Creativity is for poets and pop singers,isn’t it? Academic perspectives on creativity in doctoral writing

Abstract

This paper investigates how eight academic research supervisors working in a Faculty of Arts at a research-intensive Australian university understand the notion of creativity in doctoral writing; both in relation to what it is and where it is found. This question was investigated qualitatively through interviews focusing on reader reception to three, short doctoral texts. A framework of indexicality and orientation (Lillis, 2008) was then used to move beyond the text-level and focus on the contextual influences surrounding the writing as it was exposed to its critical readership. The findings reflect varying levels of awareness and receptivity to the presence of creativity in written doctoral work. The paper also explores the perceived location of creativity in these texts for academic readers; namely, whether it resides in the ideas (i.e., the creative thought/content) or whether it was more textually-based (i.e., the creative expression/form of the idea).

Keywords

Creativity doctoral writing doctoral education thesis writing dissertation writing creative idea creative expression perception of creativity arts academics doctoral supervisors

Introduction

This study explores the multiple and complex understandings held regarding creativity in doctoral writing contexts by research supervisors working in the Faculty of Arts at a research-intensive Australian university. This is both in relation to what it is or might be and where it is found. It is hoped that the study will contribute to the emerging conversation on the topic of creativity in doctoral education.

The study of creativity is both a well-established and on-going area of investigation in western academic contexts since the 1980s. Although traditionally associated with the disciplines of Psychology and, to a lesser extent, Philosophy, investigations into creativity have permeated a range of disciplines ranging from business studies to information technology, among others. Although resistant to neat definitions, Kleiman (2008) outlines a “general coalescing of agreement amongst creativity researchers that creativity involves notions of novelty and originality combined with notions of utility and value” (p. 209). From a social-cultural view, Csikszentmihalyi (1996) positions creativity as being jointly constructed between the creator and an “expert” audience who judge the final product of the creative process. Confirming the key role of these ‘judges’ of creativity, Boden (1994) notes that any novel combination of ideas must be perceived as both valuable and interesting, while Lubart (1999) also asserts that any creative product must be seen as appropriate in a specific environmental milieu. This emphasis would account for the close association between creativity and conceptions of value and utility in academic contexts.

The question of how academics perceive creativity is influenced by many factors, not the least of which is how they may have experienced it themselves during their student days. Jackson and Shaw (2004) in their study of attitudes held towards creativity by over 60 British academics found five key features: applying imagination, being original, using and combining thinking skills, being willing to explore, and communicating meaning using means including story-telling (p. 90). Tosey (2004), however, notes how “unorthodox” forms of thinking and expression such as those listed above are often at odds with the strong cultural values of “respectability and rigour in knowledge generation and [the need] for conformity, standardisation, accountability and risk aversion” (p. 29) operating in western-oriented educational institutions. This unhappy friction is ever-present in the debate around creativity in higher education.

Pressures for uniformity and obedience are especially relevant—but seldom visible—at the doctoral level. Reviewing the literature of doctoral education, the concepts of creativity and doctoral education are rarely combined, a situation Brodin (2018) condemns as a “stifling silence”. Studies investigating creativity in doctoral writing contexts are even scarcer. Despite valiant attempts to frame creativity in doctoral studies (e.g., Bargar and Duncan, 1987; Lovitts, 2007), doctoral education and pedagogy (Brodin, 2018; Brodin and Frick, 2011; Frick, 2012), academic identity development (Frick and Brodin, 2019) and doctoral writing itself (Badenhorst et al., 2015), creativity remains a seldom-visited and largely underappreciated notion. Despite this paucity, the following sections highlight some intersections with relevant research, primarily from the fields of Applied Linguistics and Education.

Historical development and writer’s voice

Although the connections between creativity and writing have been historically well recognized, it is only since the late-1960s that creative approaches to teaching academic writing have emerged as a distinctive pedagogy. Promoted by some theorists as a way to encourage students’ active participation in writing activities, this connection became associated with the “expressivist” writing pedagogy, advocated by Elbow (1973) and other, mainly North American-based, composition theorists. Often described as a process approach to teaching writing and incorporating such creative, writerly processes as brainstorming, it is still influential in adult education.

This movement viewed the innate creative presence of the author in their work as crucial and something that writers need to discover from within. Once discovered, the writer’s authority in their work results in both an accurate self-representation while also emphasising novel kinds of expression and/or novel content. In other words, creativity appears inextricably linked to the expression of personal voice and how this voice makes itself heard textually. For example, is the student capable or willing to “give voice” to their feelings and thoughts on the topic being written about? Ultimately, the student voices or fails to voice their ideas. During this process of attaining writer’s voice, the writing teacher’s role is to help students discover their own authenticity, singular resonance and style (Elbow, 1994). Barnett (2007) extends this “pedagogical’ voice by locating it in the wider world and conjuring “ideas of freedom, of individuality and of distinctiveness” (p. 91). Voice in this broader context also implies a metaphysical idea of voice as a collective or social notion similar to the description of a newspaper being ‘the voice of the people’ rather than as a form of self-representation (Barnett, 2007). This shifts us from the innate, private writer’s voice to the social voice.

A social conception of voice holds that it is a primarily a social and cultural construct. This Bakhtinian view embraces the diverse ways writers bring other “voices” into their work and the social role of the writer and reader who are both present in the text (Bakhtin, 1981, 1986). Extending this orientation into his work with second-language writers, Matsuda (2015) believes that voice can be located in the writer, the text, and/or the text-mediated interaction between writer and reader. In her influential work on writer identity and voice, Ivanič (1998) asserts that academic writers display intersecting aspects of identity—their different writer’s selves—to create texts. For her, the discoursal self is concerned with “the way [writers] want to sound” (1998:25) with a strong focus on the form of discourse. In tandem, the authorial self operates in “the sense of the writers’ positions, opinions and beliefs” (1998:26) and shifts the focus of the writer identity being constructed from questions of discourse form to one centered on content and ideas. In exploring the origins and manifestations of creativity in doctoral writing, this division is significant as both selves can be fruitful sources of creativity in written work.

Disciplinary influences and constraints

Any discussion of creativity in doctoral writing contexts is incomplete without addressing the impact of the disciplines. Although not specifically focused on creativity, studies examining aspects of the disciplinary presence in higher education such as their formation, conventions, and the power they wield have attracted sustained multi-disciplinary attention (e.g., Bourdieu, 1994 in Sociology; Davis, 2017; Trowler, 2012 in Higher Education research; and Chanock, 2007; Prior, 1998 in Applied Linguistics). Although beyond the scope of this piece to examine disciplinary impact in detail, in some respects, disciplinary influences are the fundamental reason doctoral texts appear as they do; painstakingly crafted for readers preoccupied with thoughts of how writers’ views will mesh with the discipline. The power of the discipline and the strength of disciplinary discourses directly impacts how written products from that discipline are formed; for written creativity is born and shaped within these disciplinary spaces. For Hyland (2012), the strong emphasis disciplinary discourses place on “what is shared among members” of the discourse community tends to lessen personal creativity and individual contribution. However, he points to tension within this cosy, shared world as “academic reputations are built on saying something new, by staking a claim to a novel idea or seeing things in an original way” (Hyland, 2012: 39). Crème and Hunt (2002) also found that there is a “perceived conflict between being creative, which is associated with putting oneself and one’s ideas into the writing, and the critical, which involves fulfilling the academic requirements” (p. 151). This choice is also faced by doctoral writers who, as apprentice academics, need to weigh up if and how far they can move from standardized forms of written expression and the well-used genres favored by their discipline.

Tension between individuality and group-mindedness is a common experience at all levels of higher education, not only for doctoral writing. Indeed, Hyland (2008) notes that all academic writers must choose to what extent they suppress or extol the presence of their writer’s voice due to ongoing concerns regarding the amount of deviation from accepted patterns of academic form their readers would accept. Allison (2004) has also written of an illusory freedom when EAP (English for Academic Purposes) teachers urge students to write freely without “established understandings of how to write and perhaps how to innovate acceptably in writing” (p. 195). In a similar vein, Tardy (2016) analyses how innovation is positioned and perceived in academic writing by both an academic leader and students in an undergraduate science class. In sum, the above studies may suggest that written creativity might be an early casualty in the tussle over the presence and strength of writer’s voice in many disciplinary contexts.

Notwithstanding these pressures to either follow or separate from accepted disciplinary ways of undertaking the work of writing, Brodin (2018) has identified numerous other constraints which may affect creativity and doctoral writing. These include a rigid funding system for research and limited time frames available for completion. However, she argues that underneath these are arguably stronger inhibitory factors such as scholarly traditions (with their emphasis on compliant apprenticeship), the unchecked power of the supervisor and the simple fact that creativity is rarely requested of candidates in their everyday doctoral practice (Brodin, 2018). Aitchison and Paré (2012) and Starke-Meyerring et al., (2014) would add to these the peripheral and remedial ways that western academic institutions frame doctoral writing and writing assistance.

Key questions

This study follows a recent investigation into how multilingual doctoral writers in the Arts experience creativity (Thurlow et al., 2019). Working with these writers and with a growing awareness of creativity’s true complexity at the research site, I was inexorably led towards the academic reader and the question; how did these judges of doctoral writing understand creativity? Specifically, I sought academics’ perspectives on two key questions:

What were supervisors’ perceptions of and reception to creativity/creative elements in three short doctoral texts?

Where did they locate creativity in the sample texts; was it in the ideas (the creative thought/content) or the text itself (the creative expression/form of that idea) or a combination of both?

Methodology

Context and participants

The study was undertaken in the Faculty of Arts in a large, research-intensive Australian university. To help understand what creativity could mean in doctoral writing contexts, six academic supervisors were asked to reflect on both their personal knowledge and experience of creativity, as well as in their work with doctoral students and encounters with creativity at both disciplinary and institutional levels. I sought a diversity of views across this large faculty with its loose conglomeration of both Humanities and Social Sciences disciplines. I invited 30 academics with significant experience of doctoral writing at examiner level to participate via an unsolicited email. Table 1 provides details of the final six participants.

Table 1.

Details of academic participants.

Participant name^a	Gender	Disciplinary affiliation	Number of completed doctoral supervisions
Aaron	M	Applied Linguistics	16
Joan	F	Linguistics	17
Warren	M	Criminology	8
Robyn	F	Public Policy	4
Peter	M	Politics	20
Kate	F	History	5+

^aPseudonyms.

The participants took part in an hour-long recorded, interview with the researcher in late 2018. Interview transcriptions, together with observations made during and postinterview, comprise the core data for this paper. Further methodological approaches included:

The use of textual prompts to focus on the link between writing and creativity

Critical analysis of the data using the tools of indexicality and orientation; designed to move beyond the text level and uncover how the context of production influences reception by academic readers.

Focus on texts

The written word lies at the core of the doctorate; indeed, it is what doctoral candidates are ultimately judged on. Therefore, investigating written product is crucial by grounding perceptions of what is considered creative in doctoral writing. To help anchor the notoriously slippery concept of creativity, I utilized what Lillis (2008) terms “talk around texts” to highlight specific discoursal and other elements that characterize creativity at a textual level. I believed this would elicit fuller information rather than directly asking the academic readers what creativity meant for them. This decision was made to avoid giving the impression that I was seeking a simple definition or “answer” to such a dense and contested topic and also partly due to my status as a nonacademic “outsider” at the research site.

To this end, I selected three doctoral texts, each approximately 800 words in length. They were written by three doctoral students from the same faculty (but not necessarily the same discipline) as the academics. Their authors had joined a Thesis Writers’ Circle I had facilitated in 2016. In this context, these pieces were shared with me as examples of creative academic writing. After gaining ethics permission for their use, they were subsequently anonymized and, apart from one occasion when a reader managed to guess an author’s identity, the writers remained unknown to these readers.

My specific procedure using the texts involved:

Listening to the doctoral writers discussing their work during an interview held immediately after the final Thesis Writer’s Circle class and probing how it was creative for them. For example, I asked them what language or other features characterized this creativity.

As a key intermediary between writers and readers in the study, I needed to source textual prompts that would stimulate a productive discussion with academics. To this end, I chose three doctoral student texts that I felt presented a diversity of creative features; ranging from those written in a formal, objective style to much more subjective and sensual work.

Sharing the texts via email with the academic participants before we met. In the subsequent interview, I asked about any creativity they observed in the texts and what form it took for them. I listened to the words they used about creativity and noted any semi-synonymous or conflated terms.

Moving from text to context

Notwithstanding an initial reliance on the three doctoral texts as a stimulus, I desired to move beyond what Lillis (2008) terms a textualist analytic lens (p. 354) to discover how creativity may extend from the text and the writer’s and reader’s perception of it into the wider social and institutional forces that shaped its production. To achieve this, I utilized the tools of indexicality and orientation (Lillis, 2008). For Lillis (2008), indexicality refers to the way specific parts of either spoken or written language can index or point to aspects of social context (p. 376). This extends the work of Gumperz (1982) who locates indexical meaning as springing from the notion of contextualization whereby people “make sense” in an interaction and “pick up” unsaid meanings through indexing connections between language form and social and cultural patterns. The key, then, is ultimately the verbal and nonverbal cues that bleed between utterances and contexts.

The dialogical aspect of writing recalls Bakhtin (1981) who famously framed the fundamentally social, heteroglossic nature of language as “dialogism.” For him, meaning is not passively received by language users, it is an active process whereby meaning is transformed and made dialogical. Language points to or “indexes” a certain point of view of the speaker or writer. Bakhtin described language as “stratified not only into linguistic dialects in the strictest sense of the word, but also … into languages that are socio-ideological: languages of social groups, ‘professional’ and ‘generic’ languages, languages of generations and so forth.” (1981: 271–272). Using these contextualized “universes,” indexicality thus becomes a tool to reveal the social class, profession, or ideological positioning of the speaker or writer.

As its partner in process of deep theorizing, the notion of orientation is also highly relevant to this study. Lillis, (2008) defines it as “how speakers or hearers orient to what is said or written” (p. 376). At a basic level, it could be how speakers orient themselves to the form or meaning of the written word; for example, positively, negatively or neutral. However, Lillis (2008) also considers that it can reveal a somewhat emotional perspective on speech or writing and can be influenced by the “style” of the utterance or text and the effect this has on the speaker. In this manner, orientation could also be viewed as involving attitudinal judgments on an object or person. Bakhtin (1986) also considers speaker orientation in his work. He believes that all texts, to some extent, are diachronic in that they intersect and address each other with this notion of “addressivity” being a key foundation of dialogism. He also discusses an orientation towards the “superaddressee” such as God, absolute truth, the court of history and science, whose absolutely fair and responsive understanding is presumed. In this study, I sought to identify any orientation towards creativity evident in the participants’ utterances, whether it was an attitude, a judgment or even the invocation of a superaddressee.

Data analysis

Following the fieldwork, full transcripts were made of the six academic interviews. These transcripts were subsequently combed for themes of interest. Shifting from text to context, I did not follow any predetermined protocol; instead, I moved through a process described by Peräklyä (2005) as “draw[ing] a picture of the presuppositions and meanings that constitute the cultural world of which the textual material is a specimen.” (2005:870). Bauman and Briggs (1990) term this process entextualization where texts are decontextualized and become a new discourse in a new context—in this case, as a basis for a discussion about creativity with academic supervisors. Thus, through analyzing the academic interviews, I sought to link individual utterances into an understanding of wider social structures and speaker orientation implied by the comments. Finally, I attempted to form a picture of what creativity is, what it might look like and what its presence (or lack of) might mean for doctoral writing for both the individual academic participants and the social group of which they are a part.

Results and discussion

The three creative doctoral texts generated diverse responses from this group of Arts academics. Here, I present extracts from the three texts and reader reactions to them through the methodological prism of indexicality and orientation while illuminating key intersections between creativity in writing in doctoral contexts.

Question 1: Perceptions of and receptivity to creativity in the example texts

Text 1: Renato

A multilingual writer from an Italian language background, Renato was researching a historical criminology topic. The extract below formed part of his draft conclusion to an early thesis chapter and was written roughly mid-candidature.

Extract A: Renato’s writing

The fact that the historical study of crime has been unable to keep away from the demands of a historiography of the left can be attributed to a certain historiographical sensibility towards the unfairness with which intellectual history and the history of criminal law have treated criminals of the past. Tortured bodies, dangerous classes, rascals, lawbreakers, evil and wicked people, demonic witches have all become, through social and crime history, more than objects of analysis; they have become voices to be heard and advisors with first-hand experiences of worrisome states of affairs and trends in penal matters. If the historical study of crime is a department of historical social science, the latter is at least in part an inheritance of new history and social history, of a fusion of historical and social-scientific methods in the early twentieth century meant to unify the human knowledge of the time against contemporary evils and social problems. The historical social scientist cannot ignore and dismiss the teachings of the new historian but rather must confront them with the courage of an empowered political constituent – of a delegate for democracy. As we shall see in the next chapter, I am not advocating for a politico-ideological abuse of history. Hobsbawn warned incessantly about the crimes of historians, about the misuse of historiography and historical narrative, and we shall soon explore in greater detail the problematic relation between past and present for science and politics and the debates about the practical past and the role of the past in the present – and of the present in history – as they were elaborated by historians and philosophers at the turn of the twentieth century.

Renato’s work presented as the most classically academic with its formal written style and high lexical density. Despite being selected by its author as a particularly creative example of his work, a degree of negativity was directed at it from some readers. For example, when I asked Warren (Criminology) if he glimpsed any creativity in it, his reply was both swift and dismissive:

Not really, actually. I think there is a kind of some creativity in bowerbird sort of work; where you’re sort of picking from this and picking from that … But creativity to me is where it sparkles and there’s a kind of clashing together that rub up together and produce something new and I don’t see that here. (Warren)

Aaron (Applied Linguistics) had an immediate, almost visceral response to the text. Unprompted, he leapt to assumptions about the author’s identity (he believed a woman wrote it) and judged the expression he found wanting:

I imagined a student writing it in a fit of frustration at the end of a PhD, just wanting to finish it… It needed better formatting. I felt the paragraphs were too long. It was overly dense and overly trudging and it seemed to have no joy. (Aaron)

However, Kate (History) was more enthusiastic about the strong and confident voice that emanated from this text; connecting it with the ability to use interesting, imaginative and precise vocabulary and also that something “possibly magical” is taking place:

There’s a certain use of metaphor … [reads aloud] ‘tortuous bodies, dangerous rascals, lawbreakers … ’ people who are doing something a little more creative with the writing use descriptors like these; they don’t just say criminals. They’ll bring that category to life with specific references that conjure up images for the reader and make it more lively. This bit is creative I would say. (Kate)

The six supervisors agreed that Renato’s sentences were overly lengthy. These dense sentences exemplifying how certain structures can cause readability problems and result in a strongly negative orientation towards writers by readers. Blommaert (2005) believes these problems stem from an impairment in the writer’s ability to deploy appropriate communicative resources as they move between social groups—even if the utterances are linguistically or pragmatically correct. In contrast to the common perception of supervisors being tolerant of dense writing, these readers generally indexed his difficult syntax as something to avoid due to its distancing effect on the reader.

Text 2: Bianca

From an Italian language and Applied Linguistics background, Bianca was researching bilingualism. This extract was from an early draft to one of her introductory thesis chapters.

Extract B: Bianca’s writing

I gradually developed an interest in the language of emotions since I started confronting myself with the need, very often a frustration, to express my preferences, feelings, anger in a language that was not ‘my own’ and consequently I also started, at first subconsciously, analysing my linguistic behaviour when speaking with international friends. I grew up in a fairly monolingual environment in Italy and I started studying English, my L2, if we consider the order of acquisition, at primary school, a language which only rarely could I relate to ‘real’ life events before moving to Australia. So why, when I was still living in Italy, did I use to switch to English, my L2, when I was angry at my ex-boyfriend, but to swear at him in Italian, my L1, when I was extremely mad, while our usual interactions were in Russian, my L4. But also, why did I feel so uneasy when I had to address him or, even more my brother, in English because surrounded by international friends who didn’t speak the language that I used to speak with these important people in my life? And why do I find hearing Spanish, which I learned mainly thanks to my bubbly, affectionate, festive Hispanic friends, so intimate and reassuring, even though it just my L5? Why can’t I help expressing my long list of endearments in Italian in front of a beautiful baby’s big eyes or a cute ‘gattino’ or ‘cagnolino’ but find myself cursing at a missed train in English?

With its extended narrative form, strongly subjective writer’s voice and the heavy reliance on rhetorical questions, Bianca’s text initially was identified as the most creative of the three texts by the academics. However, the familiar and, at times, intimate approach of the author towards her topic challenged Aaron who thought it “too casual” and “chatty and unfocused.” Warren also perceived issues with its informality, describing it as “a kind of an ethnographic, genre piece” but with some fundamental flaws:

You’d want it to be much more self-reflexive than what it is. It’s more descriptive, rather than an interrogation of the ‘I’ which I see as an auto-ethnographic ‘I’. So that’s why I see it as junior, failing to adopt the rules of being reflexive. (Warren)

These statements index Text 2 as part of a research tradition that Warren validates but also index the writer’s failure to reach a satisfactory standard of self-reflexivity. He then stratifies the writer as “junior”, thereby confirming his negative orientation towards Text 2.

The highly subjective nature of Text 2 moved my discussion with Peter (Politics) into the realms of what counts as evidence in academic discourse. His initial resistance to the possibility of creativity in doctoral writing was encapsulated by his statement:

Creativity is for poets and pop singers, isn’t it? I don’t see my own writing as creative; I see it analytical. Creative writing is fictional writing; analytical writing is not that. (Peter)

However, he conceded that, when comparing the three texts, the second one was “much more creative” in the use of evidence:

It’s much more personal, that second one. The evidence is the reaction of the writer … It’s creative in the absence of verifiable evidence … the other two, less so. (Peter)

In contrast to these largely negative assessments, Robyn (Public Policy) appreciated the directness of Bianca’s work and how it was “the easiest to understand” of all the texts. She also appreciated the personal element, commenting:

I don’t know if that’s the sense that this student thought of it as being creative – that they were bringing the personal to their doctoral writing but anyway, it was interesting because of the personal angle. (Robyn)

Here, Robyn links Bianca’s use of the personal—in other words, her authorial voice—with creativity in writing; “interesting” indexing value in this case. Similarly, Joan frames the text as interesting; “both from the perspective of the nature of the research and where it came from and also as a type of writing within the PhD genre.” She liked the narrative element and the depth of personal experience on display within that, declaring:

I like to think of PhDs as trying to tell a story about the research and that’s what I tell my own students. That you need to make it a coherent story. This is why this is interesting, this is what happened and this is the outcome. (Joan)

However, Joan tempers her enthusiasm of this creative approach to telling the PhD story by warning, almost as an aside, “that [it] can be good if it’s judiciously done … [but] you wouldn’t want it to be a constant thing.” This caveat indexes a definite limit to acceptable use of personal voice and narrative-based creativity in doctoral work.

Text 3: Lisa

This text on governance in South-East Asia was written by Lisa, a late-candidature Australian student. It was a near-final draft from the concluding section of a thesis chapter.

Extract C: Lisa’s writing

These days the Golden Triangle evokes a sense of both sedition and nostalgia. The latter has been used to market the notorious upper reaches and intersection of northern Laos, Thailand and Myanmar as a tourist destination. Visitors still arrive in busloads from the Thai side to visit the tawdry souvenir shops selling Golden Triangle T-shirts, the drug eradication museum and have their photographs taken under the gaze of a large golden Buddha statue at the river intersection viewpoint. There is a sense that the rogue, illicit and dubious underbelly of the Golden Triangle is a figment of the past. Yet, increasingly, the Golden Triangle has been reimagined, rebranded and re-crafted as an economic opportunity and presented as a space to connect with neighbouring countries. In the early 1990s, coupled with attempts to eradicate the drug trade and turn battlefields into marketplaces, the motif of an Economic Quadrangle was established in the Upper Mekong. The scale of the ADB’s GMS Economic Cooperation Program and the drive for an ASEAN Economic Community, by 2015 has in some ways overtaken the earlier regional dream, but it persists in the minds of the local entrepreneurs of regional towns from Chiang Mai to Jinghong, where the quadrangle weaves with past cultural linkages to the Tai kingdoms. Despite the newly minted roads of the NSEC and incoming capital, there remains an undercurrent of the untamed, illicit but strategically commercial forces that linger outside of state control. In fact, the existing sense of freedom and opportunity of the frontier is melding with new forms of capital and mobility, manifesting in SEZs and inviting shady entrepreneurs and opportunists of all characteristics.

With its use of evocative vocabulary and “creative” writing techniques such as alliteration, this text exudes a strong literary flavor. Among the readers, Kate appreciated its free-spirited nature and departure from convention.

This one seems to me to be a step across the line into … a kind of imaginative space. This is so wonderfully written and there’s a sense that there’s an imagination at work. (Kate)

Her positive orientation towards the writing springs from her identification of several creative elements in the text. Also significant is her use of “step across the line” which implies a conscious transgression is taking place. During our interview, Kate lingered over this text, highlighting its links to what for her is a related genre—creative non-fiction (CNF). She noted:

[With] creative non-fiction, you’re trying to turn a dissertation into something that ordinary people would want to read. In a way, the dissertation is a professional certification and not the kind of thing you’re going to pick up and read on an airplane. But there can be moments when you have narrative, story-telling. (Kate)

Kate’s penchant for occasional use of narrative in doctoral writing and her willingness to use CNF techniques could spring from her discipline’s (Modern History) openness to such approaches. This predilection is confirmed upon asking her to nominate some creative academic works in her field; her choices are all authors who have produced clearly “crossover” academic/CNF texts. Joan also appeared, initially at least, to hold a positive orientation towards Text 3.

The third one really seemed me to exhibit elements of kind of creative writing in the actual writing. It’s got lots of literary language and metaphors. Maybe that’s to do with the discipline area the person is working in. It also had a lot of value judgements and stance-taking. (Joan)

Here, Joan’s remarks index written creativity with “literary language”. For her, “literary” appears to be open to disciplinary interpretation, with the use of metaphor similarly disciplinary-specific. Her negative orientation against “value judgements and stance-taking” suggests use of this manifestation of personal positioning in doctoral writing is problematic. This is confirmed by a later statement; “The qualitative judgement of subject matter – that would be completely avoided in some disciplines but clearly its of interest in this.” Thus, she ultimately indexes Text 3 with a literary piece and one potentially unsuitable for her discipline or indeed, the academy.

Warren, too, felt Text 3 was unacceptable as a piece of doctoral writing but not due to its literariness:

This was a much more orthodox, descriptive thing about a … socio-political phenomenon so it didn’t really strike me as standing out from the what I’ve read a hundred times. This cultural anthropology or political science location … but on the edges of that discipline, I know there is writing that is much more and this is not adventurous writing. (Warren)

With these words, Warren indexes the generic and predictable nature of Text 3. His negative orientation appears to stem from the fact that the writer has stuck to the predictable, path of ‘standard’ doctoral writing and, as a result, has produced a descriptively-based, safe piece. Based on this statement, it appears that for him, Text 3 is not creative enough.

Question 2: The location of creativity; is it found in the ideas (the creative thought/content) or the text itself (the creative expression/form of that idea) or a mixture of both?

The division between the generation and investigation of research ideas and the subsequent recording of these ideas in written form, is at the heart of this question and indeed, doctoral life. Separating the process of research and “writing up” of it, particularly prevalent in the STEM disciplines, effectively downplays the “writing up” of the doctoral thesis/dissertation into a task more focused on recording or documentation. Tardy (2016) noted how the academic teacher of an undergraduate science class placed much more emphasis on creative thinking—especially logical and original thinking—perceiving creativity as present in the subject through how students grappled with ideas the literature, how they addressed research questions and how they interpreted the data. As a result, creativity was more likely to be valued in the practice or process of research rather than the textual product of the final written assignment. Creative expression was less discussed by this teacher and engendered an ambivalent reaction from her (Tardy, 2016).

It is well known that some doctoral supervisors do not view writing guidance as something integral to their job (Guerin et al., 2017). In other words, some may wish to support doctoral candidates with the development and exploration of their research ideas but remain apart from the “writing up” of research as much as possible. For this study, I sought to explore whether this group of Arts academics saw creativity as attached to one aspect of research or the other. It was also designed to discover which was more important to them—the creative idea or the creative expression of that idea in writing? If the latter, what textual features characterized this creativity, for example, use of metaphors or other literary language?

Warren (Criminology) was the sole participant who embraced the idea of an equal and interdependent relationship between these two branches of creativity. Reflecting on the three doctoral texts, he proclaimed that when the creative idea and the expression intersect in doctoral writing “you’ve got something amazing.”

Yeah, it’s both… [In Text 1], the creativity would reside in the bringing together of ideas from different places rather than specifically in the form. It’s more in the content. The other ones [Text 2 & 3] it’s about the genre, it’s actually about the form. It’s about how you use the ‘I’, the evocation of the position of the ‘I’, it’s in the style of the writing. So, I see creativity operating in both. And when it gets really brave, the two start messing with each other – where the writer plays with the form of the writing to actually spark off ideas. (Warren)

This view of different creativities located throughout the three texts is echoed by Peter (Political Science). He, too, recognizes that the creativity of Text 1 lies in the realm of ideas, while the remaining two are more creative in terms in their “expression.” However, he is clearly uncomfortable with the emphasis on individual “feelings” in Text 2 and favors a less subjective approach where form does not detract from content. The primacy of the creative idea over its form was also endorsed by Aaron (Applied Linguistics) who succinctly summed up their relationship; “For me, without being clichéd, form follows function.” This comment indexes his view of the subordinate position of creative form or expression compared to the creative idea.

Joan (Linguistics) is also a firm believer in the separation between the creative idea and the creative form of it, recognizing a fundamental separation between the two.

You can talk about creativity and innovation in the actual research and the writing up of it … But I don’t think it [the writing] needs to be presented in a creative form of expression. Like I think those two things are in principle independent. (Joan)

Although underlining their essential separation, she appeared to cautiously approve of creativity in expression if it did not detract from the integrity of the resulting written academic piece. This emphasis on form and discomfort with “distracting” expression identified by Peter, Aaron, and, to some extent, Joan, chime with Allison’s (2004) findings where a respondent highlighted the need for students to follow conventions set by the academic community with a warning that “a creative form of writing may encourage an unnecessary kind of aloofness from what the academic community is doing” (p. 203). This perspective implies that academic writers should aim to bring out the value of the ideas presented and not risk the reader missing the essential message due to “distracting” creative expression.

In a similar vein to Joan, Kate (History) believed that the creative idea and its creative expression are mostly separate but can run closely in parallel.

I don’t think they have to overlap; I don’t think you need both. I mean sometimes the ideas are really new and original and expressed very plainly and sometimes you can narrate something in a creative way but there’s no ideas there. Here, in all of these examples … to the extent they are creative, you have both. These, to me, are really ideas-based pieces that sort of move towards good expression. (Kate)

Robyn (Public Policy), initially unsure of the entire notion of creativity in doctoral writing, eventually agreed that “some useful expression of ideas and a certain style of writing” could combine to form a creative text. A little wistfully, she commented:

Some academics have the talent of using really engaging writing to express their ideas and do it in way that really engages the reader … Maybe there’s creativity in the way that they structure their sentences and the analogies, metaphors they use, whatever. And that is appealing to me. (Robyn)

In other words, for Robyn, the creative thought or idea appeared to predominate but room exists for a little flair or passion in the “expression” to facilitate reader engagement. For her, elements such as stylish sentence structure and use of metaphorical language would appear to be key areas where creativity could emerge in writing.

In sum, these academics had differing ideas whether the creative idea or the expression of it was of primary importance. Only one academic (Warren) firmly believed in the close and equal relationship between the creative idea and its form. In contrast, Aaron and Peter effectively subordinated creativity in expression firmly beneath the creative idea. Occupying a mixed position was Joan with her belief that they are separate and Kate also identifying their essential division but acknowledging that they could run in close parallel. Robyn, possibly reflecting her initial difficulty with locating creativity anywhere within the parameters of academic writing, eventually recognized the value creativity could add to content and thus, helping it “shine” for the reader.

Conclusion

This is the thing. In my five years teaching and supervising in [names School] and being on Teaching & Learning Committees and at one point being the Deputy Coordinator of the [names a large Masters coursework program], I don’t recall having conversations about creativity or using the word creativity. (Robyn, Public Policy)

Academics are not generally known for their reticence. Nevertheless, when the topic of creativity in doctoral writing was raised, a common first response was silence. Not complete quietude, but a marked absence of loquacity; with the odd sigh and an occasional, polite groan replacing words. This silence was also redolent with something else—not so much the silence of incomprehension but of someone struggling with a difficult object—such as a stiff door or a long unopened window. My respondents, professionals who are used to employing their keen intellect on various convoluted topics, seemed somehow flummoxed by the notion of creativity in doctoral writing. This mismatch between the firm ideas held by participants regarding what characterizes textual creativity but a marked reluctance to discuss it more holistically was a revelation. Before these discussions, I had assumed that experienced academics such as my respondents were routinely confronted by these and other writing “issues” in their role as professional readers. However, for most participants, I appeared to be broaching difficult and somewhat alien concepts. Although all my respondents were clearly drawn to “creative” doctoral writing, they did not seem to expect it from their doctoral students—or even raise it with them. Reasons for this reticence seem to lie at a deep level, perhaps even deeper than the discipline or the institution, and would require further time and persistence to unpack fully.

Although the number of respondents was small, a diverse range of attitudes towards creativity were uncovered by this study. Analyzing the reactions to short creative doctoral texts through the prism of indexical meaning and orientation sparked the following observations. Renato’s challenging text with its dense and lengthy sentences provoked responses indexing an almost uniformly high degree of reader resistance. Although one respondent admired his confident voice and use of imaginative, precise vocabulary, this piece ultimately elicited a strongly negative orientation from most readers. Immediately identified as the most creative of the three texts—especially in its use of evidence—Bianca’s text was indexed as too subjective and conversational by some readers. Although attracted by its writer’s strong voice and narrative style, her work was eventually oriented as “‘non-academic” by several readers and therefore, firmly rejected. Lisa’s highly literary text, with its use of evocative vocabulary and creative writing techniques such as alliteration and use of scene, impressed some readers. However, similar with the reaction to Bianca’s work, the use of non-academic and, for one supervisor, formulaic language, aroused a negative orientation. Related to this investigation into creative elements in texts, this study also assessed the relative importance of the creative idea as opposed to the creative written form of it. For the academics in this study, it appears that written creativity is mainly associated with content, with the expression of that idea somewhat less significant. In sum, through their interpretations of these texts, this group of Arts academics has revealed how the concept of creativity is shared, amplified, adapted, or jettisoned in doctoral writing contexts.

Despite its decidedly liminal status with supervisors at the research site, creativity is an essential part of doctoral writing. An effective doctoral thesis must exhibit originality through making a significant contribution to knowledge in the author’s disciplinary field. It is also present through how novel ideas are generated and subsequently presented while maintaining the reader’s engagement with the text. I maintain that it is the vehicle of creativity that drives this originality and is thus, indispensable. My hope is that this study has some way in illuminating how academic readers in Arts perceive creativity and what they take from its uncertain embrace.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the academics who participated in this study for their time and thoughtful comments.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Steven Thurlow

Author biography

Steven Thurlow began teaching academic writing in 1999 and has been working with doctoral writers since 2010. He has also worked as a professional writer.He is currently completing an interdisciplinary PhD in Applied Linguistics and Education at The University of Melbourne on how creativity could become a powerful and positive force in doctoral education.

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