What is Academic
Writing, Anyway?
Knowledge as Conversation
• Knowledge is a social artifact created (or “built up”)
over time through an unending “conversation.”
• “As human beings, we are the inheritors not of inquiry
or accumulated information, but of a conversation,
begun in the primeval forests and extended and made
more articulate in the course of centuries.”
• Thought originates in “conversation” (not in a
vacuum). Thought is conversation internalized, and
writing is the re-externalization of thought.
Academic Writing as a Conversation
Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive,
others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated
discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you
exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun
long before any of them got there, so there is no one present who is
qualified enough to retrace all of the steps that have gone before
this point. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have
caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar.
Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense;
another aligns herself against you. The discussion is interminable.
The hour grows late; you must depart. And you do, with the
discussion still vigorously in progress.
Different Spheres of Writing
• Civic/Popular
• Professional/Vocational
• Personal/Relational
• Creative/Literary
• Academic/Higher Education
Academic vs. Popular
Propositional
Narrative
Dictated organization
Flexible format/organization
Foregrounds sources
Embeds sources
Privileges complexity
Privileges engagement
Uses graphics to convey
Uses them to attract
Assumes readers will read
Assumes reader will choose
Specific reading strategies
Variety of strategies
Were Students Better Writers in the Past?
“Everyone who has had anything to
do with the graduating classes has
known many men who could not
write a letter describing their own
commencements without making
blunders which would disgrace a
boy twelve years old.”
--Adam Sherman Hill, English Professor, Harvard, 1878
Does Teaching Writing Help?
“ A great outcry has lately been made, on every
side, about the inability of University students
to write English clearly or correctly…. The
schools today are paying more attention to
composition than they did twenty or thirty
years ago; and yet, the writing of schoolboys
has been growing steadily worse. With all this
practice in writing and time devoted to English,
why do we not obtain better results?”
--“The English Question,”Atlantic Monthly, May 1893
8/31/09
5/31/09
2/28/09
11/30/08
8/31/08
5/31/08
2/29/08
11/30/07
8/31/07
5/31/07
2/28/07
11/30/06
8/31/06
5/31/06
2/28/06
11/30/05
8/31/05
Development of Student Writing
All College Students: The Ideal
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
8/31/09
5/31/09
2/28/09
11/30/…
8/31/08
5/31/08
2/29/08
11/30/07
8/31/07
5/31/07
2/28/07
11/30/…
8/31/06
5/31/06
2/28/06
11/30/05
8/31/05
The Reality
Three Different Students
One Student Throughout College
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
8/31/05
8/31/06
8/31/07
8/31/08
8/31/09
One Student, One Semester, Four Classes
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
One Writer, Many Tasks










Responding to an array of prompts and assignments
Comprehending readings and varied source materials
Generating ideas
Integrating others’ ideas
Organizing ideas in a very particular way
Expressing opinions in a very particular way
Figuring out what readers know/believe/want
Being simultaneously original and conventional
Having style or “voice,” or none at all, depending
Revising, editing, proofreading
One Writer, Many Prompts, Many Disciplines
• Write a description of an event from your childhood.
• Write a comparative analysis of two newspaper articles.
• Write a 5-pg paper analyzing class in Pride and Prejudice.
• Write a lab report based on your chemistry experiment.
• Discuss reasons why the U.S. dropped the bomb.
• Write a research paper on modern-day slavery.
• Create a Web site that sells gidgets.
Students are Asked To…
Analyze
Inform
Summarize
Contrast
Explain
Narrate
Design
Persuade
Review
Critique
Evaluate
Describe
Annotate
Discuss Revise
Paraphrase
Comment
Show
Compare
Propose
Consider
Apply
Journal
Demonstrate
Report
Respond
Illustrate
Primary & Secondary Discourses
• “Primary Discourse” is one’s natural, home language.
• A “secondary discourse” is one that a person learns
in order to function in the outside world (with
friends, at work, in school, etc.).
• We all have adopted many secondary discourses,
usually without knowing it.
• Typically, the greater the gap btwn prim. and sec.
discourses, the more problems one has in becoming
a fluent speaker/writer of the sec. discourse.
Academic Writing as a
Secondary Discourse
• Academic discourse is NO ONE’S home
language.
• It must be explicitly learned.
• For some people, their home language is—by
chance—somewhat like academic discourse,
usually making it easier for them to learn it.
Phenomenology of Error
• Definition: finding error when/where you look
for it. (Phenomenology: something happens because
you expect it to.)
• Teacher evaluation of student writing is
plagued by this phenomenon.
• What’s incorrect? Well, it depends (a lot).
Teacher comments are usually...
• Confusing
• Not helpful
• Too much or too little
• Generic (“rubber-stamped”)
• Not geared toward revision or improvement,
but justification for a letter grade
• NOT READ, or acted upon, by students
Other Problems
• Academic writing doesn’t always meaningfully relate
writing outside of school.
• Mastery of academic discourse doesn’t imply mastery of
anything else.
• Academic writing is governed almost exclusively by
conventions, so it can seem fixed and normative.
• The stakes are really high: in order to do well in college,
students must be able to negotiate, if not master,
academic discourse.
Why We Need Academic Writing
“Education, properly speaking, is an initiation into the skill
and partnership of this unending human conversation in
which we learn to recognize different voices, to distinguish
the proper occasions of utterance, and in which we acquire
the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to this
process. ‘Becoming educated’ is to join larger, more
experienced communities of knowledgeable peers through
assenting to those communities’ interests and using their
language and modes of thought.”