The story goes that the famous eighteenth-century writer and all-around man of letters Dr. Samuel Johnson, approached by a colleague hoping for a favorable review of his book, offered the following assessment: “Your manuscript is both original and good. But the parts that are original are not good, and the parts that are good are not original.”

Ouch.

The Quote Investigator informs us that there is no evidence Johnson ever said this (or even expressed the same idea in slightly different words). But someone, or many someones, did: it appears that variants of the phrase have been in circulation since the late eighteenth century, issued in different contexts by more or less illustrious writers and thinkers. The tale of Johnson’s dismissal of his colleague’s work has been the one that’s been perhaps most frequently repeated, usually in order to put down some contemporary work that is said to suffer from the same flaw.

When I first heard the quote, my immediate reaction was, “Oh, that’s my manuscript in a nutshell!” (I actually heard a version that said “your manuscript is both novel and good…” which I think sounds better, but the internet does not appear to recognize that version.)

I suspect that I’m not alone in doubting the value and originality of my work. The demand for originality is, I think, one of the most intimidating facets of academia.

Novelty, or originality, is of course in many ways a perfectly reasonable demand for academic work: after all, academia’s whole raison d’être is supposed to be the production of knowledge, and there’s little sense in simply rehashing what we already know. All of us know what that kind of work looks like: work that applies a trendy concept to new material in a predictable way that reveals nothing new, work that simply recounts experiments run or facts discovered without helping us understand anything larger, work that traverses the same old ground with only some slight variation in specific content.

Yet the demand for novelty also creates a lot of pressure to come up with provocative claims, to “rethink” things that, in all honesty, really weren’t in need of another round of rethinking, and to frame things in deliberately counterintuitive ways that seem superficially attractive but that probably will not hold water on closer inspection. (I’m going to refrain from offering examples here, since an essay like this really isn’t the place for an extended critique, and an offhand example would only succeed in offending a lot of people without contributing anything useful to the conversation. But I’m sure every academic can think of an example, or five.)

Should your manuscript offer novel insights? Yes, of course. Should you feel constantly intimidated by the demand for originality? No. Are you likely to be right if you believe that the quip attributed to Johnson fits your work to a T? No.

If you’re going “What? Of course my work is novel, I never worried about that,” congratulations! You’re one of the lucky ones. You may now stop reading.

To be sure, given that we all have read work that makes us go, “um, and so what? what’s new here?” there are cases where the author’s worry about being unoriginal would in fact have been well justified. Sometimes one just isn’t measuring up. (There was a funny and rather touching related thread on the r/academia subreddit recently where a Ph.D. student was frustrated that their advisor refused to let them submit for publication, saying things like “we don’t have enough interesting things to say” and “we need better data.” The student thought the advisor was being unreasonable. The entire thread of comments gently, and sometimes not-so-gently, basically told the student, “Your advisor is right, listen to her and do better work.” I’m not going to link to it since that would feel a bit mean.)

If people are telling you straight out that your work is lacking a so-what or that you are rehashing old ideas, try to get over the initial “but… but… but…” reaction. Instead, listen to them and try to rethink your framing. Chances are that the solution is simpler than it might at first seem—in a lot of cases, work that at first glance might seem to be lacking a so-what only needs some refocusing to find a compelling form. (I’m not kidding. I see this all the time.)

At the same time, try not to let the stress over whether you’re sufficiently groundbreaking hamstring your creative process. This is your research and your writing, and nobody else thinks quite like you do or writes quite like you do. Nor have they done the research you have done. Lean into the specifics of your evidence and keep turning the kaleidoscope to see them in different compelling constellations. Write drafts, have people comment on them, and pay attention to what they find interesting as well as what they seem to gloss over. Use that to help guide your thinking about how to present your material. And link your thoughts to the thoughts of other scholars—every original thought ever thought built on ideas that came before it.

(This post is the first of a series of posts on the fears and unproductive thoughts about writing that we all have. Except those lucky few, who may or may not be lying.)

Image source: Painting (1775) of Samuel Johnson by Joshua Reynolds. From Wikimedia Commons.