Our guest blogger this week, Julia Molinari, is an EAP (English for Academic Purposes) Tutor and PhD Researcher at the University of Nottingham in the UK. She is bilingual English/Italian and teaches academic writing to Home and International undergraduate and postgraduate students. Her PhD research focuses on ‘what makes writing academic’ and is supervised by the School of Education and the Department of Philosophy. She blogs at https://academicemergence.wordpress.com/ and tweets @serenissimaj and @EAPTutorJM.
By Julia Molinari
When you ask anyone this question—be they initiated or not—their answers will roughly cluster around the following features: its formality, linearity, clarity, lexical density, grammatical complexity, micro-macro structure (i.e., from paragraphs to whole-text organisation), intertextuality and citation, objectivity, meta-discursivity (Learnhigher; Bennett 2009; Bennett 2015, 6-8).
As someone who teaches academic writing to undergraduates and postgraduates with English as a first or additional language, I hear such answers all the time. And it’s clear why these beliefs persist. They persist because that is what we’ve all been taught.
But there are instances of academic writing that don’t tally with the above. In fact, there is considerable diversity and variety in how academics actually write, even within their own academic communities, so much so that in some cases the very notion of ‘writing’ may be at stake:
How important is language itself for writing? Terms like first/second language writing imply that the language used is central to the nature of the writing activity or the quality of the text. However, we now realize that writing involves more than words. Writing is multimodal, with multiple semiotic features (space, visuals), ecological resources (objects, people, texts), and modalities (oral, visual, and aural) contributing to its production and interpretation. Language is therefore only one of the resources that goes into writing. (Canagarajah 2013, 440)
In fact, both intra- and inter-disciplinary diversity inhabit our academic writing landscapes. This suggests that it is misleading to simply explain diverse academic writing practices by pointing to differences between disciplinary discourses (by saying, for example, that historians or biologists write the way they do because they are historians or biologists). It also seems disingenuous to dismiss deviations from the norm as instances of ‘bad’ or idiosyncratic writing. In fact, some argue that diversity is the norm.
I’d like to propose that we look for answers to the question of what makes writing ‘academic’ from within the de facto diversity of writing practices and that we reflect on why academic writers might be making the choices they make. Let’s start with the academic paragraph and then move on to writing itself as a mode of academic communication.
The perfect academic paragraph
Much has been said on how to write an ‘academic’ paragraph (cf. Bennett 2009, 46; Bennett 2015, 6-8). Like many writing teachers, I also devote class time to it. However, there is no such thing as a perfect paragraph. The reality is that when observed ‘naturally occurring in the wild’, a paragraph’s shape, form and length can be elusive.
Two examples can help illustrate this point. In philosophy, a ‘paragraph’—understood as having only ‘one theme’ (Northedge cited in Bennett 2009, 46)—might range from the abrupt ascetic aphorisms of Ludwig Wittgenstein to the discursive rhetorical prose of Michel Foucault.
Wittgenstein 1922, 25 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Foucault 1972, 37 The Archaeology of Knowledge
Yet each has its rationale: for Wittgenstein, the aphorism embodied his early atomistic philosophy; for Foucault, verbosity embodied the complexity of discourse and thought.
Within the field of Applied Linguistics, even articles published in the Journal of English for Academic Purposes, such as Uzuner (2008, 256), can be seen to flout the very advice that EAP usually offers to students. Uzuner’s one-sentence paragraph functions as a rhetorical device for building an overall argument rather than a self-contained one.
Perhaps, then, there are other ways of thinking about the academic paragraph. As Pinker has argued (2014, 145), paragraphs can function as ‘breaks’ in our thinking, as ‘breathers’—as absences rather than presences.
When Academic Writing isn’t even ‘Writing’
If we can re-think the academic paragraph, might we also be able to re-think the very mode of writing as the only way to be ‘academic’?
Carson 2017, Sociology PhD, Clemson University, USA
Sousanis 2015, Education Doctorate, Columbia University, USA
Carson—now Professor of Hip-Hop at the University of Virginia—published his PhD thesis as a series of 34 rap/hip-hop/poetry podcasts on the sociology, rhetoric and history of black lives. Sousanis published his graphic EdD dissertation as a cartoon of visual arguments embodying the interdisciplinary nature of knowledge.
There’s more detail in the references on how and why Carson and Sousanis opted for this form of scholarship, so my point here is brief: these dissertations radically flout the conventions of academic writing by arguing their theses aurally and visually, not alphabetically. This, therefore, raises the question: in what sense can they be ‘academic’?
Some tentative answers
When I air this question amongst colleagues and students, many dismiss such examples as one-off events that are not representative of the whole. They should therefore not be presented as forms of academic ‘writing’.
Yet, it takes only one exception to show that something else is possible. And if something is possible, then, as a researcher, I feel I have a duty to understand it. My understanding is that these ‘exceptions’ are academic because they embody a set of academic practices and values that are rarely mentioned in conventional advice on academic writing. These values include being creative, shifting paradigms, making the familiar seem strange, representing knowledge multimodally, having agency (Williams 2018) and, as Sousanis (2015) argues, ‘Unflattening’ our perspectives.
What makes these examples ‘academic’, therefore, is not their textual forms but the academic social practices that they embody (Besley & Peters 2013; Barnett 2012; Warnock 1989). By shifting our focus from forms to practices, we also need an account of how writers, understood as free agents, interact with the social academic structures that they shape and are shaped by. What makes writing ‘academic’ may, therefore, reside in this interaction.
References
Barnett, R. (2012). The Future University: Ideas and Possibilities. London: Routledge
Bennett, K. (2009). English academic style manuals: A survey. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 8(1), 43-54. doi: 10.1016/j.jeap.2008.12.003
Bennett, K. (2015). The Transparency Trope: Deconstructing English Academic Discourse. Discourse and Interaction, 8(2), 5-19. doi: 10.5817/DI2015-2-5
Besley, T. and Peters, M. (2013). Re-Imagining the Creative University for the 21st Century. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers
Blommaert, J. and Horner, B. (2017, March). Mobility and academic literacies: An epistolary conversation. London Review of Education, 15(1), 2-20
Canagarajah, S. (2013). The end of second language writing? Journal of Second Language Writing, 22(4), 440–441. doi: 10.1016/j.jslw.2013.08.007
Carson, A.D.: listen to his PhD here https://aydeethegreat.bandcamp.com/album/owning-my-masters-the-rhetorics-of-rhymes-revolutions and get the background here http://www.chronicle.com/article/An-Activist-Defends-His/239335; https://news.virginia.edu/content/meet-ad-carson-uvas-professor-hip-hop
Pinker, S. (2014). The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. UK: Penguin Random House.
Sousanis, N. (2015). Unflattening. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Find out more from http://meaningoflife.tv/videos/37781 and http://spinweaveandcut.com/unflattening/
Uzuner, S. (2008). Multilingual scholars’ participation in core/global academic communities: A literature review. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 7, 250-263. doi: 10.1016/j.jeap.2008.10.007
Warnock, M. (1989). Universities: Knowing our Minds: What the Government should be doing about Higher Education. London: Chatto & Windus Ltd.
Williams, B.T. (2018) Literacy Practices and Perceptions of Agency: Composing Identities. New York: Routledge.
DoctoralWriting 
I have found it useful to define academic writing simply as the presentation of what you know for the purpose of discussing it with other knowledgeable people, which implies writing in such way that you open your thinking to criticism from your epistemic peers.
This allows to think of form in terms of how it supports occasions for criticism. Mastering a form is really about learning how your reader needs your ideas to presented if they are to be able to engage constructively with them.
The essay (with its paragraphs) is one way to do this. It happens to be a very effective one, which is why it is also so common. But alternatives can certainly be imagined. Indeed, many “academic” styles aren’t styles of writing at all, but appear in spoken and visual communication. A form becomes “academic” when it frames a critical practice, when it becomes a manner of giving and taking criticism.
To say of a statement (in whatever medium) that it is “academic”, we might say, is merely to say it is open to criticism from peers. It would be interesting to see if there are any obvious exceptions to this definition.
Thank you, Thomas, for thinking about this and commenting.
I broadly agree on a pedagogic and educational level with some of your definitions, eg that ‘academic writing is the presentation of what you know for the purpose of discussing it with other knowledgeable people’ (much would need further unpacking e.g. ‘knowledgeable people’ …), but that relies on and falls prey to intentional theories of literacy (and art). What if you are writing with the intention of being published (as many do, including Sokal …) so you can get promoted or pass an exam, for example, but have no intention to engage in discussion (as is the case with many academics)? Would that kind of writing still be academic?
I’m also inferring from your definition that both Carson and Sousanis would count as instances of academic writing (understood more broadly than the term ‘writing’ is commonly used), because they (both their texts and their persona) do indeed engage in discussion with ‘other knowledgable people’ (e.g. they passed their vivas, are all over social media, and hold academic posts).
SO much more could be said, and I really hope others will feel the need to comment, but finally, and on on a purely terminological and personal level, I prefer the term ‘critique’ to the term ‘criticism’: the latter connotes confrontation, hostility, and belligerence; the former, intellectual respect, thoughtful engagement, and precision.
Thanks for your reply, Julia. I’m going to reserve judgment on Carson and Sousanis because I’m not familiar with their works or fields. My feeling is that calling it “writing” will stretch the meaning of that word too much, but I can see how we might talk about academic rapping and academic drawing. The general problem I have with these new media, and even what used to be called “new literary forms” is that they seem to avoid the application of the familiar set of standards (traditional academic norms) but also eschew an alternative set of standards (art criticism), since neither the public nor a relevant critic reaches a judgment about the quality of work. Rather, traditional academics try to decide whether this is good art within its genre. But, like I say, I’m not familiar with these particular cases, so I’m not passing judgment on them.
You make a good point about defining “knowledgeable people”. When this comes up in my work I always say that it’s not a complicated philosophical problem. You just have to know who your peers are. For first year students, its the other people in the class. (I truly believe a lot could be won by getting them to tell each other what they have learned in the course, rather than trying to tell their teachers.) For more senior scholars, the literature review is supposed to identify the relevant peer group. All academic writing should be done with a pretty finite list of names in mind and awareness of what knowledge they bring with them to reading.
This brings us on your very important point about intention. I do, indeed, not believe that “getting published” or “passing an exam” counts as a “academic” intention. But it’s also not the proper intentionality of the text. A text that says (i.e., “means”) only that it wants to get published or a good grade should get neither. It might be useful to distinguish psychological from textual intention, or the actual from the implied author. The psychology of the actual writer doesn’t make or break the “academicity” of the text. The question is what relationship is established between the authorial persona and its implied reader. This relationship is a construct. It’s contructed. It’s what the craft is about.
Finally, I see your point about the word “criticism”. But I begin with different connotations. It take “critique” in a Kantian sense, as the revelation of the conditions of the possibility of an object of knowledge. And I think of “criticism” more as in “literary criticism”, i.e., a weighing of the strengths and weaknesses of the work against exemplars of masterwork in the relevant tradition. I do definitely want to maintain opportunities for “confrontation”, however. Obviously, outright hostility is not desirable. But it has be possible to offer a corrective to someone’s point of view. It has to be possible to tell a peer that they are wrong about something. My notion of criticism includes that possibility; indeed, it reserves an honoured space for it.
We might say that I think of academic writing as almost essentially defined by the possibility of being wrong. That possibility should not feel threatening to academics. Academia, after all, is also constituted by the right to be wrong. But that right comes with the obligation to listen to one’s peers. Someone who takes any suggestion that they are, or even might be, in error as an act of hostility is not taking an “academic” stance. That, then, is the sense in which I say that the academic produces a text that is “open” to criticism. It is ready to shown wrong. It offers us a critical occasion.
I’m responding in haste, so apologies in advance for any misrepresentation of what you are saying … it would also be good to hear other voices on this.
I agree that, if we accept the multimodal nature of academic argumentation and communication, assessment of standards can be an issue. But there is a body of literature that addresses this, including discussions on the embodied (visual, gestural, oral) and not exclusively written nature of arguments. See:
– Gilbert http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/004839319402400202;
– Andrews et al. https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/the-sage-handbook-of-digital-dissertations-and-theses/book235745;
– Archer and Breuer http://www.brill.com/products/book/multimodality-higher-education and http://www.brill.com/products/book/multimodality-writing.
Scholars like Lesley Gourley (who has a chapter in The Sage Handbook of Digital Dissertations), argue that only written language can provide sufficient range and nuance in argumentation, but others offer examples of the affordances of visual argumentation compared to the verbal (often quoting Jewitt, Kress and Kress and van Leeuwen, eg. https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Reading_Images.html?id=wprZmJFXUXIC). These affordances also include social justice and educational affordances, and create greater scope for wider participation in academic debates than an exclusively written culture might allow.
I would also question what you/we mean by ‘standards’ and whose standards we are abiding by at any given time. As I’ve briefly shown, academic writing is varied, and it is so because it is trying to achieve different sets of academic practices. If it were simply about pleasing your peers or ‘confronting’ them – as you say – there would be less variety and innovation, and consequently less scope for argumentation because writing also has its limitations (see for example work by Bezemer and Kress).
And if we (as I do) want to explain how change occurs in our (social) academic writing practices (as it does), then we need to look beyond explanations that keep invoking ‘standards, pleasing our peers and winning the argument’ because these a) foster stagnation rather than informed innovation; and b), they are not representative of all academic writing (academic writing explains, describes, informs, instigates change, cultivates the imagination, plays with voice and style, and so on). By continuing to invoke the usual explanations, we basically perpetuate a status quo of standardised recyclable downloadable writing templates that impoverish the range, creativity, persuasiveness and possibility of human thought. We also limit the expressive potential of an increasingly international community of academic writers who may feel constrained and disenfranchised by bog standard English Academic Discourse.
In addressing the question of what makes our writing academic, I’m also trying to shift the focus away from the problems that theories of intentionality raise (whether textual or psychological or other) by reifying the relational element, namely how a writer relates to, interacts with, shapes and is shaped by the environment of textual and social written practices, which are historical and structural (so to some extent determined and determining), but also malleable and responsive to human agency, the present and the future of our communicative potential. This attempts to avoid the binary of whether it is the author or the text or the reader that matters, but it invariably raises other headaches, such ‘what is the nature of this interaction’ (and all the problems of phenomenology).
I still take issue with the term ‘criticism’ and prefer ‘critique’. Opting for one or the other requires justification, and I stick by mine, which is also Kantian, namely a critique is ‘the examination of a practice, to display its limits, to show where it is proper and improper’ (cite in Rom Harre). ‘Critique’ therefore, aptly describes a common academic practice.
Finally, ‘writing’ has an etymology which includes pictures (see Roy Harris and David Olson). And just as it is us who define ‘writing’, surely we can also re-define it
Interesting debate here! It would be nice to hear from some others about your ideas, especially those whose jobs involve supervising PhDs that are pushing the boundaries of scholarly/academic writing, or whose jobs include teaching thesis writing.
I really like the idea of thinking about this issue in terms of affordances. And, using these terms roughly in the way you suggest, I would say that academic writing must afford us opportunities for straight old-school criticism, not just critique. Like I say, I think academics should present their ideas to each other in way that leaves them open to being shown to be wrong. That’s not all they should do, but if their writing isn’t also open to criticism in this sense, then I’m not comfortable calling it “academic”. It can be perfectly good writing, of course, and it can be very valuable. It just isn’t scholarship.
(Most scholars easily distinguish their academic writing from their popular writing.)
I think that it is reasonable to demand of academics that they be able to put their arguments in writing. This doesn’t mean they can’t employ other modes too. I just don’t think it should be possible to become a “professor” of something if you don’t master the art of saying what you think in coherent, prose paragraphs. (The PhD dissertation is a “test” of this ability.)
I don’t think of this so much as a barrier to innovation, as a “conservationist” strategy. We need to pass on the skills and knowledge that we have as a culture. In scholarship, prose is the means by which we do this.
The Canadian poet Lisa Robertson has a neat definition of poetry: (simplifying somewhat): a gesture that innovates the receiver. Jonathan Mayhew, the Lorca scholar, points out that literature “kicks your ass [by] rewriting your subjectivity”. I like to say that academic writing is precisely not literature in this sense. It doesn’t demand that you can become a different person in order to “get it”. It just tells us what the author thinks, and offers (affords) the reader an opportunity to engage with that thinking.
There is no simple correlation between between “good” and “academic” writing, just as “poetry” isn’t a term of praise in itself. I guess I don’t see the reproduction of templates as necessarily bad. Conventions make it easier to engage. If we remember that form is a “center around which” not a “box within which” (Rosmarie Waldrop got this from Ezra Pound) it leaves us ample room for style, joy and experimentation. We just have to work within our means, as it were. Whatever we do we have to be able to afford to make mistakes. And our peers are there to help us correct them. (I hope that pun doesn’t seem too silly.)
One last thing about peers. I don’t see them as limiting. Many scholars have multiple peer groups to work with. And in a certain sense these groups are unique to each scholar. The exact network of references that your text is embedded in defines your particular “reader”. Knowing who you’re writing for is knowing how to write, as Virginia Woolf pointed out (of nonliterary writing!). It’s fine to answer that question differently from paper to paper. But academic writing remains the art of writing to occasion criticism from peers–other people who know something about the subject.
Reblogged this on Academic Emergence.
Reblogged this on Becoming An Educationalist and commented:
#becomingeducational The year of sharing what it means to be a Learning Developer
As we said in our previous post – this is the year that we are being particularly tasked with working with librarians, personal tutors and other academics in re new aspects to their roles which include what we call Learning Development (but which is variously discussed as developing study and academic skills – fixing writing problems – improving retention – supporting at risk students – giving study skills advice).
We know that a key aspect of our work when Learning Developers was working with students on their assignments…
and that whilst for academic staff the main concern was the grammar, punctuation and spelling of the students – the main concern for the students themselves was a fear of getting it wrong – a fear of failure – and the fear of being made to look and feel a fool.
In an attempt to bridge the gap between tutor concerns and those of students – we are re-blogging this post from Julia Molinara – where she interrogates the nature of academic writing itself.
Perhaps this indicates a way of working with our own students?
Do share your strategies for helping students develop their emerging graduate/academic writing identities…
All the best,
Sandra & Tom
I am very late to this conversation – but it is a very interesting conversation.
I am coming at this from the perspective of an EAP practitioner.
Here’s a scenario:If I am preparing my students for varied and wide-ranging academic futures (e.g. a class with students bound for an Msc in Medical Imaging or Data Analysis or a PhD in Special Educational Needs) they will all be required to produce very different genres of academic writing (such as lab reports, case studies, dissertations). I think a multi-modal approach to text production in my class would then be useful to cater for these diverse needs, engender useful discussions about how context, communicative purpose and audience affect what constitutes as ‘appropriate academic writing’ and help students to develop the flexibility to be able to for example, write a blog post reflecting on their research, a research proposal as part of a funding bid, or to help them disseminate their ideas to a non-expert audience – all of which they may do in their long-term academic future.