Helen Aveyard: "Writing and Practice Go Hand in Hand"

Becoming a professional

Writing and practice go hand in hand. When you write, you do not start off as a topic expert straightaway. It is not a top-down approach.

Great writing comes from connecting with those who are learning, by finding out what their barriers are, what comes easily, and what is more challenging. Only then can writing address the needs of those who are likely to read your work.

This has been my understanding since I began writing academic textbooks within nursing and healthcare in 2006. I was course leader for the dissertation, there was no standard textbook, and students found the more complex texts that did exist uninspiring and complicated to navigate. They needed a greater understanding of research than the students typically had at this stage of their education.

Kicking off the writing process

The reality was that final year health and social care students were required to carry out a task for which there was little or no accessible academic support. This realisation was the beginning of the writing process and came from student knowledge and their identified needs.

From then on, the student experience of undertaking a literature review directed my writing about how to do this task. Any student who I have supervised may find their experiences portrayed in my writing, all anonymised of course.

Connecting with the academic process

I had a model in mind of what students needed to know and what they should be doing when they engaged in the academic process of writing a literature review. This was informed by the more intricate texts and I needed to find a way of making complex arguments accessible whilst maintaining academic rigour.

I had theories as to how this could be made as simple as possible in order to engage an undergraduate student group, but the reality of the work was influenced by the relevance of my ideas to the actual projects of those with whom I was working. In this way, I recognised which challenges were worth pursuing and which, in my view, could be left aside; that is, which difficulties boosted student learning, and which merely got in the way.

Further learning and understanding

Textbook writing is about making a subject available to those who are learning. It is not about what you know, it is about the way in which you write, where intricate concepts are broken down into user friendly ideas that become building blocks for further learning and understanding.

The challenge for the writer is to keep alignment with the intricacy whilst making the concepts easy to use. Academic textbook writing is a fine balance between rigour and dedication to academic concepts, and originality to explore these concepts in a profound way that has relevance to the student experience.

Engagement with the reader is essential and helps to ensure that the writer develops his or her ideas and learns alongside the student.

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