Academic Writing Should Open the Door Not Close the Gate
The gate is guarded An academic fortress Let’s open the gate
Gatekeepers Guarding the Fortress
For my first-year composition students, I often speak of the balance between freedom and constraints in composition. I teach the first academic writing course most of my students will take in college, and I fully embrace both the responsibility and possibility that are part of their initial steps into the world of academia. In embracing responsibility, I teach my students the genre expectations of academic writing regarding language and structure in addition to style manual requirements and proper documentation. In embracing possibility, I encourage engagement by teaching the use of rhetoric, stylized crafting of sentences, creative use of metaphor, and the need for voice and authenticity. So, having academic writing and its final product talked about in relation to a “gate of a fortress being guarded” is a bit troubling. But the fortress metaphor is the exact one used to describe what many academics and graduate students perceive as a reality.
The fortress is the universities and academic publications. The gatekeepers guarding this fortress are the graduate advisors, university department chairs, journal editorial boards, and peers in their fields through which a master’s thesis, dissertation, or journal article must pass to become published. The walls are fortified walls, and the expectations being more responsibility than possibility is seemingly real. It is generally accepted that to be taken seriously and pass through the gate, academic writing must be written in a certain way. According to Helen Sword, who has extensively researched academic publications from a wide variety of fields, your prose must be impersonal and objective (no “I” or “we”); you must be highly formal and use jargon; and you must write in a way that is nearly impenetrable to anyone outside your field of expertise. According to Sword, these academics seem to be writing to only each other.[1] In other words, their writing excludes everyone that is not inside the fortress behind those wrought iron gates.
By Academics For Academics
The fortress walls of academia have been heavily fortified for over a century, and at the highest level of inquiry in every field the gate is still being fiercely guarded - by academics for academics. Don’t get me wrong. We should fiercely guard the rigorous standards that are in place that require ideas to be original and innovative, to serve as a valuable contribution in the field, to follow strict form in properly crediting other scholarship, and to display rigor in quantitative or qualitative analysis.
However, for far too many elite thinkers in and around the fortress compound, how they communicate their work through academic writing and its conventions of language and form is needlessly narrow in scope, borders on arrogance, and shows little care for much of what goes on beyond the elite (fortified) space they occupy. Rhetoric scholar Andrea Lunsford, certainly no stranger to academic writing, as she has written many college composition texts, has called this type of writing “insular, incomprehensible, and irrelevant.”[2]
In adhering to established genre expectations of the gatekeepers guarding the fortress, academic writers are limited in both how they write (we must be taken seriously after all) and how accessible their valuable scholarship is as a result. Simply put, these writers and their work are confined (hey, it’s called a fortress for a reason!). They don’t want to leave the fortress and write to others besides themselves, and others seemingly have no desire (or access) to read their work. How is this a good thing?
The Trickle-Down Effect
To extend my fortress metaphor, imagine that the fortress of academia is also on top of a mountain, and it is a fountain source with all else being downhill and downstream respectively. The responsibility part of first-year writing courses exists to prepare students to begin the journey to the fortress top, to climb this mountain and approach the fortress for entry, to get acclimatized and established in its outlying area and increasingly rough terrain, to prove your metal. And, if needed, to get weeded out.
Like any process of socialization, along the way you also learn how to act and speak properly (you’ll learn expectations and be constrained). You’ll learn what to do and what not to do; the appropriate signs and signals; you’ll be given the appropriate verbiage so you can vocalize an “I am one of you” shibboleth[3] or two; perhaps you’ll even be taught a secret handshake along the way. Combine the behavioral expectation with the need of having an original idea that bridges a gap, or identifies and proposes a solution to an issue or problem in your field, and, if rigorously analyzed with data to support, viola - your in.
This is all well and good. But it is not without serious potential shortcomings. While confinement for elite thinkers and their ideas being cut off from the mainstream because they don’t flow downstream is unfortunate, what is most unfortunate is the pervasive influence of that which has made its way downstream – that being the genre of academic writing itself. Like all things from on high, there has been a trickle-down effect.
The trickle-down effect and the gatekeeper mindset from on high currently reaches beyond first-year composition classes. In fact, it reaches all the way down to the middle school level. The procession to the “gate” - the climb - starts around 7th or 8th grade.[4] Around this time, with no warning or anyone explaining it to you, you are taught writing to prepare you for one thing and one thing only - high school. In high school, you are taught writing to prepare you for one thing and one thing only - college. Not to say either of these is bad. Writing is difficult, and good writing based on a standard of college preparedness as one aspect of a writing education is a good thing. But only a certain percentage of high school students will go to college. In my home state of Arizona, this number is currently at 50%.
What is the point for the other half?
For those that do enter college, first-year composition is preparing you for the type of writing you will be doing in college - expository essays, research papers, proposals, literature reviews, and annotated bibliographies. It is training you to enter the conversation in your field and across disciplines. But in its strictest formulation, what it is really preparing you for is graduate school - for the master’s thesis, your doctoral dissertation, and a career as a postdoc in your field. It is preparing you to write academically to other academics. At this highest rung of the ladder, you will be a person with academic expertise (writer) writing about your academic subject (topic) for academic achievement/recognition (purpose) to other academics (audience) until you retire.
But like our high schoolers that never go to college, how many first-year composition students will end up being doctoral students or postdocs?
The answer: around 1.5%.
What’s the point for the other 98.5%?
For the type of writing expected in first-year composition and in your other college courses, academic writing will mostly serve you well. You can use it for four years as you meet the expectations of profs to get the grade you want, to keep the scholarship you need, and the high GPA you feel you need for that resume to get a job in the real world.
But composition can and should be so much more on the college level. There is a large gulf between academic writing and real-world writing genre conventions of tone, style, structure, craft, and acceptable medium of delivery. All of this affects the how we write, who receives it, and ultimately how receptive and impactful it is. The type of writing most people are accustomed to reading in the real world, and most of our students (98.5%) will be writing as non-academic professionals, is quite different from academic prose.[5] There is a gap. Can this gap be closed (is it achievable)? Should this gap be closed (is it advisable)? Will this gap be closed (is it inevitable)?
If, when and how academic writing will become closer to real-world writing are all questions we as researchers are asking. But rest assured, the gap almost certainly will close due to any number of possible factors including influences of technology, global connectivity, and increasing pressure for inclusion of non-standard variants of English. These are certainly exciting times to be a composition scholar with a front row seat to see it all play out.
The Currency of Ideas & Academic Thinking
In what form academic writing will emerge on the other side is uncertain and a point of disagreement. But what we perhaps can agree on is that the most important elements of academic writing really have nothing to do with writing at all per se. It is about academic thinking. In academia, ideas are our most important commodity, and the ability to form, test, and share ideas should be our most valued “currency of exchange.”
This currency and exchange of ideas should be based on clear patterns of organization, making connections and finding logical relationships between ideas, explicitly stating claims, and fiercely adherence to documentation and giving proper credit to sources. It’s about communication, engagement, and giving credit where credit is due. And each of these is less about writing and genre conventions than a critically important mindset for academics and life.
Using standard forms of English, formulaic conventions, and the exclusive jargon of your field are simply the nice clothes you adorn on the au naturel model to compliment and complete the look. But those clothes can change based on culture, time, place, and context. They are flexible and ultimately not crucial to preserve. The natural form of the perfect model - that is, the mindset and the ideas that make up what that idea is - is that which is truly important; how those ideas are conveyed at any given time and place should be much less important.
The Exchange Rate Defines Your Value in Any Marketplace
So how can ideas be conveyed to get more currency? To get a better “exchange rate” among more people? At one extreme, we could entirely dispense with the formalities of writing by academics for academics. The heretofore supposed gold standard. If a portion of people find it “insular, incomprehensible, and irrelevant” as Lunsford claims, then this is a shame because the ideas of these scholars absolutely should be the grist of the mainstream mill - the mainstream mill that is downstream and accessible.
My own instruction in empowering my students for the global marketplace allows for multimodal compositions (writing accompanied by images, video, audio) and great latitude in creativity.[6] Why not? My own master’s thesis was defended in front of a committee by way of a PowerPoint slideshow. Why couldn’t my thesis itself have been that slideshow (with proper citations attached)? Is it beneath us? The ideas are what matter. But these important ideas are not being disseminated. How these ideas are communicated is critical to their being received as a “valued currency” of receptive “exchange.”
To be clear (hopefully I am being clear; begin clear is the point of this entire essay), it is not simply a matter of needing to “dumb down” the material as the material in most cases was unnecessarily “smarted up” to begin with. We just need to strip away the arrogance. We need to value simplicity, flexibility, and creativity. We need to allow for “Apple Pay” and other forms of “currency” to be exchanged based on a “going rate” that values its receipt, not because some artificial standard set by the “Feds” (can you say “gatekeeper!”) is in place. We should let the consumers set the standard of what is allowed, and like any capitalistic system or marketplace of ideas, everyone will benefit.
Bridging the Gap with Classical Prose
Perhaps the closest we can get as a current compromise in bridging the gap between real-world, accessible, engaging writing and inaccessible, fortress-guarded academic writing is found in the book “The Sense of Style,” written by the 21st century’s top linguistic scholar, Harvard’s Steven Pinker. Pinker illuminates (and advocates) for a writing style he references as Classical Prose. It is a stylized prose used to convey ideas powerfully and clearly, and it presupposes writer and reader as being equal in footing. The writer is like a tour guide that shows as much as they tell.[7]
A tour guide that shows you around and treats you on an equal footing is certainly not slamming any doors in your face. To the contrary, by coming to your level, they are closing the (potential) intellectual gap. Pinker’s claim that this is a good thing is self-evident, and based on the success of his books, and the popularity of his speaking engagements, the results demonstrate the definition of an “accepted currency” in action. This style of writing has led to similar success for authors such as John McWhorter and Neil DeGrasse Tyson (to name just two)[8]. The unique style of these authors opens the world to their subjects - the complexities of linguistics and astrophysics respectively - to audiences that go beyond the ivory tower. And their ability to be creative, authentic, humorous, and have a strong voice is reason for great optimism.
Let’s Open the Gate
Zoe Robertson speaks of composition as being able to "open the door to new ideas. Offering a buffet of food for thought, . . . a vehicle for dynamic perspectives and passions that can often go on to inspire in [a] reader something previous undiscovered, such as a new way of perceiving the world, a reignited drive for wider change, or maybe just a well-worded phrase to print on an encouraging poster."[9]
But if the composition that is being taught to first-year students is primarily funneling them toward entry into the very narrow fortress gate instead of the open door, is Robertson’s vision likely or even possible? Are the dishes on offer at her buffet table palatable for most guests? Can they be a “vehicle for dynamic perspectives and passions” that “inspire” if that vehicle speeds by in a blur? Can we achieve a “reignited drive for wider change” if that spark fails to ignite? Will we get the “well-worded phrase” she speaks of on the encouraging poster if it is not “well-worded” or is something that could never possibly adorn a dorm wall because it is not relatable to anything an average person would ever think, say, or hang on a wall?
Will academic writing, and the institutions to which it is attached, survive what the evidence shows to be an increasingly devalued currency? Will there be an attack on the fortress? Will that which flows far downstream dry up? To complete the fortress and gatekeeper analogy, I offer this question: If the currency you are guarding inside the fortress possesses nothing of value, is there a reason to guard it? What need is there to guard that which will not be attacked and has nothing to plunder?
Is there a reason for the gatekeeper to guard the gate of a fortress no one cares to enter?
Of course, in this scenario, even the most dutiful guards will abandon their posts. Those in the compound start to question what it is that is precisely not worth guarding, not worth attacking, not even worth discussing. The fortress rots and decays as other more accessible, inviting, and profitable structures (in the “idea as currency” sense) such as blogs, personal websites, YouTube channels and the like are built and prosper in replacing the fortress relics.
Irrelevance leads to irreverence. And it should. To the cause and to that which you serve.
Such is the potential plight of academic writing by academic elites for academic elites. Most of us are more than willing to buy what they sell, but how they sell it needs to change. The valuable contribution of academics to their fields and to society needs to be repackaged. It is time to reimagine academic writing and cash in on all it should be. It is time to get creative. To take risks. To be irreverent. Such as ending an essay with a series of fragments!
Notes
[1] Sword, Helen. Stylish Academic Writing. Harvard Faculty Club (2013) https://youtu.be/nQsRvAVSVeM
[2] Lunsford, Andrea. ASU Composition Conference 2021 Keynote Speech: Andrea Lunsford. https://youtu.be/NuAoD-_4oDY
[3] A shibboleth is any custom or tradition, usually a choice of phrasing or even a single word, that distinguishes one group of people from another.
[4] If you don’t believe the trickle-down effect in academic writing is real, ask the hundreds of thousands of middle schoolers across the nation subjected to MLA formatting and highly formulaic argumentative essays.
[5] The type of writing that most students will write across their personal and professional lives mostly falls under the broad category called technical and professional writing. I also teach this course, and I believe it should be the course most students take as a required writing course in college. Not first-year composition.
[6] The exact audience, purpose, structure, and language academic composition can take as a genre form is stretched in my class, as I embrace the composition part of First-Year Composition. Some teachers embrace the first (the first writing class). Others focus on the year (a year of writing to prepare you for the next 3, 5, 9 or a lifetime of years). I have taught my composition as rhetoric to 7th graders, high school students, college undergraduates and peer graduate students, to second-language learners in Seoul, South Korea, and to prison inmates with the New Mexico Corrections Department.
[7] Pinker, S. (2014). The Sense of Style. The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.
[8] John McWhorter is a prominent linguist and Neil DeGrasse Tyson a brilliant astrophysicist. Both have the unique ability to write about complex ideas in their respective field in a way that is engaging using Classical Prose.
[9] Robertson, Zoe. Why We Need Essay Collections Now More Than Ever. (2020) https://bookriot.com/why-essay-collections-matter
