Not to brag, but I think my writing, in my native language, is quite powerful. I’ve often written on my social media and blogs, gaining a lot of traction because of – I believe – the powerful logic behind what I was saying. I chose each word with great care, and so did I with the sequence of words and thoughts. Nothing had to be left to chance. Everything had to be planned meticulously.
Now, though, I am not in the country I was raised in and neither is my audience. I have to communicate in a different language, and I don’t have the control over every little inflection or shade of meaning. I have to abandon myself to the lack of control, to the risk of putting out there something I don’t mean or understand completely. That’s a whole new experience.
Co-authoring
The opportunity of writing together with other people is definitely something the Changemakers programme has given me, and something I’ll treasure forever.
How LCC Changemakers turn employability into real EDI by Michele Palmer was a sweet introduction to co-authoring: a small and straightforward paragraph explaining one simple concept, followed by the work needed to embed it flawlessly in the longer blog piece.
With Story as evidence, I took a more leading role, taking care of the structure of the piece and its conceptual framing, but I was always backed up by continuous suggestions by the co-authoring team and finally by the editors from the Take5 blog that hosted the piece.
There is a sense of comfort and protection in writing together with other people, a shared responsibility that pushes the team to keep each other accountable and at the same time backs you up in what you want to communicate through the piece.
Writing on my own
But writing on my own was a different story. It was between me and the courage to send the draft to the editor. When is the draft ready? Do I have enough experience to be talking about this? Am I making myself ridiculous?
You need a bit of an attitude, a spark of indifference to start sending your drafts around. And that’s exactly what made me contact the editorial team at Wonkhe to initiate the work that would make the publication of Beyond the staff-student binary possible.
Luckily, I have experienced this solo journey a bit naively. The editor liked the concept behind my article and with a few back-and-forths he considered my piece ready to be published: this was all I needed to be confident at the time.
But two facts made me realise that, on my next solo piece, I’ll have a few more things to think about before clicking that send button in my mailbox:
- I received comments on my blog from the readers: yes, I did! And this means people do read blogs – even if you are a no one on your first solo piece.
- After my blog went live, a more experienced colleague who I have confidence with asked me: “How do you feel now that you’ve put yourself out there”? Yes, I did not consider this and now it’s all I can think about.
Putting myself out there, without full control over the language, and experiencing all the consequences (mostly positive, luckily) is quite an interesting feeling of excitement mixed with uncertainty and a touch of pride. In the end, that Wonkhe’s article was kind of a Trojan horse, proposing an idea on how to share power with students to an audience fully made of staff. Quite Changemakery.
Co-owning the writing process
I am now looking forward to working with my fellow Changemakers from the Situated Evaluation Framework team on a piece that is co-owned by all of us as same-weight authors, with equal shared responsibilities and a blurry line between roles – that is where we are best at.
It will be an experience of collective action, in true Changemakers style.
No doubt I’ll feel again that sense of comfort in being part of a team. And that comfort – we Changemakers know it too well – means that we will feel brave. And when Changemakers feel brave, it only means one thing: troubles!