their diaries to write the application, or who don’t have a ton of teaching to prepare for – which is most early career academics, I would imagine.

Now it might be objected that we should have know that the call was coming.  Well…. yes and no. The timing was similar last year, and it was tight then, but it’s worse this year – it was announced on about the same date, but with a deadline 4th October, almost two working weeks later.  Two working weeks that turns it from a tall order into something nigh on impossible, and which can only favour those with lighter workloads in the run-up to the new academic year. And even knowing that it’s probably coming doesn’t help.  Do we really expect people to start making holiday plans around when a particular call might come out?  Really?  If we must have a September deadline, can we know about it in January?  Or even earlier?  To be fair, the ESRC has got much better with pre-call announcements of late, at least for very narrow schemes, but this really isn’t good enough.

I also have a recollection (backed up by a quick search through old emails, but not by documentary evidence) that last year the ESRC were talking about changing the scheme for this year, possibly with multiple deadlines or even going open call.  Surely, I remember thinking, this start-of-year madness can only be a one-off.

Apparently not.

Is there a danger that research funding calls are getting too narrow?

The ESRC have recently added a little more detail to a previous announcement about a pending call for European-Chinese joint research projects on Green Economy and Population Change.  Specifically, they’re after projects which address the following themes:

Green Economy

  • The ‘greenness and dynamics of economies’
  • Institutions, Policies and planning for a green economy
  • The green economy in cities and metropolitan areas
  • Consumer behaviour and lifestyles in a green economy

Understanding population Change

  • changing life course
  • urbanisation and migration
  • labour markets and social security dynamics
  • methodology, modelling and forecasting
  • care provision
  • comparative policy learning

Projects will need to involve institutions from at least two of the participating European counties (UK, France (involvement TBC), Germany, Netherlands) and two institutions in China. On top of this is an expectation that there will be sustainability/capacity building around the research collaborations, plus the usual further plus points of involving stakeholders and interdisciplinary research.

Before I start being negative, or potentially negative, I have one blatant plug and some positive things to say. The blatant plug is that the University of Nottingham has a campus in Ningbo in China which is eligible for NSFC funding and therefore would presumably count as one Chinese partner. I wouldn’t claim to know all about all aspects of our Ningbo research expertise, but I know people who do.  Please feel free to contact me with ideas/research agendas and I’ll see if I can put you in touch with people who know people.

The positive things.  The topics seem to me to be important, and we’ve been given advance notice of the call and a fair amount of time to put something together.  There’s a reference to Open Research Area procedures and mechanisms, which refers to agreements between the UK, France, Netherlands and Germany on a common decision making process for joint projects in which each partner is funded by their national funder under their own national funding rules.  This is excellent, as it doesn’t require anyone to become an expert in another country’s national funder’s rules, and doesn’t have the double or treble jeopardy problem of previous calls where decisions were taken by individual funders.  It’s also good that national funders are working together on common challenges – this adds fresh insight, invites interesting comparative work and pools intellectual and financial resources.

However, what concerns me about calls like this is that the area at the centre of the particular Venn diagram of this call is really quite small.  It’s open to researchers with research interests in the right areas, with collaborators in the right European countries, with collaborators in China.   That’s two – arguably three – circles in the diagram.  Of course, there’s a fourth – proposals that are outstanding.  Will there be enough strong competition on the hallowed ground at the centre of all these circles? It’s hard to say, as we don’t know yet how much money is available.

I’m all for calls that encourage, incentivise, and facilitate international research.  I’m in favour of calls on specific topics which are under-researched, which are judged of particular national or international importance, or where co-funding from partners can be found to address areas of common interest.

But I’m less sure about having both in one call – both very specific requirements in terms of the nationality of the partner institutions, and in terms of the call themes. Probably the scope of this call is wide enough – presumably the funders think so – but I can’t help think that that less onerous eligibility requirements in terms of partners could lead to greater numbers of high quality applications.

Demand mismanagement: a practical guide

I’ve written an article on Demand (Mis)management for Research Professional. While most of the site’s content is behind a paywall, they’ve been kind enough to make my article open access.  Which saves me the trouble of cutting and pasting it here.

Universities are striving to make their grant applications as high in quality as possible, avoid wasting time and energy, and run a supportive yet critical internal review process. Here are a few tips on how not to do it. [read the full article]

In other news, I was at the ARMA conference earlier this week and co-presented a session on Research Development for the Special Interest Group with Dr Jon Hunt from the University of Bath.  A copy of the presentation and some further thoughts will follow once I’ve caught up with my email backlog….

Stammering and the Academy: What the rest of you need to know

This post is something of a departure from my usual focus and normal service will be resumed next time. This post is going to be about my work-related (and higher-education related) experiences of coping with a stammer.  Is “coping” the right word?  I’m not entirely sure – working with, working around, working through.. something along those lines, anyway.

You should continue to read this (even if it’s not the kind of topic you normally come here for) because you’re a decent human being who is interested in finding out what it’s like to walk in someone else’s shoes and how you can avoid making their lives harder than they need to be.  And in return, you can ask me anything you like about stammering in the comments below, or via email if you prefer.  I absolutely don’t set myself up as any kind of authority or spokesperson  – especially as my own stammer is atypical and relatively mild – but I have my own experiences, my own opinions, I’m open about my stammer, and willing to answer questions.

Some facts

Approximately 5% of under 5s and around 1% of adults have a stammer, and these numbers are pretty consistent across cultures, social class, and over time.  Between 3.5 and 4 times as many men stammer as women. There’s a weak genetic component.  There’s no cure. While psychological factors may make a stammer worse or better at any given time, research points to a neurological cause. A stammer is not a sign of low intelligence, slow wits, childhood trauma, low resilience, or mental illness, and is not the same as – or caused by – shyness, nervousness or introversion. Though it may itself cause or contribute to those things.  Stuttering and Stammering are interchangeable terms.

Stammering ‘disfluency’ generally takes three forms. Repetition (“r…r….repet-repetition”), stretching (“stretttccchhhhiiinnnng”), and blocking (“……. blocking”).  Repetition is probably what most people would recognise as stammering.  My own stammer is about 95% blocking, 5% stretching.

“Stammer? You don’t have a stammer”

My stammer is fairly mild and a lot of people don’t notice, or if they do, think it’s just something idiosyncratic about me rather than making the connection. Some people don’t believe me when I tell them. They don’t notice because I’m pretty good at passing for fluent through various tricks and techniques and distractions.  Where repetition-stammering is hard to hide, blocks can be worked around and disguised.  This can lead to a form of stammering called “covert” or (better) “interiorised“.  Like the swan gliding across the lake, there’s a huge amount of effort and kicking and splashing going into maintaining that illusion of effortless serenity. Everything about the way I speak is carefully crafted to hide my stammer. It’s hard to explain what that’s like, because I’ve never known anything different, but the best analogy I can come up with is a resource-hungry computer program, always running in the background, always taking up some measure of resource that could be better used for something else. For people who are not open about their stammer, being ‘caught out’ can be something they dread, and although some of that dread has dissipated for me, I still find myself working very hard to pass for fluent.

Particular Issues for Higher Education

1% of the adult population is really quite a lot, and I expect that’s a lot higher than most people think.  Probably 1% of your students, 1% of your colleagues.  The chances of you not knowing anyone who has a stammer is really quite small. Stammering usually counts as a disability under the Disability Discrimination Act – yet I’ve never heard it mentioned on any disability awareness training, whether in relation to supporting students or staff.

Meetings and Tutorials

Sorry to keep labouring this point, but if you have five tutorial groups with twenty students each, chances are that one of your students will have a stammer.  As a module tutor, or as chair of a meeting or a conference session, there are a few things you need to be aware of, and to consider.  For general information about how not to embarrass yourself when talking to someone who stammers, I’d suggest this (for work) and this (for everyday situations), but if you’re chairing meetings or tutorials, you have to consider and control the behaviour of other people too.

At one point in my working life (details removed to protect the guilty), I had to attend a semi-regular meeting. I used to dread this meeting, because it had the perfect storm of a weak chair and a number of participants who sought to dominate. People would regularly talk over each other (increasingly loudly), not listen properly, and interrupt. When I was able to get a word in edgeways, I’d manage about half a sentence before someone would take a wild guess at what contribution I was going to make and then interrupt.  This was a problem for me for four reasons:

  • it’s damn rude. Were other people not taught this when growing up?
  • the view that had been ascribed to me or the impression I’d been permitted to give was often not what I’d intended to say.  What I hoped would be a nuanced and sophisticated and useful contribution would regularly be cut off before I’d made it past the obvious
  • I plan what I’m going to say quite carefully to maximise my chances of being able to say it, and I can’t recalibrate quickly to take account of interruptions or questions
  • I don’t have the vocal agility to verbally fend off people when they interrupt me

Back then I wasn’t open about my stammer, and virtually never mentioned it to anyone. These days I wouldn’t stand for being treated like that, but that’s because I have more life experience, more personal and professional confidence and higher expectations of the reactions of people around me.  You’ll note, though, that of the four reasons why you shouldn’t allow your meeting or tutorial to run as a Competitive Interruptathon, only two of them apply exclusively to people who stammer.  So there’s not really any special pleading here – just another reason why if you’re running a tutorial or chairing a meeting you actually need to chair it. It’s your job to stop people interrupting, to watch for signs that people are trying to contribute, to allow the less vocally assertive to have the chance to contribute, and for that contribution to be listened to. Please do your job.

It’s also a potential issue at conferences. As a postgraduate student I once went to a presentation from a visiting speaker and plucked up the courage to ask a question, which was answered.  But before I could follow up, the self-appointed Alpha Academic in the room (you know, the man – always a man – who always prefaces asking questions with a deep sigh) interrupted me. Not just spoke at the same time, actually deliberately interrupted and spoke right across me – effectively dismissing me and my ideas and my contribution as worthless, to ask yet another question about his hobby horse.  ‘Was there anything else you wanted to…” murmured the chair, afterwards, far too little and far too late.  I just shook my head and went home feeling furious and humiliated, and I can’t be sure that this incident didn’t play some role in me deciding that I didn’t want to pursue an academic career.

Another task as chair or tutor or even in everyday conversation is not to accidentally humiliate yourself or someone else through your own thoughtlessness.  If you ask me an open-ended question, I can navigate around my stammer and give you a fairly fluent answer.  If you ask me a closed question with only one possible answer, there’s a chance I might not be able to give it to you immediately. This is particularly common when I’m asked for my name, or for some other obvious snippet of information where I can’t cover my block by pretending to be thinking about it, making up my mind, or trying to remember. When I moved house a couple of years back, my ability to fluently state the address of potential abodes was a minor consideration in decision-making. Growing up, I used to dread maths (and to a lesser extent, sciences), where there was only one answer that could be given, and using faux-doubt to hide a slow answer wasn’t always an option.

Something that still happens to me occasionally is that someone asks me my name, and sometimes I’m unable to answer within the apparently-obligatory two seconds, and the next question is sometimes along the lines of whether I’ve forgotten my name. I’ve already said that 1% of adults have a stammer, and although I don’t have the figure to hand for spontaneous amnesia, I’m prepared to stick my neck out and guess that it’s much lower.  So if it happens to you when you’re speaking to someone…. you know… play the percentages, keep your mouth shut, and be a fraction more patient.

Laughing and asking me whether I’ve forgotten my name gives me a difficult choice to make. One option is just laugh along with everyone else, use that to buy a bit of time, get an answer out somehow, try not to show how humiliated I’ve just been made to feel, and then say nothing else.  The other option is that I call my interlocutor out on their behaviour, and explain that I have a stammer.  But by doing that, even calmly and politely, I embarrass the person who asked the question, risk putting everyone else present on edge, and reveal personal information which may not be appropriate. In any case, most people who do this aren’t malicious, and are just reacting (however inappropriately) to cover a moment that they perceive as awkward.

I used to think this was more of a dilemma than I do now – these days I think I have an educational duty, and I’m much less prepared to take the hit for someone else’s thoughtlessness. But if you factor in power differentials it’s much harder.  Did I call tutors out on this as a student?  Absolutely not.  Would I call out senior colleagues on it today?  I’d like to think so, but I’m honestly not sure.

Other issues

Presentations can be a particular issue for people who stammer. Public speaking is something that most people worry about, but for people who stammer it can be an even greater concern. I’m fairly fortunate in that I’ve had quite a lot of practice of public speaking/teaching/coaching, and that I’m usually able to process it as performance or acting rather than me speaking. I’ve taken to telling the audience at the start of presentations that I have a slight stammer, and I’ve found that that helps me. Even if I don’t subsequently stammer during the presentation, I know that if I do, it won’t come entirely as a surprise. In fact, the very first time I mentioned it was as part of a presentation for my current role, and the positive reaction told me a lot about the culture of the place.

It’s hard to say whether it’s best to expect someone who stammers to give a presentation – either as part of a module assessment or as part of their job – or make an exception for them. Certainly it’s hard to imagine being an academic without a requirement to present, and I’d imagine that presentation skills would be important for most graduate career paths. So I tend to think that unless someone has some combination of a very high level of anxiety and/or a severe stammer, it’s probably best to encourage them to present and make sure that there’s a supportive environment. Even little things like subtly asking if they have a preference about when to present may help – generally people don’t like being first up or having a nerve-shredding wait until the end. Of course, in a group exercise it may be that someone who stammers decides to contribute to their team in other ways, but I think it would be a shame not to get some experience.  But equally, getting another team member to present might well be a “reasonable adjustment” of the kind expected in the workplace by the DDA.

One final issue to mention is telephone calls. I hate using the phone, and will avoid it if I possibly can. Non-verbal communication and body language suddenly doesn’t work.  If I get a block, it just comes over as a silence on the other end, and that’s quite hard to cover for. I’m usually okay once I get going, and it’s easier if someone calls me than if I call them, as they already know who I am, and what the topic of the conversation will be. So you may well find that people who stammer prefer email or face-to-face conversations than phone calls.

Finally…

I’ve gradually”come out” about my stammer over the last three years or so, and although it’s not been my experience that being open about it has made it go away or reduced it, what it has done is enable me to worry about it less. Of course, many people who stammer don’t have the option of hiding it, but what I would say is that my experience of being much more open about it has been entirely positive. The vast majority of people are more than capable of focusing on what’s being said rather than how it’s being said, and these days (especially in university environments) I think there’s more acceptance and understanding of difference and disability than in the past.  Four out of five children who stammer will grow out of it, and I’d say that an even higher proportion of children who mock those who are different from them will also – largely – grow out of it. The workplace or the university campus is not the playground.

Right. That’s more than enough from me. Any comments or questions?

[Updated 27/09/19 to fix outdated links]

The consequences of Open Access, part 2: Are researchers prepared for greater scrutiny?

In part 1 of this post, I raised questions about how academic writing might have to change in response to the open access agenda.  The spirit of open access surely requires not just the availability of academic papers, but the accessibility of those papers to research users and stakeholders.  I argued that lay summaries and context pieces will increasingly be required, and I was pleased to discover that at least some open access journals are already thinking about this.  In this second part, I want to raise questions about whether researchers and those who support them are ready for the potential extra degree of scrutiny and attention that open access may bring.

On February 23rd 2012, the Journal of Medical Ethics published a paper called After-birth abortion: why should the baby live? by Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva.   The paper was not to advocate “after birth abortion” (i.e infanticide), but to argue that many of the arguments that are said to justify abortion also turn out to justify infanticide.  This isn’t a new argument by any means, but presumably there was sufficient novelty in the construction of the argument to warrant publications.  To those familiar with the conventions of applied ethics – the intended readers of the article – it’s understood that it was playing devil’s advocate, seeing how far arguments can be stretched, taking things to their logical conclusion, seeing how far the thin end of the edge will drive, what’s at the bottom of the slippery slope, just what kind of absurdium can be reductio-ed to.  While the paper isn’t satire in the same way as Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, no sensible reader would have concluded that the authors were calling for infanticide to be made legal, in spite of the title.

I understand that what happened next was that the existence of the article – for some reason – attracted attention in the right wing Christian blogosphere, prompting a rash of complaints, hostile commentary, fury, racist attacks, and death threats.  Journal editor Julian Savulescu wrote a blog post about the affair, below which are 624 comments.   It’s enlightening and depressing reading in equal measure.  Quick declaration of interest here – my academic background (such as it is) is in philosophy, and I used to work at Keele University’s Centre for Professional Ethics marketing their courses.  I know some of the people involved in the JME’s response, though not Savulescu or the authors of the paper.

There’s a lot that can (and probably should) be said about the deep misunderstanding that occurred between professional bioethicists and non-academics concerned about ethical issues who read the paper, or who heard about it.  Part of that misunderstanding is about what ethicists do – they explore arguments, analyse concepts, test theories, follow the arguments.  They don’t have any special access to moral truth, and while their private views are often much better thought out than most people, most see their role as helping to understand arguments, not pushing any particular position.  Though some of them do that too, especially if it gets them on Newsnight.  I’m not really well informed enough to comment too much on this, but it seems to me that the ethicists haven’t done a great job of explaining what they do to those more moderate and sensible critics.  Those who post death threats and racist abuse are probably past reasoned argument and probably love having something to rail against because it justifies their peculiar world view, but for everyone else, I think it ought to be possible to explain.  Perhaps the notion of a lay summary that I mentioned last time might be helpful here.

Part of the reason for the fuss might have been because the article wasn’t available via open access, so some critics may not have had the opportunity to read the article and make up their own mind.  This might be thought of as a major argument in favour of open access – and of course, it is – the reasonable and sensible would have at least skim-read the article, and it’s easier to marshal a response when what’s being complained about is out there for reference.

However….. the unfortunate truth is that there are elements out there who are looking for the next scandal, for the next chance to whip up outrage, for the next witch hunt.  And I’m not just talking about the blogosphere, I’m talking about elements of the mainstream media, who (regardless of our personal politics) have little respect or regard for notions of truth, integrity and fairness.  If they get their paper sales, web  hits, outraged comments, and resulting manufactured “scandal”, then they’re happy.  Think I’m exaggerating?  Ask Hilary Mantel, who was on the receiving end of an entirely manufactured fuss with comments she made in a long and thoughtful lecture being taken deliberately and dishonestly out of context.

While open access will make things easier for high quality journalism and for the open-minded citizen and/or professional, it’ll also make it easier for the scandal-mongers (in the mainstream media and in the blogosphere) to identify the next victim to be thrown to the ravenous outrage-hungry wolves that make up their particular constituency.  It’s already risky to be known to be researching and publishing in certain areas – anything involving animal research; climate change; crop science; evolutionary theory; Münchhausen’s by Proxy; vaccination; and (oddly) chronic fatigue syndrome/ME – appears to have a hostile activist community ready to pounce on any research that comes back with the “wrong” answer.

I don’t want to go too far in presenting the world outside the doors of the academy as being a swamp of unreason and prejudice.  But the fact is that alongside the majority of the general public (and bloggers and journalists) who are both rational and reasonable, there is an element that would be happy to twist (or invent) things to suit their own agenda, especially if that agenda involves whipping out manufactured outrage to enable their constituency to confirm their existing prejudices. Never mind the facts, just get angry!

Doubtless we all know academics who would probably relish the extra attention and are already comfortable with the public spotlight.  But I’m sure we also know academics who do not seek the limelight, who don’t trust the media, and who would struggle to cope with even five minutes of (in)fame(y).  One day you’re a humble bioethicist, presumably little known outside your professional circles, and the next, hundreds of people are wishing you dead and calling you every name under the sun.  While Richard Dawkins seems to revel in his (sweary) hate mail, I think a lot of people would find it very distressing to receive emails hoping for their painful death.  I know it would upset me a lot, so please don’t send me any, okay?  And be nice in the comments…..

Of course, even if things never get that far or go that badly, with open access there’s always a greater chance of hostile comment or criticism from the more mainstream and reasonable media, who have a much bigger platform from which to speak than an academic journal.  This criticism need not be malicious, could be legitimate opinion, could be based on a misunderstanding.  Open access opens up the academy to greater scrutiny and greater criticism.

As for what we do about this….. it’s hard to say.  I certainly don’t say that we retreat behind the safety of our paywalls and sally forth with our research only when guarded by a phalanx of heavy infantry to protect us from the swinish multitude besieging our ivory tower.  But I think that there are things that we can do in order to be better prepared.  The use of lay summaries, and greater consideration of the lay reader when writing academic papers will help guard against misunderstandings.

University external relations departments need to be ready to support and defend academic colleagues, and perhaps need to think about planning for these kind of problems, if they don’t do so already.

ESRC “demand management” measures working….. and why rises and falls in institutions’ levels of research funding are not news

There was an interesting snippet of information in an article in this week’s Times Higher about the latest research council success rates.

 [A] spokeswoman for the ESRC said that since the research council had begun requiring institutions from June 2011 to internally sift applications before submitting them, it had recorded an overall success rate of 24 per cent, rising to 33 per cent for its most recent round of responsive mode grants.  She said that application volumes had also dropped by 37 per cent, “which is an encouraging start towards our demand management target of a 50 per cent reduction” by the end of 2014-15.

Back in October last year I noticed what I thought was a change in tone from the ESRC which gave the impression that they were more confident that institutions had taken note of the shot across the bows of the “demand management” measures consultation exercise(s), and that perhaps asking for greater restraint in putting forward applications would be sufficient.  I hope it is, because as the current formal demand management proposals that will be implemented if required unfairly and unreasonably include co-applicants in any sanction.

I’ve written before (and others have added very interesting comments) about how I think we arrived at the situation where social science research units were flinging as many applications in as possible in the hope that some of them would stick.  And I hope the recent improvements in success rates to around 1-in-3, 1-in-4 don’t serve to re-encourage this kind of behaviour. We need long term, sustainable, careful, restraint in terms of what applications are submitted by institutions to the ESRC (and other major funders, for that matter) and the state in which they’re submitted.

Everyone will want to improve the quality of applications, and internal mentoring and peer review and the kind of lay review that I do will assist with that, but we also need to make sure that the underlying research idea is what I call ‘ESRC-able’.  At Nottingham University Business School, I secured agreement a while ago now to introduce a ‘proof of concept’ review phase for ESRC applications, where we review a two page outline first, before deciding whether to give the green light for the development of a full application.  I think this allows time for changes to be made at the earliest stage, and makes it much easier for us to say that the idea isn’t right and shouldn’t be developed than if a full application was in front of us.

And what isn’t ‘ESRC-able’?  I think a look at the assessment schema gives some useful clues – if you can’t honestly say that your application would fit in the top two categories on the final page, you probably shouldn’t bother.  ‘Dull but worthy’ stuff won’t get funded, and I’ve seen the phrase “incremental progress” used in referees’ comments to damn with faint praise.  There’s now a whole category of research that is of good quality and would doubtless score respectably in any REF exercise, but which simply won’t be competitive with the ESRC.  This, of course, raises the question about how non-groundbreaking stuff gets funded – the stuff that’s more than a series of footnotes to Plato, but which builds on and advances the findings of ground-breaking research by others.  And to that I have no answer – we have a system which craves the theoretically and methodologically innovative, but after a paradigm has been shifted, there’s no money available to explore the consequences.

*     *     *     *     *

Also in the Times Higher this week is the kind of story that appears every year – some universities have done better this year at getting research funding/with their success rates than in previous years, and some have done worse.  Some of those who have done better and worse are the traditional big players, and some are in the chasing pack.  Those who have done well credit their brilliant internal systems and those who have done badly will contest the figures or point to extenuating circumstances, such as the ending of large grants.

While one always wants to see one’s own institution doing well and doing better, and everyone always enjoys a good bit of schadenfreude at the expense of their rivals benchmark institutions and any apparent difficulties that a big beast find themselves in, are any of these short term variations of actual, real, statistical significance?  Apparently big gains can be down to a combination of a few big wins, grants transferring in with new staff, and just… well… the kind of natural variation you’d expect to see.  Big losses could be big grants ending, staff moving on, and – again – natural variance.  Yes, you could ascribe your big gains to your shiny new review processes, but would you also conclude that there’s a problem with those same processes and people the year after when performance is apparently less good?

Why these short term (and mostly meaningless) short term variations are more newsworthy than the radical variation in ESRC success rates for different social science disciplines I have no idea….

ESRC success rates by discipline: what on earth is going on?

Update – read this post for the 2012/13 stats for success rates by discipline

The ESRC have recently published a set of ‘vital statistics‘ which are “a detailed breakdown of research funding for the 2011/12 financial year” (see page 22).  While differences in success rates between academic disciplines are nothing new, this year’s figures show some really quite dramatic disparities which – in my view at least – require an explanation and action.

The overall success rate was 14% (779 applications, 108 funded) for the last tranche of responsive mode Small Grants and response mode Standard Grants (now Research Grants).  However, Business and Management researchers submitted 68 applications, of which 1 was funded.  One.  One single funded application.  In the whole year.  For the whole discipline.  Education fared little better with 2 successes out of 62.

Just pause for a moment to let that sink in.  Business and Management.  1 of 68.  Education.  2 of 62.

Others did worse still.  Nothing for Demographics (4 applications), Environmental Planning (8), Science and Technology Studies (4), Social Stats, Computing, Methods (11), and Social Work (10).  However, with a 14% success rate working out at about 1 in 7, low volumes of applications may explain this.  It’s rather harder to explain a total of 3 applications funded from 130.

Next least successful were ‘no lead discipline’ (4 of 43) and Human Geography (3 from 32).  No other subjects had success rates in single figures.  At the top end were Socio-Legal Studies (a stonking 39%, 7 of 18), and Social Anthropology (28%, 5 from 18), with Linguistics; Economics; and Economic and Social History also having hit rates over 20%.  Special mention for Psychology (185 applications, 30 funded, 16% success rate) which scored the highest number of projects – almost as many as Sociology and Economics (the second and third most funded) combined.

Is this year unusual, or is there a worrying and peculiar trend developing?  Well, you can judge for yourself from this table on page 49 of last year’s annual report, which has success rates going back to the heady days of 06/07.  Three caveats, though, before you go haring off to see your own discipline’s stats.  One is that the reports refer to financial years, not academic years, which may (but probably doesn’t) make a difference.  The second is that the figures refer to Small and Standard Grants only (not Future Leaders/First Grants, Seminar Series, or specific targeted calls).  The third is that funded projects are categorised by lead discipline only, so the figures may not tell the full story as regards involvement in interdisciplinary research.

You can pick out your own highlights, but it looks to me as if this year is only a more extreme version of trends that have been going on for a while.  Last year’s Education success rate?  5%.  The years before?  8% and 14%  Business and Management?  A heady 11%, compared to 10% and 7% for the preceding years. And you’ve got to go all the back to 9/10 to find the last time any projects were funded in Demography, Environmental Planning, or Social Work.  And Psychology has always been the most funded, and always got about twice as many projects as the second and third subjects, albeit from a proportionately large number of applications.

When I have more time I’ll try to pull all the figures together in a single spreadsheet, but at first glance many of the trends seem similar.

So what’s going on here?  Well, there are a number of possibilities.  One is that our Socio Legal Studies research in this country is tip top, and B&M research and Education research is comparatively very weak.  Certainly I’ve heard it said that B&M research tends to suffer from poor research methodologies.  Another possibility is that some academic disciplines are very collegiate and supportive in nature, and scratch each other’s backs when it comes to funding, while other disciplines are more back-stabby than back-scratchy.

But are any or all of these possibilities sufficient to explain the difference in funding rates?  I really don’t think so.  So what’s going on?  Unconscious bias?  Snobbery?  Institutional bias?  Politics?  Hidden agendas?  All of the above?  Anyone know?

More pertinently, what do we do about it?  Personally, I’d like to see the appropriate disciplinary bodies putting a bit of pressure on the ESRC for some answers, some assurances, and the production of some kind of plan for addressing the imbalance.  While no-one would expect to see equal success rates for every subject, this year’s figures – in my view – are very troubling.

And something needs to be done about it, whether that’s a re-thinking of priorities, putting the knives away, addressing real disciplinary weaknesses where they exist, ring-fenced funding, or some combination of all of the above.  Over to greater minds than mine…..