Joe Lennon is an assistant professor and coordinator of the Writing Lab at the Masaryk University Language Centre. He has been a teacher of English, academic writing, and creative writing for the last 17 years at universities in the US, China, and the Czech Republic. Email: joelennon@mail.muni.cz

 

Introduction

What is academic writing? Why do we do it? Who do we do it for? How do we know whether it’s good or not? And does any of it really matter?

I assume that for my readers, who are mostly language and writing teachers, these sound like good questions, which we’ve given some serious thought to during our careers.

But do they sound like good questions for students? In other words, is it worthwhile to spend class time getting students to ask and answer such big, fundamental questions?

I think it is – for a few reasons which I’ll briefly discuss in this article. On a basic level, conversations around such questions can make for engaging and memorable lessons. Beyond that, they may help students transfer what they learn in writing lessons to other contexts. I also think allowing these big (and possibly scary) existential questions of the field to have a regular airing in the classroom is a good discipline for teachers – it can help us avoid perpetuating superficial and misleading advice about writing, and keep us looking for better ways to explain why academics write the way we do. 

I’ll start by sharing some elements of a course design and a lesson plan that I’ve developed to get students thinking, writing, and talking about some of the “big questions” around academic writing. I’ll follow this with a short analysis and reflection about the purpose and the potential of asking students to engage with such questions.

 

Word pairs: Metalanguage for a meaningful course design

A few years ago, after finishing my PhD in the US, I took a job at the Language Centre of Masaryk University in the Czech Republic. In addition to more general EAP courses, I was asked to teach a few sections of two different courses focusing on writing: one called “Academic Writing in English,” which is open as an elective to any student at the university with a CEFR level of B2 or higher, and another called “Academic Writing and Other Study Skills,” which is open to Master’s students at the Faculty of Social Studies, and which fulfills their requirement for an advanced English class with a target CEFR level of C1. 

In both courses, I faced challenges familiar to language and writing teachers at universities everywhere: the students enrolled in each class showed very different levels of English ability (despite the level requirements), and very different levels of previous experience with writing. On top of that, the students were from vastly different study programs and disciplines (even the Social Studies Master’s students came from such divergent fields as Social Work, Psychology, and Political Science).

I wanted a course design that would allow the students to practice what Eodice, Geller and Lerner (2017) have called “meaningful writing.” The researchers asked over 700 US students in their final year of university, “What was your most meaningful writing project and why was it meaningful to you?” From the responses, they identified four main aspects of meaningful writing: it “occurs when students are invited to: tap into the power of personal connection; immerse themselves in what they are thinking, writing, and researching; experience what they are writing as applicable and relevant to the real world; and imagine their future selves” (para. 3). 

In a class full of students with often very different academic interests and different writing goals, I understood that giving them meaningful writing assignments would mean giving them considerable choice in both the content and the form of the writing they would do in the course. For students to make those choices well, though, I realized they would need scaffolding that would guide them through the process of planning, researching, and drafting a self-chosen writing project (something many of them had not done before), and they would also need sufficient writing “metalanguage” to talk about their own and others’ writing during that process.

My response to these needs, which I’ve continued to develop over the past few years, has been to build my writing courses around a series of short essays called “Word Pairs” written for the students. Each essay introduces a provocative pair of words or phrases representing key concepts in academic writing culture, and then offers a few different ways to interpret the relationship between the two concepts. The essays invite students to consider how certain academic writing beliefs and practices have developed as ways of addressing important debates, dilemmas, and ambiguities in academic work and terminology. Instead of laying down hard-and-fast style rules, each essay shows a few different specific ways these larger issues have been (and can be) addressed through the formal properties of academic texts.

To give you some idea of what I mean, here are some examples of the Word Pairs: “observing / engaging”; “showing / telling”; “claim / evidence”; “formal / informal”; “author / actor”; “audience / exigence”; “communication / clickbait”; “attribution / citation”; “abstract (n.) / abstract (adj.)”; “writer / reader.”

The students read the essays at home before (or sometimes after) particular lessons. In the lessons, I use writing and discussion activities that prompt students to use the words/concepts in the Word Pair, and to have dialogues about how they can and should address in their own writing the issues and questions raised in each essay.

 

How is academic writing different from bullshit?: A Lesson Plan      

To show you how the Word Pairs work, I will describe a lesson which I use for the very first meeting of my writing courses. It’s based around a Word Pair which I know will shock and surprise many students, called “academic writing / bullshit.” Here’s how I set it up:

In the first lesson, I pose this question to students: “This course is called ‘Academic Writing.’ If I’m supposed to teach you academic writing, and you’re supposed to learn it, then we should start by exploring what that phrase actually means.”

I ask students to brainstorm and write down, in one or two sentences, their own definition of “academic writing.” Then I put them into groups of 3 or 4, ask them to share their individual definitions with their classmates, and then try to agree on a group definition, which they will share with the rest of the class. I give them plenty of time for this – several minutes at least – so that some good discussions develop. As I’m monitoring these discussions, and then later as we compare and contrast the group definitions together as a class, I call their attention to some very interesting questions that arise when we try to define academic writing:

• Should we define it by its content (what it’s about) – or by its form (the kind of words that tend to appear in it, the kind of structures it tends to follow)?
• Should we define it from the viewpoint of the writer (say, what the writer

hopes to achieve with it) ¬– or from the viewpoint of the audience (what its

actual effect on readers is, or what its actual effect on its field is)?

• Should we define it as a process which is typically followed during the writing

of it – or as a final, published product?

And maybe most importantly:

• Should we define it by saying what it is (a description) – or by saying what it

should be (a prescription)?

Once the students have had some time to consider these possibilities, I give them (and their definitions) a final challenge, using a website called the Postmodernism Generator. Every time you refresh the page on the website, you get a new, completely fake, academic paper produced by a computer program. The texts are grammatically correct and full of erudite vocabulary, but they lack any sort of argumentative cohesion. On first glance, they appear to be well-structured academic articles, complete with section titles, citations, and a list of references. But the references are fake, and the links go nowhere. The texts are, in short, complete bullshit.

I show the students a very short excerpt which I’ve copied from the website. I obscure its actual source, and just tell them it’s “an excerpt from a paper.” I read it out loud to them, and then ask them what they think. Most students are, understandably, bewildered by the text. And yet, when I ask them whether they think it is an example of “academic writing,” most of them usually say that it is, pointing to superficial aspects such as the impressive, “academic-sounding” terminology and the appearance of citations.

After a few minutes, I reveal the source of the text, and the students usually laugh sheepishly. I tell them to look again at the group definitions of “academic writing” which they had come up with earlier in the class. I ask them: “Would this nonsense computer-generated text be accepted by your definitions as a piece of academic writing? If so – are you comfortable with that? Or would you like to revise your definitions to exclude it?”

After this first lesson, I ask them to read my Word Pair essay “academic writing / bullshit,” in which I give my thoughts on why and how those two words are often associated in the public and the academic imagination, for better or worse (if you’re curious about this association, see Eubanks and Schaeffer (2008), Berlatsky (2016), and Smith (2018) for just the tip of the bullshit-berg). In my Word Pair essay, I respond to a few scholarly conceptions of bullshit, and offer my own definition of academic writing: “Putting words to work against bullshit.”

The essay is not intended to be an end to the debate, but rather a model for the students of how an academic text can give an argument for a claim while still acknowledging that larger questions remain unresolved. In the essay, I say directly that my answer to the question “What is academic writing?” is provisional, and open to revision. I admit that my definition is “incomplete,” and I invite my students/readers to help me refine it. My essay ends with a question: “What do you think? Does my definition work?”

In the following lesson, I ask the students to revise their group definitions and share the revisions with the class as a way of responding to my essay and to the questions and challenges of the first lesson. I encourage them to keep questioning and revising their own definitions of what academic writing is (and what it should be) as they move through the course and through the rest of their studies. 

 

Some Reasons it’s Worthwhile to Ask the “Big Questions”

Students seem to enjoy this opening “academic writing / bullshit” lesson, and the Word Pairs in general. In class discussions, the viewpoints in the Word Pairs often elicit energetic responses and dialogue, and throughout the rest of the course, I hear and see the students using the Word Pair vocabulary in class discussions, in peer feedback, in my one-on-one consultations with them, and in their written reflections. In end-of-term evaluations, students often mention the Word Pairs as their "favorite" or "most useful" texts from the course, and the short in-class writings and discussions around them are regularly mentioned in response to "What will you take away from the course?" These responses suggest that many students find it memorable and engaging to think and talk about why we write the way we do, to question their preconceptions about writing, to hear different points of view on what good writing is, to share their own points of view, and to be invited to form new conceptions of these things.

Besides making for lively lessons, getting students to debate and articulate among themselves the definition and the purpose of academic writing might have benefits outside the classroom. Some interesting support for this comes from the “Writing About Writing” (or WAW) approach to teaching writing that has become popular in recent years (see the WAW Working Bibliography). One fascinating study by Adler-Kassner et al. (2016) identifies five “threshold concepts” that help university students transfer what they learn in writing classes to other courses and contexts. One of these concepts, the authors claim, is the understanding that writing is not just an activity, but an activity that can be investigated – a “subject of study.” By pursuing a line of questions such as, “How is ‘good’ writing (and its opposite, ‘bad’ writing) defined in this community? What values and ideologies are reflected in those definitions? How have those definitions been constructed and reified over time?”, students may realize that “the study of writing can provide unique insights into communities of practice” (p. 20). Rather than just learning how to write for a particular community, if students learn how to question the how and the why of writing, they may be better equipped to gain entry to whatever new communities they wish to enter.

Of course, some teachers might have reservations about broaching such “big questions” in the classroom – questions which don’t have simple answers, and which reveal some huge ambiguities and anxieties built into the practice of writing, and the practice of teaching. Asking your class to debate the very nature of the subject of the class is a bit scary, and I don’t want to downplay the genuine risks. Some students may feel baffled and overwhelmed by such meta-academic discussions. And some teachers may worry that if these discussions end up casting serious doubt on the students’ (or the teachers’) received beliefs about writing (which they are designed to do, actually) – there won’t be alternative definitions and explanations immediately on hand.

I feel that worry, too – and I have to remind myself that it’s a good thing. Knowing that every semester I’m going to unleash some existential questions on a crowd of smart and busy and skeptical and practical students keeps me honest. I know that they’ll push back against my questions with more questions. Anticipating their challenges keeps me questioning the simplistic-sounding rules and the bullshit-y shorthand that I might be tempted to use to talk about writing with my students. It keeps me searching for more elegant and precise language for explaining to them what’s happening on the page.

Teachers, as much as students, are prone to letting cliched commonplaces, or our own personal pet peeves or pet style tics, take over the wheel when we write, and when we talk about writing. Teaching the ”big questions” of academic writing is one way of switching off that autopilot long enough for new ideas and new words to enter the conversation.

 

References

Adler-Kassner, L., Clark, I., Robertson, L., Taczak, K., & Yancey, K. B. (2016). Assembling knowledge: The role of threshold concepts in facilitating transfer. In C. M. Anson & J. L. Moore (Eds.), Critical transitions: Writing and the question of transfer. (pp. 17-48). The WAC Clearinghouse and University Press of Colorado. https://wac.colostate.edu/books/ansonmoore/chapter1.pdf 

Berlatsky, N. (2016, August 5). Why most academics will always be bad writers. The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/article/why-most-academics-will-always-be-bad-writers/

Eodice, M., Geller, A. E., & Lerner, N. (2017). What meaningful writing means for students. Peer Review 19(1). https://scholar.stjohns.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=english_facpubs

Eubanks, P., & Schaeffer, J. D. (2008). A kind word for bullshit: The problem of academic writing. College Composition and Communication 59(3), 372-388. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20457010

Postmodernism Generator: https://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

Smith, C. (2018, February 9). Higher education is drowning in BS. The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/article/higher-education-is-drowning-in-bs/

Writing About Writing Working Bibliography:

https://writingaboutwriting.net/2017/09/26/writing-about-writing-working-bibliography/

 

Please check the Pilgrims f2f courses at Pilgrims website.

Please check the Pilgrims online courses at Pilgrims website