This week’s focus has been on writing. Well, not writing as such. I haven’t produced any text or made the slightest effort to craft a sentence (this one excepted), but I have been thinking a great deal about writing in the context of what I’ve been reading.

Alongside my statistics course, which has its own obscurities, I have started a course on perspectives in learning in educational sciences. It begins with an overview of the philosophy of science, with ontologies and epistemologies thrown in for good measure. Confusing? Yes. Mind-boggling? Definitely. But the literature helped get the ideas across, and a few short YouTube lectures filled in the gaps.

Then came the reading for next week, and the message got murkier. Not because of the topic, which is complicated but understandable, but because of the writing style. What on earth is this person trying to say? If they want their arguments to be understood, why explain them in such a convoluted way when other researchers manage to explain the same concepts clearly and make them fascinating? Why does one paper make me want to read more, while another makes me want to slam my laptop shut and upturn my desk? Why can’t people just say what they mean?

The risk is more texts like Alan Sokal’s famous hoax, a deliberately nonsensical article that a journal published in good faith. Hard writing isn’t the problem in itself, because hard ideas can be genuinely hard. The problem is when the difficulty hides the fact that there’s little underneath, and from the outside the two can look remarkably alike. Sometimes, I suspect, someone is havin’ you on, to use a great Northern Irish phrase. Other times they’re just badly in need of an editor.

It took me back to my Master’s in Gender Studies and my struggles with Judith Butler. I would read a perfectly clear account of her theories, then fall into a pit of despair upon opening her original work. At first I assumed the problem was me, that I simply wasn’t clever enough. Then I realised that everyone, lecturers included, found her writing hard to unscramble. That was a quietly important lesson: difficulty isn’t the same as depth, and feeling excluded by a text isn’t always a personal failing.

I know some argue that difficult ideas sometimes call for difficult language, and that prose which unsettles us can be the point, nudging us to question what we take for granted. I can see the logic. I’m just not convinced it always holds, or that it excuses losing the reader along the way.

So what is research for, if not to help us understand the complexities of our world, with the hope of making it a better place to live? Brannelly and Barnes (2022: 8), whose book on researching with care I read last week, suggest that research should help us “live in the world as well as possible.” To my mind, that means making it accessible and understandable to as many people as possible.

Of course, there will always be limits, such as language and education, but we can try. Surely we don’t want our discussions confined within the walls of the academy. Might that even be unethical? Susan Gubar (1998: 881), professor of English and Women’s Studies, was writing about feminist scholarship when she warned that obscure writing threatens “the relationship feminists within the academy have sought to maintain with one another and with women outside it.” But the same could be said of any field that claims to care about people it then writes past. If the writing is out of reach, how can research ever help marginalised groups, or the grassroots organisations working for change?

Which brings me to my own writing, and what I want from my future dissertation. I don’t want it to be an “ego-project,” a display of how clever I am (jury’s still out), how much I’ve read, and how many fancy concepts I’ve picked up along the way. That serves no one but me. I’m writing about leadership in early years education, and I want to produce something that principals, preschool teachers and nursery nurses can pick up and actually use, whatever their level of formal education. That’s the activist in me, the part that doesn’t want to slam the door in people’s faces. It’s also part of my commitment to care-full research: research that acknowledges hierarchies and power structures and works to minimise them, starting with the way it’s written.

Perhaps the most radical thing I can do as a researcher is to be understood.