Who should we write for?
An occasional series on writing a new critical physio book
Years and years ago, I asked the editor of Therapy Weekly for some tips on good writing. She suggested reading the work of Muriel Spark, author of classics like The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and The Ballad of Peckham Rye, and Roger Hargreaves, author of the Mister Men books. She thought a key to good writing was to say exactly what you meant and nothing more. This was great advice. But perhaps the best recommendation I ever received was to imagine the face of the ideal reader.
When I was writing my Ph.D. thesis, I struggled to develop the right pitch for things I needed to explain. Sometimes I would explain too much, sometimes too little. So, one of my supervisors suggested cutting out the picture of a face from a magazine and writing to just that person. All they had to do was represent your one ideal reader. For my Ph.D. it was a middle-aged, academic who knew their philosophy, for other things it was a 25-year-old PT graduate who’d never heard of the body-as-machine.
Once I did that, my writing got tighter because I knew at every turn how much or how little I needed to say.
In critical physiotherapy, there’s often a tendency to want to over-explain, especially when it comes to subjects like history, philosophy, and sociology that physiotherapists often have limited knowledge of. I’ve spent most of my life writing like this; imagining my reader as a clinician with a taste for thinking otherwise but no real knowledge of how to do it. But this can be a trap, too.
Back in the early 2000s, I was trying to write a journal article using some of the early work I’d done for my doctorate. The thesis drew heavily on Michel Foucault’s writings, but I couldn’t work out how to explain his ideas succinctly enough so that I had enough space left to say something substantive about physiotherapy. The English Physiotherapy journal had very restrictive word limits at the time and I just couldn’t make it work for that readership.
Then someone suggested that I stop trying to write it for physiotherapists.
If, instead, I wrote it for sociologists I wouldn’t need to explain so much about Foucauldian theory and could concentrate on the physiotherapy stuff because this was the stuff the sociologists didn’t know. And if physiotherapists wanted to read it, they would find their way to it because they were already interested in the sociology of the profession. That article was Physiotherapy and the shadow of prostitution, and it’s still one of my most widely-used articles.
Sometimes it’s necessary to follow the rules of good writing, and sometimes it’s necessary to break them, and yesterday saw the publication of a new journal article that definitely does that for me.
The article How do you touch an impossible thing? published as part of a new series on touch in physiotherapy (link here) was a real departure for me. It tackles material I’ve been working on in the early stages of a new critical physio book, and it focuses on a vastly expanded idea of touch. But rather than trying to explain the ideas to people — as everyone tells you you’re supposed to do, I decided to use the article as a way to write to myself; to use the article as a way to make sense of ideas that I’ve really struggled to understand.
Of course, when you’re writing you’re still trying to explain things. You’re still trying to link concepts and craft a linear, two-dimensional narrative from a three-dimensional treasure chest of ideas. But the pressure feels different if you’re writing for yourself. It’s the difference between explaining what SaO2 means to a patient and explaining it to a conference of anaesthetists. Instead of trying to collapse into meaning-making, I found myself freed up to write more expansively and more creatively.
I’ve been writing long enough now to know that there is quite a small and diverse readership for critical theory, and imagining one’s ideal reader is always likely to narrow that audience even further because some will want more context, others will want less. So perhaps writing for yourself — the self that knows there is something in here but is struggling to make sense of it all — has more integrity and authenticity because it presumes nothing about the readership, and so becomes more open and egalitarian?
I’m not sure all of my writing in the future will be like this, but it’s certainly been an enjoyable and eye-opening experience. And really, whether anyone actually reads or understands How do you touch an impossible thing? is beyond my control. All I can do is write to the best of my ability and trust that, in doing so, it keeps the movement going.
References
Nicholls DA & Cheek J 2006 Physiotherapy and the shadow of prostitution: The Society of Trained Masseuses and the massage scandals of 1894. Social Science & Medicine 62: 2336-2348. https://doi.org/doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2005.09.010
Nicholls, D.A. (2022). How do you touch an impossible thing? Frontiers in Rehabilitation Sciences. https://doi.org/10.3389/fresc.2022.934698