Introduction

Sometime in the mid-1990s my approach to writing professional and academic papers and communications changed. I relaxed my tendency to produce tightly structured, rigorously analytical and evidenced scripts conforming to traditional academic conventions of argumentation in favour of a more fluid, exploratory, and associative style of writing. I can recall the moment when I realized I was allowing this to happen. The experience was both exhilarating and rather frightening. I would set out to write with no clear idea of what would emerge and just follow where my trains of thought led me. Inevitably, the first products of this experiment were rather shapeless and opaque. Gradually, I learned to reintroduce communicative form, academic coherence, and clarity of intellectual purpose into the writing, but always now as a second-order preoccupation. The idea of “being led by my trains of thought”, rather than applying a formalized logic to the topic, became key.