The term genius aesthetic refers to the very widespread notion that "true" art strikes and illuminates select personalities like lightning, only to be created by their hands as poems or statues in all-nighters. It is a notion that insanely diminishes the artistic creative process. Time, planning, and the intermediate stages of a work are all blanked out. Moreover, this notion does not seem to be limited to the realm of art.

For example, we should not locate scientific writing in the realm of art. For many people, art is characterized by autonomy and expressed subjectivity - I wouldn't need to explain this to the supervisor of my master's thesis. He expects cool argumentation, exact descriptions, objectivity and neutrality, and, most importantly, comprehensibility. Art, on the other hand, plays with ambiguity. Some say that a work of art that tries to make its message and function clear to me is no longer good art.

Art and science are obviously two spheres that function differently. And yet, with the writing process in scientific papers, we are dealing with a creative process that also has its creative and artistic side. Finding the right words, putting together the individual parts of the text, clarifying the main theses of a paper - all this happens in a scientific context with a clearly defined function and is thus distinguished from art, but it is nonetheless an intensive handling of language; you sit there and create text, you wrestle with words. Here is the interface where images from the realm of art suddenly pop up again: writers writing down their texts at night as if struck by lightning, genius aesthetics.  

Perhaps this is one reason why I often encounter people seeking advice in writing consultations with the expectation that a good scientific (!) text should flow onto the page of its own accord and that since it doesn't do that, since there is no lightning and no enlightenment, one simply can't write.

The work as a writing tutor consists in large parts of illuminating the intermediate steps of not yet finished texts and talking about planning and organization of the writing process (no, we do not talk about how one can be struck by lightning). And in doing so, we also tackle the persistent cliché of the genius aesthetic. Writing were not waiting for inspiration, but above all planning and organizing, a TU lecturer once said after a workshop when asked about an insight about academic writing that was important to him. I can only agree with him. Lightning doesn't come. Writing competence does not fly to a select few; instead, anyone can acquire it.

It would be nice if instructors, as those who practice academic writing professionally, would regularly bring their own rough texts and revised drafts to students in seminars. Simply to make the processuality and intermediate steps of text production clear to the prospective writers. But perhaps for some researchers this would be like admitting that they are not among the chosen ones who are regularly struck by lightning. And perhaps that is a (too) difficult step for one or the other.

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Robert Bosse

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This post appeared on the occasion of the April 2023 Writing Center Newsletter. This and other newsletter issues are linked in the Writing Center Newsletter Archive.

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The Writing Center of the TU Dresden (SZD) supports students and lecturers with offers for planning and writing various texts in studies such as vouchers, protocols, seminar papers and theses and for teaching academic writing in teaching and supervision. All information about offers and possibilities of support can be found in the areas for students and teachers.