What motivates you to write?

A2A by Abigail (Abbey) Beach. See, Liana? I’m not ignoring your A2As; it just takes me a while to get through them.

By the time I met PROF Anne FREADMAN,

I was the departmental IT guy, setting up Macs, and misquoting Peirce to her, a Peirce specialist.

She certainly did not owe me any academic mentoring.

Yet bless her, she did. And one of the pieces of academic mentoring she offered me was how to get me motivated to write academic papers.

Just read what other people have written. You’re eventually going to be so annoyed with how bad everyone else’s work is, you’ll want to write your own.

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No, esteemed fellow Quorans! I am not saying that if I answer a question you have already answered, it is because what you’ve written is crap!

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… at least, not always. 🙂

But yes, realising that other people do not have the last word on something, realising that you have something to add to the conversation; being, in fact, part of a conversation. That is a powerful motivator.

That’s what you get here.

You know what is not a powerful motivator? Just having something to say, if it’s outside of a conversation. I wrote a fair few academic papers. They were pretty niche, the only people that might care to read them were in Greece, and I wasn’t over there.

There wasn’t really a conversation: I was shooting out papers, and never heard anything back. After a few years, I stopped writing papers.