Author Archives: Rachael Cayley

I’ve always been a bit sceptical about the frequent invocation of imposter syndrome. I recently heard someone say that all academics have imposter syndrome, and that claim confirmed why I am hesitant about the designation. If everyone suffers from a particular syndrome, it starts to seem less like a syndrome and more like the human condition. Or, in this case, the academic condition. But before I explore my objections, let’s consider what imposter syndrome is.

Imposter syndrome is the feeling that we aren’t qualified or entitled or competent but that we have somehow managed to fool people into thinking that we are. It is often described as a failure to internalize success. (If you want more information, here is a webpage with an extensive bibliography.) It’s easy to see how these feelings take root in academics. At many points—especially early on—we are judged on our potential while being given very little concrete feedback on our finished work. The emphasis on the potential over the actual easily leads to anxiety. We are admitted to graduate school on the basis of past performance and a statement of what we hope to do in the future. The grant application, the conference abstract, and the dissertation proposal all follow the same pattern: we write a compact and aspirational text and then start to worry that we won’t be able to produce the actual work. Not living up to our promising promises will lead to us finally being revealed as the frauds we secretly believe ourselves to be.

Needless to say, this description rings true for lots of us and shows an awful cycle in which successes can make some people more uneasy. Instead of enjoying being ABD, a doctoral student might believe that, with all the ‘easier’ steps completed, she will now be unable to write the dissertation. The imposter mindset is pernicious because it often feels cumulative; each new success means that the fraud has still not been detected, making the eventual unmasking of the imposter even worse. Imposter syndrome thrives when we fail to take into account the meaning of all the success we experience. The antidote is to trust the people who grant us approval along the way. Think of how easily we often denigrate that approval: ‘I was just lucky.’ ‘It was a weak field of applicants.’ ‘Nobody else was available.’ Any of those statements could be true—and there are real benefits to humility—but we almost never know them to be true. We all need to trust the experience and expertise of the people who express approbation. Of course, any given evaluator may in fact be throwing a stack of papers down the stairs and using the results to make decisions, but such randomness is rare. Over time, positive results mean something, and dismissing those positive responses as error or luck denies us the opportunity to deepen our confidence in our own abilities. (Here is a helpful post from Inside Higher Ed on the role of mentoring in managing feelings of inadequacy in graduate school. And another from The Singular Scientist blog that deals with the full spectrum of under- and over-confidence.)

Given all this, surely it seems useful to talk about imposter syndrome. I certainly encourage graduate students to be reflective about the way that approbation functions in academia. We can all benefit from being able to take a compliment. And there are people whose sense of their own imposterhood is so deep as to be a significant impediment to their work. So I am not objecting to the use of the term, but rather to the notion that it applies to all of us. In other words, my objection is to the way that a universal application of the term appears to pathologize inevitable aspects of academic life.

This overuse of the term concerns me for two reasons. In the first place, if the term is used to describe everyone, then it doesn’t have much power left to help those who are genuinely suffering. Those who need  resources to help them find a way to internalize their successes might be helped by having the term reserved for a more specific condition. What’s more, the widespread use of the term can hide the ways in which some people are made to feel as though they are imposters. Some may experience imposterhood all on their own, but others are having these thoughts thrust upon them by an inhospitable academy. You can’t be expected to solve your own sense of imposterhood when attitudes towards your identity–as a woman, a racialized person, an LGBTQ person, a disabled person, a first gen graduate student, a second language user–demonstrate an ongoing belief that you don’t belong.

In the second place, I worry that treating dis-comfort as exceptional contributes to the notion that we ought to feel comfortable. In particular, I am troubled by the notion that we ought to feel comfortable about academic writing. Writers must learn to live with a great deal of uncertainty and vulnerability. Exposing our ideas to public scrutiny is uncomfortable, and recognizing that discomfort as inevitable can actually help make us more comfortable. The recognition of discomfort acknowledges the inherent and ongoing challenges of academic expression. It helps keep us humble, which matters if we are going to produce interesting and honest work. It makes us work harder than we might otherwise do. Academic writing is a struggle and not a realm in which confidence and complacency are ever likely to predominate. It’s not my intention to valorize any notion of suffering for art, but rather to accept the likelihood that producing good academic prose that we are willing to present to the public will be a struggle. Students often seek out writing instruction so that the writing process will become easier. However, in many cases, it’s more realistic to focus on writing better than to focus on lessening the emotional costs of writing. This acceptance of writing as an intrinsically challenging act seems particularly important for novice writers who often assume that the challenges come from their inexperience rather than from the very nature of academic writing.

Overall, while I see great benefit in understanding the dynamics of imposter syndrome, I want to be cautious about the idea that there is something wrong with us if we find academic writing deeply challenging. For most academic writers, the best course of action may be to acknowledge the psychic toll that writing takes and to focus on acquiring strategies to make both the writing and the writing process better.

In a serene and sunny yoga studio on Saturday morning, my yoga teacher asked us to dedicate our practice to the notion of observing without judging. Being me, I immediately stopped thinking about my practice and started thinking about how this approach might also be helpful for academic writing. When we try to observe without judging we can create a useful middle space between two unhelpful extremes. One extreme would be an entirely negative stance characterized by either scolding or despair; the other extreme would be a neglectful stance characterized by an inattention to writing. Either end of this spectrum will be counterproductive: if we are thoroughly disgusted with our prose or if we are content because we aren’t paying enough attention, we are unlikely to be making the improvement we desire in our academic writing.

The reason I like the yoga analogy is the way it encourages an attitude of positive growth rather than mere criticism. Most people would agree that it sounds funny to say ‘I am terrible at yoga’.* Indeed, if you are trying to be ‘good’ at yoga, you may be going about the whole thing wrong. Is the same true for academic writing? Of course not. We all want to be ‘good’ at academic writing, but saying that we are ‘terrible at writing’ isn’t getting us any closer to that goal. If we could be ‘novice’ academic writers rather than ‘terrible’ ones, we would be positioning ourselves in such a way as to be able to improve through self-aware practice.

An important insight that emerges when we engage in this sort of editorial self-awareness is the difference between bad habits and significant weaknesses. We all need to become aware of own bad habits—feel free to point out how I overuse conjunctions at the beginning of my sentences or how I can’t get through a paragraph without multiple semicolons or how I write annoyingly long interruptions in the middle of my sentences—in order to limit the ill-effects caused by these crutches. These habits are hard to break, but they are not hard to understand. The more significant weaknesses in our writing—the poor structure, the missing information, the logical incoherence—are harder to grasp and require specific strategies for amelioration. Observation alone won’t help; we also need practice to address the deep problems we observe. But by making observation a conscious goal, we can develop a better awareness of where we are now and what we need to do to improve. The key here is to develop this awareness through observation, so we can avoid the discouraging negativity that comes from a single-minded reliance upon judgment.

*Although someone who spends an entire yoga class composing a blog post in her head is at least somewhat ‘terrible at yoga’!

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Recent links from @explorstyle on Twitter

From @Jup83 in @LSEImpactBlog, an interesting exploration of whether to cite blog posts in formal academic work.

From @thesiswhisperer, great advice on approaching reading as a research task requiring techniques and strategies.

From @ThomsonPat, ideas about what to do when you find existing work that is uncomfortably close to your own project.

From @ProfHacker, how to better understand committee feedback by recognizing the potential for unrealistic expectations on both sides.

From @ghweldon, a humorous reminder—from outside the realm of academic writing—to keep the poor reader in mind.

From @scholarlykitchn, insights into the tension in academic publishing between the needs of the author and reader.

From @ThomsonPat, the final installment in her series on PhD by publication. The whole series is well worth reading.

I love @KoryStamper’s tweets on the ‘top lookups’ from Merriam-Webster, including explanations of why that particular word at that particular moment.

From @DocwritingSIG, a great post on finding a thesis structure that fits the topic and meets genre conventions.

From @ryancordell in @ProfHacker, a reevaluation of Prezi—and the things it does well—by someone who was initially sceptical.

From @GradHacker, advice on creating a suitably limited PhD project.

From @deandad, a call to think structurally about the job market without blaming the individuals on either side of the desk.

From @literarychica, the limits of using altac as a cure for all that ails the academic job market.

From Lingua Franca, how a slash might actually be a conjunction-slash-coordinator.

From @LSEImpactBlog, a very thoughtful piece on open access publishing and academic freedom.

From Sandra Beasley in the New York Times, an eloquent discussion of what plagiarism isn’t and is and what it takes away.

From @readywriting, a call to consider existing adjuncts when discussing altac career options.

From Lingua Franca, Allan Metcalf wants people with writing peeves to get some new material and he’s got some ideas.

From @NewYorker, on their famous use of the double consonant: “No kidnapper ever focussed so marvellously on this well-travelled territory.”