Learning to read: a detective story

There are so many reasons why I #loveTwitter, but it is unusual for me to tweet for inspiration.

 I needed a sentence to start, an opener. Thanks to the New York Public Library, @nypl I found one that seems to echo something of what this blog is about:

There’s someone in my head, but it’s not me!

The idea that I am developing here is one that takes as its starting point Fairclough and his notion of reading as dialogic exchange between writer, actual and imagined readers: the imaginary reader. 

The 'exchange' in the case of written texts is played out between the writing and the reading of the text, and there may therefore be considerable temporal and spatial gaps between the initiating and responding moves. Moreover, a written text and especially a mediated text (e.g. a book) will figure in a great many exchanges corresponding to its many readings. Written texts often consist in themselves of nothing but Statements, and responses to them may go on only in readers' heads, so it may seem somewhat tenuous to insist on the concept of exchange in such cases. Nevertheless, all texts imply and are oriented to dialogue in a broad sense, even a diary I write for myself inevitably involves choices in what sort of imaginary reader (be it an imaginary self) to address, and this generalization of the concept of exchange is one way to capture this. ¹

I want to extend to reshape this idea, the stance from which it is written to suggest the ‘imagined reader’ as not the reader the writer had in mind when drafting their text, the active audience.  Not the ‘imagined reader’ that the actual reader imagine (and does or does not identify with) when reading a text. It is the readerly self I create in the process of reading.

I want to think about the ‘imagined reader’ as the readerly self I create in the process of reading.

Hence the image of ‘Coffin’ Ed and Gravedigger ‘Jones’, two fictional detectives created by Chester Himes, one of the many black writers I have read and loved – obsessively.

The readerly self, the academic readerly self is on a quest to find ‘the truth’.  This is a truth that may be pluralised: ‘to find truths’; it may also by qualified – ‘to find plausible truths’ rather than find ‘the definitive truth’.  To read, published texts or data to be able to make statements about how the world is: plausibly rather than definitively.  This is of course a risky undertaking.

The readerly self, the academic readerly self is sceptical. The stance taken in relation to everything read, heard, suggested is one of incredulous disbelief. A critical stance that demands, show me, prove it how do you know that’s the case, but what if, who says and so on. The questioning is relentless.  Whatever ls left intact at the end of the process, is temporary until old answered questions re-emerge alongside new unanswered questions.

The readerly self, the academic readerly self relies on informants. The reading process is an entirely dialogic one. The plausible truths to emerge through text do not reveal themselves spontaneously – they are actively sough be and through the engagement with the writer, through places several writers alongside each other, through looking and text and the world the text refers to – which may be a world other then the one he writer was specifically referring to –my reasons for reading may not be same as the writers reading for writing, or for wanting me to reads.  None-the-less the detective self forages for truth and draws on whatever is available to assemble plausibility.

This is one possible version of the readerly self – there are many other possible: the diver,  the orchestral conductor, the explorer, the hair stylist. The more I read, the more and newer selves I discover. There is nothing I enjoy more than being lost in text, lost as an imaginary self in a unexplored world.

¹ Norman Fairclough, Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research (London: Routledge, 2003) 109, Questia, Web, 13 Jan. 2012.

#WResearcher Meme #3 How do you read to learn / learn to read: uncovering / unfolding

How do you read to learn / learn to read: uncovering / unfolding

The idea of an academic having to learn to read is counter-intuitive but resonant. Academic reading is unlike any other reading that we do. In fact – if we adopt the stance of the New Literacy Studies, it is not unreasonable to say that all reading is deeply contextual and particular  to a specific domain. This means, and I think this is true, that the reading I do for my job – reports, emails, assignments, policy papers and texts to inform my teaching, is quite unlike the reading to do for academic research – extended, exploratory, open ended texts, books, bibliographies, research reports, conference listings, chapters, published papers, my own work in the course of revision.

Becoming and remaining an academic involves a process of learning to read.

At the start of my MA I was acutely conscious of this. On one occasion, we had a session where our lecturer sat with a small seminar group and together we read a few paragraphs from a chapter. We then went on to discuss it in detail. The approach was not unlike an activity I might well have undertaken with a group of adult literacy students, although of the course the level and nature of the text and direction of the discussion was significantly different. We were reading about Bourdieu and together unpicking habitus.

I am here making a deliberate and provocative connection. The adults who come to my literacy class have a particular set of quite specific practices they have acquired in relation to reading. Joining an adult literacy class signifies a desire on their part to change, to become someone different. A changed approach to reading is part of that process. This is not unlike the aspiration to become an academic, someone who wants to be something other than who they are at the moment:  a prolifically published writer, a highly regarded academic, a quoted and referenced expert – reading is part of achieving this changed sense of self.

I am here also making a disconnection. With the adult literacy student the actual content of the text is of little importance. What matters is their capacity to explore it independently. That they can read, that I read in identification terms is as important as what I read. Oh, it has to  be interesting - but this is a loop, if it is not interesting, I won't read it. As an academic there is an interplay between what I read and that I read. I invoke the iconic image of the academic standing in front of her books displayed decoratively in the background on rows of shelves. It is being a reader that matters.

Academic reading, reading to learn, is a very particular kind of reading.

Norman Fairclough's Critical Discourse Analysis explicates the work that texts do. How they position readers – that is the writer constructs an ideal reader inviting the actual reader to fall in with the qualities assumed of that construct. This is what readers habitually do. Usually as readers we are unaware of this process. Once we become aware, we may question the assumptions and negotiate an alternative stance. But this still positions us; if we are not the desired, imagined reader constructed by the writer / the text - then we are forced to re/define ourselves as the actual, desired, imagined, self-constructed reader. We then have to negotiate our readerly selves into an alternative position in relation to text and relation to the text's imagined reader. This happens with – for example policy texts. Texts that talk about education in instrumental terms, about qualification as if it were their exchange value rather than their use value that matter. When policy texts are well written, they are compulsive, seductive, they draw the reader in with warm faltering words. You find yourself engrossed and willingly accepting the stance the writers of policy texts take, the normative truth regime they create around you and them. We are seduced by such texts when we are disarmed by them, when our critical faculty is temporarily quietened and we willingly sign up to their agenda.

Doesn’t happen often and certainly doesn’t happen with anything this particular government has written

The point is that in starting the EdD I found I had to be very structured, explicit about the reading I was doing. These academic texts were not policy texts but still I was seduced. The trouble is – I can be faddy, a 'buy-one-get-one-free' person. I would read text (a) and I love it. I enthuse and think yes! that's it, that's it.  Then I would read text (b) a scathing critique of text (a) and have the same excitement and sense of gosh golly – that is so true. At some point I realise I have to fall out of line. It helped to devise strategies to enable a more distanced, less emotional reading. 

Remembering, that in reading these texts part of what I am doing is creating a new identity for myself: an academic.

We were advised by a lecturer on how to read. Advised to ask a series of questions. I had to translate these into a template. I need to fling words across paper (or screen). It's not all in my head. I need to let it happen on paper, through my finger tips as well – otherwise too much of it disappears.

The questions – I have still have all those notes, somewhere.  

·         What is the main argument out forward by the writer?

·         How is this argument developed?

·         How well is it supported?

·         How does this connect to other things you have read?

·         Does it convince you?

·         What other reactions do you have to it?

·         What key concepts does the author develop or use?

·         Any particular vocabulary that you want to make a note of?

These questions stopped quite early – I didn’t need to be so specific, so focussed and interrogated the text in different ways. Usually in ways that was more related to the question I had in mind for a research project and paper.

This is a kind of uncovering, or at least an unfolding; it seeks to make bare what is hidden. Hidden: not through artifice as such. But is a natural process. We present the text not the draft and redraft that created it. We present a completed garment; the stitching is on the inside. Reading involves reminding yourself of the inherent sociality involved in learning. These are not truths being presented but biographies.  Someone persuasive attempt to persuade you – the reader –that this is how it is, a plausible account of how things might, just possibly might, be.  The inherent sociality of learning means reading is not a process of reading as such, as in decoding text and understanding what it means, it is a social process of conversing with someone, the person or persons who have written the text.

And so the final take on reading: unfolding

One that is I think at odds with what I would normally associate with reading, but which explores uncovering, unfolding. Fairclough suggests that the reading associated with critical discourse analysis is no more than what readers do with texts anyway. The process formalises, records and annotates this. We read text as social theorist and as ‘consumers’ professionals charged with implementing the policies they display. But what about reading data. How do we read data – this is surely all at once reading to learn and learning to read. What Faorclough describes as a process readers engage in anyway perhaps does not appreciate the extent to which the reading, re-reading, annotating and recording of readings changes the process. It slows it down. It compels connections. It is not dissimilar to the Rorschach ink splodge test. Do we create images from the random splattering of human life to meet a deep seated yearning for order, coherence, narrative thread?

May be so.

Reading data: what and how do we do this?

I refer here to something I posted earlier this week. I have now gotten over my anxiety about the UCET presentation. What is left is not the frustration of a paper that felt truly terrible – but the pride with having broken my self-imposed silence: good. And more – with looking again at my analysis and seeking to understand the source of my discontent.

To clarify. Last Thursday I presented a paper at a conference, University Council for the Education of Teachers (UCET). The paper presented was a background paper, a contextualising draft. The data that will eventfully shape the paper had only just been gathered and was largely not collated. I had 1 quote from research participants based on earlier interviews. I have often chosen to avoid speaking to peers in public situations –  if I possibly can. And so this presentation thing is quite a challenge to me. But mostly, when I present, the nerves and dread are vindicated: the session goes well, the feedback is good and I feel exhilarated. I did not enjoy UCET. I felt stilted and that I did not cover new ground. I felt it was simply a re-churning of what I already know and that I think those who chose to attend the session also knew. It ended 20 mins early and I missed whole chunks of the paper out. This feeling of dread – post presentation dread has stayed with me.

But once it subsided – a little. I thought again about the quotes I bought with me. The tiny bits of data. 

I was asking the data one question – reading the data with a particular focusing mind. As such I fear that the elephant in the room (far from couching in the corer trying to hide) was sitting and sipping coffee without my noticing. The text does not address the question I was asking – and actually does not do so for a very particular reason. That is the context within which the participants work does not allow them the exploration an answer to this question implies. In one instant at least, a participant is clearly deeply unhappy with his professional situation. Is distressed by it and seems to feel in something of a cul-de-sac. Mostly the qualification they achieve is a means of moving toward something, for him it is means of escape.

Research participants find it difficult to answer the question – what do I mean by literacy and how to I reconcile literacy as social practice and literacy as skills – because – any attempt to move beyond literacy as skills is curtailed. They recognise it but – as one participant has said, ‘at the end of the day, I still have to tick that box’.

In the assemblage that is a policy driven, research based literacy pedagogy – professionals are compelled to play dead: to appear as if they have committed the epistemic suicide that Taylor-Webb so evocatively talks about.

Drafted Wednesday, 09 November 2011 03:04:57

First edit Wednesday, 09 November 2011 22.17.25


ALBRIGHT, J. & LUKE, A. 2008. Pierre Bourdieu and literacy education, Routledge, Taylor & Francis: London.
BARTON, D. 2007. Literacy : an introduction to the ecology of written language, Malden, Mass. Oxford, Blackwell.
TAYLOR & WEBB, P. 2007. Accounting for Teacher Knowledge: Reterritorializations as epistemic suicide. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 28, 279-295.

something I am passionate about

What do you feel passionate about: write about it

I went to Leeds University in the mid-80’s to do my PGCE in Sociology and English. I loved studying there. I think they must be one of the teacher training departments that the government  felt most bothered about. Not because of the standards they achieved.

My PGCE has had a profound impact on me.

In two ways

Firstly - all my lecturers were out and out left wing progressive Marxist. I have this impression of an entire year of lectures all of which were focussed on a single subject elaborated upon in extraordinary detail  - the education system served to effectively filter people according to race, gender and class. In was an inherently unequal system that served the interests of capital. We had a lecturer who once offered a different slant. He went through all the arguments that analysed discriminatory processes and ridiculed them.   He was a lively lecture, witty and entertaining. But his message was clear and chilling. We discussed it afterwards in seminars: if all these social explanations for inequality were unsound, the argument he was for was one that established the educational order as natural as the outcome of intelligence. Middle class, male and white students did better because they were more suited to academic education.  But he was a one voice and one we rejected. Everyone else elaborated on variations on the theme education, sociology and inequality.  I can’t quite remember the Sociology team but I do remember the English teaching team and they were great.  But I was happily indoctrinated by Leeds University and year later, I thank them for it.

I was one of two black girls on the course. I meet at Leeds (not at the University, in Chapeltown in a night club – the first person who was black and doing a PhD). It did not occur to me in those days that I would be even remotely capable of a PhD. At the time probably wasn’t.

Secondly – years later, this passion for, commitment to, insistence upon equality – continues to saturate me. This is what I am and it is what I do.  I qualified to teach in secondary schools but after spending 3 months in a school (on the PGCE course) I left because I realised these were not the relationships that I wanted to have with young people.  Having chanced upon adult education, I stayed because I loved it. The looseness of it. The informality of the teacher – student relationship. Boundaries are different in community education. Professionalism is defined in other ways. In community ed there is a commitment to equality. I liked the fact the students could join management committees and be members.  The commitment to equality was translated into practice: praxis in community education. I felt as a young strutting 20 something year old black girl, and a teacher that I was undermining the education system. There were several, but particularly, there were two black guys in my first cohort of students. They had just left school and joined the local adult education institute to take GCSE English and Sociology having failed a year earlier. They passed. I liked the fact that having failed after 10 years of schooling, they were able to pass after a year n adult ed. I guess with a bit more experience, it was not as simple as school = bad and discriminatory, adult ed = good and committed to equality. I loved being a teacher, the black girl and going out blusing in the evenings, I’d bump into my students who seemed pleased and surprised that I was part of my community. This is another line of narrative – but the Leeds was the first time I’d felt part of a black community. I loved it.

So now – some years later – what do I feel passionate about?

Well, thanks to the formative influence of Leeds University – equality is still my passion. I want to create change through the work that I do: through my teaching, through my writing, through the systems and structures I establish.

I’d forgotten this.

It’s important that I return to this and remember it. It’s my passion. Without it what I do has little meaning. The gratification that rewards what I do is constantly deferred. And what happens to a dream deferred?

More than deferred. It is made irrelevant.

I have recently started reading a colleague whose work I have read before Taylor-Webb, he writes these impassioned essays about teacher knowledge, the choreography of accountability, the anatomy of accountability. He writes about the performativity culture in schools and its impact on teachers.

I am most interested here in his ideas – these I recall at a distance and now loop back to connect to my research – on the reterritorialisation of teacher knowledge.  Asking and answering the question – what happens when teaching is made teacher-proof. What happens when teachers’ knowledge is made irrelevant. When teachers ‘deliver ‘ the commodity knowledge  that have been created elsewhere, by someone else.

He refers to this as epistemic suicide.

What happens when the dream of equality is constantly deferred? 

This is the opening quote from a paper I am now writing.

doesn’t always fit in. It’s great theory; it’s good. You know, we’ve talked about how to contextualise it and the wheel, all of that.  It was very refreshing. But my [manager], all she’s interested in is, ‘Oh! He failed. Can we get him back in?’ Not, ‘Can we develop this individual?’ ‘Can we get him back in? What do you think he failed on?’ And that’s the environment we’re in. And with the contracts coming up for renewal.           

It’s very target driven, when you are in a target driven environment professional judgement goes out the window, it suffers, because, that’s the main critique of my teaching, it’s not an excuse, it’s a business. They want more for less. It’s stressful; they are asking you for what you can’t deliver. It’s terribly stressful. I’ve had 10 years of it and I’m burnt out from it.  10 years.  It’s too long for this environment.  It’s too long. You should probably have a shelf life of 5 years.

I worked with this quote as an early example of some of the ideas trainees have in reference to their teaching. But I was asking the data one question while ignoring that it  was telling me something  else – ignoring it because this was not the question I was asking.

This student is clearly unhappy in his work. Clearly unhappy with teaching and clearly feels that the professional frame that surrounds him, what he is required to do – has no meaning for him. Worse still, has a meaning that undermines is sense of who he is and what he is meant to be doing,

He finds what he is learning refreshing – but this is made stale by the voice of his manager. 

He is asked to critique his teaching – his main critique is the environment the works in and the limitations that this imposes.

Situational analysis – I think – invites us to analyse situations to explore our themes. This implies a more open ended data analysis, rather than one that focuses exclusively on our concern but one that reads the situation. I may have an interest in conceptions of literacy, but may find that my answer lies in first of all analysing the situation in its entirety and reading the data in the first instance at face value.

I have chosen to answer my question I passing That is I am asking – not the direct question : what do you think of literacy, but in passing, what conception of literacy emerges in the course of this programme.

Everybody quotes Silverman – so I will maintain the tradition. This is just a nodded acknowledgement rather than detailed referencing. There are some narratives of methodology that I love and will refer to in another blog.  What I am thinking of here is the idea that if you ask a direct question, for example, if you ask about a culture directly you get everything included in our answer; its like asking fish what water is like. The answer offers little insight. Instead, put your hand in the water, compare it to land, send a dog or cat into the water. Heat the water up or cool it down. Add things to it. Or at least, invite the fish to tell you about his life in the water - what she can and can’t do.

And so in the quote about Joseph,   my trainee teacher,  provides an example of the epistemic suicide, the dis/connected ventriloquised self that teachers experience. This sense that there values are not even allowed full articulation. What does it mean to describe yourself as a holistic teacher? How do you in the context of a literacy class develop the whole person? What aspects of your professional judgement go flying out of the window?  What would your teaching be like if theory was able to fit the possibilities of practice? There is a sense of potentiality being stalled before it has tine to flourish. There is hankering, desire but no space to explore, embed and develop.

it’s not an excuse, it’s a business.

What strikes me here – is the professional cul-de-sac that Joseph seems to inhabit.  The trouble is there may be critiques of his teaching – even within he realms of a target driven culture – but the all pervasiveness of the context obscures the possibility of him seeing this.

So – with the desire to push the boundaries of my thinking, to cover new terrain – the ideas to further explore.

Taylor-Webb on teacher knowledge and epistemic suicide

The data may answer a question that wasn't actually asked, allow yourself to read the data in ways that enable it to speak to you – open up different explorations

Sometimes a question asked in passing is more valuable than a direct question: there is little to gain form asking a fish to analyse water 

Where and how and is there any point in creating space for teachers to explore their values and reasons for teaching, if these values are unlikely to find institutional expression

I like this image, I know too little about it.

Maeve Rendle, Blackpool: Rendle takes the inspiration for this, her first solo show, from a line in Marcel Proust's reflection on the nature of memory, In Search of Lost Time: 'I could not help being saddened by the fact that there was now nothing left of my former frame of mind.' Her series of installations is on show at the Grundy gallery, Blackpool, until 5 June 2010

The broken letters of a typewriter – I wanted to start thinking about the moments when literacies can be dysfunctional. I have to be careful here – because literacy is always told in terms of limitation, lack, deficit and I have no desire to fuel this. But, I want to explore the idea of independence. This seems to be something that those who come to literacy classes value. It can be a strong motivator.

It may also be a metaphor for the dysfunctionallity of skills based approach to literacy. The letters of the typewriter lay strewn and broken,  apart from the machine that enables them to perform. 

Meme #2 #WResearcher 2

Now that you have already introduced your research (see Meme #1), we propose you introduce your journey.  Take a minute to consider where you are at now and what brought you here. Look back into your journey of experience, and tell us how you’ve got here:

Tell the story! – Write in plain English! Allow the writing to flow. Let your voice be heard.

Provide the context of your journey: what/who brought you here? 

Tell your audience what fuels your research, what dreams, aspirations (or even life circumstances) have triggered your venture into academia, and how you’ve gone about fulfilling them. 

Share your passion!

Write for a generic audience.  Allow others to enter your world.

Keep your narrative short and rich. Shorter posts are easier to read on the screen; your personal account is what makes readers follow your blog.


You are trying to do something quite particular with this #wresearcher activity; my reasons for joining are not your reasons for starting the process. I don't think this matters. It's inevitable. And probably true for all participants. 

I love writing. It is the desire to write that started and makes me continue with academic life. I think through writing. As a child I loved reading and always imagined myself a writer. As an adult I was surprised when I tentatively started an MA to find out just how much I enjoyed it. Now there is just a permanent sense of frustration at not doing more than I do. 

The idea of blogging as a self-referencing public diary limits what I want to do: engage with ideas outside and beyond my experience that have the capacity to transform it. 

BEREITER, C. & SCARDAMALIA, M. 1987. The psychology of written composition, L. Erlbaum Associates.

I have just purchased this book though it is one a read about and have referenced some time ago. It is inconsistent with my preferred theoretical framework for understanding writing – as 'social' psychology rather than psychology. But one of the points they make is that while writing is often treated as ‘knowledge-showing’ it should be understood as ‘knowledge-transforming’. The physical act of putting ideas on paper generates new understandings. In writing we make conscious choices about nuances of meaning. We are required to be explicit about our preference for one word or phrase as oppose to another. We have to establish precisely how ideas dis/connect to each other, how they need to be sequenced. We have to decide that is important enough to include / exclude. 

I say this as an argumentative response to absent colleagues who are at time critical of essay writing as a process of merely reproducing what has been read: regurgitating. It seems to me that it is a creative process. No less creative that story telling. Indeed, it is a form of storytelling. All research is autobiography - a story of how and why the researcher has come to understand something in a particular way.

As I read I find my voice becomes caught up with other voices. I sometimes think of writing as similar to painting. That is, I use the voices, ideas, concepts I encounter like colours on an artist’s palate to create new thought shapes. 

Meme #1 #WResearcher 1 ‘What do people talk about when they talk about literacy?’

The Meme

Thinking about either a small segment of a current research project or the overall scope of a current research project, your invitation here is to

• write in plain English, let the academese lapse for a while – maybe novel words, stronger verbs, sassy sentences will find their way in,
• write to develop a single idea or concept, or to convey a novel insight, or to describe the project overall.
• write for an audience who would not ordinarily encounter this idea – an interdisciplinary colleague, your cousin or gran, a friend since primary school who took another path, or a person in government, industry, community organizing who you want to be in conversation with about a shared concern, or write (in turn, not all at once) for multiple audiences,
• write no more than two pages, ideally about one page (250 words/page),
• write before looking at samples: Research in Plain English,
• write generatively – this is about pushing, finding, exploring an idea.

And post – click on the hyperlinked How here or go to the How tab to learn the details on joining in part of the process.

‘What people talk about when they talk about literacy?’

This was the title of my MA thesis. It echoes the title of a collection of short stories, by Raymond Carver, that at the time I was reading and loved: ‘What do people  talk about when they talk about love?’

 My area of research is adult literacy.  I completed my Doctorate while worked in FE am now working in HE (holding on by my fingertips). I am acutely aware of my minority status as one of the 1.2 BMEworking in HE. And – because I am a woman - determined to open my own doors.

I am now getting started with a research project with my students at University of Hull registered on a University Diploma course. I want to explore their ideas about teaching language and literacy.  

I am curious about ‘What people talk about when they talk about literacy’. Depending on who is speaking they may talk about

·         illiteracy or lack of (functional) literacy – politicians and policy makers are keen on this

·         falling standards in reading and writing – they never define precisely when standards started falling and from what to what – politicians and policy makers and the press like this

·         the rogue apostrophe, to which my response is always http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lm2OzAX86JU (one of the things I like about literacy is subverting it - this is a popular one that educated people talk about and Linda Truss)

·         the desire to be educated, good parents or to see their children do well (students often talk about this)

·         the frustration they feel at having to reconcile the irreconcilable  - what students want, what they as teachers feel their students need and what they are required to do (teachers often talk about this)

·         the space between thought and text (me! But not mine I just think it a beautiful definition and share it with other researchers – it should be more quoted)

All writing is derivative. It prefer ‘holding hands’ to ‘standing on shoulders’. I am conscious of ideas and voices woven so completely into my own that I can at times no longer discern where my own voice starts and stops. 

#WResearcher 0

This is exciting.  I am excited. 

This is precisely what I have been looking for (without realising it). 

I’ve probably misunderstood aspects of what the project invites: but that doesn’t matter.  

It may have happened or I may have imagined it, but a friend of mine who I am no longer in touch with – once suggested that the idea of harmony emerged from vocalists who were unable to sing the same note as others. (She studied music at Twickenham).  It was their mismatched pitching of a note that developed into the idea that voices could sing in harmony rather than unison.

Intuitively I have a preference for writing alongside images. I'm not fussy about the images, nor are they required to relate to the text. Though somehow, a connection - by virtue of being placed alongside - is implied. The images are not illustrative  but are what images can legitimately be - decorative.

This image I like - by my husband and artist Papa Essel - because it is called 'breaking new ground'.

Of course the fear is - if I write everyday - a great deal of it will be rubbish - but the Australian professor has already covered that ground - vomit 'write everyday and at the end of it - look back at what you have written and it will be like searching through the vomit - you will find (and I know this to be true) some beautiful themses, ideas words and phrases that will shine and make you feel proud, boastful, surprised and secure.