What Makes Writing Academic

Also Available from Bloomsbury

Content Knowledge in English Language Teacher Education: International
Experiences, edited by Darío Luis Banegas
Essentials for Successful English Language Teaching, by Thomas S. C. Farrell and
George M. Jacobs
On Writtenness: The Cultural Politics of Academic Writing by Joan Turner
Pedagogies in English for Academic Purposes: Teaching and Learning in
International Contexts, edited by Carole MacDiarmid and J. J. MacDonald
Researching Language Learning Motivation: A Concise Guide, edited by
Ali H. Al-Hoorie and Fruzsina Szabó
Successful Dissertations: The Complete Guide for Education, Childhood and
Early Childhood Studies Students, edited by Caron Carter
Teaching English-Medium Instruction Courses in Higher Education: A Guide for
Non-Native Speakers, by Ruth Breeze and Carmen Sancho Guinda
The Value of English in Global Mobility and Higher Education: An Investigation
of Higher Education in Cyprus, by Manuela Vida-Mannl
What is Good Academic Writing?: Insights into Discipline-Specific Student
Writing, edited by Melinda Whong and Jeanne Godfrey
Writing a Watertight Thesis: A Guide to Successful Structure and Defence, by
Mike Bottery and Nigel Wright
Writing the Research Paper: Multicultural Perspectives for Writing in English as a
Second Language, by Philip M. McCarthy and Khawlah Ahmed
What Makes Writing Academic
Rethinking Theory for Practice

Julia Molinari
 BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK
1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA
29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland

BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published in Great Britain 2022

Copyright © Julia Molinari, 2022

Julia Molinari has asserted her right under the Copyright,

Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.

For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. xii–xiii constitute an extension

of this copyright page.

Cover image: © Carlos Sanchez Pereyra/Getty Images

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for,
any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses
given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher
regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist,
but can accept no responsibility for any such changes.

This work is published open access subject to a Creative Commons Attribution-

NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0,
[Link] You may re-use, distribute,
and reproduce this work in any medium for non-commercial purposes,
provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher
and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: HB: 978-1-3502-4392-7

ePDF: 978-1-3502-4393-4
ePUB: 978-1-3502-4394-1

Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

To find out more about our authors and books visit [Link]
and sign up for our newsletters.
To Felia
vi
 Contents

List of Figures viii

Foreword ix
Acknowledgements xii
List of Abbreviations xiv

Letter to My Reader 1
1 Troubling Academic Writing: Problems and Implications for Higher
Education 17
2 How Did We Get Here? A Selected History 45
3 What Makes Writing Academic: Learning from Writings ‘in the Wild’ 73
4 Critical Realism: Re-claiming Theory for Practice 99
5 Foundations for a Future Writing Pedagogy 131
Signing Off 163

Afterword 169
References 174
Index 199
 Figures

1 A critical realist conception of academic writing 105

2 Sousanis (2015, p. 66 © Harvard University Press) 131
 Foreword
Chrissie Boughey

Critical realism is a philosophy of being that accommodates the relativism of

individual experience and practice as well as the existence of an ultimate reality
independent of human thought and action. For those of us who draw on critical
realism, understanding reality as layered and emergent means looking at the
world with different eyes and never understanding it in the same way again.
It involves asking questions such as ‘What must the world really be like for
my experiences and observations of it to be possible and for my experiences
and observations to be different to those of others around me?’ As we try to
answer these questions, the potential is opened for the explanations offered to
contribute to social justice.
One place where the need for social justice is often overlooked is higher
education. In the last fifty or so years, higher education systems across the world
have expanded and, as they have done so they have come to accommodate
ever more diverse groups of students. Most of this expansion has been driven
by discourses privileging the role of higher education in the production of
‘knowledge workers’ for the global economy. From this perspective, what can
be wrong with the universities? How can they be unjust? More and more young
people get to study in them and gain qualifications that will allow them to gain
highly paid employment. Isn’t this all for the social good?
What this sort of thinking masks is the fact that access to and success in higher
education is socially differentiated. Who gets to attend the most prestigious
universities? Who gets the best marks, the best degree classifications? Equally
important are questions about who gets to thrive in universities. Whose ways of
being, whose ways of expression do they privilege and whose do they undermine?
Does every student go to university in order to gain better employment? Don’t
some students study to fulfil their own intellectual aspirations however they
might imagine them?
As Julia Molinari argues in this book, what is usually referred to as ‘academic
writing’ influences the answers to these questions in myriad ways. Dominant
assessment practices continue to privilege particular ways of learning and of
demonstrating that learning that favour some and exclude others. Rather than
x Foreword

looking at the way dominant practices exclude the possibility of diversity, the
response of most universities is to support the ‘industries’ associated with
the production of ‘acceptable’ forms of demonstrating knowing in the form
of writing courses, units and centres focusing on ‘student development’ and,
even, attempts to police plagiarism. The result of all this is that those who do
not produce the performances sanctioned, either because they have not yet
mastered them, because they are alien to them or because they do not want to
produce them, are ‘pathologised’ in a process that simultaneously ensures that
the industries themselves are sustained and those who most reap the benefits of
a higher education continue to do so.
Molinari’s powerful text draws on critical realism to show how academic
writing, the form of demonstrating knowing privileged in the universities, came
to be reduced to a series of ‘transferable mechanical skills’. These ‘skills’ are, of
course, the raw materials of the industries used to sustain dominant forms of
academic expression. In order to do this, she examines the way ‘writing’ came
to be conflated with the alphabet and so-called ‘higher order thinking’ at the
expense of oral and visual means of expression. In critical realist terms, this
involves exploring the ‘the world’ that exists independently of our apprehension
of it, the world of relatively enduring structures and mechanisms that led to the
emergence of events over centuries in time and our experiences of those events.
For those concerned with social justice, this exposition of the way things ‘came
to be’ offers the potential to see how things could be changed.
Essentially, this book is about writing pedagogies and more specifically about
the development of writing pedagogies as ‘levers for change’. Historically claims
have been made for other pedagogies to do this. Approaches to developing
writing that saw the need for students to be socialized into a set of practices were
seen as a means of opening access to students. What they offered, however, was
access to an unchanged order of things. By identifying the multiplicity of literacy
practices, researchers such as Brian Street and Shirley Brice Heath allowed us to
see how some practices were more powerful than others and how some had more
access to those practices. The problem, though, was that the acknowledgement
of multiplicity did not necessarily entail ensuring that power was challenged and
often this work was used simply as a means of understanding why some people
found it more difficult to master performances of knowing than others.
The use of critical realism allows Molinari to identify texts as emerging
from the interplay of enduring structures and mechanisms at a level of reality
that cannot be accessed empirically. Understanding this interplay allows us to
see what contributes to the experience of these texts as ‘academic’. Molinari’s
 Foreword xi

location of scholarship as lever for change at this level of reality is important for
a number of reasons not least because of the role of common-sense discourses
in constraining action. She notes that writing has to have ‘content’, that it has to
be about something. This leads to an argument for the use of interdisciplinary
approaches that ensure that novice writers have something to write about. The
trouble with interdisciplinary approaches is that those in the disciplines then
draw on common-sense discourses to claim that they are not writing teachers,
that their role is not to ‘teach English’. The identification of scholarship as a
mechanism that can be drawn upon to challenge academics’ understandings
of themselves as experts in the disciplines rather than teachers of writing is
therefore key to change. Molinari’s powerful arguments offer the potential to
guide that scholarship regardless of the forms it takes.
Other mechanisms identified by Molinari as needing to be brought into play
include indigenous knowledge systems and indigenous languages, long denied a
place in the ‘academic’ world. At the centre of critical realist thinking is the idea
that we should never conflate ‘what is’ with ‘what can be known’, a phenomenon
termed the ‘epistemic fallacy’. Language is a resource for making sense of the
worlds around us and different languages allow us to do this in different ways.
Requiring students to use English, or any other dominant language, requires
the adoption of a form of sense making that may be foreign, enhancing the
alienation they may feel from having to draw on the theories and principles that
deny them the understandings that have sustained their lives before entering a
university. If higher education truly is to contribute to social justice, how can we
deny that ‘what is’ may be much more than what we can know by drawing on
epistemologies and ontologies developed in the Global North?
In identifying these mechanisms at a level of reality that normally escapes
us and in calling for others to engage in the enquiry necessary to recognize
others, Molinari is not outlining a pedagogy in itself but rather the potential
for the emergence of pedagogies that will contribute to change. This is what
makes her book important. It is not a ‘how to’ manual. It does not advocate any
one particular approach. Rather it opens up the possibility for the emergence
of an array of pedagogies and approaches that will take account of the myriad
different contexts in which students and teachers live and work. In doing this,
the book offers hope and the excitement of seeing what can emerge as we work
to make what can be counted as knowing and as manifestations of knowing
more socially just.
 Acknowledgements

The 2020–21 have been years of hostile environments; two painful years,
exacerbated by COVID-19, climate emergencies, BREXIT, flood and wildfire
devastation, political divisiveness, personal loss and heartache. The collective
aftermath is still being felt and it will be long-lasting. Somehow, I managed
to squeeze this book through the cracks of lockdown, trapped at home, and
fortunate to not only have a home but to have one with ‘a room of my own’. It
was my best friend Felia, to whom I dedicate this monograph, who insisted: ‘if
not now, then when?’ I am indebted to her dogged insistence, over forty years of
friendship, that I ‘do something’ with these ideas! Thanks, Fe x.
I would be lost without Luay and Robs. They’ve had to endure the years of
the PhD and now this, more hours at my computer, absent-mindedness in all
matters domestic, last-minute and random decisions about what to eat or what
to do on a weekend. Between the eye-rolls and theatrical yawns as they listen to
me droning on about academic writing and how it could all be so different, they
have never stopped repeating ‘I am so proud of you’ and ‘Brava mamma’. I love
them with all my being.
This monograph germinated and grew from the generous conversations, kind
mentoring and vigilant supervision of Professor Patricia Thomson and Professor
Andrew Fisher. I am beyond grateful to them, along with my examiners, Professor
Gina Wisker and Dr Ian James Kidd, for believing there was something in the
way I think about academic writing, both educationally and philosophically, that
was worth teasing out. Pat and Andy, you’ll recognize most of what we did for
the thesis in here (including the stuff you probably weren’t so keen on!) but there
are also omissions and additions. I could have done more and better, but for
now, and given the circumstances, it’s the best I could do.
Also key to my thinking have been the three people involved in either
reviewing the initial proposal or writing the foreword and afterword to this
first book. Professor Chrissie Boughey, Dr Fiona English and Professor Suresh
Canagarajah, all of whom are luminaries in their fields and have significantly
shaped the ways in which I think about academic writing. They are creative,
innovative and courageous intellectuals who have stood up for marginalized
students and academics throughout their academic trajectories. Thank you for
 Acknowledgements xiii

endorsing what I am trying to say and for generously giving up your time to do
so. An anonymous reviewer also dedicated their energies to reading the whole
manuscript and I hope that I have done some justice to your kind comments and
suggestions.
Never in a million years would I have expected Bloomsbury to agree to
publishing this, yet here I am, one of their authors! Who would have thought!
Maria, Evangeline and Anna (my editors), and their teams, have been kind and
patient and so encouraging at every step of what is a brand-new process for me.
I am especially grateful for the early support and suggestions that I received,
especially when I expressed the desire for the book to be available Open Access.
Several critical friends and colleagues have stood by me over the years. Two,
in particular, stand out: Dr Alex Ding and Dr Sally Zacharias. This is because of
the many hours we have spent talking each other’s ideas through, constantly and
generously looking for synergies in how we think about language, literacy and
writing, differing on some aspects, but ultimately pushing each other to think
through the implications of some of our more controversial positions. Please let’s
keep talking.
I now take full responsibility for anything that is good and everything that is
bad in here.
 Abbreviations

DBIS Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (UK)

EAP English for Academic Purposes

EDI Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

EV Epistemic Virtue

HEI Higher Education Institution

HESA Higher Education Statistics Agency (UK)

IELTS International English Language Testing System

SAP Socio-Academic Practice

SoTL Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

TC Threshold Concept
 Letter to My Reader

Dear Reader,

I am assuming that if you have chosen to read this book, it is because you either
teach academic writing as a tutor, lecturer or supervisor and/or you are an
academic writer yourself, maybe a student who has to write essays, a doctoral
researcher who needs to make choices about how to represent your knowledge
or a writer of academic journals, maybe even books, who continues to question
what shape and form your writing should take. If you are any of the above, then
there should be something in here for you, maybe a reference you hadn’t come
across before or an idea for how you could write your next academic text, teach
a writing lesson or advise a doctoral researcher. Note my use of ‘how you could’ –
this gives a clue as to what this book is about. It is about possibilities for writing,
not prescriptions on how you should write. How you should write is a question of
opportunities and constraints that are so specific to your unique contexts that I
would need to be the proverbial fly on the wall to glean the knowledge to advise
on what you should do. No, this isn’t a ‘how to write’ book. It is a book about
the knowledge work that academic writing does and the forms that (dis)allow
writing to do its job as a ‘knowledge worker’. It is a book about possibilities for
how academic writing could be.
By ‘forms’ I mean genres, understood throughout this book at their most
basic level of ‘conventionalised ways of acting and interacting by exhibiting
regularities and shared understandings of how language is used’ (Devitt, 1996;
Hamilton & Pitt, 2009). I will be using ‘form’ and ‘genre’ somewhat synonymously
and interchangeably rather than in any technical or specialized sense. This is
because the book isn’t about genre per se but about how academic writing comes
to be classified as ‘academic’ in the first place. An IELTS essay, a traditional
PhD monograph, a poem and an academic journal article are all examples of
genres because they communicate knowledge by arranging words and sentences
in ways that readers expect to find them. The reason genre is so important to
understanding what makes writing academic is that academia is somewhat
territorial and defensive of its writing traditions: as soon as anybody disrupts
conventionalized ways of writing – breaks the rules, subverts the standards – the
2 What Makes Writing Academic

academic literacy wars erupt, students fail, articles get rejected and the almighty
wrath of the guardians of the academic temple descend on their victim, a writer
who may simply have been exercising their intellectual and creative right to
communicate complex knowledge differently or grappling with the universally
shared challenge of finding the right words to say what needs saying. Either way,
messing around with genres, with form, is seriously frowned upon in academia.
As you can probably tell, I have started this book as I mean to continue it, by
doing just that, by messing around a bit with genre. This is meant to be a serious
‘academic’ monograph based on my PhD research about academic writing, no
less! Yet, here I am, informally chatting away, seemingly digressing as if you were
here, in the same room or on the same screen as me (forgive me, I write this
having been in lockdown for over a year because of the Covid-19 pandemic, I
haven’t been with people in a long time and the unexpected comforts that the
informalities of lockdown have generated – from teaching in loungewear to
lecturing from the kitchen table – may be wreaking havoc with my writing!).
Well, this is a serious book, it is an academic book and what makes it academic
is the knowledge it deals with, the references it draws on, the research that has
gone into it and my identity, my right to be a writer who is present in her text.
Le Ha (2009) did this too and she got published in an academic journal, as did
Richardson (1997), so I tentatively, wholly deferentially, take my cue from them
by giving myself the licence to be both academic and have a personality, to take
a risk in negotiating institution and intuition, structure and agency, convention
and voice. Some may not like this style, but others will, just as some don’t like
the zombified prose and predictable patterns of formal academic writing, but
others feel reassured by the authority of its clinical, monotone and passive voice.
If nothing else, it is the differences in taste about style that unite us because, at
some stage, we all have to trudge through text that sends us to sleep or irritates
us. And this again is the whole point of the book. There are different ways of
communicating academic knowledge and I hope that if you do make it to the
end (there may be some unfamiliar technical jargony hurdles to get over, but I
do my best to explain), you will see that what makes writing academic is actually
quite simple and has nothing to do with using the passive voice or avoiding
personal pronouns.
What also gives me the licence to mess around a bit with my language and tone,
with genre, is that what makes writing academic emerges from socio-academic
and historical practices rather than conventionalized stylistic, linguistic or
syntactic forms. What this means in practice is that academic writings are and
can be varied. They don’t all have to fit the mould of convention. Using a critical
 Letter to My Reader 3

realist lens as my theoretical framework, the book re-imagines (I re-imagine)

academic writings as twenty-first-century open systems that change according
to affordances perceived by writers. In so doing, the book offers opportunities
for re-imagining how, which and whose knowledge emerges. This matters
because academic communication hinges on us all being able to write in certain
forms but not others, which risks excluding knowledge that may lend itself to
alternative forms of representation. Moreover, because academic ability tends
to be misleadingly conflated with writing ability, limiting how the academy
writes to a relatively narrow set of forms (such as the essay or thesis) and a single
modality (such as language) may be preventing a range of academic abilities
from emerging.
Standardized forms require abstracts, introductions, main bodies and
conclusions. They are also predominantly monolingual and monomodal. One
troubling shortcoming of this kind of standardization is that it can narrow, distort
or flatten epistemic representation. A related shortcoming is that standardization
is exclusionary and this can lead to a range of epistemic losses and gains. Drawing
on the history of academia, socio-semiotic research, integrational linguistics and
studies in multimodal and visual thinking, the book proposes that academic
writings be re-imagined as multimodal artefacts that harness a wider range of
epistemic affordances. It further highlights that even if writing were to remain
the preferred academic mode, it needn’t be so standardized. Old and new genres
ranging from dialogues, chronicles, manifestos, blogs and comics can also be
academic.
(I hope I just sounded academic enough).
My purpose in writing this book is threefold: (1) to provide students, teachers
and supervisors with reasons (and a licence) to re-imagine academic texts; (2) to
extend established academic writing scholarship by introducing critical realism
as a conceptual framework for justifying plural, democratized, multimodal,
diverse and inclusive forms of academic writing; and (3) to develop a philosophy
of change that lays a foundation for diversifying writing pedagogies. Overall,
I draw extensively on previous scholarship, extending its theoretical reach by
providing a socio-philosophical perspective that explains how and why change
is needed for socially just writing practices. I go beyond describing different
approaches to writing academic texts and instead advance a social philosophy of
change that provides a rationale for sustained innovation and diversity. I situate
my book more firmly within the broader conversation on educational social
justice by arguing that what makes writing academic are its epistemic virtues,
namely what knowledge is valued, for what purpose and by whom. Epistemic
4 What Makes Writing Academic

virtues (and vices) affect how academic texts are written and who sets the
standards by which they are deemed ‘academic’. By situating my book in this
way, I provide a rationale for diversity that is hinted at in several similar books,
but not made fully explicit.
There are three further underlying reasons for writing this book. Firstly, UK
universities, the context with which I am most familiar, are increasingly diverse
spaces attended by up to 50 per cent of the UK’s eligible population (ONS,
2019) representing a range of socio-economic and cultural demographics.
This widened participation amongst home students brings with it a range of
educational, linguistic and literacy backgrounds (for example, 90 per cent
of students are from state-funded schools [HESA, 2020b]), abilities and
motivations. Moreover, approximately 20 per cent of the UK university student
body is ‘international’ with a further 20 per cent accounting for mature students
(DBIS, 2016; HESA, 2020a; Tuckett, 2013). In Europe alone one in seven people
of working age (fifteen to sixty-four) identify as disabled (EUROSTAT, 2019);
yet, disabled people frequently face barriers when it comes to participating
equally in many aspects of society, including education. The diversity that
characterizes university students and that HEIs (Higher Education Institutions)
boast of in their promotional literatures as hallmarks of their inclusive provision
rarely manifests itself as diversity in academic writing practices. Rather,
university literacy practices are designed to cancel differences, to homogenize
and standardize to norms and templates that don’t reflect or respect or explore
the literacies and languages students bring with them. Yet, as Canagarajah (2021)
reminds us in a recent online lecture, we can actually ‘have it both ways’ because
norms can be negotiated; they can change because literacy and language are not
fixed. Academic texts can be part of a rich and varied ecological landscape which
acknowledges, for example, that there is no such thing as ‘standard English’:
Standard English is not a ‘thing’. It doesn’t have a life of its own outside. We
created ‘standard English’. Standard English has words from so many languages,
from Swedish, Norwegian, Tamil, lots of languages. How did this come to
be treated as pure, normative, standard English? It’s purely ideology. It’s not
something ontological. Language doesn’t exist out there, in one state, in one
stage and then start.

Canagarajah goes on to remind us that standards are merely ‘approximations’

whereby diversity can co-exist alongside the norms and whereby writers,
understood as agents, can participate in norm changes. Diversity is possible
because writers and readers recognize that patterns remain fairly stable over
 Letter to My Reader 5

time: variation within those patterns does not threaten the unity of the pattern
but it can provide writers with opportunities to take part in changing the norms
that constitute the overall pattern.
The second underlying reason for writing this book is that movements to
decolonize universities, educate online and question neoliberal higher education
practices further highlight transformative trends that raise concerns about social
justice, including who or what universities are for. As Boughey reminds us in the
foreword to this book, diverse students bring diverse literacies and if universities
are to be sites for inclusion, diversity and knowledge transformation, writing
practices need questioning. And finally, my motivation for writing this is to
index that what makes writing academic is evolving, emerging and contestable:
it has evolved over time; it emerges as a practice that transcends its forms; and
it remains contested, as academic disciplines revisit how best to represent the
ontologies and epistemologies of their fields of knowledge. This matters at a
point in history, now, when the crisis of representation endures: how should
knowledge be communicated and in what forms in an era of instant social
media, bite-size and click-bait broadcasting, fee-charging universities, widening
participation, climate emergencies, six-minute or long reads, open access,
posthuman technology and crowd-sourced wisdom?
The book begins by contextualizing academic writing within two particular
fields of study: UK EAP1 or EGAP (English for General Academic Purposes) and
American Composition Studies (also referred to as Rhetoric and Composition
or WAC (Writing across the Curriculum). I start my focus in these areas because
they are the areas with which I am familiar as both a teacher and a researcher
and because pedagogic programmes such as these are highly influential in
shaping discourses about academic writing. As such, they have a responsibility
to educate students and practitioners about the evolving purposes, forms and
possibilities for academic expression. I then subject academic writing to an
interdisciplinary (educational and philosophical) analysis in order to argue that
what makes writing academic are its socio-academic practices and values, not its
conventional forms. It is this argument that allows me to gradually re-think the
theories that academic writing pedagogies traditionally draw on – such as genre
theory and cognitive and applied linguistics – and to propose the inclusion of

1
Presessional EAP courses in the UK enable access to undergraduate and postgraduate courses for
which students, typically international students, have an offer that is conditional on passing an EAP
course. These are different to insessional courses which offer EAP support alongside study on degree
programmes. Both presessional and insessional courses provide academic communication support
to international and home students.
6 What Makes Writing Academic

a new one – critical realism – so that writing practices can be transformed into
more inclusive methods of enquiry and of epistemic representation.
The norms taught by traditional, often commercial, academic writing
programmes tend to be those associated with what has been called the ‘scientific
paradigm’ (Bennett, 2015; Turner, 2010, 2018). EAP, for example, teaches this
paradigm and in so doing is presenting a particular form and ideology of
academic writing that is not representative of all disciplines. Asking students
to replicate norms and conventions leads to uncritical syllabi and assessment
practices that do not require knowledge of the broader educational process of
understanding why these norms prevail, what they can and cannot afford, who
benefits and what the implications of adopting these norms might be for them as
learners and writers and for the academic knowledge communities they will be
contributing to. Given that writing is the preferred mode of academic assessment,
as evidenced by the ‘essay’ remaining the default genre in the humanities and in
many of the arts and social sciences (Womack, 1993), it is not surprising that it
is student writing that receives a great deal of attention in higher education and
EAP. This has been shown in Nesi and Gardner (2012) and Andrews (2003).
As a consequence of the centrality of writing, the focus on norms mentioned
above is also to be found in how academic writing is approached. This is
despite a shift, in the last twenty years or so, from a narrow focus on text and its
linguistic norms towards more multimodal forms of communication (Andrews,
2010, p. 93; Andrews et al., 2012; Paré, 2018; Roozen & Erickson, 2017). This
shift has seen literacy practices (such as informed rhetorical choices about
style and multimodality), as opposed to skills (such as the decontextualized
and transferable mechanics of writing, like paragraphing), come to the fore in
several areas of research writing, including Kamler and Thomson (2006) and A.
Archer and Breuer (2015). EAP, however, has been slow to catch up with or even
embrace this trend, a trend that indexes the richness and possibilities academic
writing practices afford so that it can fulfil a range of academic purposes. Such
purposes include preparing students for the multimodal communication needed
in the twenty-first century (Andrews et al., 2012; A. Archer & Breuer, 2016;
Mcculloch, 2017; Paré, 2017), respecting and celebrating the diverse literacies,
values and identities that students bring with them to academia (Canagarajah,
2019; Roozen & Erickson, 2017; Sperlinger, McLellan, & Pettigrew, 2018;
Williams, 2017) and educating about writing so that students are empowered to
make informed choices about what is possible and why it is possible as well as
about what is expected (Downs & Wardle, 2007; Mays, 2017).
 Letter to My Reader 7

To answer my research question – what makes writing academic – I have

chosen an interdisciplinary approach which draws on educational, sociological
and philosophical theories. This allows my research to be explorative rather
than exploitative (D’Agostino, 2012), meaning that it aims to ‘discover and
innovate’ within the realm of what is possible, rather than ‘add details and fill
in gaps’ (Krishnan, 2013, p. 19) within the boundaries of what already exists.
In this sense, it fulfils the socio-academic practice of being imaginative about
‘future possibilities’ (Barnett, 2012, 2013). In the process of introducing a new
theory to inform pedagogic practices, I reject dominant discourses that frame
academic writing as a transferable skill which can be reduced to conventional
forms. Instead, I show that academic writings are varied and evolve alongside
changing writer agencies and textual environments. This accounts for the
emergence of a diverse academic writing landscape that enacts diverse socio-
academic practices and that does not reduce writing to the predictable static
surface features that genre approaches to academic writing tend to get reduced
to. My methodology resists traditional disciplinary classifications and is in
line with the reflective and interpretative approaches associated with the
humanities. Rather than ‘filling a gap’ in academic writing research, I see my
role as a researcher as one that challenges existing writing conventions by
questioning their underlying assumptions and highlighting the implications
they lead to.
My approach further aligns with the kind of ‘problematisation’ discussed
in Alvesson and Sandberg (2013), who also object to the uncritical adoption
of the default ‘gap-spotting’ approach to research on the grounds that it posits
an incremental, or ‘additive’, approach to academic enquiry that can leave
unchallenged the underlying ontological, epistemological and ideological
assumptions about what and whose information is missing and why it might be
missing in the first place. Gap-spotting is problematic for a host of other reasons,
too, as Canagarajah pointedly explains in the Afterword to this book and as Pat
Thomson (2021) eloquently reminds us in her blog post. Rather, my aim is to
unsettle assumptions about academic writing because (Barnett, 1990, p. 155)
a genuine higher learning is subversive in the sense of subverting the student’s
taken-for-granted world, including the world of endeavour, scholarship,
calculation or creativity, into which he or she has been initiated. A genuine
higher education is unsettling; it is not meant to be a cosy experience. It is
disturbing because, ultimately, the student comes to see that things could always
be other than they are.
8 What Makes Writing Academic

Monodisciplinary approaches to knowledge can lead to assumptions

remaining unchallenged, allowing them to seem ‘objective’ and to then ‘settle’
into established, arguably complacent, ways of knowing. Such disciplinary
objectivity and complacency have their challengers, though. For example, there
exists a plurality of different conceptions of objectivity. This has been documented
historically by Daston and Galison (2007) who trace the etymological trajectory
of epistemic virtues. They locate the naming of the epistemic virtue of ‘objectivity’
(understood as a mechanical conception of reality that does not require the
subjective interpretation of a knower) within the mid-nineteenth century (2007,
pp. 17 and 31). Although they concede that etymology does not, in and of itself,
bring reality into existence or deny it (i.e. naming something does not negate its
previous existence), they nevertheless question the importance that etymology
is given in the history of ‘Western’ knowledge because it can result in conflating
how we come to understand the nature of knowledge. For example, they argue
that the ‘Western’ scientific paradigm of conflating objectivity with epistemology
is misguided. They claim that ‘objectivity and epistemology do not coincide’
because the history of epistemology, namely of the ways in which we have come
to know and interpret reality, has drawn on other epistemic virtues that are not
‘objective’. These include the virtue of ‘truth-to-nature’, which is an essentialist
and universal subjective representation of reality whereby scientist and artist
work together to represent, as well as distort, what they see (cf. early-eighteenth-
century botanical drawings) and the virtue of ‘trained judgment’, whereby
scientists, i.e. subjects, make judgements about and interpret data. History can
thus unsettle our epistemic complacency by reminding us of the contingencies
that have led to how and why things have come to be the way they are.
The socio-feminist theories of the twentieth century have further broadened
the range of what counts as an epistemic virtue. Feminist philosopher of
science Harding (1995), for example, has argued that disciplinary assumptions
that seem to be ‘objective’ are only so from the particular ‘standpoint’ of the
researcher. Standpoint theory has been described as a ‘political and social
epistemology’ and explicitly positions the knower as a legitimate source of
epistemic justification (Wylie, 2003), especially when oppression and other
social injustices are prevalent. This indexes a further epistemic virtue, namely
one in which ‘insider knowledge’ (such as being a black female maid in a
white household) affords explanatory power not necessarily available to an
outsider (such as a white male researcher investigating racism) and one where
subjectivity is not only valued but is an epistemological precondition for
understanding social phenomena.
 Letter to My Reader 9

Moreover, from a specifically interdisciplinary perspective, epistemologist

D’Agostino (2012) recognizes that disciplinary classifications can and do
advance knowledge. Because of this epistemic pursuit, ‘disciplinarity’ could be
said to count as an ‘epistemic virtue’. Yet, for D’Agostino, what actually binds
traditional disciplines is their ‘shallow consensus’ rather than the epistemic
virtue of ‘objectivity’, for example. This ‘shallow consensus’ can be understood
as a broad and abstract disciplinary assumption (or agreement), such as
‘democracy is worthwhile’ in the discipline of Politics. However, a ‘shallow
consensus’ can go unchallenged when more fine-grained, technical analyses
within disciplines – such as which countries can be classified as democratic or
which electoral systems are more conducive to democracy – prevent researchers
from questioning their initial assumptions, such as whether democracy is
indeed a universally worthwhile pursuit. When academic communities syphon
into specialized and technical sub-fields about how to implement democracy,
for example, they are less likely to question their initial assumptions, namely
the value of democracy itself. Such syphoning then avoids abstractions, inhibits
non-specialist communication and encourages incremental approaches to
knowledge that can mask deep-rooted and potentially erroneous assumptions.
All of this points to what Wiley recognizes as ‘epistemic trade-offs’ (2003, p. 34),
namely that the objectivity-making properties of epistemic virtues cannot be
‘simultaneously maximised’. What this means is that in the process of ascribing
objectivity to the specialist knowledge that disciplines afford (e.g. when we
claim that a voting system based on proportional representation leads to more
democratic outcomes), we can lose sight of or stop questioning the bigger picture,
so to speak, such as whether democracy is a desirable outcome in the first place,
or for whom it might be a desirable outcome and in what circumstances. So, to
remain with the democracy example and to paraphrase Wiley, the commitment
to maximize specialist understandings requires a trade-off of empirical depth
against value judgements about democracy.
An equivalent shallow consensus in EAP might be that ‘academic writing
is formal’ or ‘objective’ or ‘linear’. Fine-grained approaches to how to teach
such formality then syphon EAP into its own sub-fields of discipline-specific
writing, academic grammar and academic corpora, leaving the original
assumption about whether academic writing is formal, objective and linear
unchallenged and, in doing so, denying students the opportunity ‘to see that
things could always be other than they are’. The epistemic trade-off here
consists in a commitment to maximize specialist knowledge about academic
genres, grammars and vocabularies against the value, or even the possibility
10 What Makes Writing Academic

and meaning, of academic writing being formal, objective and linear in the first
place. What this looks like in EAP is a ‘piling up of highly similar textbooks
and resources’ on how to write an academic essay, for example, that ‘resist’ the
challenge that might come from other disciplines, such as Composition Studies
(Tardy & Jwa, 2016), Writing Studies (Adler-Kassner & Wardle, 2015), Academic
Literacies (Scott & Lillis, 2007), Multimodality (A. Archer & Breuer, 2015), post-
Colonial Literacies (Thesen & Cooper, 2013) and Philosophy and Sociology
(Judd, 2003). An example of one such challenge might be that academic writing
might be better described as ‘recursive’ rather than linear, as argued by Palmeri
(2012), who belongs to both the Composition and Multimodal Writing Studies
tradition. What he means by this is that when academic writing is seen through
the lens of composition and multimodality, we notice recursive patterns of
voice, argument, rhythm, pathos, logos and ethos that the attribute of ‘linearity’
fails to capture.
EAP is a fairly well-established field (it has its own journals, professional
networks, conferences, publications and all the trappings of what constitutes a
field of study) and, as such, it, too, boasts its own shallow consensus and fine-
grained specialisms, from building lexical corpora to analysing discipline-
specific genres. Rather than add further to the process of disciplinary
specialization and incremental technicalization, I have chosen to take a step
back, to ‘zoom out’ as Mays (2017) might say and challenge some of the shallow
consensus that binds EAP with regards to the social complexity of academic
writing. I do this by asking a deceptively simple question: what makes writing
academic, given its diversity and contingent history and given that what can
seem to be academic may not be academic at all (as in the case of academic
hoaxes)? I have chosen Philosophy, broadly understood as a form of enquiry
into the nature of things, or as an ‘under-labourer’, to quote Roy Bhaskar, as
the main approach for my argument because it allows me to step back from
the traditional disciplinary specialisms and standpoints of EAP and engage
more freely in considering alternative conceptualizations of academic writing.
For example, research into academic writing might benefit from resisting, or
momentarily suspending, disciplinary and methodological classification. This
is because researching writing has led me to raise broader questions that require
educational and philosophical responses. Instead of deciding where I stand on
any particular (specialist) theory of writing, by identifying putative gaps and
limitations, I take a step back to look at writing as a broad and abstract social
phenomenon and then try to clarify questions regarding its nature, such as ‘what
is writing’ and ‘what makes it academic’. This steers me more towards advancing
 Letter to My Reader 11

a theory of academic writing which may then have repercussions for pedagogies
that influence ‘how to write’. I discuss these in the last chapter.
An analytic approach allows me to address the epistemological and
ontological dualism that underlies EAP’s approach to academic writing. This
dualism manifests itself as a binary between skills, which tell us how to achieve
something, namely procedural knowledge, and practices, which are claims
about what is the case, namely propositional knowledge (Fantl, 2017; Knorr
Cetina, Schatzki, & von Savigny, 2001). Writing instruction in EAP, for example,
makes knowledge claims such as ‘writing is formal, objective and linear’ that
collapse claims about how to write some academic texts (procedural) with
what all academic writing is (propositional). Similarly, critics of American
writing instruction, such as David Russell and Mike Rose, have highlighted
the failure of what they call the ‘myth of transience’, namely the mistaken belief
that writing skills, once learnt, can be ‘transferred’ to any writing context: the
myth of transience is a myth precisely because it lures teachers and students
into thinking that procedural knowledge about certain genres (such as the five-
paragraph essay or the ‘create a research space’ gap-filling approach to research
writing (Swales & Feak, 2012)) can be collapsed into propositional knowledge
about academic writing in general. Such erroneous generalizations from the
particular to the universal are seductive because they are easy to standardize, to
teach and to learn. But, equally, these same generalizations run into trouble and
become increasingly difficult to unlearn when academic writers move across
contexts, negotiating new academic purposes and discovering the affordances
of diverse ways of representing their knowledge. Academic writing instruction
collapses epistemology into ontology by conflating some of its basic constitutive
elements (which are by no means exhaustive), such as its putative formality, with
its characteristics as a whole: the fact that one academic text is formal does not
mean that all academic texts are formal. The mistake of collapsing epistemology
(how we come to know something) with ontology (what something actually is)
occurs when we generalize what academic writing is (as a whole) on the basis
of some of its features (its parts). The fact that I have come to know academic
writing as ‘formal, objective and linear’ does not tell me what academic writing
is because there could be other kinds of academic writing that do not share
these characteristics. In fact, as I show throughout the book, there are plenty
of reasons to not describe academic writing as linear, objective and formal. In
this sense, EAP conflates how it has come to know and then define academic
writing with what academic writing is. This amounts to an epistemic fallacy,
discussed in Chapter 4, whereby ‘how we come to know the world’ from a
12 What Makes Writing Academic

monodisciplinary and particularist position gets equated with the way the world
is or could be. That this fallacy is problematic can be evidenced by how, for
example, definitions of IQ or literacy differ according to the methods of enquiry
used to establish their ontologies: for example, a child will be deemed illiterate
if my definition of literacy reifies the prescriptivist standards of a Latin-inspired
grammatical tradition or of monolingualism over the socio-communicative
skills of descriptive grammars or of multilingual literacies. Similarly, prescriptive
approaches to academic writing tend to single out particular forms and
standards of academic writing and then reify these to the status of universal
standards. A student whose academic literacies may be more complex, varied
or epistemologically and ontologically nuanced will inevitably be disadvantaged
when assessed against standards that reduce the academicness of writing to the
shallow consensus of linearity or objectivity rather than frame this academicness
as a recursive or disciplinary social and historical phenomenon (whereby what
counts as ‘objective’ becomes a matter of disciplinary contentions and epistemic
virtues rather than a matter of the surface features of the text).
EAP is a field of writing instruction that has a responsibility for educating
students about academic writing just as much as it has a responsibility to teach
them how to write particular genres. Yet, it often falls foul to universalizing a
particularist version of academic writing at the expense of other ways of writing
academically, as I show in Chapters 1 and 3. Moreover, EAP has been known
to make further misleading ontological claims, such as ‘composites are nothing
more than the sum of their basic constitutive elements’ (Beckett & Hager, 2018,
pp. 138–40), thus compounding the perception that learning to write academically
is about learning to master a set of discrete, finite and transferable skills. This
deeply troubling reductionist framing of academic writing underscores many
mainstream and commercial approaches to EAP writing. It is this framing that I
challenge throughout the book.
My analytic approach exposes these epistemological and ontological
conflations by proposing a generative model of academic writing that accounts
for change in how instances of academic writing come to be classified in the
first place and for what academic writing is and could be: the former requires
empirical and inductive observation and includes a range of methodologies such
as ethnography and corpus analysis to show how varied academic writings are.
The latter demands a conceptual shift that does not conflate what something is
composed of with what it is as a whole. This means that whatever our inductive
observations tell us about what academic writing looks like may not be sufficient
to determine what makes writing academic. Rather, what I am proposing in this
 Letter to My Reader 13

book is that what makes writing academic – its academicness – emerges from a
complex stratified ontology of structures and agencies. Because of this emergent
nature, academicness cannot be reduced to any defining feature or variable, such
as its grammar or vocabulary or style. Instead, academicness can be thought of
as ‘multiply realizable’ (Fodor, 1974, 1997), a position that is compatible with
systems theory (Ball, 2004; Mays, 2017) and its implications for the philosophy
of mind and sociology (Sawyer, 2001). Similarly, the multiple and emergent
realizability of academic writing has important implications for understanding
writing as an evolving social academic practice rather than as a static genre.
The book is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 is concerned with explaining
what academic writing is in EAP and how EAP can misrepresent it. Chapter
2 delves into the history of writing and literacy to tease out the ideologies
shaping writing practices. Chapter 3 showcases a range of academic writings
that challenge conventional understandings of what makes writing academic.
Chapter 4 proposes a macro-theory of academic writing that can inform
academic writing pedagogies. This theory is critical realism. It is a socio-scientific
philosophy that allows us to re-imagine academic writing within a non-linear,
emergent and complex social open system. Conceptualizing academic writing
as an open system allows us to shift our thinking away from describing writing
as a reductive and mechanistic ‘transferable skill’ that can be deployed across all
writing contexts. When re-imagined as an open system, change and diversity in
academic writing practices become not only possible, but inevitable. The final
chapter proposes a foundation for a future pedagogy of academic writing as an
open system that can continue to change. It highlights ways in which writers
and teachers of academic writing can enact their agencies to effectuate change
in their teaching and writing practices. When conceptualized as an open system,
diverse genres can emerge.

Notes on Style

You may be pondering the same question I am often asked when I present my
work to others at conferences, staff meetings and workshops: doesn’t the genre
that I have chosen to communicate my knowledge undermine my argument for
diversity, multilingualism and multimodality in academic literacy practices (even
my examiners asked me that)? The short answer is – no. My argument is not that
we should all stop writing linear, passive and impersonal prose. My argument
is that we shouldn’t all have to. The whole point of acknowledging diversity
14 What Makes Writing Academic

by pluralizing and democratizing academic expression and communication is

exactly that, to acknowledge the diversity (Horner & Lu, 2013). That includes
my own preferred style as the style that falls within my (cap)abilities, my
background and my education. I wouldn’t know where to start drawing or
rapping my research and even if I could, I am not sure what the rationale would
be. Scholars who represent their research in modalities other than language or
multilingually have compelling reasons to do so and, unlike those of us who
write in the conventional canon, they shoulder the added intellectual labour of
having to persuade others of why they need to transcend language and traditional
genres. But if my reasoning on this still doesn’t persuade you, then have a look at
Playing with #acwri by Molinari (2021), where I used the genre of the dialogue
to enact a play about these very same issues.
What you will notice about my style is that because of the interdisciplinary (e.g.
philosophy, education, history, sociology) readings that I have drawn on to write
my research, there is some stylistic heterogeneity in my academic prose as well
as some inconsistency. As an academic writer and regarding stylistic variations,
although I have been mindful of what voice to project in my writing, the book
reflects the heteroglossic (Bakhtin & Holquist, 1981), multimodal (A. Archer &
Breuer, 2015) and theoretical (Besley & Peters, 2013; Peters, 2009) discourses
that have informed my thinking. By ‘discourses’ I mean the different ways that
language is used in the different disciplines and in the social practices that they
enact (Fairclough, 1992). This means that I swing between encyclopaedic tones,
especially when trying to relay key historical events that have shaped writing,
to ones that are didactic (when providing examples), analytic (when trying to
convey key notions in philosophy) and simplistic (when trying to retain a macro
stance that glosses over micro analyses). Since I have also drawn on historical
and archival methods to advance my arguments, the reader will also notice that
I defer some knowledge to footnotes – a literary device that is frowned upon in
the academic writing circles I inhabit. But once more, I take my cue from others
who do this and who have actually devoted an entire book to the footnote on the
grounds that the rhetorical use of footnotes in the field of History functions as
‘the humanist’s rough equivalent of the scientist’s report on data: they offer the
empirical support for the stories told and arguments presented’ (Grafton, 1997,
p. vii). In my own writing, footnotes also serve a rhetorical function: they disrupt
the faux linearity, orchestrated sequentiality and perceived clarity that ‘polished’
academic prose is designed to conceal, further affording the reader-researcher
nuggets of knowledge that store the potential to germinate into something new
and unexpected.
 Letter to My Reader 15

Regarding multimodality, the book is a manifestation of the skills and

practices I am familiar with, of negotiations with editors and informed choices
about expectations. It reflects my agency in relation to the textual environments
that have shaped me. What I advocate here is that academic writers should be
writing, drawing or dancing their PhDs or other texts according to their (cap)
abilities, in line with epistemological and ontological rationales and in relation
to what is structurally possible and institutionally negotiated with(in) the
textual environment (see Figure 1, p. 105). I am not advocating that writers
engage in acts of ‘arbitrary or radical defiance’ (Sousanis, 2016), but that they
be respected as agents who have a degree of freedom and knowledge to enact
unique ways of expressing themselves academically. This book represents my
(cap)abilities in re-shaping (Bazerman, 1988) and transducting (i.e. translating
from one mode to another) (Bezemer & Kress, 2008) the knowledge that I
have developed through research and which came to me in the form of words,
images, quotations, personal anecdotes, conversations with students, colleagues
and critical friends, social media interactions, blog writing and conference
presentations. My own multilingualism and literacies (English, Italian, Venetian
and French) will be manifest in my text through idiosyncrasies in signposting,
sentence structures and linguistic choices (including multilingual choices and
possibly some malapropisms that may have slipped through unwittingly). Some
readers will find these odd or unexpected or unclear whilst others who share
my cultural backgrounds and who know me will find these perfectly consistent
and will probably not even notice them since they will seem perfectly normal
to them. These idiosyncrasies have become part of my style of writing and just
as others have styles that are not always familiar to me or that I find difficult to
read, I hope my reader will be as charitable and cooperative in understanding
how I express my ideas as I try to be when reading others.
Enjoy, as my best friend says,
Julia
26 July 2021, Buxton, UK
16
 1

Troubling Academic Writing: Problems and

Implications for Higher Education

Introduction

It is ironic that some educational institutions … militate against the very higher-
order thinking that they are supposed to encourage.
(Andrews, 2010, p. 53)

In certain circles, English academic writing has developed a troublesome

reputation. Its genres, jargons, grammar, syntax and overall forms have been
pejoratively described by writing scholars as straightjackets, chains, pigeonholes,
frauds and hoaxes. It has also been branded as discriminatory, elitist,
exclusionary, colonial, dull, zombified and confusing. Far broader indictments
are that academic writing’s privileged status within the academy compounds the
perception that alphabetic and monolinguistic texts are superior to other forms
of knowledge communication, such as multimodal and multilingual texts. These
are hefty value judgements on something that is so crucial to academic life at all
levels, from undergraduate study onwards.
This chapter lays the foundations for the rest of the book by exposing some of
the ways in which academic writing is (mis)understood and by highlighting some
of the consequences of this confusion. In doing so, my intention is to show why
academic writing is troublesome. I draw mainly on the context of EAP writing
instruction in the UK, with which I am most familiar, but also refer to the US
tradition of Rhetoric and Composition, especially where there are parallels. After
some brief remarks about epistemology and ontology to establish the foundations
for this and the ensuing chapters, I go on to trace the roots of the trouble to
the ways in which academic writing has been reduced to a series of transferable
mechanical skills. I then expose some of the implications. My staging of the
problem will require even further background to do it justice and this I provide
in Chapter 2, where I situate the trouble within its historical legacies.
18 What Makes Writing Academic

The ‘Ologies’

An early, but swift, distinction between an epistemological and an ontological

conceptualization of writing is necessary because it is the binary that seams the
book: most of the time it keeps to the margins, but occasionally, it will take centre
stage, particularly in Chapter 4, where I propose critical realism as a theory for
explaining what makes writing academic.
The problem with academic writing, as I have come to know it, is (mis)
understandings around what it is and how it gets taught. This begs further
questions about what it means for something to be academic in the first place.
At the root of these (mis)understandings are inconsistent ontological and
epistemological distinctions between what academic writing is (its ontology)
and what it does (its epistemology). Eliding this distinction has consequences.
Simply put, ontology is the study and classification of what things are.
Epistemology is the study of how we make decisions about what things are. This
matters for how we then classify things as being one thing rather than another.
Epistemology is therefore associated with the methods and methodologies used
to generate findings, whereas ontology is associated with what those findings
are then classified as. Ontology and epistemology are co-extensive, meaning
you cannot understand one without the other. For example, I can’t classify an
apple as a fruit (ontology) until I have investigated what counts as a fruit and
to what extent an apple fits in to that classification (epistemology). Similarly,
I can’t classify writing as academic until I have investigated what it means for
something to be academic and how writing fits in to that classification.
Here is a hopefully accessible, albeit caricatured, way of explaining this in
relation to academic writing.
Popular textbooks have traditionally classified academic writing as something
that is formal, objective, impersonal and so on (see, for example, Stephen
Bailey (2006)). Other, less popular textbooks have classified academic writing
as something that allows us to transform knowledge (see, for example, Lillis et
al. (2015)). These are ontological classifications, each of which has implications
for classroom instruction. If I classify academic writing as ‘impersonal’, I am
likely to teach students to write certain kinds of texts, for example, ones that
have features associated with being impersonal (such as the passive voice). On
the other hand, if I classify academic writing as a transformative practice, I am
likely to teach a student to do something that transforms knowledge: in the first
scenario, the student is more likely to form the belief that what makes writing
 Troubling Academic Writing 19

academic are its impersonal forms and that for something to be ‘academic’, it
needs to be impersonal. In the second scenario, the student is more likely to
form the belief that what makes writing academic are a wider range of features,
since there are many ways of transforming, or re-configuring, knowledge (see,
for example, work by Fiona English (2011, 2015)).
Each ontological classification is the result of an epistemological finding. If
what makes writing academic are its impersonal forms (ontology), this assumes
that being impersonal is what it means to be academic because academia has been
found to be the kind of place where impersonal claims are made (epistemology).
If, on the other hand, we posit that what makes writing academic are its powers
to transform knowledge (ontology), this assumes that transforming knowledge
is what it means to be academic because academia has been found to be the kind
of place where knowledge is transformed (epistemology).
Here is a sense of the confusion generated when these distinctions are elided
in writing instruction. Sam is a semi-fictionalized but real UK university student
whose words I have anonymized to protect their identity but to also signal that
they represent the familiar refrain of many such students.

I got 48% in my essay and I don’t understand why. I got distinctions in my

Access course and when I was writing this essay, I thought it was good. I put
in references, avoided personal pronouns, I looked at different aspects of the
research question, my friend, who is really good academically, advised me to
start with some context and give some definitions, but my tutor said I had too
many ideas and they weren’t really connected to the main question. I also don’t
really know what a paragraph is or how long it should be and what should go
in the introduction and conclusion? Is the conclusion just a summary? I need
to start writing my second essay and I just don’t know where to start now.
I want to do it right, but I don’t know how. How do you write an academic
essay? How is it different to what they taught me on my Access course? I know
people who have done A-Levels and they also say it is completely different to
an A-Level essay.

Sam is a casualty of misunderstandings about what makes writing academic.

By asking how do you write an academic essay, they put their finger on the
problems introduced above. These were that, firstly, academic writing cannot be
ontologically reduced to its characteristics, such as being impersonal or having
paragraphs. There is no such thing as a ‘standard’ academic essay because there
20 What Makes Writing Academic

are several kinds. The reason there are several kinds of writing is that academic
writing is doing and achieving different sorts of things. In fact, a far better
designation for referring to the writing that takes place in the academy might be
to use the plural form of ‘academic writings’ (exemplified in Chapter 3). Sam has
formed the belief that an academic essay is a ‘certain kind of thing’ (ontology)
that can be transferred across contexts. Had they been taught that academic
writing is a method for representing knowledge, they might have been more
open to understanding it epistemologically. An epistemological understanding
of academic writing is more likely to have prepared Sam for the seemingly
confusing feedback they had received because if writing is understood for the
epistemological work that it does, it becomes easier to recognize that it will vary
in its forms according to its purposes.
Having introduced the distinction between ontological and epistemological
understanding of academic writing, I now highlight another dualism intended
to further trouble what makes writing academic.

Enduring the Legacy of Skills versus Practices

Academic writing – how it is taught, talked and written about and then
experienced – is dualistic. This dualism broadly consists of framing academic
writing as either a skill (Hyland, 2006, p. 17) or as a social practice (Lea & Street,
1998, p. 159; Lillis & Curry, 2010a, p. 19), a distinction that has important
implications for how academic writing is taught. References to this dualism
resonate throughout the literatures in which writing is discussed from a UK
EAP/Academic Literacies perspective (e.g. Hocking & Toh, 2010; Lea & Street,
1998; Scott & Lillis, 2007; Wingate & Tribble, 2012) and a US Composition
Studies perspective (e.g. Anson & Moore, 2016; Downs & Wardle, 2007; Russell
& Cortes, 2012). A ‘skill’ can be understood as the mechanical ability to turn, for
example, an active sentence into a passive one. This ability requires knowing how
to use grammar, regardless of context, purpose or audience. By contrast, a ‘social
practice’ is knowing that the use of a passive or plural can be inappropriate. Skills
can be further understood as being transferable to other academic contexts
whereas social practices are less straightforwardly transferable because they
are concerned with protean human activity that changes according to socio-
academic contexts, purposes and intentions.
Distinctions between skills and practices are premised on broader sociologies
of knowledge that differentiate between ‘knowing how’ to do something (for
example, how to spell a word) and ‘knowing that’ (for example, that words can
 Troubling Academic Writing 21

have different meanings in different contexts). Skills thus become equated with
‘technical knowledge’ and social practices with ‘practical knowledge’: the former
concerns knowledge of rules and techniques; the latter ‘consists of organised
abilities to discern, judge and perform that are … rooted in understanding,
beliefs, values and attitudes …. Practical knowledge is acquired by living within
the organised social world’ (Hirst, 1998, p. 152). Specifically, this dualism maps
on to the distinction between procedural knowledge (knowing how to do
something) and propositional knowledge (knowing that something is the case),
whereby skills are examples of the former and practices of the latter (Fantl, 2017).
The roots of this dualism run deep and have evolved from translations of the
ancient Greeks’ distinction between epistêmê (science/theory) and technê (craft/
practice). As such, the dichotomy of skills and practices characterizes ‘Western’
thinking and it is traditionally traced to Aristotle’s ethical theory. Aristotle
describes as poiesis those human actions that require a form of knowledge he
called technê, which has been translated as a rule-governed ‘ability to make’ an
artefact, such as a pot. Because poiesis requires the maker to know in advance
what the result of their activity will be, it is not the same as praxis, which is an
action aimed at ‘doing’ some morally worthwhile ‘good’. Within the Aristotelian
tradition, political, social and educational activities fall under phronesis,
meaning wisdom and deliberation and, as such, they are aligned with praxis, not
poiesis (Carr, 1998; Hogan, 2015), because of their open-ended reflective and
explorative nature.
The legacy of this dualism survives in current philosophical, sociological and
educational discussions about how theory relates to practice. However, to make
matters confusing, current understandings of ‘theory’ are probably closer to
what Aristotle meant by praxis (i.e. reflection and deliberation), whereas poiesis
is possibly closer to the idea of what we now call ‘practice’ (as in the repetition of
a skill to achieve an outcome known in advance, e.g. a painting or riding a bike).
The sematic slipperiness of these terms might explain why misunderstandings
arise from their usage. For example, modern-day understandings of ‘skills’
are associated with practical and technical abilities (poiesis and technê) rather
than theoretical dispositions (praxis); yet, each shares attributes of the other: a
joiner is both skilled in a technical sense and is reflective in a theoretical sense
because they need geometrical knowledge to deliberate that a range of practical
possibilities for shaping the wood is available. American educationalist Mike
Rose (2005) has endeavoured to blur these distinctions in his sociological
accounts of the tacit propositional knowledge (knowing that) needed to perform
the highly skilled labour of ‘American workers’; writing scholars Graff and
Birkenstein (2006) do the same when they encourage the use of ‘know how’
22 What Makes Writing Academic

templates as a way to ‘demystify’ the practice of academic writing; and Warner

(2018, p. 20) goes further by subsuming ‘skills’ under ‘practices’ alongside
‘knowledge’, ‘habits of mind’ and ‘attitudes’.
Whilst I acknowledge the confusions underpinning the skills-practice
divide (such as the fact that propositional and procedural knowledge cannot
be seamlessly prised apart; that skills are needed for practice and vice versa;
and that both theory and practice guide human actions), in theorizing about
whether academic writing is a skill or a practice and what any of this has to
do with what makes it academic, I have deliberately chosen to foreground
a particular view. This view is that academic writing instruction, in both the
UK and United States, has, historically, erred on the side of skills, understood
as technical abilities associated with knowing how to do something (poiesis).
Along the way, the conflation of academic writing with a skill has generated
misunderstandings about what makes writing academic. It has done this by
proposing templates as ‘formulaic devices … that encourage passive learning or
lead students to put their writing on automatic pilot’ (Graff & Birkenstein, 2006,
p. xxii). In this sense, skills are more readily seen as ‘limitations’ that encourage
‘mere habits’ (Dewey, 1916). Such negative framings of skills as habit-forming
underscore several literatures that critique the ways in which academic writing
is taught to university students (see, for example, Yun & Standish (2018)).
Skills-based approaches to writing can be further understood with reference
to what anthropologist and New Literacy scholar Brian Street (1984) called the
‘ideological and autonomous approach’. This model ‘encourages a transparency
approach to language and transmission understanding of language pedagogy’
(Fischer, 2015, p. 83). What Fischer means by ‘transparency’ and ‘transmission’,
respectively, is that the meaning of words is treated as unequivocal (i.e. clear)
and that this meaning can be taught and learnt (i.e. transferred) without the
need to interpret why the words are used, by whom and in which contexts. As
such, the autonomous model frames academic writing as a cognitive skill that
exists independently of its contexts and which, for example, ‘does not recognise
that learning rests on the integrated development of both writing and reading
within the disciplinary discourse’ (Turner, 2018, p. 134). Zamel (1998a, 1998b)
has similarly argued that the autonomous model presents the learning of
language in essentialist terms, namely as a skill that is decontextualized from
the ‘intellectual work’ that it has to do. For example, learning how to compose a
paragraph (a skill, closer in meaning to poiesis) is not the same as understanding
the ‘intellectual work’ that paragraphs do (a practice, closer in meaning to praxis),
which is to cumulatively build arguments (Thomson, 2018a): it is for this reason
that there can be no template for writing them. A paragraph can vary in length
 Troubling Academic Writing 23

and structure because it is part of an argument that forms a broader deliberation

(Hayot, 2014), a fact that was not made clear to Sam, my semi-fictional student.
In EAP, the skill–practice dichotomy reveals similar binaries. On the one hand,
it foregrounds an atomistic and technical understanding of what makes writing
‘academic’. It does this by conflating skills-based approaches with the teaching
and learning of discrete but tangible textual items, such as lists of ‘academic
words’ (Coxhead, 2011; Paquot, 2010) or rules for ‘paragraph structures’ (Bailey,
2006). A skills-based approach becomes problematic because, for example, it
remains silent on the more elusive academic practice of developing an ‘academic
voice’ (Elbow, 1994; Matsuda & Tardy, 2008) or on cultivating an awareness
of readership (audience) (Richardson, 1990b). On the other hand, the more
‘holistic’, reflective and complex understanding of literacy associated with the
social practice approach can lose sight of the particulars needed to make a text
‘academic’. For example, a social practice approach will typically downplay the
centrality of linguistic ‘accuracy’ or question what is meant by an appropriate
‘academic style’ on the grounds that these vary or that they embody exclusionary
ideologies that ignore a writer’s purpose and the experiences they bring with
them (Holbrook et al., 2020; Lillis, 2001; Scott, 2013; Thesen & Cooper, 2013;
Turner, 2018). In this sense, both approaches – skills-based and social practice –
are problematic as neither is satisfactory in pinning down what makes writing
academic. By isolating textual and linguistic features from the wider social
practices of having purposes and audiences, skills-based writing pedagogies and
assessments (such as IELTS) weaken the academic credibility of the resulting
written text (see Moore and Morton (2005) and Warner (2018)). Moreover,
emphasizing skills (knowing how) at the expense of practices (knowing that)
can lead to ‘hollow’ and ‘stilted’ expressions aimed at displaying language instead
of thought. This trade-off, combined with weak and unsupported arguments,
can result in ‘bad writing’ (Helms-Park & Stapleton, 2003). Yet, despite there
being no evidence that correlates grammatical and lexical accuracy per se with
good academic writing,1 prescriptive, skills-based, straightjacket (Hamilton

1
This is a controversial claim that I do not develop in this book. Suffice to say that I am aware of a
vast body of literatures on this controversy. Hyland, K. (2016). Teaching and researching writing (3rd
ed.). Abingdon: Routledge., Rose, M. (1989). Lives on the boundary: the struggles and achievements
of America’s underprepared. New York: Free Press. Collier Macmillan Publishers., Warner, J. (2018).
Why they can’t write: Killing the five-paragraph essay and other necessities. Johns Hopkins University
Press., including ongoing debates about editorial bias with regards to standards of accuracy in
academic writing. Politzer-Ahles, S., Girolamo, T., & Ghali, S. (2020). Preliminary evidence of
linguistic bias in academic reviewing. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 47, 100895. https://
[Link]/[Link] Politzer-Ahles, S., Holliday, J. J., Girolamo, T.,
Spychalskae, M., & Harper Berksonf, K. (2016). Is linguistic injustice a myth? A response to Hyland
(2016). Journal of Second Language Writing, 34, 4–8. [Link]
jslw.2016.09.003.
24 What Makes Writing Academic

& Pitt, 2009) approaches that focus on grammatical accuracy – often referred
to pejoratively as ‘essayist’ literacies – have dominated the EAP approach to
writing. Reasons for such a skills-based ontology of academic writing vary and
are well documented. They range from the ubiquity of commercial assessments,
whose imperative is to standardize testing, to the over-reliance of pedagogy on
commercial textbooks (Bennett, 2009; Feak & Swales, 2013; Harwood, 2005;
Leung et al., 2016; Tribble, 2015; Turner, 2004, 2018).
However, when standard forms of academic English are questioned and
disrupted, for example, by being re-genred2 (English, 2011) or translanguaged3
(Wei, 2016), this raises concerns about where, how and whether we can
draw boundaries between what counts and does not count as ‘academic’ (cf.
Canagarajah & Lee (2013); Scott (2013)). Chapters 4 and 5 focus on theoretical
and pedagogical approaches to overcome the muddles generated by the skills
versus practices dualism, but, before we get there, more needs to be said about
each to further appreciate their influence on academic writing instruction.
Skills-based approaches can be further said to encourage and perpetuate the
‘myth of transience’ (Russell, 2002). The ‘myth’ consists in the mistaken belief
that writing can be taught in transitory, temporary and isolated ways without an
authentic purpose. It further suggests that whatever skills are learnt in a writing
class can be seamlessly transferred to all other contexts: Sam’s confusion can,
therefore, be explained by the myth of transience. Such approaches reflect the
widespread perception that writing instruction can be outsourced and learnt
separately from the disciplines, a phenomenon that has been criticized by
American educationalist and writing scholar Mike Rose (1985, p. 355): ‘The
belief persists in the American university that if we can just do x, or y, the
problem of poor student writing will be solved … and higher education will be
able to return to its real work [of teaching disciplinary content].’ Rose (1989) has
lamented the conflation of learning to write with the acquisition of cognitive
skills (such as memorizing rules). He claims that when we collapse the process of
writing into the acquisition of skills, we risk sidelining attitudes and dispositions
that may be more conducive to developing writing abilities. These include the
2
‘Re-genring’ is a term used by English (2011) to describe the process of re-working an essay by
using a different genre, for example, from prose to a dialogue. This allows ‘students to introduce
new perspectives, debate new issues and show a greater sense of ownership over the topic than was
apparent in their original essays’ (2011, p. 1) and develops critical thinking in ways that are not text-
centred.
3
‘Translanguaging’ is a term used by several sociolinguists, including Canagarajah (2011), Wei (2016)
and Leung et al. (2016) to describe the multilingual practice of communicating by drawing on one’s
full linguistic repertoire to re-appropriate or re-define meanings. Translanguaging is viewed as a
positive practice and signals a departure from framing ‘interference’ from other languages as negative.
 Troubling Academic Writing 25

need to nurture everyday exploratory and personal literacies (as also argued by
Williams (2009); Williams and Zenger (2012)) and to cultivate the imagination
and a sense of ‘wonder’.
Rose traces the conflation of skills with writing ability back to the early-
twentieth-century writing curriculum which was influenced by studies in
psychology. These were used to inform pedagogies based on ‘memory and drill’
and the mechanics of grammatical ‘dos and don’ts’. He labelled this approach
to literacy as ‘essentialist’ and ‘exclusionary’, further claiming that it assumes
the meaning of words is straightforwardly accessible i.e. ‘clear’ to all. Instead,
argues Rose, it excludes learners who do not share its underlying conceptual
frameworks. What better explains students’ misunderstandings of academic
discourse is often not their lack of ‘academic’ vocabulary but their ignorance of
the ‘semiotic reach’ of academic words and of the conceptual frameworks and
disciplinary traditions they belong to. His poignant example of a student, Lucia,
is illustrative. Lucia, whose brother’s mental illness drew her to a psychology
degree, abandoned her course because her first-hand experience of psychological
trauma differed from the academic depictions of it. The university’s response to
Lucia’s difficulties was to remove her from the psychology class and send her to
language lessons that would ‘fix’ and ‘remedy’ her lack of understanding. Rose’s
contention is that ‘remedial’ approaches to developing academic literacy that
are removed from their disciplinary discourses are unlikely to help students
become writers because Lucia is not so much ‘suffering from a lack of specialist
vocabulary’ as she is ignorant of the histories of concepts that this vocabulary
refers to (Rose, 1989, pp. 192):
The discourse of academics is marked by terms and expressions that represent
an elaborate set of shared concepts and orientations: alienation, authoritarian
personality, the social construction of the self, determinism, hegemony,
equilibrium, intentionality, recursion, reinforcement and so on. This language
weaves through so many lectures and textbooks, is internal to so many learned
discussions, that it’s easy to forget what a foreign language it can be. Freshmen
are often puzzled by the talk they hear in the classrooms, but what is important
to note here is that their problem is not simply one of limited vocabulary. If we
see that problem as knowing or not knowing a list of words, as some quick-fix
remedies suggest, then we’ll force glossaries on students and miss the complexity
of the issue.

Learning any discipline requires access to ‘scholarly conversations’ (Healey

et al., 2020) that have a semiotic reach extending far beyond lists of academic
26 What Makes Writing Academic

vocabulary. Moreover, since these remedial approaches are also frequently

associated with skills-based approaches (see Anson & Moore, 2016; Myers
Zawacki & Cox, 2014; Russell, 2002), skills also become enmeshed in the
language of medicalization (diagnose problems, drop-in clinic) and failure (fix,
correct), further contributing to a deficit approach to the teaching of academic
writing. This indicates that skills cannot be understood outside the discipline
by decontextualized rote learning and grammatical drills or gap-fills. The ‘myth
of transience’ thus raises questions around what makes writing academic in the
sense that if Lucia’s first-hand experience of psychology, a phenomenon that is
as much a personal experience as it is an academic discipline, is not reflected or
recognized in academic representations of psychology, then what does it mean
to study psychology, or any other domain of human knowledge, at university?
We know from standpoint theory that knowledge is also ‘situated knowledge’.
This situated epistemological stance re-centres the knower, in this case Lucia,
as a legitimate source of knowledge in virtue of her ‘insider knowledge’
(Wylie, 2003). Removing this insider knowledge from the domain of academic
knowledge therefore serves to compound, rather than hold to account, epistemic
hierarchies that de-legitimize what counts as knowledge and whose knowledge
counts. And since academic writing is both a method of knowledge enquiry
(Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005) and knowledge representation (Atkinson, 2013;
Thomson, 2018c), then how does Lucia’s knowledge come to be represented in
writing if it is excluded from the outset? In Chapter 5, I suggest ways to answer
this question.
So far, I have been implying that a skills-based approach to academic writing
is insufficient to determine what makes a text academic. This is because skills-
based approaches encourage the conflation of some characteristics of what it
means for something to be academic (such as ‘formal’ academic lexis) with what
academic writing is at the expense of other characteristics (such as situated
knowledge and its related language). I now explain what is meant by ‘practices’
in relation to writing and conclude that this approach, too, is insufficient to
determine what makes writing academic.
As discussed in Knorr Cetina et al. (2001), practices can be broadly understood
as ‘arrays of human activity’ (2001, p. 11) organized around ‘patterns’, ‘relations’
and ‘interdependencies’ that cannot be reduced to the micro-activities of the
individual. Rather, since they are part of our propositional knowledge (knowing
that), they can guide and monitor our actions, including our procedural
knowledge (i.e. the ‘knowing how’ of skills), without which practices could
 Troubling Academic Writing 27

not be enacted. Practices are also closer to the classical meaning of praxis and
involve reflection and deliberation.
Practices are generally viewed more favourably than skills by literacy theorists
(Scott & Lillis, 2007), by philosophers (MacIntyre, 1985) and by progressive
educationalists (Dewey, 1916). They are seen as activities that require reflection
and thought, social interaction and a sense of purpose that changes to suit the
aims, beliefs, values, experiences and choices of, in this case, writers (Scott, 2000;
Williams, 2017). For sociolinguist and literacies scholar Theresa Lillis (2013,
pp. 78),
practice signals two key principles: an empirical commitment to observe and
explore what, where and how people read and write, including their perspectives
on what they do, as well as their values and interests; a theoretical interest in
seeking explanations for the nature and consequences of what people do,
including a focus on issues of power and agency drawing on notions from
sociological and critical discourse theories.

The spirit of Lillis’s sociological, ethnographic and normative understanding

of practice resonates with the following claims by moral philosopher Alasdair
MacIntyre (cited in Hogan, 2015, pp. 372):
By a practice I am going to mean any coherent and complex form of socially
established co-operative human activity through which goods internal to that
form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards
of excellence which are appropriate to and partially definitive of, that form of
activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence and human
conceptions of the ends and goods involved are systematically extended.

MacIntyre’s views on the role played by ‘human powers’, ‘agency’, ‘activity’ and
‘purpose’ in ‘social activity’ echo those of Lillis, who unequivocally foregrounds
the role that ‘people’ have in shaping practices through their values, interests,
experiences and agencies. This did not happen in Lucia’s case because her
experience and situated knowledge of psychology were not valued or deemed
relevant to the academic discipline of psychology – as a consequence of her
knowledge not being valued, the way that she expressed it in writing was not
deemed to be academically appropriate. What MacIntyre’s understanding
of practice further indexes is its processual and complex nature whereby the
standards of excellence in any given practice, such as the practice of writing
academically, are relative to the practice itself, not to any specific token (product
or artefact) of writing, such as an essay or ‘academic’ vocabulary: a skill thus
becomes a means to an end, that end being a practice that human agents can
28 What Makes Writing Academic

‘extend’. As we shall see, this has important implications for what makes writing
academic.
Drawing on the practice of farming as her example, Fitzmaurice (2010, p. 47)
illustrates what MacIntyre meant by ‘practice’ and the ‘standards of excellence’
needed to achieve it. Specifically, Fitzmaurice is concerned with the practice
of teaching and with teachers’ agencies in transforming their practices. She
argues that teaching requires human dispositions, values, virtues and qualities
(standards of excellence) that transcend the application of techniques (or skills).
If practices are understood as the ends of human activity, then when these ends
change, so must the skills required to achieve them:
The planting of crops is not a practice, but farming is, as are the enquiries of
physics, chemistry, biology and the work of the historian, the musician and the
painter. A practice involves standards of excellence and to enter into a practice
is to accept these standards and to judge one’s own performance against them.
The goods internal to a practice can only be had by involvement in that practice
unlike external goods such as money, status, prestige, which can be achieved in
many ways.

A similar argument can be mobilized for writing. When academic writing is

understood as a practice, it too requires an understanding of a range of standards
of excellence that are internal to it. These might include specific disciplinary
ways of representing knowledge or understanding how to re-purpose a text
for different audiences, but they may also include more elusive qualities such
as ‘writtenness’, discussed in Turner (2018). ‘Writtenness’ refers to qualities of
‘good writing’ that are difficult to pinpoint, that can be achieved in different ways
and that experienced writers simply ‘recognise’ (Becker, 1986). The practice of
writing is also the practice of writing in and for institutional framings, constraints
and policy, where standards of excellence vary (recalling feminist epistemologist
Sarah Harding (1995) on ‘strong objectivity’) and where communities of scholars
are required to reach agreements about what counts as disciplinary writing (see,
for example, research by Alvesson et al. (2017); Mcculloch (2017); Tusting et al.
(2019)). Different genres also serve different purposes, with some, like the PhD
thesis, possibly no longer being fit-for-purpose (Paré, 2017, 2018). Specifically,
Paré argues that the traditional ‘big book format’ of the PhD requires skills
that are obsolete, such as the ability to work alone, when much of academia
and other professions require collaboration, co-authorship and versatility
(Carmichael-Murphy, 2021; Thomson, 2018b). As such, the thesis understood
as a practice, rather than as a skill, requires standards of excellence that adhere to
 Troubling Academic Writing 29

the activities of research and enquiry, rather than to the skills required to achieve
these standards, such as referencing: clearly, these skills are necessary, but they
are simply means to achieving the practice; they are not the ends of writing a
PhD thesis (or other academic text). Since they are means to an end, they are
more likely to change because they are external to the practice of achieving a
PhD, which is driven by internal standards of excellence that could evolve and
be achieved by deploying new skills. These new skills may not even include
writing, as I showcase in Chapter 3, but will always be instrumental to upholding
the standards of excellence that inhere to the academic practice of research and
enquiry.
In my endeavour to rethink dominant academic writing theories for practice,
MacIntyre affords me an opportunity to signal something that will become
important in understanding the theory of critical realism that I propose in
Chapter 4, namely the importance of human agency in transforming practices.
It is humans, MacIntyre reminds us, who have the ‘powers’ to be the agents of
change that mobilize ‘transformations’ in any given practice (1985, pp. 193,
emphasis added):
What is distinctive in a practice is the way in which conceptions of the relevant
goods and ends which the technical skills serve – and every practice does
require the exercise of practical skills – are transformed and enriched by those
extensions of human powers and by that regard for its internal goods which are
partially definitive of each particular practice or type of practice.

What this entails for thinking about academic writing is that when writing
is conceived as a practice, it is the writers (human powers), not the skills, who
through reflection, deliberation and understanding (by that regard for) drive
transformations and determine what writing could be. Clearly, institutional
constraints and expectations influence the degree of agency that writers have
but, as sociologist and critical theorist Norman Fairclough also reminds us,
subjects have the capacity ‘to act individually or collectively as agents’ in
opposing [ideological] practices (Fairclough, 1992, pp. 72–3; 80).
As mentioned at the start of this section, an over-emphasis on writing
as a practice raises troubling concerns about the standards of excellence that
are internal to the practice and about who sets these standards. When we
foreground the importance of agency in determining standards, we run the
risk of undermining the rules and conventions that have accrued over time
(arguably, for good reasons) and of praxis being so open-ended that it loses its
practical reach of each purpose. Laurel Richardson dramatically captures this
30 What Makes Writing Academic

tension in her book Fields of Play: Constructing an Academic Life, where she
reflects on the academic field of sociology and on how sociological knowledge
is represented in the academic literatures of her discipline. In one of her semi-
fictionalized dialogues, Richardson disrupts standard written representations of
sociology by publishing her research as poetry instead of prose, much to the
consternation and hostility of her fellow conferees. In the edited extract quoted
below, Richardson is the fictionalized Professor Z addressing other eminent
scholars of sociology at a conference (1997, pp. 197–206):

Professor Z: Why prose? Prose, I submit, is not the only way to represent
sociological understanding. Another way is through poetic representation
…
Conferee 1: Where is the f———-king validity?
Conferee 2: What about reliability?
Conferee 3: Truth? Where’s truth?
Conferee 4: And reality?
Conferee 1: You have lost your f———-king mind!!!
Professor Z: (takes field notes)
…
Lundberg: (returns to the stage) Oh ye of little memory and less
imagination: Sociology is what sociologists do … If a sociologist writes and
publishes poems in a sociology journal, the poems are sociology.
… Professor Z: I know why these people are so threatened. They fear that if
any rule is violated, all rules might be violated. They fear lack of control not
only in their professional but in their personal worlds. The subtext of the
question, “But is it sociology,” is their silenced fear: “If poetry is sociology
and I can’t do it, what happens to my identity, my prestige, my status – my
place in the pecking order – ME? … Me, me …”

The tensions that this ignites about standards of excellence and the skills
needed to achieve these standards (in this case, whether to represent sociological
knowledge using poetry or prose) in order for the discipline of sociology to
be recognized as ‘sociology’ are mirrored in the questions I am raising when
I ask what makes academic writing ‘academic’. At the heart of Richardson’s
concerns is a disagreement about which skills are considered to be internal
and which are considered to be external to the practice of sociology (and who
has the agency to decide). Richardson’s reason for choosing poetry over prose
to represent sociological knowledge is that the rhythms of poetry seem to be
 Troubling Academic Writing 31

attuned to re-presenting the embodied and situated voices of the women whose
stories she is re-telling. The standard academic prose of disciplinary sociology
would not have captured the richness of these stories and would therefore have
missed the meanings and emotions of Richardson’s interlocutors. Richardson’s
use of poetry to enact the practice of sociology can be understood in terms of
what MacIntyre calls skills that are ‘external’ to the practice of sociology: prose,
poetry, drawings, animations and any number of modes of representation
are methods for representing sociological knowledge that are external to the
disciplinary practice of sociology because they can be understood as skills that
are deployed elsewhere, i.e. they are not inherently sociological (another way of
understanding the distinction between internal and external skills is in terms of
essential and non-essential). Her fellow conferees, however, objected to her use
of poetry on the grounds that they perceived prose to be a skill that is ‘internal
to the practice’ of sociology and to achieving its standards of excellence. The use
of the passive or active voice in academic writing and any number of markers of
standard academic prose generate similar tensions because they are seen to be
inherent in the practice of academic writing. Who determines what counts as an
internal or external skill creates tensions between agency and structure, namely
the extent to which, on the one hand, academic writers, at all levels, are required
and expected to follow the rules and, on the other, the extent to which they are
able and enabled to define what the standards of excellence are and what skills
are needed to achieve them. The philosophy and sociology of critical realism
attempt to reconcile these tensions. Before then, more needs to be said about
the specific consequences of reducing the practice of academic writing to a set
of finite skills.

Implications of Reductive Approaches to Academic Writing

In addition to the problem of deciding which skills are internal or external,

there are undesirable, possibly unintended, consequences of reducing academic
writing to a set of prescriptive transferable skills. I describe these consequences
in turn as aesthetic and socio-ethical.

Aesthetic Implications
In a book on the difficulty of being (La difficulté d’être), French writer, dramatist,
poet and film director Jean Cocteau made a fleeting reference to the nature of
32 What Makes Writing Academic

writing that illustrates what I am calling the ‘aesthetic’ problem. His words are
thoroughly lost in translation so I will quote them in French first and then
translate them (Cocteau, 1957, p. 151):

●● Écrire est un acte d’amour. S’il ne l’est pas, il n’est qu’écriture

●● My translation: Écrire (writing) is an act of love; when it is not, it is simply
écriture (script, also writing).

Cocteau’s distinction between écrire (to write – verb and process) and écriture
(writing – noun and product) captures how academic writing instruction,
such as EAP, has tended to represent academic writing, namely as écriture. By
conceptualizing it as a formulaic product stripped of love, emotion and feeling,
cleansed of the impurities of the ‘difficulty of being’ and of the inherent ‘messiness’
of ontological representation (Law, 2004), academic writing instruction teaches
students to write scripts, not write.
Understood as a product, or script, a piece of text rather than a process,
academic writing as écriture becomes an object of standardized convention,
structure, formality, clarity and logic, or, in the words of political philosopher
Jonathan Wolff, nothing but ‘a dull read’ that leads to ‘literary boredom’ (Wolff,
2007). Wolff further laments the genre’s obsessive focus on ‘clarity’ and on
‘making every move explicit’, an act, he says, which kills suspense, removes
surprise and saps joy. Such joylessness is inherent in what the reader will
recognize as familiar attributes of academic writing: formal, logical, linear, clear,
concise, balanced, more ‘algorithmic than human’, as Warner might describe
it (2018). These characterizations are common in EAP teacher feedback and
their origins can be traced to popular textbooks and manuals on how to write
academically as well as to university and library web pages with advice on study
skills and ‘how to write essays’: as a student reading this, you may be familiar
with advice and feedback that tells you to structure your argument ‘logically’. As
a teacher reading this, you may recognize what is arguably shorthand for your
lack of comprehension or knowledge, namely a comment in the margin of a
student script about their ‘lack of clarity’ (as opposed to your incomprehension).
Significantly, none of these characterizations suggest that academic writing is
being either written or read as an act of love.
The distinction evoked by écrire and écriture is exemplified in the context
of American academic writing instruction, specifically in controversies around
who is responsible for teaching academic writing (Rose, 1989, p. 207):
 Troubling Academic Writing 33

Anything longer than the sentence (even two or three sentences strung together)
is considered writing and the teaching of writing shall be the province of the
English Department. Anything at the sentence level or smaller (like filling words
and phrases into a workbook) is to be considered grammar review and that falls
within the domain of the remedial programme.

Here, Rose could easily be likening the writing taught by English departments
with the more prosaic beauty of écrire and the writing taught to students such
as Lucia (the psychology student who was sent to remedial classes) as écriture.
Along with several other educationalists concerned with literacy, social justice
and access to higher education (Judd, 2003; Lillis, 2001; Russell, 2002; Sperlinger
et al., 2018), Rose laments the disciplinary and institutional divides that create
binaries between ‘writing’ as prose (écrire), taught by professors of English
literature, and ‘writing’ as a mechanical skill, as écriture, taught by writing
tutors in ‘corrective’ writing centres, library services or separate language units.
Units that serve the academic disciplines in this way have been described as
‘butlers’ (Raimes, 1991) who are not integral partners in the shared endeavour of
communicating knowledge.4 In this sense, academic writing instructors are the
‘underlabourers’ (Bhaskar, 1989) of the disciplines, just like philosophy is to the
disciplines, invisibly working to keep the academic show on the road, but rarely
invited to dine at the disciplinary table where ideas are questioned and norms
are challenged. Indeed, from a UK perspective, academic writing scholar Ken
Hyland has described these ‘remedial’ units as ‘handmaidens’ and highlighted
the way in which EAP practitioners (2006, p. 34)
have generally been seen as inhabiting the less glamorous, low rent
neighbourhoods of the academy and this is particularly true of those concerned
with English for Academic Purposes, which is generally regarded as a hand-
maiden to those ‘proper’ disciplines which are more directly engaged in the
serious business of constructing knowledge or discovering truth. EAP, in fact,
has come to be regarded as an almost mercantile activity and attracted to itself
negatively evaluative concepts such as pragmatic, cost-effective and functional,
untroubled by theoretical issues or questions of power as it merrily seeks to
accommodate students to the faceless and impersonal prose of their disciplines.

There can be little beauty in ‘faceless and impersonal prose’, but the dullness
lamented by Wolff is potentially more insidious because it indexes deeper

4
For a nuanced account of why this segregation endures in the UK, see Ding, A., & Bruce, I. (2017).
The English for academic purposes practitioner: Operating on the edge of academia (P. Macmillan, Ed.).
34 What Makes Writing Academic

epistemological and ontological consequences. To appreciate these consequences,

we must briefly return to the skills–practice dualism.
The tension between academic writing as a skill and academic writing as a
social practice re-emerges when framed by likening the skills-based approach
to the ‘servant’ metaphors invoked above by both Raimes (butler) and Hyland
(handmaiden) and the social practice approach to what Hyland has elsewhere
referred to as ‘transgression’. In the literatures on writing as a social practice,
writing is described as ‘transformative’ rather than ‘transgressive’, but,
connotations aside, what the transformative/transgressive metaphor signals
is that the academy is a site of learning, creating and transforming knowledge
(Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1987). What this means is that university students are
expected to engage critically with knowledge by simultaneously learning it and
critiquing it. Since the purpose of EAP is to facilitate access to the academy, it
follows that EAP should be a site for both learning and transforming knowledge.
Arguably, therefore, in addition to ensuring learners become knowledgeable
about received norms for writing academically, EAP has a responsibility to
prepare students for transforming this knowledge. This transformation, or
‘transgression’, might include becoming knowledgeable about norms that exist
beyond those that are ‘received’, such as knowledge about who sets these norms
and why; about the epistemological and ontological consequences of choosing to
follow some norms rather than others; about the risks and ethical implications of
choosing to follow prescribed norms; and about student agency in transforming
these norms.
Knowing why some kinds of English academic writing have evolved to
be ‘faceless and impersonal’ (and to be valued as such) and why other kinds
have not can help students, like Sam, make sense of the confusing writing
feedback they receive, but it can also help teachers provide nuanced rather
than prescriptive feedback. Knowing, for example, why different supervisors,
different disciplines and different editors have differing norms regarding the
use of personal pronouns and other grammatical choices can empower writers
to make, accept, reject and generally negotiate their writing styles with their
teachers and assessors, including their publishers. For example, knowing that
the convention to avoid personal pronouns in English academic writing is not
universally shared, that it is historically contingent and relative to disciplinary
orientations is likely to raise writers’ consciousness and assuage their confusion.
Conceptualizations of English academic writing, particularly the version
of academic writing that is popularized, are 500 years old. They owe their
imaginaries to the legacy of a Cartesian and then Lockean worldview which
 Troubling Academic Writing 35

assumes that language and therefore writing are a reliable and unique proxy
for representing the world (Bennett, 2015; Turner, 2010). In academic writing
instruction, this legacy translates into linguistic prescriptions to sound ‘objective’
‘clear’ and ‘transparent’ and encourages students to favour some linguistic forms
over others. These include choosing the passive form over the active; third
person pronouns over first; and nominalized sentence constructions that reduce
the number of main verbs (because main verbs require subjects that can make
the writing sound ‘subjective’).
Together, these prescriptions make for rather dull écriture.

Socio-Cultural and Ethical Implications

A further implication of EAP’s reductive approach to writing is that it
standardizes to a textual monoculture that makes academic writing look the
same across the disciplinary spectrum, regardless of who has written it and why.
This has broader socio-cultural and ethical repercussions.
Advocates of multimodal and multilingual approaches to literacy question the
supremacy of the alphabet and of English-only texts and remind us of the socio-
semiotic affordances of writing texts that draw on a range of modalities to create
meaning. Palmeri (2012), Canagarajah (2018), Blommaert and Horner (2017)
and Archer and Breuer (2015) are just a few of the literacy scholars who regularly
remind us that conventions both endure and are flouted chronotopically (across
time and space). They also warn that universalizing standards and rules thwarts
multiculturalism (Björkvall, 2016, p. 28):
In unstable social environments conventions disappear … convention is actually
an expression which comes from a period of relative semiotic stability where the
exercise of power, not normally even noticed because it is very subtle, leads to
a kind of agreement to do things in a certain way. But in a deeply multicultural
world – a hugely diverse world – there are no such agreements. And, as you
know, in Anglophone Ph.D. s in many places you can now use the first person,
‘I’, which you could not do 25 years ago.

Pedagogically, there is a commonly held assumption that conventions are

necessary rather than contingent and that second language learners need to
‘learn the rules before they can break them’. This forms the basis of what has
been called the ‘deficit model’ of academic writing (see, for example, Bennett,
2009; Hathaway, 2015; Turner, 2004; Wingate & Tribble, 2012), whereby
writers are told they must ‘take themselves out of their writing and never use
36 What Makes Writing Academic

“I”’ (Parker, 2017; Rodríguez, 2017) or that the five-paragraph essay (Bernstein
& Lowry, 2017) sets the standard for what counts as academic writing (see
Sowton (2016), whose model ‘academic’ texts are five-paragraph essays and
the ubiquitous 250-word IELTS essay). Yet, this approach is chained to ancient
history. It is entirely modelled on the classical spoken and then written rhetorics
of Aristotelian and Quintilian literacy practices. These posited that what
counted as argument in the public fora of ancient Rome could be narrowed
down to five parts: the exordium (the introduction), the narratio (the events in
question), the confirmatio (the argument/claims), the refutatio (the counter-
argument/claims) and the peroratio (summary) (Andrews 2010). As will
become apparent in Chapter 4, arguments are by far more varied, especially
when expressed multimodally (Molinari, 2021).
Interestingly and in relation to the question of what makes writing academic,
the familiar form of the five-paragraph essay is considered to be a sign of ‘bad
student writing’ for US Composition Studies, ‘whereas in the EAP program
the same form is considered “an extremely serviceable template”’ (Tardy &
Jwa, 2016). Tardy and Jwa explain the predilection for having standard models
as follows: ‘Students and teachers … desire a tool that can quickly and easily
be applied to immediate writing needs’ (2016, p. 59). The fact there are also
significant inconsistencies in the advice given by academic style guide books
should further alert us to engage critically with what and whose purposes these
rules serve. On the one hand, guide books tell writers to avoid colourful words
and the use of the personal pronoun ‘I’; on the other, they encourage the use of
vivid language and avoidance of the passive (Sword, 2012). Similarly, as shown
in Ball and Loewe (2017), the very existence of unqualified, or ‘bad’, writing
advice should suffice to undermine uncritical acceptance of what the rules of
good writing are and who has the authority to break them. Indeed, with regards
to the common refrain that one must ‘learn the rules before one can break them’,
Canagarajah (2021) replies ‘you can have it both ways’ because there is no such
thing as ‘standard’ English. The norms of a social practice like academic writing
can be discussed, negotiated, chosen to fit the purpose, and re-created. When it
comes to what makes writing academic, it seems that we actually can have our
cake and eat it!
What is emerging from the discussion so far is that socio-cultural norms,
however deeply embedded in tradition and however pedagogically reasonable,
can be questioned and are, as such, questionable. Uncritical assumptions about
‘rules being learnt before they are broken’ can be challenged because, quite simply,
these rules are not universally shared. And in virtue of not being universally shared,
 Troubling Academic Writing 37

they are ‘not the only possibility’ (Sousanis, 2015). Opening up possibilities for
academic writing is important because if higher education remains dependent
on and reduced to monolingual (i.e. English) and monomodal (e.g. language)
standards of writing proficiency, measuring academic success against language
proficiency alone and against a narrow variety of this proficiency, it will
encourage a deficit-model approach that judges students’ diverse repertoires as
‘deficient’ rather than as resourceful: multilingual, multimodal, dyslexic, autistic,
artistic and multicultural students have wide-ranging and diverse literacies that
could be harnessed as resources instead of straightjacketed into anachronistic
norms, or even cancelled. Standardization based on contingent and outdated
norms becomes at best disingenuous and at worst exclusionary because it
ignores the diverse identities of writers. Epistemically, it is also self-defeating,
since knowledge is best arrived at via multiple representations.
A further problem with reducing writing to a monoculture is that if we agree
that language is an expression of diverse socio-cultural identities (Evans, 2014;
Holmes, 1992), then by insisting on linguistic homogeneity in academic writing,
we are also insisting on ‘cultural and social’ homogeneity. By requiring everybody
to write and speak in the same way, just as was once the case with RP (Received
Pronunciation), English-speaking universities are creating the conditions for
a homogenized academy that communicates via a monoliteracy modelled on
écriture rather than écrire. I would further contend that this encourages the
conditions for what sociologists Collyer et al. (2019), drawing on the work of
African philosopher Paulin Hountondji (1995), call ‘academic dependencies’
and ‘extraversion’, the phenomenon whereby universities in the Global South
model themselves on those of the rich North. A standardized monoliteracy
culture, that conveniently also happens to be the literacy of the dominant
universities, is likely to orient ‘knowledge workers’ on the peripheries of the
academic ‘metropole’ towards a dependency on the ‘techniques’ of the dominant
elites. These techniques include academic writing practices that favour norms
shown to be unjust and exclusionary (Lillis & Curry, 2010a; Politzer-Ahles et al.,
2016), such as publication bias (Politzer-Ahles et al., 2020).
When grammatical and linguistic norms, including disparate notions of what
counts as ‘accurate’, become the focus of rule-learning, controversies further
ignite around which standards and whose standards of ‘good’ English and writing
are being privileged. Turner has compared controversies about what counts as
‘good writing’, an elusive quality that she calls ‘writtenness’ to the controversy
of what counts as good pronunciation. But, unlike research on how accent and
pronunciation are used to discriminate between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ spoken English
38 What Makes Writing Academic

(Donnelly et al., 2019; Orelus, 2017), the socio-politics of writtenness have not
received the same attention (Turner, 2018, p. 7):
Writtenness is a cultural ideal, whose values are implicit rather than explicitly
espoused. Indexed by evaluative tropes such as ‘polished prose’ … and
assumptions of precision, accuracy and stylistic elegance, it is saturated with
ideological and cultural value. As such, it is similar to the position of RP
(received pronunciation) in spoken language. However, unlike RP, whose
ideological resonance has been extensively commented upon in sociolinguistics
…, the ideologies, social identifications and linguistic assumptions of written
language have generated much less concern.

Deficit models signal that the knowledge which students bring with them
is inadequate and needs to be replaced with the ‘correct’ conventions and rules
so that the learner can be ‘socialized’ into their academic community (Lea &
Street, 1998). Since the ‘overall aim of an EAP course is to help students towards
membership of their chosen academic community’ (Alexander et al., 2008,
p. 80), the assumption prevails that students are ‘empty vessels’ needing to be
filled and becomes so normalized that it is hard to conceive how else it could
be. This assumption, however, is fundamentally flawed, profoundly political
and insidiously ideological. It signals troubling power asymmetries that sit
uncomfortably with a participatory, emancipatory, democratic and dialogic
progressive education. This has been shown by many, not least by Paulo Freire
(2000), whose opposition to a ‘banking model’ of education captures the colonial
ethical and educational agendas underlying deficit models. Whilst deficit
approaches go largely unquestioned by most academic writing tutors, textbook
writers and service providers, including the EAP sector, there are at least three
reasons to challenge it.
Firstly, in a complex global (super)diverse higher educational context,
diversity, not homogeneity, is the norm (Blommaert, 2013; Blommaert &
Horner, 2017). Diversity is already manifest in the existing varieties of English
academic discourse (such as blogs and reflective and graphic essays), in
disciplinary diversity and in the multilingualism and multiculturalism that
are already established in the academic landscape (Canagarajah, 2011). What
are students being ‘socialized into’ if not a diverse but also mobile academic
landscape? Yet, since academic writing instruction rarely exposes future
generations of students to the broader academic writing landscape, it is unlikely
that diversity can thrive if academic writing practices continue to converge
towards a monomodal, monolingual and monocultural standard (Canagarajah,
 Troubling Academic Writing 39

2002a, 2013b, 2013c; Lillis & Curry, 2010a; Vertovec, 2007). Secondly, diversity
provides higher education with opportunities rather than constraints in so far as
it allows the academy to shift from a ‘difference-as-deficit’ model to a ‘difference-
as-resource’ consciousness (Cox, 2014). This shift ensures students can bring
their multiliteracies and identities to the classroom and create new ways of
thinking, writing and representing knowledge (Thesen & Cooper, 2013). And
thirdly, voice, originality and criticality – other qualities that contribute to the
‘writteness’ of good academic writing – are less likely to emerge when students’
agencies are being corrected and ‘socialized’, with the intention of conforming to
norms that are themselves also changing (Williams, 2017).
Deficit models have negative educational and academic repercussions because
they risk eclipsing creativity (Robinson, 2001) and dismissing prior knowledge
and experience, which a so-called ‘progressive’ education is said to value (Russell,
2002). In his seminal book Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the
Philosophy of Education, associated with progressive and secular instruction
(as opposed to authoritarian and religious), John Dewey defines education as
‘the reconstruction or reorganisation of experience which adds to the meaning
of experience and which increases ability to direct the course of subsequent
experience’ (Dewey, 1938, p. 76). If EAP and similar academic writing providers
are genuinely committed to their higher educational ambition of helping
students ‘understand their disciplines and … successfully navigate their learning’
(Hyland & Hamp-Lyons, 2002, p. 1), then, based on a Deweyan understanding
of education, they would need to foreground the experiences students bring
with them, including their past and present literacies, at least as much as they
foreground their mission to ‘socialize’ students into existing university practices.
When academic writing instruction focuses entirely on socializing writers
into existing writing conventions, it is training students to produce academic
scripts (écriture) rather than educating them to write (écrire) academically and
become writers. In this sense, student writers become de-humanized. Indeed,
Dewey argues that training is the proper term for describing what we ask of
(non-human) animals. Education, on the other hand, is what is proper to human
beings. Training is the blind response to a stimulus, whereas education involves
mental acts that respond to meanings. Training is ‘less intellectual or educative’
and can be understood as follows (1938, pp. 64–5):
The more specialized the reaction, the less is the skill acquired in practising
and perfecting it transferable to other modes of behaviour. According to the
orthodox theory of formal discipline, a pupil in studying his [sic] spelling lesson
40 What Makes Writing Academic

acquires, besides ability to spell those particular words, an increase of power of

observation, attention and recollection which may be employed whenever these
powers are needed. As a matter of fact, the more he confines himself to noticing
and fixating the forms of words, irrespective of connection with other things
(such as the meaning of the words, the context in which they are habitually used,
the derivation and the classification of the verbal form, etc.) the less likely he is
to acquire the ability which can be used for anything except the mere noting of
verbal visual forms.

If we apply Dewey’s reasoning to EAP, then when we over-specialize and

focus on forms and conventions, we are training students rather than educating
them. By training to write academically, we may be limiting students’ ability
to notice and make broader connections, such as how words that fall outside
of academic word lists are used and how those that fall within it are not. The
dangers of foregrounding routines and skills in discussions about education are
that these lead to ‘ineptitude’ rather than understanding meanings and making
connections (Dewey, 1938, p. 78):
Routine action, action which is automatic, may increase skill to do a particular
thing. In so far, it might be said to have an educative effect. But it does not lead
to new perceptions of bearings and connections; it limits rather than widens the
meaning horizon. And since the environment changes and our way of acting has
to be modified in order to successfully keep a balanced connection with things,
an isolated uniform way of acting becomes disastrous at some critical moment.
The vaunted “skill” turns out to be gross ineptitude.

If academic writing instruction were as intent on educating about writing,

i.e. explaining the diversity and mobility of writing genres and practices, as it is
on teaching how to write some forms of writing at the expense of others, then
it might avoid mechanistic ‘routine actions that limit’ the meaning-making
potential that emerges from engaging with a far broader range of academic texts.
Some may argue that this is an unfair characterization of EAP, in particular.
However, it is one that reflects the observations I have made throughout my
thirty-year teaching and examining experience and one that seems to be
shared by writing scholars such as Hyland (2016) and Jenkins (2016), both of
whom have identified a mismatch between what EAP might be preaching in
its scholarly publications and what it is actually teaching in its classrooms. For
example, although some literatures claim that a wide range of academic genres
are being taught by EAP practitioners, they also single out the academic essay as
being the most prevailing (Nesi & Gardner 2012). This has likely compounded
 Troubling Academic Writing 41

EAP’s privileging of developing a skill in ‘a particular thing’, namely the academic

essay, over and above other genres. That Nesi and Gardner have also claimed
that they are offering templates (2012, p. 2) for teachers to follow further betrays
compliance with EAP’s standardizing, rather than transforming, function within
the university. By ignoring socio-semiotic and multimodal research on literacy
development, for example, which approaches writing instruction as part of a
complex educational ecology that cares about and integrates students’ previous
and current literacies into the acquisition of new ones (see, for example, Wardle
(2017), Williams (2017) and Parnell (2012)), EAP projects itself as a perpetrator
of functional transferable skills continually aimed at future ‘target situations’
(Ding & Bruce, 2017, p. 97):
The notion of the gap between the present situation analysis (where students are
now) and the target situation analysis – what students are required to know in
the future in terms of academic language knowledge and skills – is an important
concept that drives much of EAP and strongly influences pedagogy. Therefore,
pedagogic goals in EAP tend to centre on the types of conventionalised
communication – spoken and written – that students must process and master
in university contexts.

That past and present literacies are so absent from the academic writing
classroom is somewhat surprising because nurturing present literacies does not
prevent future ones from emerging. On the contrary, valuing and harnessing
the literacies students bring with them are more likely to nurture reflective
dispositions that allow learners to make sense of new and diverse academic
writing contexts. Since it is the students who will be inhabiting their own future
‘target situations’ long after their teachers and since their teachers can’t know
what these future target situations will require, students’ future needs and
capabilities (Robeyns, 2016) might be better ‘served’ by seeing past and previous
literacies as conducive to learning and not as ‘interference’ (Bennett, 2010). This
understanding of the writer-learner who brings experience in order to make
sense of the future is echoed in Dewey (1938, p. 56):
It is not a question of whether education should prepare for the future. If
education is growth, it must progressively realise present possibilities and thus
make individuals better fitted to cope with later requirements.

Ignoring the literacies, experiences, capabilities and agencies of individual

writers fundamentally ignores what King (2010), arguing from a critical realist
and humanist perspective, calls the ‘dignity of the self ’ and what EAP scholar
Bee Bond refers to throughout her book on Making Language Visible in the
42 What Makes Writing Academic

University (2020) as the ‘human’ dimension of a university education. De-

humanizing students is a matter of great ethical concern and one that signals
uncomfortable truths about the fairness and purpose of EAP practices overall,
which include writing instruction. EAP is seen as a commercial sector whose
imperative is to generate income by teaching transferable skills rather than to
educate. This explains why it has been described in somewhat benign terms as
a butler and a handmaiden, and in more pernicious ways as a ‘cash-cow’ (Ding,
2016) because of the way international students, in particular, are referred to
behind closed boardroom doors. The unethical implications of this have not
gone unnoticed by the media (Matthews, 2014):
Global neoliberal trends ‘ … have had astonishing success in creating markets
for things whose commodification was once almost unimaginable: drinking
water, body parts and social welfare among them’ (Connell, 2013, p. 100). It
is within this broader economic and political climate that the specifics of EAP
commodification have attracted the attention of and also generated debate in
the media by raising concerns around the ethics of taking money from foreign
students who already pay significant amounts for their British degrees.

A systematic review of the unethical underpinnings of internationalisation

can be found in Mulvey (2021). It seems urgent, therefore, to wonder what impact
the commodification of EAP, discussed at length in Ding and Bruce (2017) and
Hadley (2015), may also be having on the ethics of writing instruction. The
assumption that all students wish to and should learn a standardized version of
academic writing to the exclusion of all others seems unfair given the diversity
of the student population. This population includes mature students who, for a
range of reasons, may be unaccustomed to traditional academic writing and for
whom traditional academic writing may even be obsolete (Grove, 2016); students
who choose to or are expected to write creatively within the social sciences
(Phillips & Kara, 2021) and to write multimodally (Palmeri, 2012); students with
a range of abilities and backgrounds (Sperlinger et al., 2018); academic writers
who communicate, or who might want to communicate and publish in English
as a lingua franca; and students obliged to endure the high costs of learning a
particular variety of English, which is arguably neither predictive of how students
will cope with the language requirements of university study (Coleman et al.,
2003) or a reliable indicator of linguistic competence (Leung et al., 2016), nor is
it a measure of ‘good’ writing: indeed, Turner has pointed out that students who
fail language proficiency tests, such as IELTS and, by implication, EAP courses
that mimic the IELTS format, may be and go on to become able academic writers.
 Troubling Academic Writing 43

Yet, ‘such students are being denied the opportunity to develop their academic
writing, as well as their studies’ (Turner 2018, p. 134) when they do not pass
these courses. Entry exams such as IELTS and EAP, including the burgeoning
textbook industry that supports them, are not only expensive but there is an
increasing sense in which they are ineffective and exclusionary, too. This fuels
the perception that they are socially unjust.
I close this chapter on reductive approaches to academic writing – whereby
what makes writing academic is reduced to a finite set of transient skills – by
raising one final, but no less troubling implication of standardizing academic
writing in this way. Related to the ethical concerns decried above are the profits
and injustices generated by profit-making essay writing services known as ‘essay
mills’ and ‘ghostwriters’. This phenomenon deserves a book in its own right, so,
for now, I refer my reader to the growing debate and body of research on this
phenomenon (Peters et al., 2021) whilst confining my own contribution to the
following brief remarks. Writing templates, grammatical rules and conventions,
standard phrases and genres, the outsourcing of writing instruction to ‘service
providers’, such as EAP and Library Services – all the things that are associated
with a skills-based approach to academic writing – can be replicated and
reproduced, copied and sold, downloaded and programmed algorithmically
(Collins, 2019; Introna, 2106). They can even be generated by computers as full-
blown fakes that enter citation networks (known as ‘farms’) (Labbé & Labbé,
2012; Van Noorden, 2014). Standardization is both a cause and an effect of what
Macfarlane (2021b) calls ‘performativity’,5 whereby academic writers are taught
to perform and display behaviours, including writing behaviours, that comply
to the norm. This performativity includes forms of ‘soft plagiarism’ that are the
result of ‘symbolic citations’ of scholarship that writers have never read and
which lead to ‘uncritical valorisations’ of theories that are not understood. The
use of essay mills (Aitchison, 2017; Medway et al., 2018; Peters, 2018) and the
occurrence of academic writing hoaxes (Alvesson et al., 2017; Cuthbert, 2018)
are symptoms of an academic writing culture that readily relies on the surface
features of a genre in order to deem that a text is bona fide academic. I discuss
hoaxes further in Chapters 3 and 4, but for now, my intention is to signal an
ethics of academic misconduct that all too frequently places the moral burden
on the student rather than on performative university practices that contribute
5
The term ‘performativity’ has been used by scholars from a range of disciplines spanning critical
theory, education and philosophy to mean a range of practices. In this book, I refer to 2 of its
meanings: the first is as Macfarlane intends it to describe the hollowness and superficiality of
academic writing forms. The second is as Lunsford (2015) intends it (see Chapter 3) to describe
what academic writing can do and has positive connotations of action and agency.
44 What Makes Writing Academic

to the conditions for misconduct (Molinari, 2014). One of the troubles with
having a standardized, transient and reductive academic writing culture which
also belongs to an increasingly commodified higher education sector is that
writing is easily and readily monetized, plagiarized and disembodied from the
humans who created it.

Conclusions

In troubling the way that academic writing is understood, taught and assessed
by university programmes, such as EAP, my intention has been to foreground
the predilection by writing service providers, including EAP, of reductive and
standardized writing ontologies. These include the skills needed to produce a
particular version of academic writing, one that is ‘objective’ and ‘impersonal’,
monomodal, monolingual, and monocultural. Such reductive approaches have
undesirable aesthetic, social and ethical implications, which include the denial
a writer’s humanity. The next chapter highlights some of the historical reasons
that have led to the privileging of this version of academic writing and offers
glimpses of how else it could be.
 2

How Did We Get Here? A Selected History

Introduction

The evidence has begun to accumulate that our beliefs about literacy are a blend
of fact and supposition, in a word a mythology, a selective way of viewing the
facts that not only justifies the advantages of the literate but also assigns the
failings of the society, indeed of the world, to the illiterate.
(Olson, 1994, p. 2)

This chapter highlights the contingency of human choices and shows that what
counts as writing and, by extension, academic writing is a matter of human
decision-making and ideology. I argue that ‘Western’ literacy has idealized
‘higher order’ thinking by arrogating and then conflating ‘logical’, ‘linear’
thinking with alphabet-based literacies. Throughout history, knowledge has
been communicated via a range of script, alphabetic and non, each representing
the values and purposes of people. Shining a spotlight on this range allows us
to reflect on what was and what is. It further creates a space within which to
consider why things are as they are and how we’d like them to be.
After some introductory remarks on why I use history to explain current
practices, I suggest that the orthodox conflation of writing with the alphabet
and with cognition is misguided and, because of this, writing should be re-
positioned as one of several modes for communicating academic knowledge
and thinking about it critically. I evidence some of the different ways that
academic knowledge has been communicated to suggest that academia might
reclaim some of this diversity. The final section of this chapter focuses on how
the scientific paradigm of the European enlightenment and European colonial
practices have imposed their own forms of literacy to the exclusion of others:
this serves to remind us that writing practices are ideological, including those
favoured by ‘Western’ academies (Canagarajah, 2021; Henderson, 2018; Lillis &
Tuck, 2016; Russell, 2002; Street, 1984; Turner, 2010, 2018).
46 What Makes Writing Academic

Using History to Understand the Present

History shows it could all have been different. In his Representations of the
Intellectual, which document his 1993 BBC Reith Lectures, Palestinian critical
theorist, secular humanist and historian, Edward Said (1994) claims that history,
not God or similarly unaccountable entities, allows us to see why things are and
how they could have been. In Said’s thinking, humanism is a response to social
injustices and is a way of ‘speaking truth to power’. In this sense, ‘humans are the
measures of all things’ and can therefore (Said, 1994, p. 45):

Look at situations as contingent, not as inevitable, look at them as a result of a

series of historical choices made by men and women, as facts of society made
by human beings and not as natural or god-given, therefore unchangeable,
permanent, irreversible.

Said identifies with the legacy of Giambattista Vico (1959 (1725, 1730, 1744,
1928)), the eighteenth-century Italian professor of Rhetoric whose seminal
work La Scienza Nuova was a response to the rational hypothetico-deductive
Cartesian philosophy of the time. Vico argued against Descartes’s method on
the grounds that ‘it renders phenomena which cannot be expressed logically or
mathematically as illusions’ (Costelloe, 2018). Instead, Vico proposed that (Said,
1994, p. 45)

the proper way to understand reality is to understand it as a process generated

from its point of origin, which one can always locate in extremely humble
circumstances.

More recently, critical theorist and historian Michel Foucault (1972a, p. 7)

claimed that ‘history is one way in which a society recognises and develops a
mass of documentation with which it is inextricably linked’.
Our social practices – of which writing is one – are also ‘located in extremely
humble origins’ and are ‘inextricably linked’ to our past, making the history of
writing an inseparable part of understanding writing itself. With knowledge of
why writing practices have evolved as they have, present and future practices can
emerge from informed choices and possibilities, not templates, straightjackets
or pigeonholes (Paxton, 2013). This allows us to hold rules to account, breaking,
following and adapting them from a position of knowledge and openness
towards change.
 How Did We Get Here? A Selected History 47

A Misguided Conflation: The Alphabet and Cognition

Historians of writing show that definitions of writing are as useful as they are
redundant. None are univocal. Arguing from a philological and semiological
perspective, Pettersson (1994) has claimed that attempts to provide core
definitions of writing are fallacies doomed to failure. This is because of three
interconnected reasons. Firstly, in order to decide what counts and does
not count as writing, we would need to have a pre-agreed notion of what
writing is before being able to recognize instances of it. But since we don’t,
as I discuss below, definitions remain elusive. Secondly, even if an antecedent
definition were possible, countless problems would arise in trying to classify
new instances that do not sit comfortably with the definition. For example,
do non-alphabetical scripts such as pictorial rebuses or Chinese logographs
count as ‘writing’ (DeFrancis, 1989; Harris, 1986)? And thirdly, by extracting a
definition from an ad hoc classification based on ‘uniquely identifying’ features
(such as a mark on a surface or an alphabet), we are, on the one hand, conflating
what are contested defining properties with what is a post hoc classification and,
on the other, begging a whole series of other questions such as what counts
as a ‘mark’, a ‘surface’, an ‘alphabet’. For example, history shows that writing
is not exclusively alphabetic and that what has been labelled as ‘writing’ has
varied in form, content, purpose and interpretation (Olson, 2001; Schmandt-
Besserat, 2001; Woodard, 2001). Some argue that ‘real writing’ is unequivocally
alphabetical, i.e. based on phonological representation, which explains why,
over time, it has become conflated with ‘literacy’ (DeFrancis, 1989; Gelb, 1952;
Havelock, 1976). Others, however, refute this conflation on the grounds that
what counts as ‘writing’ very much depends on who is doing the counting
and why, which leaves open the possibility to re-think what writing means
(Coulmas, 1989; Harris, 1986, 2000). The debate over what counts as ‘writing’
further assumes that there was a key moment in time that separated non-writing
communities from writing ones. It also rests on a contention concerning the
purpose of writing: does it function as a representation of the objects it refers to
or as a symbolic correspondence that ‘stands for’ something else? If it represents
the objects it refers to, then what is the nature of this representation: a copy
or replacement of its object, as the alphabet is said to graphically ‘replace’ the
phonology of spoken language? If writing is symbolic in its correspondence
to nature, who decides which symbol stands for its referent and how do they
decide this?
48 What Makes Writing Academic

Despite its problems, the representational theory of language has endured and
forms the basis of influential theories that underscore modern-day structural
linguistics (Harris, 2000; Harris & Taylor, 1989; Orman, 2016). Its origins can
be traced to how Cuneiform ‘writing’ is said to have evolved during the early
Mesopotamian era of 8000–3000 BC from the use of geometrically shaped
counters to record the inventory of goods (such as grain) to incisions, or marks,
on clay tablets that re-presented these goods functionally: clay tokens ‘stood
for’ an object not a sound, as the alphabet is said to do. While representational
theories of language may account for the one-to-one correspondence between a
geometric token and the number of grains needed for a commercial transaction,
they struggle to explain pictographic languages, such as ancient Egyptian
hieroglyphs or ancient Chinese characters, because the use of pictograms, namely
pictures representing ideas, is not concerned with one-to-one correspondence
with an object but with symbolism. This linear (and highly compressed) history
of how writing has evolved leads us to logographic writing (2600–2500 BC), of
which both ancient and modern Chinese are examples. Here, a sign or mark
is said to re-present or ‘stand for’ a sound or word, not an object. In philology,
it is generally agreed that the emergence of logograms marks the shift from a
visual representation theory of language, where a mark stood for an ‘object’, to an
aural representation theory of language, where a mark now stands for a ‘sound’
(Schmandt-Besserat, 2001). Syllabic scripts, where signs represent syllables rather
than whole words, are concurrent with logographic ones (Fischer, 2005). Current
Indian, Japanese, Arabic and Hebrew are all examples of syllabic languages and
are said to have converged in 2000 BC with the invention of what is commonly,
but, as we shall see, problematically, referred to as the ‘Greek’ alphabet: this
moment marks a seismic shift in how phonetic languages came to be represented
in writing and in how ‘Western’ notions of literacy subsequently developed.
The alphabet is Proto-Sinaitic-Phoenician-Palestinian-Greek-Lebanese and
dates to between 2000 and 1000 BC (Fischer, 2005; Goody, 1977; Harris, 1986,
pp. 30–1; Schmandt-Besserat, 2001, p. 16623). Its designation as ‘Greek’ and
as having been ‘invented’ at one moment in time, i.e. 2000 BC, is, therefore,
inaccurate because of the vast geographical area where the alphabet developed
and because it established itself over one thousand years. While it may seem
pedantic to point this out, it is a reminder that men and women select which
histories and whose accounts and approximations to refer to when they
trace the genealogies of the phenomena they care about. By signalling that
nationalistic claims to ownership of something as momentous as the origin of
the alphabet are questionable, I am preparing the reader for what is to come.
 How Did We Get Here? A Selected History 49

Indeed, some linguists and historians of language (e.g. Harris, 1986) remind us
that writing systems did not suddenly appear but they developed incrementally,
synchronously and serendipitously alongside other writing systems. This suggests
that it is misleading to reduce definitions of writing to alphabetic writing. This is
because rather than having evolved in a linear and chronological fashion, from
pictograms to ideograms to logograms, to syllabic representations culminating
in the phonetic representations of the alphabet, writing systems are likely to have
co-existed. And during this co-existence, they are likely to have borrowed and
(erroneously) copied from each other, adapting these borrowings to specific
needs (Fischer, 2005, pp. 296–7). If writing is thought of in this serendipitous
way, then ‘alphabetic’ writing is just one of many kinds of writing.
Despite the possibility that writing can be non-alphabetic, the alphabet
has become co-extensive with ‘Western’ definitions of ‘writing’, most likely
because it now forms the basis of some of the world’s writing systems, those
that share an alphabetic genesis, such as Latin, Arabic, Hebrew and Cyrillic.
Unlike pictographic and logographic forms of notation, the ‘Greek’ alphabet had
twenty-two letters ‘each standing for a single sound of voice, which, combined
in innumerable ways, brought an unprecedented flexibility to transcribe speech’
(Schmandt-Besserat, 2001, p. 16624): it is this flexibility that is said to explain
why alphabetic script formed the basis of so many languages. Gradually, writing
came to be defined by the alphabet because, unlike a picture, writing could
‘record a linguistic utterance directly’ (Woodard, 2001, p. 16633):
The term ‘writing system’ specifically denotes a set of symbols which is used
for the graphic (written) recording of language …. Forms of graphic expression
which may have some semantic content – such as cave drawings, petroglyphs,
icons and even sophisticated picture messages – but which do not or could not
record a linguistic utterance directly, are thus excluded from the realm of writing.

The co-existence of pictorial and alphabetical symbols allowed philologists

to create different categories with which to include and exclude different forms
of graphic representations. These categories included distinctions between non-
writing systems, as noted by Woodward, above, partial writing systems1 and full
writing systems (DeFrancis, 1989, p. 5):
Partial writing is a system of graphic symbols that can be used to convey only
some thought. Full writing is a system of graphic symbols that can be used to
convey any and all thought.

1
For DeFrancis, mathematics and rebuses are forms of ‘partial writing’ because they are not based on
the sounds of speech.
50 What Makes Writing Academic

To side-step the many difficulties generated by creating categories to include

and exclude what does and does not count as writing (such as whether ‘all
thought’ can be conveyed by any form of representation), others, such as Erard
(2018), began framing writing in functional terms, not graphic ones. Erard sees
writing as a ‘layered’ concept that has explosive effects. His conception challenges
the idea that ‘writing’ can be defined by reducing it to any single form:
I like to think of writing as a layered invention. First there’s the graphic invention:
the notion of making a durable mark on a surface. …. Then the symbolic
invention: let’s make this mark different from all other marks and assign it a
meaning that we can all agree on. Humans have been doing this for a long time,
too. Then there’s the linguistic one: let’s realize that a sound, a syllable and a word
are all things in the world that can be assigned a graphic symbol. This invention
depends on the previous ones and itself is made of innovations, realizations,
solutions and hacks. Then comes the functional invention: let’s use this set of
symbols to write a list of captives’ names, or a contract about feeding workers, or
a letter to a distant garrison commander. All these moves belong to an alchemy
of life that makes things go boom.

Olson (2001, p. 16640) and Harris (1986) have argued that, rather than an
evolution from mark to picture to sound, changes in scripts reflect borrowings,
errors and adaptations from several co-occurring scripts. A modern-day
example of such borrowings is English spelling, a system which bears an erratic
resemblance to its phonology because of its Latin, French and Anglo-Saxon
influences, because of historical errors in transcriptions and because it has never
been possible to systematize it via, for example, an Academy of Language. This
mottled history explains why the English language has remained a porous and
open system that can swiftly accommodate neologisms and changes in meaning
(Barber, 1993; Crystal, 1988). Harris, Olson and others have argued that similar
dappled borrowings and unsystematic uses are likely to have occurred in ancient
times, too, especially over the course of the thousand years that culminated in
the establishment of a ‘Greek’ alphabet. What this less linear account suggests is
that the orthodox conflation of ‘writing’ with the alphabet may be unwarranted
(Harris, 1986):
Writing was originally merely a term designating the process of scoring or
outlining a shape on a surface of some kind. (In this very broad sense, writing
ought to include drawing and even the art of the silhouette. Nowadays, it does
not, although that original use of the verb write survives in English as late as
the sixteenth century). Ancient Egyptian had one word meaning both ‘writing’
and ‘drawing’. Similarly, the Greek verb γράφω (‘to write’) originally meant in
 How Did We Get Here? A Selected History 51

Homer ‘engrave’, ‘scratch’, ‘scrape’. The later restriction of such words to designate
alphabetic writing hardly warrants the narrow perspective adopted by those
historians of the subject who take for granted that graphic signs count as writing
only when used for purposes which alphabetic writing was later to fulfil.

On Roy Harris’s account, if ‘writing’ can include drawing, then, in principle,

it can include other forms of representation. Indeed, both Harris (1986)
and Halverson (1992) have argued that many enduring assumptions about
how writing originated need challenging. In particular, Harris refutes the
classical Aristotelian and De Saussurean thesis that the alphabet, understood
as a precursor to writing, evolved as a substitute for speech, with each letter
(grapheme) representing a sound (phoneme). Rather, since an alphabet cannot
capture all the nuances of speech, writing can never be a full surrogate of speech
(Harris, 1986, 1989, 2000). That the alphabet does not account for all forms of
writing is evidenced by the existence of Chinese characters and script, an example
of a writing system that can be processed semantically without an intermediate
phonetic stage. Unfortunately, the reason Chinese was not considered to be a
writing system by ‘Western’ standards has more to do with political ideology
than it does with the putatively unique adeptness of the alphabet in capturing the
sounds of speech. I discuss this later in the chapter, but before then, more needs
to be said about why the conflation of the alphabet with writing is misguided.
Even if we grant that alphabetic writing is a representation of speech, it
has become clear that it is inherently inadequate in this representation. This
inadequacy is evident when we consider the vast range of non-alphabetic ways
that humans have developed to try and compensate for the fact that the alphabet
cannot fully represent speech (Olson, 2001, p. 16641):
The history of writing is largely the history of inventing devices, such as
punctuation and text structures, as well as rules for interpretation that have
taken sometimes as long as millennia to develop.

If the alphabet, and by implication writing, cannot fully represent speech,

then it becomes as (in)adequate as drawing in representing human thought. This
is one reason why Harris (1986, 2000) and Coulmas (1989) see no difference
between writing and drawing (Olson, 2001, p. 16641). In fact, for both Harris
and Coulmas, semasiographic systems, such as road signs and mathematics, are
systems of writing capable of representing meaning without relying on a prior
link to spoken forms.
A final difficulty with reducing the function of writing to a representation of
speech is that it assumes ‘speech’ is synonymous with ‘language’. But this conflation,
52 What Makes Writing Academic

too, is problematic not least because of its exclusionary implications (see Evans
(2014)). If ‘speech’ were equal to ‘language’, this would entail that deaf/mute people
don’t communicate linguistically. The fact that a deaf/mute person can read,
write and understand alphabetic script suggests that it is meanings, rather than
sounds, that are conveyed by the graphic sign, whether alphabetic or not: this is
because there is nothing phonologically inherent in ‘cat’ that it needs to be heard
or pronounced as /kæt/ to be understood as meaning ‘cat’.2 By undermining the
conflation of the alphabet with writing, on the grounds that writing does not need
to be heard to be understood (or seen, for that matter), we are more likely to accept
that pictographic and logographic scripts convey meanings in ways that do not rely
on alphabetic script or sound. Similar arguments are developed in Evans (2009) and
Malpas (2002). They are important because, as we will see, the prominence given
to the alphabet by ‘literate’ cultures has been used to discriminate against non-
alphabetic cultures and against multimodal ways of communicating knowledge.
Notwithstanding the above critiques, influential historians of writing, like
Gelb (1963), have defended the thesis that for a script to count as ‘writing’ it
needs to be alphabetic. Gelb claimed that pictures cannot be considered part of
writing because the urge to draw is aesthetic, not communicative (Pettersson,
1994, p. 131). This stance led him into several difficulties when attempting to ‘lay
a foundation for a full science of writing’ (Gelb, 1963, p. 23 cited in Pettersson,
1994, p. 138). Not only did Gelb equate writing with the alphabet and therefore
speech, but he also insisted that for writing to be considered ‘writing’ it had
to consist of a ‘mark on an object’ rather than ‘be’ that object (as a token or a
drawing might be). Significantly, Gelb’s definition of writing would rule out
Chinese script as a written form of its language,3 because it is not alphabetic. Gelb

2
An extreme example of how unphonetic the English language is illustrates this point further by
showing that there is nothing phonologically inherent in the letters of the alphabet that they sound
one way or the other: ‘ghoti seagh’ is a non-sensical phrase in English; yet, based on how the English
language has evolved to represent the sounds of the alphabet, it can be pronounced as ‘fish chef ’
(Fish: Gh pronounced as ‘f ’ as in ‘enough’; O pronounced as ‘i’ as in ‘women’; Ti pronounced as ‘sh’
as in ‘tion’. Chef: S pronounced as ‘sh’ as in sugar; Ea pronounced as in ‘bread’; Gh pronounce ‘f ’ as
in ‘enough’).
3
In an attempt to assuage the divisive polemic that has surrounded dismissive ‘Western’ attitudes to
Chinese (cf. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Joseph Priestley in Harris, 2000, p. 2), DeFrancis, J. (1989).
Visible speech: The diverse oneness of writing systems. University of Hawaii Press has argued that
although Chinese is not alphabetic, it is nonetheless ‘phonetic’ in the sense that the early pictograms
and the later stylized signs of Chinese characters represent phonic elements (such as morphemes
and syllables) or whole words. This, according to King, B. (1991). Reviewed work(s): Visible speech:
The diverse oneness of writing systems by John DeFrancis. Linguistic Society of America, 67(2),
377–9. [Link] is, however, a trivial observation that can be applied
to all written forms because they can all be pronounced whether they are alphabetical or not. In
this sense, then, DeFrancis does little to extinguish the polemic. Rather, Chinese characters, whilst
having originated as pictograms, have since become so stylized and far removed from their original
pictorial depiction that Chinese cannot meaningfully be said to be a pictorial language any more.
This is because the original representation can no longer be discerned.
 How Did We Get Here? A Selected History 53

therefore revised the definitions he gave in A History of Writing by omitting any

reference to the alphabet (Gelb, 1980, pp. 21–2 cited in Pettersson (1994, p. 144)):
The proposed new definition of writing is as follows: writing in its broadest sense
is a recording system or device by means of conventional markings or shapes or
colour of objects, achieved by the motor action of the hand of an individual and
received visually by another.

This new, non-alphabetical definition of writing would now include picto/

logographic languages but it remains problematic for at least the following
reasons:

●●‘conventional markings’ would now cover the entire field of semiotics,

including semasiography (whereby communication is achieved entirely
without words, such as in road signs);
• the requirement for writing to be ‘achieved by the motor action of the hand’
would rule out Stephen Hawkin’s ‘writing’ because he used eye movement
and dictation software; and
●●the condition that the marks be ‘received visually by another’ excludes
braille from the definition.

What this cursory4 overview has served to highlight is that there are reasons
to challenge the conflation of writing with the alphabet as well as to question
the motivations for this conflation. Since definitions of writing, literacy
and cognition have been used to exclude and vilify forms of literacy that do
not conform to the alphabetic canon, writing is as much ideological as it is a
mechanical skill. Indeed, as noted by Olson in opening this chapter, being or not
being ‘literate’ has implications for social inclusion and exclusion.
Many studies on ‘Western’ literacy assume a linear transition from an oral to a
written culture. They include influential work by historian Havelock (1976, 1982),
who has also dated the origins of ‘Western’ literacy to the Greek alphabet. I have

4
Key linguistic theories of the twentieth century have been necessarily omitted because the scope of
this chapter is to provide a very brief historical foundation for justifying the possibility, in principle,
of diverse forms of (academic) writing. I am, however, aware of the complex and nuanced tradition
of ‘Western’ linguistics, in particular De Saussure’s structuralism, which distinguishes between
writing and speech by drawing attention to the diachronic contingencies of the latter (parole)
and the synchronic stability of the former (langue) Harris, R., & Taylor, T. J. (1989). Landmarks in
linguistic thought: The Western tradition from Socrates to Saussure. Routledge, Saussure, F. d., Baskin,
W., Meisel, P., & Saussy, H. (2011). Course in general linguistics. Columbia University Press and with
Derrida’s deconstruction of Western logocentrism, which de-centres language and meaning and re-
positions them as differential relationships involving absences, differences and defferals. Derrida, J.,
& Spivak, G. C. (1976). Of grammatology. Johns Hopkins University Press.
54 What Makes Writing Academic

already questioned the sweeping linguistic and geographical generalizations that

underscore this view, namely that what is meant by ‘Greek’ is actually a vast
geographical area that includes the modern-day Middle East. Indeed, the ‘West’
is far too readily accepted as a synecdoche that covers immense geographical
and cultural areas which are not ‘Western’, as patiently shown, for example, by
Appiah (2016a) in his Reith Lectures and by de Sousa Santos (2009) in A Non-
Occidentalist West: both have challenged the mis-appropriation of ‘Western’ by
the ‘West’. When Havelock claims that the ‘psychological and epistemological
revolution’ brought about by written, i.e. alphabetized, prose, ‘inheres only in an
alphabet’ (Halverson, 1992, p. 151), he is clearly advancing, or at least assuming, a
normative thesis about the superiority of the alphabet compared to other systems
of thought and knowledge representation. This has cemented and perpetuated
the collective dismissal of oral and visual cultures on the grounds that they
restrict thought and lead to indoctrination, whereas written culture (‘Western’
written culture, specifically) frees thought from rote repetition. An obvious
objection to this is that civilizations that are non-alphabetic, but nonetheless
‘written’, have also generated their own ‘psychological and epistemological
revolutions’ – China’s millennial history of medicine, philosophy and literature
being a case in point (Van Norden, 2017) and the debunking of the myth that
‘literate’ minds are more conceptually ‘agile and deductive’ than non-literate
ones, being another (Scribner & Cole, 1981).
Despite such objections, the shift from oral to written societies, where
‘written’ is equated with ‘alphabetic’, has been credited with developing a
‘logical’ mind because it has allowed us to ‘see’ language, enabling us to do
what Havelock calls ‘backward scanning’, whereby we can reflect on how
a text is organized, categorize the topics that it deals with and create logical
ordering. This has allowed us to turn language into an object of study which
has generated grammatical concepts such as ‘clause’ and ‘sentence’ (Olson,
1994). In addition to providing opportunities for reifying language as an
object of study, the shift from oral to written has also freed us from the need
to preserve cultural wisdom through repetition, proverbs and prescriptive
metrics – associated with oral prose – so that we can create novel statements
through writing. Havelock illustrates this shift through a detailed analysis of the
socially unifying and culturally preserving function of Homeric prose, which
used repetition, proverbs and prescriptive metrics as a way to preserve cultural
wisdom. By having a writing culture, he argues, we are no longer bound by the
need to memorize familiar ideas and to be ‘indoctrinated’. In short, according
to Havelock, ‘the Greeks did not just invent an alphabet; they invented literacy
 How Did We Get Here? A Selected History 55

and the literate basis of modern thought’ (cited in Halverson, 1992, p. 152). This
view has not only had negative repercussions on how the ‘West’ has treated non-
Western civilizations, but it has led to the illogical and normative conclusion
that alphabetically literate cultures are superior to non-alphabetic ones, rather
than being simply different (Appiah, 2016b; Said, 1978, 1993).
Notwithstanding its widespread acceptance and influence, Havelock’s
account may also be misguided. Firstly, whilst it is true that writing has afforded
the development of a systematized grammar, it does not follow that thinking
in ordered ways would not have happened if alphabetical writing had not
developed. This leaves open the possibility that other forms of representation,
including images, also produce ordered ways of thinking. Secondly, according
to Halverson, Havelock based his arguments that the Greek alphabet has shaped
‘Western’ thought on some unfounded assumptions about Homeric prose and
about the primacy of orality over the written word. Indeed, there seems to be
insufficient evidence to conclude that Homer’s ballads were indeed spoken
first and then transcribed: they could have been written and co-existed with
an oral tradition. If Halverson is right, this would undermine the orthodox
view that society transitioned from orality to writing and that the latter is a
thought-structuring substitute for the former. If true, this would have significant
implications: if writing did not substitute speech but co-existed with it instead,
then the arguments that suggest writing is superior to speech are weakened
indicating that writing and speaking simply allow us to think differently, not
better or worse. And finally, even if it were true that writing was a precursor
of logical alphabetical thought, this does not entail that writing caused logical
thought5 since, for example, logical thought was presumably already happening
with Socrates before Plato transcribed him for posterity. In fact, because there
is no conclusive evidence for the need to memorize spoken language in the first
place, it is hard to see what role writing played at all. It is possible that alphabetic
writing simply functioned as cuneiform writing in corresponding to and
recording astronomical-mathematical observations or accounting. That new
thoughts became possible because of the structures and societies that developed
as a result of writing is not the same as saying that writing caused us to think
‘better’.
Walter Ong (1982, 1986), another influential historian of literacy who
continues the legacy of Havelock, is notoriously credited with the cognitive

5
This is referred to as a post hoc propter hoc fallacy, namely the illogical conclusion that derives from
stating that if an event precedes another it must have caused the event that follows it. Another way
of thinking of this is in relation to the difference between correlation and causation.
56 What Makes Writing Academic

theory that writing is, in fact, superior to speech because it raises consciousness
by developing reasoning in ways that orality does not. Ong’s most cited work,
Orality and Literacy (1982), argued that the transition from speech to writing
in literate societies had a profound impact on the ways in which people thought
and argued. Ong makes the seemingly reasonable claim that the technological
advent of writing simply makes us think in a certain way, suggesting that
writing is comparatively, rather than qualitatively, different to other ways of
communicating (1986, p. 24):
Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not
only when engaged in writing but even when it is composing its thoughts in oral
form.

But Ong soon betrays value judgements that relate to the putative superiority
of literate thinking (writing-influenced) over non-literate thinking (oral) (1986,
pp. 29 and 32):
We know that totally oral peoples, intelligent and wise though they often are,
are incapable of the protracted, intensive linear analysis that we have from
Plato’s Socrates. … Like other artificial creations and indeed more than any
other, writing is utterly invaluable and indeed essential for the realization of
fuller, interior, human potentials … By distancing thought, alienating it from
its original habitat in sounded words, writing raises consciousness. Alienation
from a natural milieu can be good for us and indeed is in many ways essential
for fuller human life. To live and to understand fully, we need not only proximity
but also distance. This writing provides for, thereby accelerating the evolution of
consciousness as nothing else before it does.

The above quote is revealing in several other ways. For example, the
reference to ‘alienation’ and ‘distance’ signals that Ong considers detachment
from context (‘original habitat’ and ‘natural milieu’) to be a virtue. This
might explain why the characterization of academic writing as objective and
impersonal has come to be accepted as an inherent epistemic virtue rather than
a culturally determined attribute. Elsewhere, Ong also draws attention to the
‘cool, analytic processes generated by writing’, invoking Plato’s shunning of the
oral poets in Phaedrus (Ong, 1986, p. 29). He goes on to observe that writing has
an impersonal quality because it ‘separates the world from the living present’
in a way that speech does not. Ong’s references to writing being ‘impersonal’,
‘cool’, ‘detached’, ‘distant’ and as providing a ‘full consciousness’ very much echo
in modern-day understandings of academic writing as autonomous, objective
and impersonal.
 How Did We Get Here? A Selected History 57

The conflation of writing with the alphabet and with higher-order thinking
(e.g. Emig, 1977) clearly has enduring historical and ideological roots and it
explains why Turner has referred to it in terms of an ‘ontological complicity’ (2018,
p. 181): it is a complicity because it assumes ‘good’ thinking cannot take place
without ‘good’ writing and it is ontological because ‘good’ writing is equated with
‘good’ thinking. Notwithstanding its misguided legacy, this complicity remains
largely unquestioned. Yet, as I have shown, there are reasons to question the
assumed qualitative superiority of ‘Western’ written literacies over other forms
of literary practices and to consider the affordances of non-standard, including
non-written, communication for expressing higher-order thinking. I turn my
attention to this in Chapter 3, after showing that academia itself, the institution
of higher-order thinking par excellence, has a long tradition of communicating
knowledge in a variety of formats, including poetry, a tradition which seems to
have become lost in modern-day academic practices.

Varied ‘Academic’ Writings

One way of approaching a history of English academic writing is to locate

it within the history of how universities have historically communicated
knowledge. Unfortunately this lies far beyond the scope of this book, but, luckily,
I can defer instead to historians of scientific and other academic writings, such as
Bazerman (1988), Doody et al. (2012) and Taub (2017), who have painstakingly
documented and analysed an impressive catalogue of written academic genres.
These include the ancient world’s tradition of communicating science via poems,
letters, encyclopaedias, commentaries and biographies, to name a few and via
modern-day understandings of ‘essay’. My aim in this section is to draw on the
wealth and breadth of this research to trace an account of how the modern-day
imaginary of what makes writing ‘academic’ celebrates objectivity, linearity, some
linguistic standards rather than others, prose and impersonality at the expense
of other epistemic virtues, such as creativity, public and popular engagement (to
democratize knowledge), recursiveness and composition, multilingualism and
multimodality. A note of caution is that what I refer to as ‘academic’ genres are
not necessarily texts that have been written at an academic institution, such as a
university, as we now know it: universities as we now think of them have a varied
history, and scientific and other knowledge, which we now associate with being
generated at institutions of higher learning, has been equally developed within
learned societies, such as research centres and royal and religious institutions.
58 What Makes Writing Academic

Indeed, academic communication existed long before universities were

founded. The first ‘Western’ European universities are only a thousand years
old and even they were late-comers to the world’s academic scene, appearing
as they did after those in Africa: Al-Qarawwiyyin, in Fez, Morocco, 859 AD,
which is still a university; the University of Timbuktu (West Africa) founded
in 982 AD ‘and attended, throughout the 12th century, by about 25,000
students’ (de Sousa Santos, 2017, p. ix) and Al-Azhar University, Cairo, 970
AD. Earlier still, there were universities in China, where the Dà xué, the Great
Academy, was founded in 200 BC by Emperor Wu Di of the Han Dynasty; in
India, where ancient centres of learning existed in 300 AD; in Korea, where
the Gukhak was founded in 682 AD, and in Japan, where the Daigaku-no
kami of the Japanese Imperial Court existed before 794 AD (Peters, 2017).
Today, it is the European academies that dominate the global stage, alongside
their American and Australian progenies, which are younger still. In Europe,
Bologna and Paris are said to be the oldest, founded in 1088 and 1150,
respectively, although these dates are contested (Rüegg & Ridder-Symoens,
1992–2011), followed by Oxford 1150 (where teaching occurred earlier, in
1096) and Cambridge in 1209 (Collini, 2012).
These early mediaeval European universities did not require students to
write. Teaching and learning were informal arrangements and their official
establishment as universities grew out of a need to ensure the financial security
of their students and teachers, to promote rationality in the belief of God and
to cultivate la vita contemplativa, which involved reading, rehearsing and
interpreting scriptures. These universities provided practical social solutions to
trade and commerce, especially at Bologna University, which built its reputation
around the study of Law. The lecture, where a professor read from books for
several hours and the oral disputatio, not writing, where students discussed and
displayed their knowledge mnemonically rather than interpretatively, were the
main forms of academic communication (Clark, 2006; Friesen, 2017; Leedham-
Green, 1996).
The emergence of writing as a way to communicate academic knowledge
can be traced to the Early Modern/Renaissance university (1500–1800) and
specifically, to the advent of the printing press (1450–1700), which allowed the
knowledge, languages and vernaculars of pre-print society to become visible and
widespread. It became easier to classify information and collect data; to create
index pages and multiple maps; and to circulate portraits of leading cultural
figures, such as Erasmus and Luther (Eisenstein, 1983, p. 130). The Gutenberg
Bible – which lent its name to the ‘Gutenberg Revolution’, aka ‘The Printing
 How Did We Get Here? A Selected History 59

Revolution’ – was the first Bible to be printed between 1450 and 1460 using
a system of incunabula (movable print), allowing for several reprints which
facilitated the dissemination of religion and individual, unmediated reading
practices. A new, smaller pocket-sized format for books, called the octavo, also
emerged during this time, making books more portable. This format became
known as the ‘Aldine’ edition named after its Venetian printer-inventor, Aldus
Manutius. It was smaller than the previous Gothic formats because it used the
italic typeface which reduced the space taken on the page allowing more books
to be printed more cheaply, thus contributing to the dissemination of knowledge.
Eisenstein (1983) has cautioned, however, that, contrary to default and
prevailing historical classifications, what is commonly referred to as the
‘Renaissance’ took place before the advent of printing,6 indicating that print
simply allowed existing knowledge to circulate rather than to be created ex
novo. Eisenstein’s warning is important because, once again, it guards against
unquestioning dispositions towards historical events: the printing press did not
take Europe out of the ‘dark ages’ and into a ‘re-birth’ (Renaissance), as many
history books have had us believe. Rather, according to Eisenstein, print simply
made visible what was already there. The surreptitious conflation between print
and the emergence of knowledge, between the ‘dark ages’ and the absence of
reason, has echoes of the conflation between writing and reason, discussed
earlier.
At this time, writing and reading became firmly established in European
cultures because of print and this triggered significant social and cultural
consequences. For example, between 1500 and 1600, the Reformation movement
of Martin Luther, a German Friar and Professor of Theology at Wittenberg
University in Saxony, toppled the dominance of the Catholic Church. This
was made possible because Luther’s Protestant message spread via ‘academic’
writings called ‘theses’ famously pinned to his door. Despite the fact that they
were not intended to be read by ‘the people’, Luther’s writings became a powerful
revolutionary tool that allowed his Reformation to gather momentum (Postman,
1993, p. 65):
What Luther overlooked was the sheer portability of printed books. Although his
theses were written in academic Latin, they were easily transported throughout
Germany and other countries by printers who just as easily had them translated
into vernaculars.

6
In fact, Francesco Petrarca (1304–74), commonly referred to as a Renaissance poet, died before
printing was invented.
60 What Makes Writing Academic

This period in history witnessed further transformations such as the rise

of individualism and standardization: for those who could read, reading
alone and in silence became possible because reading no longer needed to
be performed exclusively in a public forum (such as the Church or Lecture);
and the sheer volume of publications that print generated meant that writing
began to standardize in new ways. Tensions arose between individuality
and standardization, for example, in how subjects and landscapes were
reproduced in print. Ironically, impersonal standardization also spawned
a ‘heightened appreciation of individuality’ (Eisenstein, 1983, p. 133; Good,
1988), which explains the success of humanist philosopher and essayist Michel
de Montaigne (1533–93). His Essais proposed a new informal essay style that
reclaimed a sense of the personal, private self as a way of counteracting the
increasingly standardized, public self that print enabled. Montaigne’s personal,
introspective and contemplative style became popular because it spoke to the
needs of an ever wider, geographically scattered and impersonal readership
(Eisenstein, 1983, p. 58):
Traditional rhetorical conventions had allowed for the difference in tone
between addressing a large assemblage in a public arena, where strong lungs
and broad strokes were required and pleading a case in a courtroom, which
called for careful attention to detail and a more soft-spoken, clearly argued,
intimate approach. But no precedent existed for addressing a large crowd of
people who were not gathered together in one place but were scattered in
separate dwellings and who, as solitary individuals with divergent interests,
were more receptive to intimate interchanges than to broad-gauged rhetorical
effects. The informal essay which was devised by Montaigne was a most
ingenious method for coping with this new situation. He thus established a
new basis for achieving intimate contact with unknown readers … provided
a welcome assurance that the isolated sense of singularity which was felt by
the solitary reader had been experienced by another human being and was …
capable of being shared.

Montaigne’s essay format was to greatly influence the genre of the scientific
experimental article (discussed below) because of the way it represented human
experience as being both narcissistically personal and distantly objective
(Eisenstein, 1983, p. 58):

Its [the essai’s] abbreviated structure reflects both a prescriptive world view,
empirical in spirit and observational in method and a sceptical despair of
achieving any unified cosmological view. The kind of discursive informalism
 How Did We Get Here? A Selected History 61

and ordinary subject matter epitomized by the French familiar essay had
immense philosophical appeal for growing scientific interests in seventeen-
century England, which, Bacon had cautioned, would not succeed without a
profound literary reform.
(Paradis, 1987, p. 60)

At the same time as Montaigne was challenging standardization and

reclaiming individual expression, standards were being imposed by
religious and political authorities in attempts to reclaim, stabilize and
sanitize language: Latin, the language of authority and Catholicism, had
been increasingly co-existing with local ‘vulgar’ vernaculars, as evidenced
by Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy written in Florentine vernacular in 1320
as an attack on and parody of the corruption and double-standards of the
Church. The quest for linguistic standards culminated in the establishment,
in 1584, of the Italian Accademia della Crusca. Some forty years later, in
1635, the French Académie Française boasted a similar language-preserving
and tradition-entrenching mission (Rüegg & Ridder-Symoens, 1992–2011,
p. 11, Vol. 2):
For the French humanist the correct cultivation of language was the heart of
the new educational movement …, in the mediaeval universities, language was
raw and barbarous; scholastic textbooks darkened the intellect. It was through
reading the ancient and biblical writings in the original languages that light was
brought into university education.

The English language has never been able to police its language in this way,
despite several attempts (see, for example, Crystal (2003)). As a consequence of
this lack of language policing, it has evolved into a porous and flexible system
able to accommodate new lexis (Yun & Standish, 2018). Oddly, despite its
porousness, or possibly because of it, the English language to this day lends itself
to heated controversies about standards and correct usage.
Unlike the Ancient university, the Renaissance university was projected
towards action and novelty. It nurtured la vita activa, pushing the boundaries
of knowledge through human discovery and technology rather than divine
intervention. Famously, Columbus’s explorations of the Americas in 1492
sparked a wave of ‘humanism’, understood as the waning of mediaeval and
divine reverence and as the waxing of human reason and capacity to understand,
explore, conquer and colonize the world (Rüegg & Ridder-Symoens, 1992–2011,
Vol. 2).
62 What Makes Writing Academic

The emergence of new genres to communicate this knowledge marks the

humanist era.
Several important academic literary and scientific genres re-emerged during
this period, including the Chronicle, the Dialogue and the Letters (Bazerman,
1988; Eisenstein, 1983; Taub, 2017). Chronicles were used to record the travels
of explorers because this format lent itself to being written on the move and to
recording un-analysed geographic, anthropologic and botanical observations.
The dialogue afforded opportunities to engage in conversation and discussion
with the classics rather than showing uncritical deference to them by reporting
or transcribing them verbatim. This genre was revived by Galileo’s well-known
literary outputs. Crucially, Galileo broke away from the established scientific
writing conventions of his time, including his own, to re-propose the discredited
Copernican heliocentric theory both in dialogue form and in Tuscan, the local
vernacular of Pisa (where he taught). In doing so, like Dante (and in an act of
what might be considered by modern standards as ‘public engagement’ or ‘open
access’), he broke away from the use of Latin and was able to reach non-academic
and non-scientific audiences who proved to be more open to persuasion than
his recalcitrant and sceptical scientific colleagues (Eisenstein, 1983, pp. 251–3):
Galileo’s Dialogue on Two World Systems was such a provocative and polemical
treatise, however, it almost seemed to court censorship in a way that is quite
typical of most serious scientific work. The same thing cannot be said of his
later treatise which helped to found classical physics: the Discourses on Two
New Sciences. … No great cosmic or philosophical questions intrude into
this unimpassioned treatise … it is about as controversial and stirring as some
freshman lecture on mechanics, of which indeed, it is the ultimate source. … The
crowing irony of Galileo’s career is that the failure of the great Dialogues should
be so much more interesting than the success of the unobjectionable Discourses.

Other sixteenth-century scientists, such as philosopher Francis Bacon

and mathematician Johannes Kepler, also broke with the tradition of using
Latin, preferring instead to use vernaculars which lent themselves to greater
dissemination via the printed word ‘in an effort to convey the new spirit and
methods of scientific philosophy’ (Postman, 1993, p. 64).
And finally, the epistolary genre also thrived during these centuries as
academics and natural philosophers (later to be called scientists7) began to
publish work in and correspond via the two most influential academic journals
7
The term ‘scientist’ wasn’t coined until 1833 by William Whewell Ross, S. (1962). Scientist: The story of a
word. Annals of Science, 18(2), 65–85. [Link]
 How Did We Get Here? A Selected History 63

of the time, the Journal des Savan(t)s and the Philosophical Transactions, both
established in 1665. In particular, Henry Oldenburg, the first editor of the
Philosophical Transactions, was keen to encourage correspondence and debate.
He became known for being a ‘present’ editor who enthusiastically mediated
between the readers and the article writers, publishing letters that became
scientific documents in their own right and gradually allowing contributors
to have more voice (Bazerman, 1988). Significantly, he published the work
of international scientists, such as biologist Marcello Malpighi (Eisenstein,
1983), who were being ignored or censored in their native countries and
published the correspondence with Isaac Newton in both English and Latin
(Bazerman, 1988, p. 84), reflecting the widespread multilingualism of the
scientific community.
Having briefly tended to the re-emergence of the chronicle, the dialogue
and the letters as examples of ancient genres that were re-purposed to better
communicate the knowledge of their time, I now turn to the specific relevance
of the Philosophical Transactions to current academic writing practices. It is
in fact the scientific genre of the experimental article that has survived and
become the model for the ubiquitous academic essay. The genealogy of the
experimental article has been meticulously traced by Charles Bazerman (1988)
in Shaping Written Knowledge. Bazerman tracks its evolution from its early
reports and descriptions of unusual events using the language of ‘curiosity and
wonder’, whereby science was reported as uncontested and devoid of theory or
methodology, to the increasingly careful illustration and precise reporting of
methods and experiments. Attention to how methods were reported signalled
the need to dispel controversies that were beginning to emerge as scientists
were no longer individuals working alone to report what they saw in nature.
Instead, they were increasingly being held to account publicly via the journals
they corresponded in and in their presentations to learned societies. The
function of drawings and illustrations also changed. Hitherto, they had been
deployed to represent nature. By the 1700s, they became the methods and
instruments for understanding it, as explained below with reference to Robert
Boyle and his physico-mechanical experiments with pneumatics in the 1600s
(Shapin, 1984, p. 492):
The sort of naturalistic images that Boyle favoured provided a greater density
of circumstantial detail than would have been proffered by more schematic
representations. The images served to announce that ‘this was really
done’ and that it was done in the way stipulated; they allayed distrust and
facilitated virtual witnessing. Therefore, understanding the role of pictorial
64 What Makes Writing Academic

representations offers a way of appreciating what Boyle was trying to achieve

with his literary technology.

Along with images, language also developed to reflect greater attention to how
methods were reported. In 1672, Newton writes with the intention of eliminating
uncertainty towards his optical findings. He develops a new rhetorical style to
deal with criticisms, a form of compelling argument which becomes a closed
system in which opposing arguments are reduced to errors. He writes with the
intention of making his writing appear as fact, not controversy and finds ways of
shaping it to avoid ambiguity by artfully guiding the reader step-by-step through
an experiment expressed in self-referential language – recalling the meandering,
explorative and tentative style of Montaigne – all the while intending to report
what he believes to be an objectively observable phenomenon: the style evoked
is that of a neutral observer ‘stumbling across a fact’. Bazerman analyses a section
of the carefully crafted rhetorical style of Newton’s ‘A New Theory of Light and
Colours’, an article published in the Transactions in 1672, highlighting the
prominence of first person pronouns to reflect that it is the author-narrator-
scientist who is making the discoveries (Bazerman, 1988, p. 91):
This earlier part of the article relies heavily on the language of personal thought
and agency as it unfolds the attempts of a baffled investigator to come to terms
with a robustly visible phenomenon. The first person followed by an active verb
forms the armature of most sentences: ‘I suspected’, ‘I thought’, ‘I took another
Prisme’, ‘I then proceeded to examine more critically’, ‘Having made these
observations, I first computed from them’. At key moments he offers quantitative
descriptions of his experiments, switching to third person existential statements:
‘Its distance from the hole or Prisme was 22 feet; its utmost length 13¼ inches.’ But
even experimental quantities are framed by his limited agency: “The refractions
were as near as I could make them, equal and consequently about 54 deg. 4’”
(93). The orderliness with which he pursues and isolates the phenomenon gives
rhetorical warrant to the degree of facticity of language Newton allows himself
in this section. That is, the credibility of the investigation helps establish the
credibility of the fact and the credibility of the investigator.

Rather than a representation of speech (and its alphabet), the scientific

language of seventeenth-century Europe is now a conduit for channelling
mental thoughts from the mind of the truth-knowing writer/observer to the
mind of the sceptical reader (Russell, 2002; Turner, 2010). Language becomes
invested with the responsibility to not simply report what the scientist sees as
an objective natural reality, but to also persuade a sceptical reader. Contrast
this style of writing with the mnemonic verses of Homer, Pindar and Aeschylus
 How Did We Get Here? A Selected History 65

which required no reporting verbs, suggesting that for the pre-Socratics, reality
did not need to be interpreted, it simply needed to be told (Olson, 1994, p. 193).
The term ‘verbatim’ had been coined by the 1400s, suggesting that already by
then, a new linguistic awareness was dawning relating to how a text could fix and
stabilize meaning. English began to borrow reporting verbs from Latin, such as
imply, to signal mental state verbs which indicated that an interpretation was
taking place as opposed to an unhedged factual description of nature (Daston &
Galison, 2010; Olson, 1994). With the 1700s came the development of theories of
interpretation to understand what was ‘in’ the text, not what could be ‘read’ into
it (hermeneutics). Because knowledge was becoming increasingly contested, the
following authority-conveying features began to emerge in scientific writing: the
use of nominalizations as grammatical metaphors to reify and de-personalize
activities, presenting them as facts rather than processes; acknowledgements (in
the form of references) to build allegiances but also to comply with the new
1710 intellectual property copyright encoded into British law (Pennycook,
1996); hedging language such as probably and might be to indicate speculation
before a bold conclusion; and introductions to conflicts between theories began
appearing in Volume 40 of the Transactions (1737) to signal that a hypothesis
preceded the account of the experiment, even when there was no contention.
The need to report accurately and clearly meant that language became ‘invested
with the role of “mapping” knowledge, without drawing attention to itself as part
of the map. In other words, it has to be transparent’ (Turner, 2010, p. 63).
Fast forwarding to more recent times, a period of great university expansion
occurred during the 1900s following their decline during the French Revolution
and the Napoleonic wars. Of immense significance was the influence of Wilhelm
von Humboldt, a German scholar and statesman credited with founding, in 1810,
the modern ‘Western’ concept of the research university, which has particularly
left its imprint on US universities and on Oxbridge in Britain (Rüegg & Ridder-
Symoens, 1992–2011, Vols. 3 and 4; Russell, 2002). The Humboldtian university
fully embraced the growing faith in science, reason, discovery and empiricism
of the previous centuries making ‘research’ its core, essential nuclear foundation.
According to Friedrich Schleiermacher, the liberal theologian and philosopher
who inspired Humboldt (Vol. 3, p. 5):
the function of the university was not to pass on recognised and directly usable
knowledge such as the schools and colleges did, but rather to demonstrate how
this knowledge is discovered, to stimulate the idea of science in the minds of
the students, to encourage them to take into account the fundamental laws of
science in all their thinking.
66 What Makes Writing Academic

At the same time, the increased professionalization of research and of

salaried university staff, coupled with an increase in standardization processes
and widening participation – compared with the 1700s, when no academic
qualifications were needed to study at university and no written exams existed
before 1820 (Leedham-Green, 1996, p. 125)8 – led to a steep rise in assessment
procedures with written assignments becoming the main means through which
to assess students, replacing the oral seminars or the more traditional disputatio.
This, according to Kruse (2006, p. 348), ‘turned writing into a constraint that
threatened to exclude [students] if they did not master the writing assignments’.
In terms of content and the structure of language, the written research paper
began to stabilize and increasingly emphasize methods, a phenomenon that
had begun in the early 1700s. Findings and conclusions, especially in Medicine,
discussed consequences of hypotheses and experiments at the end of a paper in
terms of logical deductions of the facts. These were presented using impersonal
language such as nominalizations and making explicit reference to methods;
citations began to develop into codified networks of acknowledgements and
sentence structure became increasingly complex: noun and subordinate clauses
increased (signalling intellectual complexity), even though sentence length and
syntactical complexity remained stable at around 70 per cent simple and 30 per
cent complex (Bazerman, 1988). All this suggests that scientific discourse was
fairly homogenous during this time. That it continues to remain relatively stable
to this day can be explained by the fact that these fixed, somewhat formulaic,
forms have become ‘encapsulated’ by a dependency on the way knowledge
is produced whereby findings and bold claims are foregrounded to serve the
interests of (Bazerman, 2015, p. 267)
university departments and professional societies (with their structures of rewards
and advancements), government and business interests and funding (based on
perceived needs for scientific and technological knowledge), knowledge-based
professions that pervade contemporary society (with their reliance on systems
of authority and credentials), expanding educated populations who look toward
science for knowledge and evolving technologies and systems for the production
and distribution of texts (including cheap printing, commercial publishing
companies, university and professional libraries, national mail systems and
international agreements), despite advances in digital technology.9

8
The grading of papers had been introduced for the first time in 1792 at Cambridge University.
Postman, N. (1993). Technopoly: The surrender of culture to technology. Vintage Books.
9
Despite the stability of genres described by Bazerman, Hyland, K., & Feng (Kevin), J. (2017). Is
academic writing becoming more informal? English for Specific Purposes, 45, 40–51. [Link]
org/[Link] have begun to detect some linguistic informality in
academic writing in what they call ‘illicit initials’, i.e. starting a sentence with ‘and’, ‘but’ or ‘so’.
 How Did We Get Here? A Selected History 67

But just as the humanist University was characterized by the contradictory

dualisms of expressive individualism (epitomized by Montaigne) and
technological standardization (triggered by print), so too was the university
of the twentieth century caught between competing ways of thinking: on the
one hand, a staunch faith in the precision and exactitude of science meant that
hitherto ‘unscientific’ disciplines such as philology and (applied) linguistics
became scientized (Orman, 2016), systematized (Harris & Taylor, 1989) and
unified into an object of study that assumes language lies outside of us and
can be a conduit for thought that is independent of its users (Yun & Standish,
2018). On the other, the emphasis on clarity, transparency of language and logic
triggered a literary ‘relativist turn’ (Turner, 2010). This encouraged the reader
to bring their own understanding to the text and to question the authority of
both the author and the written word (Olson, 1994). Writers, historians, social
critics and philosophers such as Richard Rorty, Michel Foucault, Jacques
Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend,
even the Ludwig Wittgenstein of The Philosophical Investigations (Sigmund,
2017), became controversially known as the post-modernists who ‘relativized’
knowledge, reified ‘discourse’ and generally questioned the power of language
to ‘refer’ to reality. In so doing, they developed an influential rhetorical style of
their own which, unlike the grammar of the research article, privileged sentence
length and syntactical subordination10 as a way of displaying through form the
complex interconnectedness of reality, particularly social, psychological and
philosophical reality.

Writing and Its Ideologies

As Bazerman has shown, writing has the power to shape knowledge. Because of
this power, several scholars have been concerned with how writing also enacts
political and social ‘ideologies’. For the sake of brevity, I simply take ideology to
mean ‘worldviews’, although I acknowledge the nuance and contention that such
a loaded word warrants because of its connotations (see, for example, Hannah
Arendt (1953), who defines ideology literally as ‘the logic of an idea’ and follows
this through with an account of how following the logic of an idea can result in
‘terror’).

10
Wittgenstein’s aphoristic style is clearly an exception to this.
68 What Makes Writing Academic

This section, therefore, limits itself to signposting rather than developing the
link between academic writing practices and ideology because similar ideas have
either already been hinted at or will re-merge in subsequent chapters. For now,
it is sufficient to note that literacy practices, which include academic writing, are
ideological in the sense that they enact worldviews. This has already transpired
from the above discussion where I argued that ‘Western’ views of literacy
have invested alphabetical writing with the power to ‘raise consciousness’ and
improve thinking in ways that other writing systems do not. This worldview
contrasts with other worldviews whereby literacies do not need to be alphabetic
to develop and display ‘good thinking’ (Arnheim, 1969; Kara, 2015; Kuttner et
al., 2017).
In his history of the American university curriculum, Russell (2002)
documents how academic writings enact what he calls ‘ideal’ social practices.
When these are dictated by the needs of industry, writing becomes specialized
and technical. When they are motivated by a research ideal, such as the
Humboldtian faith in the fundamental laws of science, not only do they prevent
any other genre from taking root, but they impose a straightjacket on the genres
of all disciplines (Russell, 2002, pp. 71, 79, 85):
To understand why certain forms of student writing endured and others faded,
or why certain pedagogies included writing and others did not, one must look
to the character of the research ideal and the ways it interacted with writing
in the new mass education system …. German scholarship rapidly set a new
standard for academic writing, not only in the sciences but also in the emerging
humanities and social sciences because disciplines viewed student writing
through the narrow lens of their own research writing, they rarely explored
other possibilities.

Russell further posits that these ‘ideals’ can morph into ‘ideologies’ (2002,
p. 269). He exemplifies this with reference to two progressive US writing
programmes in the 1950s and 1960s which were abolished because they prioritized
the developmental and learning potential of writing over its specialized, skills-
based technical nature. These programmes drew significantly on the progressive
ideas of Arthur N. Applebee, an educationalist who regarded writing as integral
to the learning process and was associated with progressive left-wing political
ideals of equality and inclusion. Given the right-wing conservative political
tendencies of the United States at the time, according to Russell, the association
with a left-wing progressive thinker might explain why such programmes were
not maintained. Several other writing scholars have similarly claimed that
 How Did We Get Here? A Selected History 69

writing ‘reproduces the ideologies and inequities of the institution and society’
(Archer & Breuer, 2016, p. 42); that academic writing as it is practised and taught
in today’s academy is ‘ideological, transparent, objective and autonomous’
(Bennett, 2015; Lea & Street, 1998; Street, 1984); that it embodies ‘exclusionary
ideologies’ (Lillis, 2001; Scott, 2013; Thesen & Cooper, 2013; Turner, 2018) and
that by focusing on accuracy and standards, it privileges conservative, elitist and
undemocratic ‘ideologies’ (Rose, 1985).
As also shown by Fairclough (2001) and Bourdieu and Thompson (1991),
language wields great power in enacting political ideologies. The 1900s
witnessed the emergence of English as the lingua franca of academic research,
replacing French and German (and Latin). This signalled a shift in economic
and political power from mainland Europe (once the heart of academia) to
the UK and the United States (now setting higher education agendas). The
key events that cemented the shift to English include: the establishment of the
American university based on the German research model (Russell, 2002);
the two world wars, which intensified and prioritized scientific research
to serve the war industry (Russell, 2002); the consequences of nineteenth-
century colonialism (Mbembe, 2008; Morris, 2010; Said, 1978), then of de-
colonialism (such as India gaining its independence in 1947) and then again
of post-colonialism, which meant that European countries, including the
UK, had obligations to educate those it had colonized but also to maintain a
form of ‘soft power’ to ensure allegiances (Peters, 2017). Indeed, the English
language can be described as what Blommaert (2010) calls a ‘language
regime’, namely a complex sociolinguistic ‘multiplex item’ that is mobilized
to create dynamics of exclusion and marginalization. In this sense, language
becomes ideological because it compounds what counts as ‘good’ and ‘bad’
English, even in multilingual contexts, where different kinds of English have
evolved for a range of purposes that no longer warrant reference to a ‘correct’
standard.
Since English is the language of academia, it retains the soft power to enact
the ideology of the dominant ‘West’. However, and somewhat more insidiously,
the dominance of English (and of a certain variety of English, the one that
conflates objectivity with an epistemic virtue) as the language of academia enacts
linguistic injustices that exclude many from global academic conversations. This
has been documented in Turner (2010), Politzer-Ahles et al. (2020), Politzer-
Ahles et al. (2016), Lillis and Curry (2010b, 2015) and Hanauer et al. (2019).
This is why Turner, in discussing EAP, claims (2010, p. 78) that
70 What Makes Writing Academic

Academic writing should not be seen as autonomous or given. It is not an

autonomous set of skills or a discrete set of rhetorical values that have been
arrived independently, or been designated as such by some kind of decree. It
is rather a cultural practice that has been invested in rhetorical values that are
themselves the effects of wider cultural processes.

Moreover, ideologies are gendered because worldviews reflect the values of

all individuals. Feminist writings enact ideologies that are ‘situated’ (Haraway,
1988), meaning that they acknowledge, through language, the bodies that
produce them, the emotions that accompany them and the processes,
constraints and locations that engendered them. They are typically contrasted
with the confident certitude of male-authored objective, rational, impersonal
texts. For feminist scholar Haraway, like Laurel Richardson referred to in
Chapter 1, discourses of ‘objectivity’ are ‘enshrined in elementary textbooks
and technoscience booster literature’ (Haraway, 1988, p. 576); yet, even
scientists know that this is not how science is ‘actually made’, because the
history of science also tells us that science is achieved through trial, error and
incertitude (Kuhn, 1962). Instead, Haraway argues her stance in a style that
academic writing textbooks do not showcase, presumably because her writing
does not display the features of academicness that the standardized academic
writing industry privileges. This omission is ideological, too, because it denies
students the opportunity to be exposed to forms of academic writing that
embody different worldviews by subscribing to other epistemic virtues, such
as situated knowledge and feminist epistemologies, and that communicate
knowledge through the use other kinds of prose, such as creative non-fiction
(Gutkind, 1997), to narrate factually accurate stories that draw on a range of
literary styles, such as personal memoirs and lyric essays (which combine prose
and poetry).
Ideologies are also technological. Postman describes these in terms of a
‘competition’ whereby one technology vies to dominate another in order to gain
advantage (1993, p. 16):
New technologies compete with old ones—for time, for attention, for money,
for prestige, but mostly for dominance of their world-view. This competition is
implicit once we acknowledge that a medium contains an ideological bias. And
it is a fierce competition, as only ideological competitions can be. It is not merely
a matter of tool against tool—the alphabet attacking ideographic writing, the
printing press attacking the illuminated manuscript, the photograph attacking
the art of painting, television attacking the printed word. When media make war
against each other, it is a case of world-views in collision.
 How Did We Get Here? A Selected History 71

The idea that technologies embody a worldview is also captured in McLuhan

(1964), who argued that technologies are ‘extensions of man [sic]’ because they
embody the values of who creates them and deploys them. In his oft-quoted
dictum, the ‘medium is the message’ (1964, p. 13), he was referring to the fact
that language divorced from the context through which it communicates, its
medium, becomes meaningless. For McLuhan, the ‘context’ of language includes
the media (e.g. the words, visuals, sounds) through which language is carried. To
understand a message one therefore needs to account for the medium through
which that message is conveyed. Since that medium includes language, the
affordances of language – its opportunities and potentials as well as its constraints
– need to be acknowledged because as Bezemer and Kress (2008, p. 190) remind
us in their multimodal and socio-semiotic analysis of scientific textbooks, there
is always ‘something lost and something gained’ when we move between media
(a process known as ‘transduction’, i.e. translating meanings from one medium
to another such as from word to image) and that even in our choice of fonts and
how we organize space on the page, we are communicating our ideologies to our
readers:
[The] use of layout realizes an ideology of simplicity of display that is comparable
to what is often said about sans serif fonts: That is, providing less ‘information’
is seen as apt for those regarded to have a lesser capacity to process information.

A further way in which ideology can be enacted through writing relates to

epistemic injustice. By measuring academic competence almost exclusively
through writing assessments that require standards of literacy that are
exclusionary, we restrict which knowledge and whose knowledge is allowed
to emerge. This point has been made by Flores and Rosa (2015), who have
called out the raciolinguistic ideologies that underpin the monolingual literacy
standards to which bilingual Spanish speakers are expected to conform,
standards which discourage multilingualism from the American classroom.
In this sense, excluding knowledge and ways of thinking not traditionally
communicated in writing amounts to a form of ‘epistemic injustice’ (Carel &
Kidd, 2014), namely an unfairness towards the way somebody communicates
their knowledge because their background, upbringing, education, interests and
abilities differ from the standard and because we (the readers/receivers) don’t
understand why somebody is communicating the way they are. The phrase
‘epistemic injustice’ was coined by moral philosopher Miranda Fricker (2007)
to refer to the ways in which the words of a speaker (in our case, a writer) are
ignored, derided or simply misunderstood because the hearer (or the reader) is
72 What Makes Writing Academic

negatively or ignorantly pre-disposed towards the speaker (writer). This negative

predisposition could involve racist, sexist or educational biases, such as those
implied by Rose (1989) when discussing Lucia’s exclusion from the psychology
class (see Chapter 1): Lucia was excluded on the grounds that she didn’t have
the language of academic psychology; yet, she was knowledgeable because of
her situated experience of mental illness. Instances of epistemic injustice also
resonate throughout Sperlinger et al. (2018), who argue that higher education
should be made accessible to a far greater range of people and throughout life, not
only at the age of eighteen. And finally, since translanguaging and codeswitching
form part of a complex ecology of literacies whereby multilingualism is the
norm for many students and academics, not the exception, preventing writers
from making meaning and communicating their knowledge by drawing on a
range of resources (i.e. polysemiosis) amounts to an ideology of discrimination
(Canagarajah, 2011, 2013b, 2013c, 2018).

Conclusions

History as a method for understanding the phenomena we care about has two
main functions: it allows us to trace the genealogies of phenomena so that we
can identify key junctures at which things might have turned out differently; it
lends itself to being selected to advance a particular worldview. In this chapter,
I have challenged the histories that conflate writing with the alphabet and with
higher-order thinking, arguing instead that writing did not have to be conflated
with the alphabet and that although it has been, this does not mean that
alphabetic cultures are better at thinking than oral or visual cultures. I have also
highlighted that within academic writing cultures there is a thriving diversity
of genres; yet, modern-day standards of academic writing seem to have evolved
from and reified only one, the experimental article. Selecting the histories that
have colluded with the idea that writing raises consciousness and that academic
writing is ‘objective’ amounts to an ideological stance that leads to unjust
practices, such as the exclusion of knowledge that is not presented ‘objectively’
in written form.
 3

What Makes Writing Academic: Learning from

Writings ‘in the Wild’

Introduction

what is academic writing? What is an academic community? Wide-ranging

change will occur only if the academy redefines writing for itself, changes the
terms of the argument, (and) sees instruction in writing as one of its central
concerns.

(Rose, 1985, p. 359)

At this pivotal point in the story about what makes writing academic, I
showcase the diversity of academic texts by drawing attention to writings that
roam naturally, ‘in the wild’, so to speak. Like Rose, I call for a re-definition of
academic writing, one that is more inclusive and diverse, less standardized and
prescriptive, less wedded to the ideologies associated with alphabetic literacies
and more open to diverse ways of communicating knowledge. With reference to
multimodal and multilingual doctoral theses and other modes that do not rely on
the linearity of the alphabet and of prose to be ‘academic’, I highlight the role that
writer agency can play in shaping written knowledge. In this and the remaining
chapters, I will argue that what makes writing academic are the emergent varied,
current and future practices of the academy, including its values.
Chapter 3 posits that what makes writing academic, namely its
‘academicness’, cannot be reduced to any particular feature. Secondly, it
explains the naturally occurring diversity of academic writings with reference
to Adler-Kassner and Wardle (2015)’s threshold concepts in writing studies.
And, thirdly, it shows that ‘argument’, commonly assumed to be the defining
characteristic of academic writing, is one of the features that can make it
academic, but it is not the only one.
74 What Makes Writing Academic

Academicness

I use the term ‘academicness’ to refer to a holistic property of a text, i.e. the totality
of what makes it academic rather than, for example, legal or poetic. A property
is a quality that can be predicated of whole objects, like colour, shape, sound, or
taste. It is a quality that does not pick out any single or uniquely identifying part
of the whole object (Sellars, 1963). In this sense, academicness is like ‘meaning’:
it emerges from a context and cannot be reduced to a ‘single element that stands
alone’ because it is ‘relational’ and ‘holistic’ in structure (Malpas, 2002, p. 407).
Since it emerges, ‘academicness’ is not dependent on the presence or absence
of specific features relating to language, genre moves or argument. If what
made writing academic could be reduced to these specific features, then hoax
academic papers such as those by Alan Sokal (Cuthbert, 2018; Franca & Lloyd,
2000; Sokal, 1996, 2008) and Ike Antkare (Labbé, 2010; Labbé & Labbé, 2012;
Van Noorden, 2014) would count as academic in virtue of the fact that they
display the features that standard academic writing programmes readily teach as
‘academic’ (such as the passive voice): despite displaying conventional academic
forms, hoaxes promulgate ‘nonsense’ (Alvesson et al., 2017) and, in so doing,
they fail to adhere to the standards of excellence (MacIntyre, 1985) inherent
to socio-academic practices (SAPs). These SAPs include epistemic virtues such
as a commitment to the truth (Connell, 2013), to academic integrity (Zgaga,
2009), to social justice (Case, 2013) and to innovation and research (Warnock,
1989). Such commitments require an ethical orientation towards honesty, an
orientation that must be intentional and originate from an agent, in this case the
writer. Neither an automated generator of academic jargon (C. Labbé, personal
communication March 25, 2014; Labbé & Labbé, 2012) nor the deliberate
human intention to mislead and distort disciplinary knowledge (Sokal, 2008)
is commensurate with these standards of socio-academic excellence. It is in this
sense that academic hoaxes do not count as academic because academicness
cannot be reduced to its forms and because there are no inherent standards of
excellence from which academicness can emerge. Clearly, however, those who
published these articles, the editor-readers of Social Text and Springer (for Sokal
and Antkare, respectively) believed them to be genuinely academic, probably
because they based their judgements of academicness on the form of the texts
(i.e. they looked and sounded academic). Sokal (2008) has documented these
reasons. They include the editors’ appreciation of post-modern academic jargon
and relativist conclusions which suggested to them that the text was bona fide.
 Learning from Writings ‘in the Wild’ 75

Similarly, Van Noorden (2014) has indicated that the fake papers published
by Springer had ‘characteristic vocabulary’, meaning the kind of recognizable
academic jargon that a fake text generator, in this case SCIgen, had been
programmed to produce.
If the text itself, i.e. its form, has the power to generate this level of confidence
in the reader, then this might suggest that the academicness of a text resides
in the text itself and/or in the reader’s perception of it. Accordingly, hoaxes
might indeed count as academic in virtue of the reader’s perception of their
academicness. However, this is an uncomfortable position to hold because readers
can be wrong, in the sense of being misled. Alternatively, rather than relying on
the reader’s perception, the academicness of a text might reside in the author’s
intent (Fish, 2017). The writings of twentieth-century analytic philosopher
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s are a case in point. Wittgenstein famously wrote his
philosophy of logic and language using aphorisms, namely short, sequenced
statements that express a definition or truth in a literary style that is terse and
that can seem brusque (Wittgenstein & Russell, 1922). Do his aphorisms count
as ‘academic’ writing? Would an undergraduate or postgraduate or doctoral
student be allowed to write like this? Why? This remains contentious, yet the
debate surrounding whether they count as academic hasn’t prevented them from
remaining established and cited, in the disciplinary (academic) discourses of
analytic philosophy (Sigmund, 2017, p. 128):
Wittgenstein confided to Russell [one of his PhD supervisors (the other was
G. E. Moore)] that no one would ever understand the book, although it was, as
he put it, ‘crystal clear.’ Elsewhere, however, he noted: ‘I am aware that all these
sentences are unclear.’ As he seemed to realize at least to some extent, his style
struck an odd balance between moments of dazzling lucidity and moments of
total opacity, reflecting the tension between his yearning for clear expression
and his awareness that some things simply cannot be expressed … Wittgenstein’s
style was at once cryptic and crystalline.

How could a text that was both ‘clear’ and ‘unclear’ become such a classic of
analytical philosophy? One possible reason is that Wittgenstein was well known
and sufficiently well regarded in his intellectual circles, namely Cambridge
University, for his ideas to be trusted and his writing respected. This suggests
that it is the ideas, the extent to which a person is known and accepted in their
academic community and the academic standards of excellence of an academic
community, that determine what makes a text academic, not the form of the
text itself. Compare this to the treatment of philosopher Jacques Derrida,
76 What Makes Writing Academic

deemed to be a ‘charlatan’ and unworthy of an honorary degree in Philosophy

by philosophers trained in the analytic tradition of Cambridge University, like
Wittgenstein and Russell: Derrida, unlike Wittgenstein, apparently, did not meet
the ‘accepted standards of clarity and rigour’ of ‘normal and universal’ writing
(Peters, 2009). Yet, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logicus Philosophicus (which was
also his PhD thesis) was rejected by several publishers because of its cryptic
style, indicating that a judgement about the text was concurrently being made
on the basis of the text itself and/or the reader’s perception of it. Eventually, the
Tractatus was accepted for publication thanks to Bertrand Russell’s introduction
and endorsement, which further signals that ‘knowing who the author is and
endorsing their intentions’ may have more bearing on what is considered
‘academic’ than the form of the text itself.
This complex relationship between authorial intent, reader perception and
text meaning lies at the heart of what makes writing academic. It matters because
it has implications for who gets published and what grade an essay receives.
Debates about this relationship have an established literary history that highlights
the messy complexity of how and whether it is the text that represents knowledge
or the author. This complexity can be described in terms of the tension between
textual authority and authorship (linked to a foundational conceptualization of the
author as the ultimate source of knowledge), on the one hand and interpretations
and reader meaning-making (referred to as hermeneutics, whereby it is the reader
who brings meaning to the text through interpretation), on the other. That the
author’s intended meaning is irrelevant to the interpretation of a text is referred to
in literary theory as the ‘intentional fallacy’. Proponents of this fallacy are Barthes
(1967); Wimsatt and Beardsley (1946) and Foucault (1969). Strictly speaking, on
their account, it would not matter that Sokal and Antkare are hoaxes because if
the academicness (or meaning) resides in the text, not the author, then nothing
more than the text is needed to judge its academicness. Conversely, proponents
of the thesis that authorial intent does matter include Knapp and Michaels (1982)
and Fish (2017). Knapp and Michaels collapse ‘the author’s intended meaning’
with ‘the text meaning’ arguing that we cannot ‘derive one term from the other,
since to have one is already to have both’ (1982, p. 724). For them, only authorial
intent establishes text meaning in the sense that the intent is the text (i.e. the text
is an expression of the author’s intent). Stanley Fish also points to the culture of
plagiarism as further evidence that authorial intent and originality are measures
of academicness: if intent didn’t matter, he argues, then why would the ‘West’
be so concerned with plagiarism and originality (Jones, 2014; Moynihan, 2015;
Pennycook, 1996)?
 Learning from Writings ‘in the Wild’ 77

The Sokal and Antkare texts complicate matters further. Despite both being
hoaxes, they differ in at least one crucial way: one was written by a human and
the other by a computer. If we appeal to author intent, following Knapp and
Michaels (1982) and Fish (2017), then the Antkare texts are clearly not academic
because they cannot enact any SAP (further outlined later in this chapter) since
they were generated by a computer and, typically, computers do not have intent.
But, following Barthes and other proponents of the ‘intentionalist fallacy’, Sokal’s
article could count as ‘academic’ because it displays ‘predictable and recognisable
patterns’ that readers would normally expect in an academic text: it is researched
in the traditional sense of ‘referring to relevant literature’; it made sense to its
intended audience; and, worryingly, it remains (as I write this) in circulation
and available in Social Text via an established academic publisher, JSTOR (Sokal,
1996). The fact the text is published in an academic journal further confers
institutional legitimacy to the text, giving it academic credibility. Moreover, at
the time, the article generated genuine academic debate around what counts
as knowledge (see, for example, Dawkins [1998]). What makes us reluctant to
call it ‘academic’, however, is not its content but the intention with which it was
produced and perhaps more importantly, the dishonesty of this intention: Sokal
intended to parody and discredit critical theory and did not believe his own
arguments.
In the Sokal case, intent becomes a contributing factor in whether a text is
deemed to be academic, whereby his dishonest intent detracts from the academic
credibility of his text. But this, too, is an uncomfortable conclusion to reach
because it suggests that intent matters: if the intent were honest, would this
change our perception of whether the text is academic? For example, despite
being ‘unclear’, was Wittgenstein ‘sufficiently honest’ to warrant being published?
Moreover, how do we establish authorial intent, when the author may not be
available to confirm what their intent was? A further problem with appealing
to the author’s intention to determine whether a text is bona fide academic or
not is that, to the joy of many students and academics, this would confer to the
writer ultimate jurisdiction as to whether their writing counts as academic or
not because only the writer can know what they intended.
Both the hoax and Sokal’s subsequent justification for it raise further unsettling
prospects for determining what makes a text academic: on the one hand, the
hoax was read as an ‘academic’ text; on the other, none of it was ‘true’. If we accept,
as I do, that a necessary value of higher education is a commitment to ‘truth’ or to
‘realness’ (understood broadly from a critical realist perspective as the recognition
that external ontologies exist [Bengtsen & Barnett, 2017]), then the hoax was not
78 What Makes Writing Academic

academic. But if we accept this, then we also have to accept that the commercial
tests relied upon by universities to predict the writing abilities of students, such as
the IELTS and Pearson Tests of Academic English, are not academic either. This
is because they are written to display language and mimic academic essay forms,
not to advance truthful, or real, accounts of the world.
To sum up, what I am claiming so far is that when we invoke the formal
markers of academicness as standards by which to judge whether a text is
academic or not, hoaxes would count as academic but the unconventional texts I
refer to next would not. This is because unconventional texts – academic writings
that don’t conform to the imaginary of what an academic text should look like
– display the ‘wrong’ sort of language and moves and certainly not the kind of
academic language that EAP writing programmes and textbooks are likely to
engage with because they do not meet putative standards of academicness. Yet,
such texts circulate in ‘the wild’ and are imbricated in the structures of academic
knowledge communication. They include, alongside many others, the graphic
doctoral dissertation of Nick Sousanis (2015), the musical PhD exegesis of A.
D. Carson (2017), the playful and feminist PhD thesis of Harron (2016), the
aphorisms of Ludwig Wittgenstein and earlier still, the scientific dialogues of
Galileo Galilei’s Two Chief World Systems.1
Crucially, the need for these academic texts to break with convention was
not driven by the arbitrary whim, or intention, of their authors. These academic
writers broke the rules on epistemic grounds: their textual forms afford knowledge
representation that conventional forms, arguably, do not. Theoretical physicist
Daniel Shanahan (2015), for example, holds the form of the scientific article to
account by calling for it to become a ‘living document’ that allows more space to
report methods rather than results. Since what matters most in scientific research
is the appropriateness of the methods used and the extent to which these can be
replicated to yield sound findings, methods need to become more prominent
in scientific writing. Instead, findings rather than methods tend to be given
more prominence in abstracts and in the way journals ‘market’ key findings. By
not giving due prominence to methods and by granting more visibility to the
findings of scientific research, the ‘form’ of the academic paper amounts to a
scientific ‘fraud’. This fraud is further compounded when superlative language is

1
Clearly, Galilei’s dialogues were written before modern academic conventions existed. My point
here, however, is that Galilei chose the dialogue genre to propose his heliocentric thesis as opposed
to the more conventional prose and less controversial thesis of his other work on classical physics
(cf. Chapter 2).
 Learning from Writings ‘in the Wild’ 79

used to inflate the significance of the findings (Vinkers et al., 2015). By allowing
more published space for methods, scientists would curb the unscientific drive
that publishers have towards prioritizing controversial or trending results which
are more likely to capture the attention of a superficial audience than satisfy
the needs of the scientific community. Shanahan, therefore, advocates that we
re-configure the scientific article so that we can move beyond the now-obsolete
print model and truly embrace the freedom that online publication gives us,
moving towards living documents that can be updated, amended, extended and
indeed directly linked to other articles and data.
Shanahan’s living physics document, Sousanis’s visual interdisciplinary
argument, Carson’s aural anti-racist activism and Harron’s black feminist
mathematics can all be classified as examples of what Bazerman (1988) means
by ‘shaping’ knowledge or of what literacy scholar Lunsford means when
she claims that writing is ‘epistemic’, namely that it doesn’t ‘simply record
thought or knowledge but … has the capacity to actually produce thought and
knowledge’ (2015).2 In drawing attention to these academic writers-authors, I
am highlighting that the academicness of a text can be explained in terms of an
interaction between the structural elements available in the textual environment
(such as form, grammar, genre and reader expectations) and the disciplinary
knowledge, values and intentions of the writer who has agency in shaping the text.
What makes these four authors ‘academic’ thus becomes an interaction between,
on the one hand, the writer’s disciplinary values and their intention to ‘shape
knowledge’ by giving more space to methods, visuals, rap and voice, respectively,
thus upholding the epistemic integrity of the scientific, interdisciplinary, socially
just and feminist endeavour and, on the other, what the textual environment
affords in terms of structures that enable this to happen, such as the possibilities
afforded by the online medium in the case of Shanahan’s living document or the
fact that there are other ways of writing non-fiction that still fulfil the academic
standards of excellence required for the award of a PhD in mathematics.
What makes the text academic is thus irreducible to either the writer’s
intentions or to the structural form of the text.

2
N. B.: As argued in Chapter 2 with reference to Ong and others, this is not tantamount to claiming
that the thought and knowledge produced by writing is better than thought and knowledge produced
by other media. My claim here is simply that since writing has the power to shape and produce
thought and knowledge (as do many other modes of communication), the forms that writing takes
matter to the kind of knowledge that is created. For example, Carson’s anti-racist thesis would have
been different – less persuasive? Less impactful? – had he written in conventional academic prose
instead of performance poetry, rap and rhythm.
80 What Makes Writing Academic

Socio-academic Practices (SAPs)

Despite breaking the rules, these ‘wild’ texts are academic. What makes them so
are their SAPs. SAPs are the specific practices of the academy, what MacIntyre
(1985) might have described as their inherent ‘standards of excellence’, standards
that cannot be reduced to any finite set of external skills. This is because they are
what philosopher of mind, complexity and emergence Fodor (1974, 1997) might
have described as ‘multiply-realisable’, meaning that they are complex phenomena
that have been caused by a range of interacting variables. The standards of
excellence which are inherent to academic practices include acknowledging
the work of others, establishing warrants (Toulmin, 1958), arguing, providing
evidence, generating and crossing threshold concepts (Meyer et al., 2010) and
creating new knowledge. Crucially, what makes these practices academic are their
underlying epistemic virtues, such as scientific, social and human values and
knowledge (Fricker, 2007; Harding, 1995; Wylie, 2003); qualified commitments
to subjectivity, objectivity and trained judgement (Daston & Galison, 2007), to
the truth or truthfulness (Connell, 2013), to academic integrity (Zgaga, 2009),
to social justice (Case, 2013; McArthur, 2020), to innovation and research
(Warnock, 1989) and to creativity (Besley & Peters, 2013; Robinson, 2001). SAPs
can include problem-solving and problem-generating research; understanding,
imagination and interpretation; care, wisdom and thinking; activism (Spivak,
1987); ideologies and identities; creativity and reflection; inclusion and diversity,
phronesis (deliberation) and eudamonia (human flourishing); risk-taking and
public engagement; and intellectual love (Rowland, 2008). References to these
practices and epistemic virtues resonate throughout the literatures on higher
education and the nature of academic study, yet they are rarely mentioned as
conditions for what makes writing academic (Barnett, 2012; Bengtsen & Barnett,
2018; Besley & Peters, 2013; Biesta et al., 2019; de Sousa Santos, 2017; Nixon,
2012; Sperlinger et al., 2018; Thesen & Cooper, 2013; Warnock, 1989b).
When writers (and, by extension, their texts) are committed to SAPs and
epistemic virtues (EVs) rather than to a display of form, they are more likely to
mobilize a wider range of semiotic resources. This is because when academicness
is conceived as a non-reductive property of texts, as I showcase below, there is no
a priori semiotic resource to enact it. What this means is that an image, sound or
movement (Roque, 2015) can confer academicness to a text.
SAPs emerge from an interaction between the writer (their agency, knowledge,
intentions, values and abilities) and knowledge of the textual environments they
operate in. This textual environment includes the readers and the institutional,
 Learning from Writings ‘in the Wild’ 81

social and linguistic structures which determine conventions and which writers
need to be knowledgeable about so that they can make informed decisions about
shaping their academic texts. In claiming that writers have agency in shaping
their texts, I am not downplaying the role of the reader or of institutional
expectations in establishing the academicness of texts. I recognize with Tardy
(2016, p. 76), for example, that:
In the traditional academic classroom, clearly defined roles of the teacher (as
expert and assessor) and the student (as novice and learner) shape how student
texts are both written and read and they limit the likelihood that a student will
depart from genre expectations.

However, innovation, even at a relatively novice level, does occur, as the

doctoral writings referred to earlier exemplify. It occurs through interaction,
dialogue and negotiation with the ‘experts’, who belong to and have some agency
in shaping the structures of the institutions that establish academic conventions.
This innovation needs to be given a space in which it can be nurtured because
it is what allows novel SAPs to emerge. For example, Harron (2016), in her
mathematics PhD, uses language to disrupt her readers’ expectations and to
enact a socio-academic practice of inclusion: this is signalled by the claim in her
Preface that ‘Respected research math is dominated by men of a certain attitude’.
Harron is using her academic writing to foreground her identity as a female
mathematician in a male-dominated discipline and to advance her ideology of
social inclusion (Adler-Kassner & Wardle, 2015). This is further compounded
by writing her thesis for three different audiences, or readers: the lay person, the
initiated person and the expert. Harron is knowingly and knowledgeably both
anticipating and orienting her readers’ expectations by disrupting the traditional
genre of the PhD thesis that assumes one type of reader (the expert). She does this
because she wants to write a thesis that is ‘as mathematically complete as I could
honestly make it’ and for a community of mathematicians that includes those
who ‘do not feel that they are encouraged to be themselves’. By interacting with
her textual environment and by choosing the forms and genres that allow her to
express her identity and ideology, she is enacting a socio-academic practice of
inclusion and social justice. Had she chosen to write a conventional mathematics
thesis, she is unlikely to have shaped knowledge of mathematics in this way.

Threshold Concepts (TCs)

Having argued that academicness refers to holistic and relational SAPs that
cannot be reduced to any single element in the text or to a writer’s intent, the
82 What Makes Writing Academic

following section examines threshold concepts in writing studies (Adler-Kassner

& Wardle, 2015) to further argue that what makes writing academic emerges
from an interaction between the ways in which writers, i.e. agents, conceptualize
their written texts and their textual environments, understood as the structures
that both constrain and enable writer choice.
Threshold concepts designate a powerful heuristic for describing knowledge
and how we come to understand it. Threshold concepts can be understood
as ‘portals’ that open ‘a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking
about something’ (Meyer & Land, 2006, p. 4). This new way of thinking has
a ‘transformative function’ because ‘once students have understood a key
disciplinary concept, they are taken into a new intellectual and emotional
space’. For example, Reimann and Jackson (2006, p. 166) discuss the threshold
concept of ‘opportunity cost’ in economics. This is explained as ‘the sacrifice
made, when resources are scarce, to seek opportunities between competing uses
of finite resources’. An ‘opportunity cost’ is therefore not actually a cost. It is
a ratio that measures ‘the best alternative’ in the range of resources available.
Understanding this, for an economics student, is part of a ‘liminal’ state in their
learning whereby they may feel confused, stuck and challenged (Kiley & Wisker,
2009, p. 432) as they try to ‘integrate’ their previous understandings with the
new ‘troublesome’ understandings that seem ‘conceptually difficult, counter-
intuitive or even “alien”’ (Meyer & Land, 2006, p. 39).
Similarly, understanding that what makes writing academic cannot be
reduced to a set of prescribed conventions requires entering a liminal state
where the familiar comfort of previous knowledge (e.g. prescriptive paragraph
patterns or impersonal grammar) becomes troublesome. Although threshold
concepts are referred to as ‘troublesome’ because they disrupt previously
held understandings, this does not presuppose that there is a ‘correct way’ to
understand a concept: the point is that any shift in conceptual understandings
is likely to be troublesome. This point is implied by Cousin (2006) when she
reminds us that threshold concepts are ‘bounded’, meaning that concepts border
with other concepts that index new conceptual areas. Their boundedness
requires us to resist ‘essentialist readings’ by remaining open to questioning the
concepts themselves. This is because of the ‘provisional explanatory capacity’ of
disciplinary concepts rather than because of any ‘congealed property’ that might
be defining them. For example, understanding that in economics an ‘opportunity
cost’ is not actually a ‘cost’ but a ‘ratio’ does not mean that understanding it as a
‘ratio’ is correct: this, too, may be a ‘provisional explanation’. It is the conceptual
shift in crossing the threshold that matters because this shift will be required
 Learning from Writings ‘in the Wild’ 83

again for new and evolving disciplinary understandings. In what follows, I am

proposing that a similar conceptual shift is needed to understand that what
makes writing academic are its practices and not its forms. The shift consists in
the troublesome recognition that when writing is reduced to a relatively finite
and closed set of skills, it may fail to ‘encapsulate’ new SAPs, but that when it
opens up to new skills it can shape knowledge in new and creative ways.
In Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts in Writing Studies, Adler-
Kassner and Wardle (2015) articulate thirty-seven threshold concepts of
academic writing. These threshold concepts foreground the diversity, the
affordances, the social practices and the mobility of both writing and writers
in ways that a standard EAP writing class, for example, typically, does not. An
example of a threshold concept in writing includes what Lunsford (2015) calls
‘performativity’,3 meaning that written texts can make things happen ‘beyond
their own terms of reference’ (Back, 2016), such as a policy change. Another
example is the power of texts to build identities (Villanueva, 2015), such as
feminist writings (Haraway, 1988; Harding, 1995) and ecologies of knowledge (de
Sousa Santos, 2009), which allow non-dominant epistemologies and ontologies
to become visible. Policy changes and new epistemologies and ontologies are
examples of SAPs that emerge from the performativity of a text and from the
identities it foregrounds. They are irreducible to prescribed language forms.
When a writer is knowledgeable about the range of options that the textual
environment affords, they can then make informed choices about the shape,
form, genre, language, modality of their written text. Below, I list and illustrate
what two of these threshold concepts look like when applied to academic writing.
Threshold Concept 1.5 refers to the fact ‘writing mediates activity’: ‘The
concept that writing mediates activity [e.g. a STOP sign or a performative]
is troublesome because it goes against the usual concepts of writing as “just”
transcribing … thought or speech’ (Adler-Kassner & Wardle, 2015, p. 27).
What makes writing academic with regard to this threshold concept is its
capacity to make things happen. An example of such a text might be O’Dwyer
et al. (2018), who invite us to resist the pressures of academia by performing a
manifesto. By choosing to write a manifesto, the authors are perceiving their
writing as a ‘Mediating Activity’. The academicness of their text (published in
a journal of reflective practice) emerges from the authors’ intention to perform
a manifesto and their knowledge of the textual possibilities available to them,

3
This is not the same meaning of ‘performativity’ found in Macfarlane (2021b).
84 What Makes Writing Academic

in this case a poem that represents the self-care they wish to perform (taken
from pages 245–7):
An invitation: to our reader
The poem that follows is both a representation of our self-care and reflective
practice and an invitation to others to engage in dialogue with us. We invite you
to read, to reflect and to resist.
Self care: a manifesto
Eat apple pancakes smothered in Nutella.
Practice yoga
Watch The English Patient
Turn off email notifications
Walk
Drink wine
Have a massage
Eat fish and chips
Swim.

Threshold concept 3.0 refers to the fact that writing enacts and creates
Identities and Ideologies: ‘When we seek to “apprentice” students into
academic writing, what ideological imperatives are being asserted in the
ways we choose to conceive of academic writers and writing?’ (Adler-
Kassner & Wardle, 2015, p. 50). Here, what can make writing academic
is the recognition that writers are different and as such, not only do they
bring different kinds of knowledge to their texts, they also shape their texts
differently. Examples of such writing include Harron (2016), Carson (2017)
and Kunju (2017), the latter having chosen to write his thesis in isiXhosa,
one of South Africa’s eleven languages. In doing this, not only does he
obtain his doctorate, but he also asserts his humanity through an ideological
imperative that consisted in reclaiming as academic an indigenous language
and in resisting the dominant geopolitics of academic English (Lillis & Curry,
2010a). By choosing to write in isiXhosa, the academicness of Kunju’s text
emerges from the interaction between his intention to challenge a dominant
ideology and the textual possibilities available to him (namely writing in
isiXhosa instead of English).
When read cumulatively, these and many other threshold concepts afford
creative possibilities for re-thinking academicness. These possibilities include
de-centring language to embrace multimodality and dethroning English as the
lingua franca of academia.
 Learning from Writings ‘in the Wild’ 85

Argument, Logic and Why Language Isn’t Enough

I have so far indicated that academicness, a holistic non-reductive property

that makes a text academic, resides neither in the text nor in the intention of
the writer for their text to count as academic. Instead, academicness can be
said to emerge from a space that facilitates the interplay of writer agencies and
their textual environments. These environments include reader expectations
and the range of threshold concepts that define writing. I articulate this
position more explicitly in Chapter 4, but before then, reference must be
made to the role that argument plays in determining the academicness of
a text. This is because argument is often associated with what makes a text
academic.
My contention will be that argument can make a text academic but that it is
only one of several non-defining features. It, too, emerges from the interaction
of a writer’s purpose (their agency) and their perception of what the textual
environment (the structure) affords. I begin this section by assuming a shared
and generic understanding of argument as the means through which we
persuade others (Fish, 2017), but as the section draws to a close, I will offer
more specific definitions with the intention of showing that an argument does
not need to be linguistic. This is intended to further foreground and disrupt the
historical contingency, introduced in Chapter 2, of the ‘Western’ logo-centric
legacy that conflates logical thinking with alphabetic literacy and, ultimately,
language.
Although there are times when academic communication doesn’t need to be
about argumentation (Allen, 2015; Bammer & Joeres, 2015), generally, we think of
argument as being a marker of academicness (as discussed throughout Andrews,
2010; Archer, 2016; Björkvall, 2016; Fish, 2017; Gourlay, 2016; Wingate, 2012).
In this section, therefore, I assume argument to be one of the properties that
emerge from the interaction between the writer and their textual environment,
but I also take it to be just one of the many non-essential SAPs that arise from
this interaction. I further demonstrate that there is no univocal understanding
of argument and because of this, academic arguments can take many forms.
I focus on the ways in which ‘argument’ has been conflated with language to
show that this conflation has led to marginalizing multimodal affordances of
argument. I conclude by claiming that an over-reliance on language limits our
ability to argue and that a multimodal approach to argument affords greater
academicness.
86 What Makes Writing Academic

How Language Came to Define Argument

As shown in Chapter 2, academic writing instruction has inherited a legacy which
considers language, and language alone, to be the primary enabler of complex,
higher-order thinking that ‘raises consciousness’. This ‘higher order thinking’
is further associated with ‘argumentation’, understood simply, but by no means
simplistically, as the ‘art of persuasion’ (Fish, 2017, p. 6): what Fish refers to as
the ‘art of persuasion’ is shorthand for the Aristotelian legacy of ethos, pathos
and logos which underscores much current literature on what argumentation
consists of (Ramage et al., 2009). Because of its persuasive powers, argument
has come to define academic communication (Andrews, 2010; Wingate, 2012).
However, we are now faced with yet another conflation, that between alphabetic
language and argumentation.
This conflation is a problem because we know from the histories of literacy
and of philosophy that language is both limited and fallible in capturing and,
therefore, doing justice to the ontologies we seek to represent and cognitively
engage with. Philosopher Miranda Fricker (2007) has not only re-iterated the
limits of language in representing the world, she has also shown that epistemic
injustices emerge from these limits. She describes several social situations in
which knowers who do not have the linguistic resources to interpret and then
describe a social event can become victims of a ‘hermeneutical injustice’. This is
when somebody (a knower) becomes disempowered and then disadvantaged by
social realities that have not developed the linguistic repertoires to describe an
event. Some of her examples relate to instances of sexual harassment whereby
women must develop the language needed to describe situations that may not be
adequately captured by previously established words, such as sexual ‘coercion’,
‘intimidation’ or ‘exploitation’: in the contexts that Fricker describes, ‘harassment’
helps women describe behaviours that were not adequately captured by the
other terms. She shows that language can create conceptual spaces to frame
thoughts and experiences in new ways, but, in doing so, she equally indexes how
readily language fails to describe what is happening.4 It is this failure that I wish
to foreground.
For our present purposes, the limits of language signal the possibility that
human cognition might develop through a range of representations whereby

4
Interestingly, the word ‘harassment’ does not exist in Italian. It is generally translated as molestia
(as in ‘being molested’). However, since the 2019 #MeToo scandal, whereby several women took
to social media to call out male harassment, the English word has increasingly been used in Italian
media, often untranslated.
 Learning from Writings ‘in the Wild’ 87

(academic) reality is not dependent on being represented by a single mode,

namely language. When argument is allowed to draw on the most fitting
modes rather than the most conventional, the richness and fullness of SAPs
are more likely to emerge. As artist and psychologist Rudolf Arnheim reminds
us (1974, p. 2):
The scientist builds conceptual models he [sic] wants to understand about a
given phenomenon. But he [sic] knows that there is no such thing as the full
representation of an individual instance.

That language is the most fitting modality to be the transparent carrier of

our thoughts has had many critics. Literacy and EAP scholar Karen Bennett,
for example, has described this conceptualization of language as a ‘transparency
trope’, claiming that rather than a conduit for reality, language is constitutive
of it. This view challenges the widely deferred to Orwellian metaphor whereby
language is seen as a ‘window pane’ that is detached from, but through which
we represent, the outside world: this view of language as a window onto reality
assumes that language is ‘clear’ and ‘transparent’. A more robust challenge
has come from socio-semiotic integrationist linguists, such as Harris (2011),
who claims that the ‘window pane’ view of language falls into the ‘fallacy of
telementation’. The fallacy assumes that words are adequate carriers of our
thoughts and that our listeners and hearers are able to intend our words as we
intended them to be understood, as though the meaning of these words were
transparent and complete, needing no further integration with the context
in which they were uttered or with the receiver’s own understanding of those
words. In this sense, traditional linguistics (in the tradition of De Saussure and
Chomsky) is segregationist and has failed to recognize that ‘languages must be
conceived as systems that are entirely dependent on their use in communication’
(Harris, 2011). Meaning emerges from the integration of the word and the social
context it is uttered in by the speaker or writer. It does not emerge from its
segregation, as the ‘window pane’ metaphor suggests. This explains why writers
need knowledge of their readers by interacting with their textual environments
and integrating meanings accordingly to allow academicness to emerge, but
it also explains why readers need knowledge of their writers: how else can we
explain why Wittgenstein and Derrida were understood by some but not by
others?
In his later writings, Wittgenstein himself adeptly captures the problem of
signification when he wonders what it means to ‘point to something’, in the
sense of trying to give an ostensive definition. He asks (1953, #33):
88 What Makes Writing Academic

[W]hat does ‘pointing to the shape’, ‘pointing to the colour’ consist in? Point to
a piece of paper. – And now point to its shape – now to its colour – now to its
number (that sounds queer) – How did you do it? You will say that you ‘meant’ a
different thing each time you pointed. And if I ask you how that is done, you will
say you concentrated your attention on the colour, the shape, etc.

Instead, Wittgenstein proposes that we think of meanings in terms of

‘language in use’. This frames language as a social practice and not as the mental
representation of what it refers to (Wittgenstein & Russell, 1922). Thinking of
language in this way, as integrated with its uses, has important implications
for how we think about academic writings. Integrating meanings and fixing
referents to ensure we all understand what we mean is a troubled process,
as painstakingly demonstrated by philosopher Saul Kripke (1972). What is
meant by ‘academic’ is not fixed because, in Kripkean terms, ‘academic’ is not
the ‘rigid designator’ of a fixed external referent in the same way as the word
‘bachelor’ is in designating an ‘unmarried man’ (or even a university degree).
Since the meaning of ‘academic’ cannot be fixed, what makes writing academic
remains open to how we integrate its meaning with its uses. From a linguistic
perspective, Harris (2011) claims that the ‘semiological value’ of using any
linguistic structure ‘depends on the circumstances and activities in which they
fulfil an integrational function’ rather than on external referents. Harris gives
the example of how the seemingly unequivocal word ‘tree’ can refer both to a
plant and to a landmark that signals ‘the need to turn left’: to understand ‘tree’
as ‘landmark’, we need to integrate a wide range of signs, circumstances and
activities.
On an integrationist reading, then, the visual literacies of Sousanis (2015),
the aural thesis of Carson (2017), the messy social scientific methods of Law
(2003) and the call by English (2015) to conceive of academic writing as a
creative venture can be said to have an ‘academic semiological value’ because
they depend on the academic ‘circumstances and activities’, namely the practices,
and their inherent standards of excellence, that generated them.
Yet, despite the ways in which writers translanguage and integrate signs
and meanings to advance their polysemiotic arguments, the burden of a ‘full
representation’ of our thoughts and meanings has historically been on (a mono)
language (Blair, 2008, p. 44):
Arguments are traditionally associated with speech, either written or oral, for
a couple of linked reasons. First, because the reasons they use are propositions.
Second, because propositions are standardly expressed by propositions in
language.
 Learning from Writings ‘in the Wild’ 89

Like language, what is meant by ‘argument’ is contested and varies according

to its purpose (Fish, 2017), its disciplinary norms5 (Andrews, 2010; Toulmin,
1958) and its cultural forms (Galtung, 1981; Kaplan, 1980 [1966]). Once we start
to investigate the structural diversity of propositional arguments and how this
might affect representations of reality, deeper questions arise about how form
and content relate to each other. Philosopher Martha Nussbaum has a long-
standing interest in this area and has focused on how form and content influence
each other in the field of philosophy (Nussbaum, 1990, p. 3):
How should one write, what words should one select, what forms and structures
and organisation, if one is pursuing understanding? … Style itself makes its
claims, expresses its own sense of what matters. Literary form is not separable
from philosophical content, but is, itself, a part of content – an integral part,
then, of the search for and the statement of truth.

An example of how ‘style itself makes its claims, expresses its own sense of
what matters’ is the Manifesto of Care (O’Dwyer et al., 2018) article referred to
earlier, which invites us to reflect on and resist the pressures of academic life by
affording us the opportunity to read an academic text written as poetry.
I now highlight how the meaning of argument has changed over time and
how it becomes conflated with language. This opens up the possibility for
argument in academic writing to go beyond language, making it inclusive of
a range of ‘ecologies of knowledges’ (de Sousa Santos, 2017), ‘textual ecologies’
(Canagarajah, 2018), ‘intellectual styles’ (Galtung, 1981) and ‘creativity’ (Besley
& Peters, 2013).

The Limits of Language

Stephen Toulmin (1958)’s The Uses of Argument was a turning point in the way
argumentation can be understood. This is because Toulmin repudiated the logical
positivist reduction of argument to a series of symbols that divorced argument
from natural, or ordinary, language. Instead, he proposed that we re-think what
we mean by logic. His response consisted in recognizing that argumentation
shares some of the features of psychology, understood as the study of ‘healthy
laws of thought’ and of sociology, namely the study of ‘habits and practices
developed in the course of social evolution and passed on by parents and
teachers from one generation to another’ (1958, p. 3). He argued that language is

5
For example, a deductive mathematical argument is different to an inductive historical argument.
90 What Makes Writing Academic

only one of the modalities that allow us to be ‘logical’ in both the psychological
and the sociological sense but he also posited that framing argument in terms
of psychology and sociology imbued the thinking process with a subjective and
relative quality, such as a reliance on induction that ‘proper’ deductive logic did
not (Toulmin, 1958, p. 5):
[I]t cannot be custom alone that gives validity and authority to a form
of argument, or the logician would have to wait upon the results of the
anthropologist’s researches.

His discomfort with subjectivity and relativity was not, however, resolved by
turning to the kind of logic that posits formal relations between propositions
and that reduces the validity of an argument to its deductive form. This is
because logic is concerned with statements about logic itself and not with the
thinking process per se. The mistake of equating logic with correct and rational
thinking is known as ‘qualified psychologism’6 and assumes that logic, rather
than psychology, is the study of thought. Toulmin invokes logical positivist
Rudolf Carnap to refute the way in which logic has arrogated the thinking to
itself (Toulmin, pp. 86–7):
The characterisation of logic in terms of correct or rational or justified beliefs
is as right but not more enlightening than to say that mineralogy tells us how
to think correctly about minerals. The reference to thinking may just as well
be dropped in both cases. Then we say simply: mineralogy makes statements
about minerals and logic makes statements about logical relations. The activity
in any field of knowledge involves, of course, thinking. But this does not mean
that thinking belongs to the subject matter of all fields. It belongs to the subject
matter of psychology but not to that of logic any more than to that of mineralogy.

By the same token, it can be argued that when it comes to the practice of
academic writing – pace Ong (1982, 1986), Emig (1977), Kaplan (1980 [1966])
and other literacy scholars who have in various ways subscribed to the view
that writing raises consciousness in ways that are qualitatively superior to other
forms of communication – the reference to ‘good thinking’ may as well be
dropped. This is because it amounts to an instance of ‘qualified psychologism’,
whereby writing has arrogated to itself the process of correct thinking, a process
that more properly belongs to the enquiries of the field of psychology. Since the
activity of any field requires ‘good thinking’, it is not clear why it should belong
to the practice of writing any more that it does to that of drawing.
6
For an overview and explanation of qualified psychologism, see [Link]
psychologism/ [accessed 14 December 2018].
 Learning from Writings ‘in the Wild’ 91

Rather, Toulmin proposes that we shift our conflation of logic with correct
and rational thinking to thinking of logic as a way of making sound claims that
give prominence to warrants instead of prominence to form and truth (Toulmin,
1958, p. 7):
Logic is concerned with the soundness of the claims we make – with the solidity
of the grounds we produce to support them, the firmness of the backing we
provide for them – or, to change the metaphor, with the sort of case we present
in defence of our claims. The legal analogy implied in this last way of putting the
point can for once be a real help. So let us forget about psychology, sociology,
technology and mathematics, ignore the echoes of structural engineering and
collage in the words ‘grounds’ and ‘backing’ and take as our model the discipline
of jurisprudence. Logic (we may say) is generalised jurisprudence.

In re-framing logic as jurisprudence, where what persuades is a convincing

and reasonable case, not the truth, Toulmin discards much of the language
associated with logic, such as ‘premise’ or ‘proposition’ and replaces it with legal
terminology, such as ‘data’, ‘warrants’ and ‘qualifiers’: data are the situations we
wish to make a claim about; warrants are legitimate ‘steps’ that act as ‘bridges’
which ‘authorise’ further ‘steps’ culminating in further ‘claims’; and ‘qualifiers’
provide conditions under which a claim can be considered reasonable (as opposed
to ‘true’). By introducing this terminology, he shows that what constitutes an
argument is not its reliance on logic and language (propositions) but its reliance
on the legitimacy of the warrant. As will be revealed, the ‘legitimacy of a warrant’
can also be established in several non-linguistic ways.
Toulmin further cautions against the mis-use of the term ‘logic’. He does
this by reminding us that non-mathematical and non-logical arguments
are substantial. This makes their truth and validity contingent on external
conditions, not on the internal, logico-deductive conditions of formal logic.
Since the majority of meaningful academic arguments, ones that extend our
knowledge – in the sciences, social sciences and humanities – are substantial and
inductive, they require warrants and qualifiers as well as linguistic modalities for
expressing attitudes of probability, possibility and necessity, rather than formal
logic (Toulmin, p. 154):
The only arguments we can fairly judge by ‘deductive’ standards are those held
out as and intended to be analytic, necessary and formally valid. All arguments
which are confessedly substantial will be ‘non-deductive’ and by implication
not formally valid. But for the analytic syllogism validity can be identified with
formal validity and this is just what the logician wants to be possible universally.
92 What Makes Writing Academic

It follows at once that for substantial arguments, whose cogency cannot be

displayed in a purely formal way, even validity is something entirely out of reach
and unobtainable.

Reaching similar conclusions in response to those who objected to her use of

poetry to represent sociological data, Laurel Richardson has cautioned against
the mis-use of ‘rational’ to describe the academic endeavour (Richardson, 1997,
p. 41):
[T]he fact that social science research does not meet the logic of enquiry model
of research does not mean that the research is irrational. The problem is not with
social science, but with the inappropriate narrowing of the meaning of ‘rational’.

Drawing on philosopher Richard Rorty (who is unfortunately also associated

with problematic relativist ontologies), Richardson rightly calls for the meaning of
rational to include a set of ‘moral virtues’ such as tolerance, respect, a willingness
to listen and persuasion. This is quite different to reducing rationality to a set of
logical linguistic propositions.

Language Is Field-Dependent Rather than Clear, Precise or

Transparent
A further key move in Toulmin’s critique of classical logic and its arrogation
of argument is that substantive arguments require more than a reliance on the
univocal meaning of language. He develops this thesis by drawing attention to
the field-dependency of arguments (1958, p. 15):
How far, for instance, can one compare the standards of argument relevant in a
court of law with those relevant when judging a paper in the Proceedings of the
Royal Society, or those relevant to a mathematical proof or a prediction about
the composition of a tennis team?

A specific example of ‘standards of argument’ might be that what counts as

evidence for a warrant or qualifier in each discipline will differ. In a court of law, a
blood-stained garment, rather than a linguistic proposition about how the victim
had blood on their clothes, may provide a warrant for claiming that the victim
had been injured; in a scientific paper, references to previous studies can serve
to qualify a new theory; in mathematics, an axiom such as A = ∏r2 to calculate
the surface area of a generic circle can provide the warrant for establishing the
surface area of a specific circle; in tennis, the use of past performance statistics
can establish which players are the most competent for the formation of a new
 Learning from Writings ‘in the Wild’ 93

team. The point being that by narrowing and reducing the meaning of argument
to propositional logic, we fail to capture the wider-ranging uses of argument
that occur in other fields of human enquiry, uses which may or may not include
language itself. This is why the frequent designation and juxtaposition, in EAP
and other general academic writing courses, of academic writing as ‘logical’ and
‘linear’ is misleading: both terms are highly field-dependent and it is not clear
what they designate when they are used to describe the arguments in generic
student essays.
Toulmin’s focus on warrants and qualifiers now creates a space within which
to think of arguments as non-linguistic, since neither warrants nor qualifiers
need be expressed in language.

The Case for Non-linguistic Argumentation

Richard Andrews (2010), whose scholarship on academic literacies has been
influential in studies on higher education and EAP, draws significantly on the
seminal work of Toulmin. The claim that ‘arguments may be of different kinds’
(Toulmin, 1958, pp. 158–9) is of specific relevance to this section. Arguments
can and do include, but need not be reduced to, the logical characterizations
favoured by EAP (Chapter 1) and the Enlightenment research genres (Chapter
2) but they can further be conceptualized in terms of composition, as dialogic,
as (inter)disciplinary and as multimodal. Specifically, by drawing attention to
the interdisciplinary nature of argumentation, Andrews is highlighting that
the form and the aim of an argument are not paradigmatic, meaning that there
isn’t a standard to which all arguments conform. In the absence of a paradigm,
arguments are not universally transferable across disciplines: a mathematical
argument is substantially different to a historical argument, for example.
Because arguments are not paradigmatic, Andrews leaves open the possibility for
arguments to be non-linguistic and multimodal, showing that these ‘can operate
inductively, not just as evidence for a verbally conceived set of propositions but
as a set of propositions in [their] own right’ (Andrews, 2010, p. 52). The existence
of a range of academic arguments signals that what makes writing academic
goes far beyond the narrow requirement to be ‘logical’ and ‘linear’ and includes
requirements that are usually ascribed to creative writing, such as the need to be
‘refreshing’, ‘modest’ and ‘curious’ (Andrews, 2010, pp. 99–101); to be open to
interpretation (Marin et al., 2018); and to develop authorial identities (Ivanič,
1998; Kamler & Thomson, 2006).
94 What Makes Writing Academic

To achieve such wide-ranging qualities, propositional arguments

themselves frequently rely on non-propositional forms, such as implicit
or unstated premises. Enthymemes are an example of this. These are the
‘missing parts’ of an argument, such as a premise or conclusion (Hurley,
2000), that require readers’ knowledge or interpretation to ‘fill in the gaps’.
They rely, that is, on the reader’s ‘cooperation’ (Turner, 2018). According
to Andrews, visual argumentation creates opportunities for this kind of
inference, which matters in education: it is what Dewey calls a ‘forecast’, a
‘leap from the unknown’, a ‘creative incursion’ (cited in d’Agnese, 2017, p.
451). Similarly, Tarnay (2002) argues that moving images can argue without
being reduced to propositional content. This can be illustrated with reference
to Fuocoammare (2016), Gianfranco Rosi’s 2016 documentary about the
plight of refugees arriving on the small island of Lampedusa in Sicily. In one
scene, we are shown that ordinary life continues on the island despite the
tragic loss of life: two young boys play together throughout the documentary
while rescue boats, helicopters and other medical services concurrently deal
with migrant emergencies. It is a mostly silent documentary, yet, as viewers,
we become aware that Lampedusa’s children are being affected by what they
see and hear around them. Despite this never being stated linguistically (i.e.
propositionally), the inference that their lives are being affected is clear and
the viewer cannot help but make that inference because their knowledge
of life, or maybe even shared experiences, allows them to fill in the gaps.
This documentary film, narrated visually, meets the conditions for what
Toulmin (1958) calls substantive arguments and as such, can be said to meet
the criteria for being ‘academic’ in the sense of enacting the socio-academic
practice of advancing an evidence-based claim (or thesis): it provides data
(D) of migrants arriving on a small island and claims (C) that this affects
the local children. The steps the director takes in moving from D to C are
realized by the editing and juxtaposition of images and overlay of sounds to
provide warrants (W), or bridges, between the data and the claim, a form of
arguing that relies on recursive composition rather than linearity (Palmeri,
2012). A full analysis of this documentary might further show that backing
and qualifications are also present in the film when considered as a whole.
The reason we can make inductive inferences, rather than formal deductions,
from the data to the claims is because images and motion are being arranged
according to what Tarnay (2002, p. 4) calls intentional ‘compositional’
features (in the sense of intended by the director) that cannot be reduced
to propositions that merely guide the eye in a linear and sequential way or
 Learning from Writings ‘in the Wild’ 95

that are left open to unqualified interpretation. Such features include ‘depth’,
‘motion’, ‘distance’ and, following Groarke (2015), ‘non-verbal sounds’, which
are ‘perceived’ by the viewer through the senses rather than directly processed
as propositions (Tarnay, p. 5):

[T]he operation of our sense organs (or whatever it is that computes and
processes sense data) can be described as an inferential activity under the level
of phenomenal consciousness (The strongest version that our eyes ‘argue’ can
be found in Bonfantini, 1987). …. The retrieval of arguments should not be
confined to higher – semantic and pragmatic – level of processing, but it should
be grounded on certain ‘automatic’ processes.

Some may object that a documentary such as Fuocoammare does not count
as an academic argument on the following grounds. Firstly, as discussed above,
argument is traditionally understood as a propositional, not visual, endeavour.
In the case of Fuocoammare, the scope for interpretation is, arguably, far wider
than it might be in a traditional academic format. A film or an image allows
the viewer to see much more in a single frame or panel than does a sentence
containing a proposition or a paragraph containing several sentences. Secondly,
whilst acknowledging that language is ‘unstable’, some writing scholars such as
Gourlay (2016, p. 88), for example, remain of the view that ‘written text is still
more suited than visual images’ to the complex requirements of argumentation
and critique, especially within the context of a literature review (Gourlay, 2016,
p. 87):

The dense, precise and closely-argued nature of much academic argumentation

in reference to other academic texts seems to demand a system which delivers
nuance and can be readily and unambiguously shared with a readership beyond
the immediate context of text production – the complexity of language still
appears better suited to the task than images alone.

A third objection is that films and images tell stories which rely on narrative
rather than argument. This third contention relies on the common acceptance
that argument and narrative are mutually exclusive methods for communicating
knowledge. The implication of this contention seems to be that by doing the
former one is not doing the latter and vice-versa. The contention indexes
that since narrative is not traditionally valued as a method of inquiry, the
documentary genre which relies on narrative to advance a thesis is less likely
to be accepted by academic writing programmes, such as those taught in EAP.
The assumption that narrative is not deemed to academic is made explicit by
96 What Makes Writing Academic

Ingraham (2005, p. 49) in discussing whether the BBC documentary entitled

Walking with Beasts can be considered ‘academic’:
[A]n obvious way in which documentary often differs from conventional scholarly
discourse is in the use of narrative. Documentary programmes are much more
likely to use narrative as a strategy to maintain and direct an audience’s attention
than are scholarly articles or books. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with
using narrative within the context of scholarly discourse. Many historical and
biographical studies almost inevitably involve narrative.

The extent to which the documentary being analysed by Ingraham can

be considered as a ‘carrier of academic argument’ has been deliberated by
Gourlay (2012, p. 95) who concludes that it cannot be classified as academic.
This is because academic argument should be explicit, something that
narrative is not seen to be and unambiguous, something only words can be
(Gourlay, 2012, p. 97).
It is, however, possible to challenge the above three objections to the thesis
that a documentary and its non-verbal forms of argumentation can be academic.
Firstly, we need to remind ourselves that even traditional argument and its
investment in language is fallible and requires constant refining clarifications.
If linguistic argument were as precise and as clear as Gourlay and others claim,
then why is so much academic time spent on revisiting and surmising over the
ambiguous meanings expressed through the language of academic writers? As
Fish (2017, p. 19) notes:
[I]f we could confine ourselves to a language that did not admit [uncertainties],
there would be no need for argument; for argument is required when there are
competing accounts of what is the case. If everyone agreed on how a set of facts
should be characterised, there would be no competing accounts and there would
be nothing to argue about. And such agreement would be assured if there were
prior agreement about the correct vocabulary for stating things.

Secondly, Toulmin has shown that traditional propositional logic fails

to capture the substantive nature of human argumentation which includes
understanding argument as an ‘invitation to inference’ and not merely as a logical
deduction to establish the truth of a premise (Pinto, 2001 cited in Groarke (2015,
p. 135)). Since inferences and interpretation are very much part of the academic
endeavour, it seems unwise to defer so extensively to the power of propositional
arguments to convey unambiguous meaning. Similarly, Tseronis (22 May 2013)
shows that argumentation is a social and discursive activity in which images, in
addition to playing a role in conveying premises and conclusions, communicate
 Learning from Writings ‘in the Wild’ 97

something about the argumentative process that goes beyond mere representation
to include the ways in which images contribute to the context in which they are
being used. The scene where the two Sicilian boys in Fuocoammare are pretending
to shoot down targets in an imaginary war is therefore not to be viewed for its
representational value, namely two boys shooting, but as contributing to the
overall narrative argument, namely that migration is affecting life on the island.
Crucially, Tseronis also reminds us that meaning and truth are distinct concepts
and that ‘the meaning of a proposition cannot be reduced to its truth-evaluable
propositional content’. In other words, meaning, rather than truth, can equally be
the aim of an argument. To quote Fish again (2017, p. 8):
Argument is protean – ever changing, mutable, kaleidoscopic, voracious – and
almost anything can be its vehicle, swinging a big stick, putting on a badge,
intoning a holy phrase, making the sign of a cross, wearing a uniform, speaking
in a stentorian tone.

Thirdly, and contrary to Ingraham’s and Gourlay’s claims, narrative methods

are used in academic research (see, for example, Chanock [2014]; Richardson
[1990a]), including the use of ethnographic methods in anthropology, sociology,
education and science. As evidenced in Chapter 2, Isaac Newton himself deploys
the narrative of ‘stumbling across a fact’ to persuade the reader of an epistemic
virtue, that of the ‘objectivity’ of his findings. Despite the ubiquity of narrative
in academic communication, academic writing programmes such as EAP, with
their underlying positivistic ideologies, rarely foreground multimodal narrative
as a valid form of argumentation.
And finally, since academia is, or ought to be, moving on from the discredited
logical-positivist endeavour of seeking to establish a strict correspondence
between word and object, what counts as an academic argument also needs to
move on (Paré, 2017). One way of moving on is to recognize that privileging
monomodal practices narrows what can and cannot be said (Bezemer & Kress,
2008; Laurillard et al., 2000 [2]), making it more likely that by mobilizing a wider
range of semiotic resources to communicate meaning, academic arguments will
become more persuasive. This likelihood stems from the fact that our meaning-
making capacities and ability to think in abstract conceptual ways extend beyond
language (Arnheim, 1969, p. 228):
[L]anguage is widely assumed to be a much better vehicle of thought than other
shapes or sounds …. Nobody denies that language helps thinking. What needs
to be questioned is whether it performs this service substantially by means of
properties inherent in the verbal medium itself or whether it functions indirectly,
98 What Makes Writing Academic

namely by pointing to the referents of words and propositions, that is to facts

given in an entirely different medium. Also, we need to know whether language
is indispensable to thought. The answer … is ‘no’.

Arnheim’s point is that if the sole function of language is to describe, or point

to, a reality that is beyond it – such as a thought or an object – then art and other
modalities can do this, too. But since words, images, sounds and other media are
ontologically distinct from what they are describing, none can be said to provide
a ‘full representation’ of that reality. From the perspective of what makes writing
academic, this entails that words are not inherently superior to any other forms
of representing reality because something is always lost and gained through
semiotic choices.

Conclusions

This chapter has argued that what makes writing academic cannot be reduced to
formal features of language and grammar because doing so would allow hoaxes
and IELTS essays to count as academic. These are not academic because they
transgress values of academic integrity (such as a commitment to the truth),
which are emergent SAPs. Rather, what makes writing academic are the ways in
which writers knowledgeably interact with their textual environments to allow
these SAPs to emerge. These environments include the threshold concepts that
trouble and re-configure what we think makes writing academic. In considering
the role that argument also plays, I claimed that whilst arguments can make
writing academic, there is no requirement for them to be propositional (i.e.
linguistic) or logical because most academic arguments are substantive and
inductive rather than logical in any formal sense. Because of this, they are possibly
better described as reasonable. Given this non-reductive nature (non-reductive
to logic), argument, too, can be considered as a socio-academic practice that
emerges from the interaction of the writer’s warrants and claims with the range
of socio-semiotic resources available to them in their textual environment.
 4

Critical Realism: Re-claiming Theory

for Practice

Introduction

Critical realists do not deny the reality of events and discourses; on the contrary,
they insist upon them. But they hold that we will only be able to understand – and
so change – the social world if we identify the structures at work that generate
those events and discourses.

(Bhaskar, 1989, p. 2)

In what follows, I propose to move beyond the skills versus practice binaries
presented in Chapter 1, because, as we have seen, neither fully captures the
complexity of what makes a text academic: skills and their associated mechanistic
approaches are unsatisfactory because they reduce the academicness of texts to
its forms, namely formal features of grammar, lexis and genre. This foments a
culture of performativity (Macfarlane, 2021b) that can encourage academic
writers to display language at the expense of deep knowledge engagement and
creativity. This kind of performativity would allow hoaxes and IELTS essays
to count as ‘academic’, further compounding the ‘Western’ imaginary of what
and whose standards of literacy are acceptable. They also make copying and
plagiarizing easier because formulaic templates lend themselves to being
transferred across contexts. Conversely, practice approaches to academic literacies
and their associated critiques of standards and conventions risk being equally
unsatisfactory because they potentially allow anything to count as ‘academic’.
This, in turn, can result in relativizing and ‘romanticising’ all forms of writing,
something which anthropologist and academic literacies scholar Brian Street,
for example, has cautioned against in his response to McCabe, 1995, in Prinsloo
and Breier (1996). Donald Judd (2003), too, has stood against relativism in his
critique of the American expressivist literacy tradition of the 1960s because by
100 What Makes Writing Academic

focusing on the originality, creativity and subjectivity of the author, expressivist

rhetoric reifies the ‘authentic self ’ at the expense of objective and socially just
knowledge (more on this later). Moreover, as Boughey remarks in her Foreword,
whilst academic literacies approaches acknowledge multiplicity and diversity –
showing a deep understanding of why academic writing is difficult for some but
not others – they do not as readily identify the agencies and mechanisms needed
to challenge the powers that impose a one-size-fits-all literacy. To escape the
fractious reductionist and relativist entanglements of the skills-practice aporia,
I now mobilize the philosophical and sociological theory of critical realism. The
appeal of critical realism is that it necessitates both relativism (or subjectivity) and
foundationalism (or objectivity) to account for the social reality of phenomena, of
which academic writing is an instance. But rather than looking for academicness
in either the subjective will of the writer or the objective, i.e. standard(ized), rules
and conventions of what counts and does not count as an appropriate academic
text, critical realism allows us to anchor and reclaim academicness as a property
that emerges from the critical judicious and reflexive interaction between the
writer’s agency (their subjectivity) and their textual environments, or structures,
which are objectively real. For example, on a critical realist account, to produce
his multimodal thesis, Carson (2017) enacted his agency and subjectivity by
interacting with his supervisors and with the full range of modalities available
to him in his textual environment. The academicness of his thesis emerged
from this interaction rather than from his personal whim or from adhering to a
particular set of academic writing conventions. Critical realism puts interactions
at centre-stage, what Donati and Archer (2015) call ‘relations’ between
phenomena. Interactions are ontologically real and have effects that transcend
the effects of the individual phenomena involved in the interaction. For example,
when individual people are part of a crowd, their individual behaviours interact
in such a way as to have effects that the individual alone could not have: a crowd
can attract attention, be threatening or inspire action in ways that the single
individuals cannot. Similarly, an academic text can make us think and learn
in ways that the individual words, sentences and references cannot. Thinking
about academic writing in this way affords a conceptual space within which to
understand academicness in a way that is non-reductive, i.e. irreducible to either
the writer (their intentions, literacies, etc.) or the features of the text (namely
grammar or style). Within such a conceptualisation, changes and innovations
in writing practices require informed structural responses to the full range of
skills and conventions needed to uphold the totality of standards of excellence
that make writing academic. This range transcends both the writer and the text
 Critical Realism 101

because it is historical and potential as well as beyond our contingent empirical

experience. The totality of standards may include new or unacknowledged
standards that the writer (and their instructors) may be unaware of and that
conventional academic texts may not possess. An ‘informed structural response’
presupposes that agents are able to knowledgeably interact with the total potential
range of standards of excellence. It is this interaction that allows academicness
to emerge. In the case of A. D. Carson, these standards of excellence included
his values of social justice and his literacies, namely his ability to communicate
through poems and music. Because he wanted his thesis to be understood by
the communities he was researching, he chose to rap his thesis ‘chapters’ as five-
minute podcasts of performance poetry to ensure they reached his intended
audience. In doing so, he democratized his knowledge. But he similarly wanted
his PhD examiners to acknowledge his intellectual contribution and to confer his
doctorate in compliance with institutional requirements. His thesis, therefore,
duly referenced social theories, histories and literacies in order to satisfy his
institutional committees. The interaction of his individual intentions and values
with his knowledge of the deeper structures that lead to the award of a PhD
allowed an academic text to emerge. Moreover, it is unlikely that this kind of
thesis could ever be commissioned to an essay mill to be ghostwritten or that
its author would even be motivated to plagiarize. If academia were a culture
where writers had the space to explore the most fitting ways of communicating
their knowledge, their values and their research, they would be far more likely to
treat their ‘writing’ as acts of love, recalling Cocteau, and as an instance of what
Spinoza calls ‘intellectual love’ (Rowland, 2008).
Now, surely love of knowledge, of thinking, of being just is a standard of
academic excellence worth nurturing!
To appreciate the relevance of critical realism to what makes writing academic,
I begin with an introduction to the theory, enough to then make sense of the extant
literature on writing that adopts critical realism as a theoretical lens. I extend this
theorization to further propose that academic writing be conceived as a complex
open system in which writers interact with their textual environments to shape
written knowledge. The chapter concludes with a reminder that the standards
of excellence of higher education practices are wide-ranging and evolving and
because of this, what makes writing academic must necessarily broaden its scope
and evolve accordingly. This prepares the terrain for articulating the foundations
for a future pedagogy of academic writing, outlined in Chapter 5.
102 What Makes Writing Academic

Mobilizing Critical Realism to Explain What Makes

Writing Academic

Critical realism is a philosophy of science and social science oriented towards

change and social justice. It addresses the complex ‘structure and agency’
discourses that have characterized social theory since Max Weber and Emile
Durkheim, through to Pierre Bourdieu, Basil Bernstein and Anthony Giddens
by asking, for example, what powers do we, as agents with free will, have to
enact social change or what must the world be like for our theories and practices
to be correct (Archer, 2000; Bhaskar, 1989). At the same time, critical realists
acknowledge that we are bound and constrained by history and its social
structures and that this makes it difficult for individuals to enact change. Critical
realism distinguishes itself within this sociological tradition by disambiguating
the structure-agency binary and by introducing an explicit analytical construct
referred to as ‘analytical dualism’. The reason critical realism opts for this
disambiguation is to counter the tendency of previous sociological theories to
explain social phenomena by either reducing the ontology of society to the level
of individuals, thus denying the existence and influence of ‘society’ all together
(as in Margaret Thatcher’s infamous claim,1 which can be understood with
reference to a sociological position known as ‘methodological individualism’2)
or by reifying society to such an extent that it denies the agency and powers
of individuals to enact change because their choices are entirely determined by
society (a position known as ‘methodological collectivism’). Instead, critical
realists attempt to give structure and agency their own independent realities so
that they can be studied separately and so that claims about each can be made
without being reduced to the other. Their relationship is then established via a
‘stratified ontology’ that links them via reflexive and emergent relations rather
than via relative, deterministic or reductive claims. This allows critical realists to
‘reclaim’ the reality of agents who have ‘powers’ to intervene and change social
structures which are equally real and which exist independently of individuals
(i.e. the structures are there even if we are not). It is for this reason that the
theory is generative for reconfiguring written knowledge as a socio-academic
1
Former Conservative UK prime minister made the following claim in an interview on 23 September
1987 for Woman’s Own: ‘there is no such thing as society.……. There are individual men and women
and there are families’ ([Link]
2
See Sawyer, R. K. (2001). Emergence in sociology: Contemporary philosophy of mind and some
implications for sociological theory. American Journal of Sociology, 107(3), 551–85. [Link]
pt/~jmal/mcc/Keith_Sawyer_Emergence_in_Sociology.pdf for a nuanced and comprehensive
account of the philosophical and sociological tensions, contradictions and implications of
methodological individualism and collectivism.
 Critical Realism 103

practice that can be changed by writers (namely agents) in relation to their values,
abilities, capabilities and the affordances of their textual environments (i.e. their
social structures). This re-configuration can then pave the way for laying a
foundation for future practices that can transcend (or emerge from) standard
rules and conventions (which are real social constructs) and for explaining why
some writings ‘in the wild’ are academic and can be taught as such. As we shall
see, critical realism seems to have had relatively little uptake in academic writing
studies for reasons that are not yet clear to me but that may have to do with
its associated ideology, namely Marxism. Interestingly, educationalists working
in contexts where inequality of access and social injustice are prevalent, such
as Jennifer Wright (2011), Jennifer Case (2013), Chrissie Boughey (2013) and
Boughey and McKenna (2021), have turned their attention to critical realist
theory. This suggests that it affords a generative heuristic for mobilizing change
in educational practices and policies, especially those that are unjust.
Critical realist philosophy is associated with Roy Bhaskar (1989, 1998) and
further developed by sociologist Margaret Archer (1995, 1998, 2000, 2003),
amongst several others, including Keith Sawyer (2001) and Andrew Collier (1994),
who has helped to introduce the theory to a wider audience. It is underpinned by
three fundamental notions of reality which are referred to as ‘stratified’: the first
is that there is an objective reality that exists beyond our human perception. This
reality is made up of causal mechanisms, such as the physical laws of nature and the
structures that constitute the social world. It is not a relative or subjective reality, it
is a reality made up of facts that have effects, it is ontologically real and intransitive
and is referred to as REAL.3 So, for example, in the case of the laws of nature,
gravity is real and exists regardless of whether we perceive it or not. Similarly,
social phenomena are also real. For example, poverty is real: it exists regardless
of whether we perceive it or experience it because its effects are real: people are
objectively homeless, hungry, ill and uneducated. In this sense, reality is intransitive
and objective because it is independent of human enquiry (e.g. the sciences, social
sciences, humanities and other methods of enquiry, such as writing). The second
fundamental notion is that there is an actual reality where specific events emerge,
or don’t emerge, from the intransitive mechanisms and structures. For example,
trees may or may not fall because of gravity and people may or may not die
because of poverty. This is what is referred to as the ACTUAL. It is the visible and
potential manifestation of underlying powers and structures, whether the event

3
I am capitalizing the terms that Bhaskar uses. For the original systematic and nuanced articulation
of his theory see Bhaskar, R. (1989). Reclaiming reality: A critical introduction to contemporary
philosophy. London: Verso.
104 What Makes Writing Academic

takes place or not. The final level of Bhaskar’s triumvirate classification of reality
is the EMPIRICAL. This stratum describes how we investigate and understand
the ACTUAL and the REAL through experience, measurement, observation
and dissemination at the individual level. This investigation takes place via our
methods of enquiry, such as disciplinary research and writing. It, too, is real but
not in the ontological sense. It is real in the epistemological sense of being relative
and transitive because it varies according to an agent’s disciplinary orientation, to
their knowledge, their standpoint, their abilities, their values, their resources, their
intentions and so on. In other words, agency exists at the level of the EMPIRICAL
because methods of enquiry are relative to humans. As such they are contingent,
they can change and they are fallible, but what they all have in common is their
teleological nature, namely their shared goal of understanding the mechanisms
and structures at the intransitive level of the REAL.
The three levels are related by a complex stratified ontology, a full explanation
of which exceeds the scope of this book so I will limit myself to asking: how might
the REAL, the ACTUAL and the EMPIRICAL map on to an understanding of
what makes writing academic? I offer this initial proposal: the REAL refers to
the total textual environment available to a writer, including all possible texts,
genres, modalities (or, in philosophical-speak, the REAL refers to all possible
worlds). This includes the full range of past, present and future semiotic and
semantic resources (such as grammar, vocabulary, genres, visuals and all other
textual and technological features, as well as rules, conventions and institutional
requirements and standards) but it also includes all of history’s contingencies
and the present and future threshold concepts that account for academic writing
reality as a social and academic practice. The ACTUAL refers to any given
instance (or event) of an academic text: a traditional written essay, a monograph,
a graphic dissertation, a dialogue, a poem, a visual essay (Thomas, 2018) or an
audio/dialogic essay (see, for example, the pre-digital pioneering work of Shor
and Freire [1987]). These are all potential or actual manifestations of the real
and they include texts that have yet to become manifest (such as haptic essays
or 3D virtual essays). These ACTUAL texts don’t have to happen, but there is
real potential for them to happen because of the opportunities afforded at the
level of the REAL. The EMPIRICAL refers to how writers go about investigating
what is available at the level of the REAL, how they experience the level of the
ACTUAL (via institutional practices of assessment, for example) and how they
then choose to represent what they notice at the manifest ‘actual’ level: the
methods of enquiry at the EMPIRICAL level are multiple and transitive, allowing
writers (agents) to notice a very wide range of academic texts which further
 Critical Realism 105

triggers their agency to investigate the level of the REAL in order to uncover
what else the textual environment might afford. The ‘empirical’ allows writers
to notice writings ‘in the wild’ and to then enact their agency by knowingly and
reflexively making choices about how to write. Academicness emerges from the
critical interactions that take place across the EMPIRICAL, the ACTUAL and
the REAL. These critical interactions require reflexive judgements, referred to in
critical realism as ‘judgemental rationality’ (Mirzaei Rafe et al., 2020). Figure 1
offers a diagrammatic summary of this. I also refer the reader to the work of
Boughey and McKenna (2021) and Mirzaei Rafe et al. (2020), who, respectively,
mobilize critical realist ontology to explain how changes can be enacted at the
level of educational policy and of curriculum design.

Figure 1 A critical realist conception of academic writing.

106 What Makes Writing Academic

The analytical dualism of structure (intransitive) and agency (transitive) is

part of critical realism’s overarching ambition to transcend deterministic and
positivist accounts of social reality, on the one hand, and relativist constructivist
ontologies, on the other. This is because, critical realists argue, both these
theoretical frameworks have been unable to explain social phenomena: positivism
fails because it reifies the epistemic virtue (or vice) of ‘objectivity’ as a ‘value-free’
judgement about the nature of reality; it also tends towards deterministic and
mechanistic explanations that undermine agency. Constructivism is inadequate
because it tends to relativize judgements about what counts as ‘real’ (Collier,
1994), potentially denying the existence of social reality by over-emphasizing
the role that agents play in constructing it. Instead, critical realists argue
that ontological claims about the reality of social phenomena (such as social
structures) are justified because social reality is not a construct, it is ‘real’ and
‘objective’, but not in the positivist sense of being value-free: it is real and objective
in the sense that humans have created social realities that embody their values –
we might say that for critical realists social reality is objectively ideological. This
makes the reality of the natural and the social worlds ontologically real. Whilst
ontological reality is harder to change, the reality of the social world at the level
of the ACTUAL can be changed by individuals (agents) operating at the level of
the EMPIRICAL through their judgements and understandings of how social
structures work at the level of the REAL: critical realists argue that individuals
do not engage in neutral, objective and value-free descriptions of the world, they
judge it and act upon it through their values, which include epistemic virtues
and vices, namely how they value knowledge (Daston & Galison, 2010). These
value claims, which are relative to the EMPIRICAL (where we experience
the REAL through the manifestations at the level of the ACTUAL), are what
enable individuals to intervene critically in changing epistemological reality.
The reality of individual value judgements is thus epistemologically real, albeit
relative to our EMPIRICAL and ACTUAL experience of the world. What this
entails for academic writers is that knowledge of what is available in the textual
environment can inform their choices about what kinds of texts they value
and therefore wish to write. This knowledge can be accessed by learning about
writing (as opposed to learning to write [Downs & Wardle, 2007; Mays, 2017])
through scholarship, whereby academics and writing instructors can become
knowledgeable of the textual environment at the level of the REAL and make
this knowledge available to their students so that they, students and their writing
instructors, can make informed choices at the level of the ACTUAL, where their
writing becomes manifest.
 Critical Realism 107

As introduced in Chapter 1 and developed here, transitive knowledge is

epistemological, i.e. it is knowledge of how we come to know things, not knowledge
of what things are. It is what I have also referred to as procedural knowledge, for
example, how a doctor comes to establish that a patient is ill or how a researcher
comes to write about something they wish to understand better. Intransitive
knowledge, on the other hand, is ontological and declarative knowledge, namely
knowledge that something is the case. It is knowledge that something is real (e.g.
poverty is real, regardless of how – what methods we use – we come to know about
it). Ontological (intransitive) and epistemological (transitive) reality includes
both the social and the natural world. For example, social structures, such as
capitalism, are ontologically real, until they are epistemologically shown to be
otherwise. Natural phenomena, such as gravity, are ontologically real, until they
are epistemologically shown to be otherwise. However, the ‘how’ (epistemology)
should never be collapsed into the ‘is’ (ontology) because knowing how to do
something (e.g. to detect an illness) does not entail knowing everything about
what that something is: I may know how to measure my temperature, but I don’t
know what caused it or even what is happening to me physiologically. Equally,
I may know how to teach a student to write an EAP or IELTS essay, but I may
not know all that there is to know about academic writing or the student’s future
writing requirements. This is why it is misleading for academic service providers
such as EAP units to claim that they teach ‘academic writing’, as if academic
writing were a homogeneous and static genre.
Moreover, when we collapse the ‘how’ into the ‘is’, there is a danger of
misunderstanding the world at the level of the REAL. For example, a patient
may not actually be ill (REAL) despite my methods of enquiry (EMPIRICAL
and ACTUAL) indicating or representing them in a way that suggests that they
are: think of the many cases of false positives in science (e.g. positive pregnancy
tests that turn out to be negative or misdiagnoses of cancer). When writing is
understood as a method of EMPIRICAL enquiry to represent reality at the level
of the REAL, then when I erroneously claim that my use of the passive voice, for
example, with its putative connotations of impartiality and objectivity, makes
my writing objective, I am collapsing the ‘how’ (how I am representing reality)
into the ‘is’ (what that reality is). My use of the passive does not make my writing
objective any more than my use of a thermometer makes me have a temperature:
the passive is simply a rhetorical device, an instrument, so to speak, that allows
me, the writer/enquirer, to tell my reader that I believe an event to be objective at
the level of the REAL, even though that event might turn out to not be objective
(just as a thermometer allows a nurse to tell his patient that he believes they may
108 What Makes Writing Academic

have a temperature). Like other rhetorical devices and methods of enquiry to

represent reality, the passive is epistemological and transitive, it does not establish
the intransitive reality at the level of the REAL of the event I am describing: that
event would exist regardless of whether or how I represent it, whether in the
active or passive voice, via statistical analysis, ethnographic enquiry, a sculpture,
a thermometer or a tune on a piano.
To illustrate the danger of collapsing the ‘how’ with the ‘is’, let’s consider the
computer-generated hoaxes referred to in Chapter 3: these were written in such
a way that they persuaded the editors at Springer to publish them (Van Noorden,
2014). A tentative explanation as to how this could have happened is that the
texts displayed all the surface features of how an academic text should look
(e.g. academic jargon, passives, paragraphs, to suggest the text was ‘objective’
and ‘rigorous’). Yet, there was nothing objective or rigorous about any of the
nonsense generated in these hoaxes: how this nonsense was written, supposedly
‘objectively’, did not represent any objective reality whatsoever.
The ontological reification by socio-constructivists of what is in fact transitive
(i. e. relative) knowledge amounts to what critical realists refer to as an ‘epistemic
fallacy’, namely the reduction of intransitive knowledge, which is ontological, to
its transitive method of discovery, which is epistemological. For critical realists,
therefore, our knowledge of reality and our experience of reality are not the same
because the mechanisms underlying each are different. To conflate reality with
our experience of reality amounts to committing an ‘epistemic fallacy’ (Archer,
2002, p. 12):
Realism can never endorse the ‘epistemic fallacy’ and, in this connection, it must
necessarily insist that the world has a regulatory effect upon what we make of
it and, in turn, what it makes of us. These effects are independent of our full
discursive penetration, just as gravity influenced us and the projects we could
entertain, long before we conceptualised it.

The relevance of the epistemic fallacy to conceptualizing academic writing

is twofold. On the one hand, it alerts us to the fact that what I am calling the
‘textual environment’ at the level of the REAL has a ‘regulatory effect’ on writing,
when writing is understood as a method of enquiry and representation at the
level of the EMPIRCAL. This means that the shape and form of our methods of
enquiry is to a great extent constrained by what already exists at the level of the
REAL. For example, institutional practices, reader expectations or technologies
exist prior to anybody entering academia and they will regulate what we can
and cannot change. The level of the REAL represents what ‘is’ in the objective
 Critical Realism 109

and intransitive sense of being outside of our power and agency to transform
practices. For example, a student taking an IELTS test must display the
standards of writing imposed by the IELTS genre. On the other, however, power
and agency also exist in a transitive and subjective sense (recall that critical
realism conceptualizes reality as a ‘stratified ontology’, meaning that there are
several levels at which things are real). Power and agency exist at the level of
the EMPIRICAL (where humans have values and skills) and they represent the
potential we have to understand the mechanisms and structures at the level
of the REAL so that we stand a chance to knowledgeably influence what then
becomes manifest at the level of the ACTUAL. The level of the EMPIRICAL
represents the ‘how’ we come to know about the ‘is’ at the level of the REAL.
For example, that same student taking the IELTS test and who has knowledge
of the expectations and requirements of the genre can, potentially, also exert
their agency by demonstrating their knowledge of a topic and articulating an
informed, thoughtful and sensitive judgement on it, rather than simply display
language skills at the expense of saying anything truthful or meaningful or just.
The implication of this for academic writing is that as a method of enquiry
at the level of the EMPIRICAL, it can change to better reflect our values as
humans and how we, as writers, interact (i.e. take into account) with what is
possible at the level of the REAL. But as a standardized and de-personalized
artefact at the level of the REAL, writing also limits (regulates) our powers to
bring about change in how we write. It is in this sense that ‘how’ we (choose to)
write is not the same as what writing ‘is’ because how we write could always be
different.
According to Bhaskar, the epistemic fallacy is a legacy of Cartesian rationality
which posits that our thinking can determine what there is. In this sense,
Cartesianism is subjective and relative because what ‘is’ is determined by the
human subject. It is also a relic of Kantian idealism whereby the categories of
our mind (space and time) impose structures on a world that may not exist
(or at least not exist outside of how our cognitive categories describe them).
Critical realism dismisses Cartesianism by showing that it commits an epistemic
fallacy. Critical realism flips the equally subjective Kantian ontology by asking
‘what must the world be like for humans to have knowledge of it?’ replacing the
Kantian ‘what must humans be like in order for the world to be as it is?’ (Collier,
1994, pp. 137–68). This commits the critical realist to enquire about the world
retroductively, namely from how the world ‘must be’ to the subjective knower
rather than from the subjective knower to the world. Retroduction ensures
that we all have something firm and REAL to investigate in the first place. If
110 What Makes Writing Academic

we apply retroductive reasoning to establish what makes writing academic, we

are committed to asking: what must academic writing be like for writers to have
knowledge of it? We must, therefore, begin our enquiries at the level of the REAL
where we encounter all possible, past, present and future instances of academic
texts (because history is also located at the level of the REAL). A retroductive
enquiry of this sort would soon reveal that the number of exemplars of academic
writing at the level of the REAL exceeds those at the level of the ACTUAL. The
implication of this, from a critical realist perspective, is that there is potential for
a great deal of variety at the level of the ACTUAL because not everything at the
level of the REAL is manifest in the ACTUAL (but it could be).
Transitive methods of enquiry include language, discourse and the
disciplines. They allow us to designate the existence of an objective phenomenon
and to understand its nature (e.g. the patient’s illness). A danger of reducing
ontological knowledge to epistemological methods, namely to how knowledge
is discovered, is that this knowledge risks being understood and potentially
believed, only by the communities that share the same discourses and methods
of enquiry. For example, to determine the level of a nation’s inequality, I might
either focus my investigations on income or on wealth. If I focus on income,
I may reach the conclusion that a nation is unequal (because of the huge
gap in individual incomes). On the other hand, if I focus on wealth (namely
accumulated monies as an aggregate), then I may reach the conclusion that a
nation does not have a problem with inequality. This epistemological relativism
is dangerous because it leaves no scope for being wrong since methods of
enquiry are incommensurable and, as such, are rarely measured against each
other because their methodological paradigms are too disparate: for example,
a deductive method of inquiry can be valid and true in formal logic in virtue
of the conclusion following from its premise, even if the premise turns out
to be substantially untrue or wrong when measured against an inductive or
abductive method of enquiry. If left unchallenged, this kind of epistemological
relativism becomes an epistemic fallacy which creates the space for intransitive
knowledge to become ‘weaponized’ (Peters et al., 2020), in the sense that the
knowledge that exists at the level of the REAL becomes relative rather than
objective. The post-truth politics that emerged during the Donald Trump
presidency of 2016–20, in the United States, are an example of how intransitive
knowledge can be weaponized by being relativized: ‘alternative facts’ and ‘fake
news’ were phrases used to discredit and prevent attempts to establish the truth,
understood in its common sense and well-intentioned meaning of wanting to
know what is happening so that action can be taken to either prevent or initiate
 Critical Realism 111

change. If the objective intransitive reality of a truth such as climate change, a

deadly virus or poverty, all of which are ontologically real, is conflated with its
subjective transitive methods of enquiry, methods such as ethnography, logic,
experimental and control groups, economic and statistical data, investigative
journalism, political or dictionary definitions, writing, photography, video
footage and so on, then it becomes possible to deny the existence of such truth
because each method of enquiry can potentially show that no such truth exists.
In this sense, a real phenomenon such as poverty or racism can be argued out
of existence! This is clearly a very dangerous conclusion to reach, particularly if
you are poor or belong to a discriminated group. To counter this relativist truth-
denying tendency, Donald Judd, critical realist and writing scholar, reminds
us that knowledge can be understood dialectically, rather than relatively, as an
interaction between transitive knowledge and intransitive knowledge, which in
critical realist theory is made possible by the ‘judgmental rationality’ of agents.
Judgemental rationality can be understood in critical realist terms as the ability
of agents to reflexively learn from their environments and adjust their actions
accordingly. This requires knowledge at the level of the REAL because it is at this
level that agents can understand the structures and the mechanisms that lead
to the manifestation of phenomena at the level of the ACTUAL. Judgemental
rationality can be further understood scientifically as ‘trained judgement’,
namely as an epistemic virtue that guides agents towards having knowledge of
the world (Daston & Galison, 2010), or philosophically as ‘practical wisdom’,
in the Socratic sense (Smith, 1999). The common denominator that underpins
‘judgement’, understood as a human rational, trained and practical disposition,
is an ethical orientation towards knowledge, the truth and the common good.
This explains why critical realism is a theory that is motivated by change that
leads to social justice.
The dialectical interaction across the stratified ontology represented in
Figure 1 is essentially an interaction between agency and structure, between a
writer and their textual environment. It allows us to reclaim a realm of reality
that can potentially be known by everybody, regardless of their methods of
enquiry. With regard to writing, I have represented this dialectal dimension
in Figure 1 as ‘judgement’ to signal that what makes writing academic is the
writer’s judgement about which SAP they wish to enact given their knowledge of
what the textual environment affords them. This means that writers are required
to acknowledge (and have as much knowledge as possible of) the existence
of the vast historical and social textual environment at the level of the REAL,
because by knowing what the textual environment affords, they are more likely
112 What Makes Writing Academic

to make rational, trained and ethical choices about how to write. They may, of
course, not be able to act upon and make those choices because of a range of
constraints (such as institutional practices or lack of access to technology), but
the fact that they are knowledgeable about what is possible at the level of the
REAL empowers them to investigate a far greater range of ways of enacting their
choices so that they can become manifest at the level of the ACTUAL. Because
judgement requires knowledge of the objective deep structures and mechanisms
at the level of the REAL as well as knowledge of one’s own subjective values,
disciplinary orientations, capabilities and skills at the level of the EMPIRICAL,
constraints on what can make a text academic do exist. For example, a hoax
cannot be academic because it lacks the epistemic virtue of a commitment to
the truth (REAL) and it contravenes reader expectations (REAL) about what an
academic text should be. The more attuned, reflective and reflexive the writer’s
judgement becomes through knowledge of what is available and possible at each
level, the greater the range of texts at the level of the ACTUAL that can count as
academic. As I explain below, these three levels of stratified reality form an open
system that allows new knowledge and new possibilities to move between the
different strata.
Once we agree that some things are ontologically real (unless reasonably and
knowledgeably judged to be otherwise) and that they are intransitive, we stand
a better chance of ensuring that different communities are able to talk about
the same reality. The fact that different communities (with different theoretical
and disciplinary traditions) mobilize different methods and, ultimately, different
values to investigate the world does not change the ontological reality of what
they are talking about (e.g. poverty is always real, regardless of which methods
are deployed to investigate it). Rather, what these differences allow for is an
ongoing conversation about what is possible at the level of the ACTUAL based
on the objective affordances at the level of the REAL.
The relevance of all this to academic writing is that there can be far greater
variation of what makes writing academic at the manifest level of the ACTUAL
when we understand and know what is possible at the level of the deep structural
and potential level of the REAL.

Critical Realism and Academic Writing

Not much has been written about the relevance of critical realism to academic
writing, but what has been written provides generative insights to potentials
 Critical Realism 113

that warrant further investigation. Three theorists, all of whom are also teachers
of academic writing, stand out in this regard. These are US scholars Michael
Bernard-Donals (1998) and Donald Judd (2003) and South African scholar
Deirdre Pratt (2011). I will review them briefly in chronological order.

The Practice of Theory: Rhetoric, Pedagogy and Knowledge in the

Academy
Bernard-Donals (1998) writes from within the literary tradition of American
rhetoric and composition which is rooted in the classics (Plato and Aristotle).
His book is a reminder of how varied, ideological and contested writing
traditions are. For Bernard-Donals, rhetoric is a method for knowing the world.
This chimes with Richardson and St. Pierre (2005)’s portrayal of writing as a
method of enquiry and it assumes that the world is real and composed of both
social and natural structures and mechanisms that are measurable, observable
and objective. Because of the foundational (i.e. objective) ontology of the world,
writing (and the language it is composed of) is not constitutive of reality but
descriptive of it. By being descriptive of reality, it remains ontologically distinct
from it. In advancing this thesis, Bernard-Donals is positioning himself against
the post-modernism of philosophers such as Richard Rorty and Michel Foucault,
for whom it is the discourses of language and writing that seem to be intransitively
real. However, on a critical realist reading, they cannot be intransitively real
because writing is always about something that is external to it. This makes
it an epistemologically transitive method of enquiry and not an ontologically
intransitive constituent of reality. If writing were intransitively constitutive of
reality, this would potentially commit us to claiming that reality can only be
accessed or realized through language and writing, which further suggests that
only written (or linguistic) reality exists. But this would deny other modes of
representation (the visual arts, for example) the right to claim their legitimacy
as constitutive of reality, or it would at least make them incommensurable with
writing. Moreover, if writing were constitutive of reality, rather than its proxy,
as I argued in Chapter 1, it would make human communication unintelligible:
if there is no external non-linguistic reality to refer to, because what is real is
simply language (which further begs the question of ‘whose’ language?), what
then becomes of our shared human endeavours to understand and interpret
both the natural and the social world? I have located writing at the level of the
EMPIRICAL in Figure 1 because it is ontologically distinct from the REAL. This
matters because it allows us to think of writing as one of many methods for
114 What Makes Writing Academic

interpreting and describing the world, alongside music, the visual arts, statistics,
mathematics and countless other methods deployed by disciplinary enquiry.
At best, writing remains a partial representation of reality. Although Bernard-
Donals makes no such normative claim, I would argue, along with Olson (1977,
1994) and Harris (2000) that because it is an empirical and transitive method
of enquiry created to describe the intransitive world, writing is not inherently
superior to other methods of enquiry. Indeed, writing is as fallible as other
methods for interpreting the world and regularly fails to represent reality, as we
saw in Chapters 2 and 3 with reference to the epistemic injustices inflicted when
words fail to describe discrimination.
Crucially, what a critical realist theory of writing entails is that it is not the
writing, qua method of enquiry, that is ‘objective’, it is the ontological reality at
the level of the REAL that is objective in the sense that it is independent of how
the observer-writer describes it. This is why I challenge the characterization of
writing as ‘objective’ (see Chapter 1): writing choices are always at the level of
the empirical and, as such, are always relative and subjective. What is objective is
the intransitive reality a writer wishes to describe using their text as a proxy for
reality, not as a substitute of this reality. For this reason, academic writing can
never be ‘objective’.
Having established that the social and natural worlds exist independently of
their knowers (and writers) by appealing to Bhaskar’s critical realism, Bernard-
Donals argues that writing can then intervene critically in how it describes
reality because writers make rhetorical choices. It is in virtue of their rhetorical
choices (which include linguistic and non-linguistic choices) that the writer qua
agent also becomes an agent of change and transformation whereby their text
describes reality as the writer wishes to describe it from a position of knowledge.
In other words, it is through informed choice about how to write about the
world that writers can have an influence on and therefore change reality. For
example, Piper Harron’s PhD thesis (referred to in Chapter 3) was written from
a position of knowledge: transitive knowledge of her agency at the level of the
EMPIRICAL and intransitive knowledge of what was textually possible at the
level of the REAL. This allowed a novel mathematical PhD genre to emerge by
becoming manifest at the level of the ACTUAL.

Critical Realism and Composition Theory

Judd (2003) is a teacher of English and Composition Studies, what the
Americans call ‘Academic Writing’ and which continues in the tradition of the
 Critical Realism 115

United States’ established field of rhetoric and composition. His book is inspired
by his predecessor Bernard-Donals, whom he credits for having helped him
make the link between academic writing and critical realism. Judd takes to task
three cornerstones of American composition studies. To varying degrees, these
writing traditions have influenced the UK tradition of EAP (Russell et al., 2009),
particularly the cognitivist tradition which underscores several textbooks that
foreground process approaches to academic writing. The theories of writing that
Judd challenges are:

●●Expressivist theory and voluntarism

• Cognitive rhetoric and empirical positivism
●●Socio-constructivist rhetoric and super-idealism

According to Judd, none of these three mainstream pedagogies recognize the

distinction between transitive and intransitive knowledge and, for this reason,
all are inappropriate academic writing pedagogies. After subjecting each to an
immanent critique by identifying their theoretical inconsistencies with regard
to their practical classroom implications and applications, he provides a radical
transcendental critique by proposing the social philosophy of critical realism.
Unlike Bernard-Donals, who recognizes that each approach has considerable
merits at different stages of writing instruction and that each tradition has
evolved and continues to evolve in response to very specific contexts, Judd is
less forgiving. Rather, Judd seems intent on simplifying in order to magnify the
undesirable consequences that each approach potentially commits its writer
to and on exposing their inherent theoretical inconstancies via an immanent
critique.
Judd berates expressivist theory for being individualistic and having the
(un)intended consequence of becoming wholly subjective, whereby all writing
counts as ‘good writing’; he accuses cognitive rhetoric of falling foul to the
linear, mechanistic determinism of input–output computer analogies, whereby
each step in the writing process sequentially leads to a predictable outcome that
takes no account of context or human agency; and he takes serious issue with
socio-constructivist and post-modern theories of writing because, he argues,
they lead to the kind of relativism that makes knowledge wholly transitive and
incommensurable rather than intransitive and shared. His main contention is
that each writing approach runs the unintended risk of thwarting the educative
and epistemically transformative purpose of writing. Expressivist pedagogy is
uneducative because it encourages students to dwell on individualistic, relative
116 What Makes Writing Academic

and transitive knowledge (i.e. what I think, how I got there, etc.) at the expense
of intransitive knowledge; cognitive pedagogy encourages students to think
that knowledge is sequential, logical, linear, predictable and value-free and that
academic writing is meaningful and good as long as it is well planned and well
written: IELTS essays or other skills, genre and template-based approaches to
academic writing might be examples of the cognitive approach, as might hoaxes,
in the sense that they can be well-written but meaningless. Because this kind of
writing is ultimately devoid of content, its knowledge is neither transitive nor
intransitive; socio-constructivist pedagogies deny expert positions (such as the
expertise of the teacher) by suggesting that knowledge is co-constructed and
sanctioned by the community (e.g. the teacher and the students). This, like the
expressivist tradition, reifies epistemic relativity at the expense of intransitive
objective knowledge: academic literacies approaches might be an example of
socio-constructivist approaches because it is not clear where or how they might
draw the line between what counts and does not count as an academic text.
By not recognizing that knowledge is both epistemological (transitive)
and ontological (intransitive), the three pedagogies fail to fulfil their ultimate
function, which is to be educational. To be educational is to be transformative,
as already highlighted in Chapter 1 with reference to Bereiter and Scardamalia
(1987), who, although cognitivists in their approach to learning the process of
writing, recognize the socially transformative role of building a kind of knowledge
that changes beliefs, skills and attitudes. If education is to be transformative
it needs to be able to change our knowledge of reality, re-configure the status
quo and advance social justice, an epistemic virtue that underpins the mission
of some modern-day higher education. To do this, writing instruction needs
to foreground the development of students’ knowledge of the topics they are
expected to write about (rather than disproportionately focus on the myriad
surface features that will allow them to write about this knowledge). The
implications of a critical realist writing pedagogy are that writers must work
retroductively from knowledge of the world (i.e. knowledge of the topics they are
interested in) to making decisions about how best to represent that knowledge
in their texts. This approach turns much current general academic writing
instruction on its head because it starts with knowledge of content and then
decides on the most fitting genres, modalities, languages and technologies for
representing that knowledge.
Judd’s more positive transcendental critique consists in proposing critical
realism as an alternative theoretical foundation for academic writing. His
reasons are fourfold:
 Critical Realism 117

1. From a critical realist perspective, the reason we need knowledge is to

further human emancipation. This means that writing instruction, if it is
to have educational value in the academy, must create the conditions for
writers to emancipate themselves. On this reading, what makes writing
academic is knowledge. Since a hoax or an IELTS essay or any other kind of
writing that displays conventional or performative forms of academicness
(such as plagiarized texts) does not need knowledge to be deemed worthy of
publication or a grade, it cannot be considered academic. As such, symbolic
citation and other forms of plagiarism would place the necessary constraints
on what counts as academic. However, the use of personal pronouns or
contracted forms would not constitute such a constraint because they do not
prevent knowledge from emerging;
2. Knowledge is neither individualistic (expressivist), cognitive, nor relative
(socio-constructivist), but always about the social in the sense that a
writer must be knowledgeable about the objective reality of the social
and institutional structures that generate the social phenomena they are
writing about (e.g. poverty; capitalism; climate change, injustice). On this
account, for a text to be academic, it needs to engage with deep knowledge
and research. Judd proposes, in keeping with critical realist philosophy,
that this deep knowledge is best approached in an interdisciplinary
way. His suggestion aligns with sociologies of knowledge that require
multidisciplinary approaches to understanding reality (see, for example,
Michael Gibbons (1994) in Baber (1995) on the differentiation between
Mode 1 (disciplinary) and Mode 2 (interdisciplinary) knowledge) and with
decolonizing ecologies of knowledge so that we become better attuned to
what counts as knowledge and to whose knowledge counts (Collyer et al.,
2019; de Sousa Santos, 2009);
3. Knowledge is corrigible. Through self-reflexivity and an ongoing quest
to understand and to know things, we can correct mistaken beliefs.
Writing pedagogy should be educative in this respect, i.e. it should lead
students away from mistaken beliefs and provide them with authentic
and meaningful tasks to ensure they are always writing from a position
of knowledge. This would imply that for writing to be academic, it must
always be research-informed and truth-oriented. An implication of such
a condition would be that any writing instruction that is not research-
informed and truth-oriented would result in writing that is not academic;
truth and consistency are epistemic virtues that involve value judgements
about social and natural reality. This means that writing tasks which require
118 What Makes Writing Academic

students to communicate their positions on social (and natural) phenomena

need to allow students to learn content, do research and read up about
the phenomena they are being asked to write about. This ensures that
writing pedagogy honours its educational mission to be emancipatory and
transformative. The implication of this for what makes writing academic
is that writing instruction needs to engage meaningfully with content.
When content becomes a pre-condition for meaningful writing, the ‘myth
of transience’ lamented by Rose (1985) and Russell (2002) is exposed for
what it is: a myth. Writing choices that depend on writing content having
a meaningful purpose are rarely universally transferable, as Sam, from
Chapter 1, found out in the transition from writing at secondary school level
to writing in tertiary education.

To sum up, both Judd and Bernard-Donals think of writing as ‘epistemological’,

as a method of enquiry that allows us to make value-laden claims about a
world that is external to us. In this sense, all academic writing is subjective.
They argue that by ‘reclaiming reality’ (which is Roy Bhaskar’s socio-scientific
project), a realist ontology does away with the reification of relativistic and
anti-foundationalist ontologies and replaces these with the concept of the
dialectic, namely a relational and stratified ontology whereby human agents
interact with their environments by shaping them and being shaped by them.
This assumes that there is an objective reality to shape and to be shaped by and
that social change is possible when agents intervene critically, rationally and
using their judgement. Realist philosophy acknowledges that there are material
structures, mechanisms and tendencies that exist independently of language
and of how we name and classify reality. Once reality has been reclaimed,
language and its written forms, via the intentional agency of the author, can
do the methodological and dialectical work of intervening critically on these
material structures but only through research and working with content rather
than by changing discourses: simply changing how we name phenomena does
not change the structural nature of those phenomena (e.g. re-naming ‘climate
change’ to ‘climate emergency’ does not substantially alter the phenomenon we
are describing, it simply provides an indication as to how the observer views that
phenomenon). Only a deep knowledge of the structures of reality at the level of
the REAL can lead to change at the level of the ACTUAL, which is where writing
is manifest. Re-describing these structures by, for example, changing how we
name something, e. g. replacing ‘writer’ with ‘author’ to signal authority; or
‘customer’ with ‘student’ to signal resistance towards a lexicon of neoliberalism;
 Critical Realism 119

or ‘writing’ with ‘composing’ or ‘academic literacies’ to signal an ever-increasing

range of nuance, goes some way towards re-configuring imaginaries, but it does
little to fundamentally modify what happens at the level of the ACTUAL. Indeed,
critical realists tend to be sceptical of what they see as sui generis language games
whereby we claim to have enacted change simply through changes in discourse:
‘Re-description does not change the material [real] constraints by which you
are bound’ (Bernard-Donals, 1998, p. 228). In saying this, Bernard-Donals is
explicitly criticizing the post-modernist and socio-constructivist tendency to
locate change at the level of the EMPIRICAL, which is where I have located
language and discourse, rather than at the level of the ACTUAL. Instead, a critical
realist framing of academic writing posits writing as a socially transforming self-
reflexive and transitive methodological practice that recognizes the agency of
the writer whilst acknowledging that there are material constraints to writing
as one would like. However, through a process of dialectical judgement that
requires knowledge of the REAL, writers can harness the opportunities that exist
at the structural level. What this dialectic nature further entails is that although
academic writing is subject to established conventions, it is not reducible to or
determined by these conventions. Because of this non-reduction, change in
writing forms can occur.

Modelling Written Communication: A New Systems Approach to

Modelling in the Social Sciences
Writing in the South African context, Pratt (2011), too, has mobilized critical
realism to provide an alternative to relativistic post-modern approaches. Her
work is aimed at proposing a theoretical model for creating what she calls a
‘computerized writing tutor’. I refer the curious reader directly to her book for
the finer details of her technical analysis and limit myself here to quoting her at
length because her words provide an apt conclusion to what has been said so far.
They also afford a natural segue into thinking about writing as a ‘complex’ open
system, which can provide students like Sam, from Chapter 1, with a sense of
‘empowerment’ rather than confusion (Pratt, 2011, pp. 27–8):

Critical realism offers an appropriate perspective from which to view the complex
processes involved in composing [writing]. The critical realist philosophy
represents reality as complex and dynamic and inquires into the way things
work – particularly the deep-structure causes of events and social processes ….
The participant focus is also favoured by critical realism, which views human
120 What Makes Writing Academic

action not as governed by behaviouristic laws, nor as a conditioned response

to pre-determined social structures, but as individual agency (M. Archer, 2002)
with a fair amount of free will within any given social order. Human agency is
both enabled and limited by the opportunities and constraints afforded by social
structures, at the same time maintaining the fabric of these social structures,
which are fairly stable, but capable of gradual change, usually by one or more of
the complex social mechanisms which maintain these structures rather than as
the result of individual human agency (or specific interest groups) per se. This
means that, while learner writers often find themselves operating in a ‘given’
(but not fixed or static) context, where academic writing is an undisputed fact
of academic life, they are able to make efforts to empower themselves by gaining
insight into and expertise in academic composing, in spite of the constraints
set by academic requirements and other factors (e. g. lack of experience and/or
background knowledge).

To better understand the critical realist project, I now turn my attention to

explaining the role that complexity theory plays in this endeavour.

Academic Writing as a Complex and Emergent Open System

In Molinari (2019), I articulated a systematic account of how complexity theory

has been understood in the domains of philosophy, sociology, science and
linguistics and of how its related concept of emergence can be further harnessed
to conceptualize academic writing as an ‘open system’ in which change and
novelty become possible. For my present purposes and readers, I offer the
following definition of complexity by social philosopher Dan Little (Little, 2018),
whose fascinating blog on Understanding Society provides several analyses of
social phenomena that draw on critical realism:
A complex system is one in which there is a multiplicity of causal factors
contributing to the dynamics of the system, in which there are causal interactions
among the underlying causal factors and in which causal interactions are often
non-linear. Non-linearity is important here, because it implies that a small
change in one or more factors may lead to very large changes in the outcome.

Little refers to two fundamental concepts in complexity theory: change and

non-linearity. These are essential to understanding critical realist philosophy
and its relevance to re-conceptualizing academic writing as a complex open
system.
 Critical Realism 121

Complexity Affords Change and Non-linearity

Several writing scholars in the sociolinguistic tradition of Academic Literacies
seek to explain how writers can push back against the conventions that constrain
them in order to change them by invoking the metaphor of a ‘crack’ in the system,
which is presumably ‘how the light gets in’ (echoing singer-song writer Leonard
Cohen’s famous ‘Anthem’ refrain). Brian Street, for example, in conversation
with Theresa Lillis and Mary Scott, claims (Lillis et al., 2015, p. 389):
One metaphor I’d use comes from the person in Algeria who was appointed to
follow Kofi Annan as the UN representative in Syria. He said: ‘all I can see in
front of me is a wall but I know that walls have cracks in them and that’s what
I’m going to work on’ So that’s what we’re doing. Universities look like walls but
there are some cracks.

Writing scholar Catalina Neculai similarly refers to how she has resisted
neoliberal terminology in dissertation descriptors in a ‘subcutaneous’ way.
What she means by this is that she defied the institutional requirements to give
prominence to certain information by deliberately choosing to foreground the
disciplinary contributions of her students rather than focus on the neoliberal
jargon of student ‘employability’, which she nevertheless had to refer to ‘obliquely’
and ‘indifferently’ (Neculai, 2015, p. 405).
Complexity theorists (e.g. Kuhn, 2008; Parnell, 2012) and critical realists
deploy similar metaphors but they possibly conjure up a more prominent role for
the agent, particularly in signalling the need for the agent to more actively ‘seek’
the cracks and force them open or to create the opportunities for those cracks to
form in the first place. What sociolinguistics in the academic literacies tradition
call ‘cracks’ and ‘subcutaneous’ acts of resistance (which conjures up a more
serendipitous, happenstance image, as though you happen to be walking past
the crack or you chance upon a document with neoliberal jargon), complexity
theorists call ‘levers’ that need switching to re-direct the course of history and
shift the deep structures of power (Mason, 2008, p. 38):
Complexity theory seeks the levers of history, the sources and reasons for
change, in the dynamic complexity of interactions among elements or agents
that constitute a particular environment. It is in this sense that seemingly
trivial accidents of history may increase dramatically in significance when their
interactions with other apparently minute events combine to produce significant
redirections in the course of history, significant shifts in the prevailing balance
of power.
122 What Makes Writing Academic

It is because of the need to enact change that some applied linguists have
also turned to complexity theory to explain and to justify diversity and change
in linguistic practices, particularly in response to deterministic, building-block
approaches to language learning. With regard to the dynamism of language and
the unpredictable non-linearity of language development, they argue that when
language is conceived of as a complex system, changes in language development
can occur in interactive, dynamic an non-linear ways because language is an
open system (Cameron & Larsen-Freeman, 2007, p. 227, emphasis added):
Complex systems are composed of elements or agents that interact in different
ways. Their interactions lead to self-organization and the emergence of new
patterns at different levels and timescales. Such systems are also adaptive and
dynamic. The elements and agents change over time, but crucially so also do the
ways in which they influence each other, the relations among them. Complex
systems are open rather than closed; energy and matter can come into the system.
The dynamic nature of element interactions and the openness of a system to the
outside lead to non-linearity, which in complex systems theory signifies that the
effect is disproportionate to the cause.

Here the emphasis is explicitly on the language learner as agent and how
they interact with their environments to develop language competence. This
competence emerges from a series of interactions, the effects of which on
learning a language are non-linear and unpredictable.
What complexity theory signals, in contrast to the seemingly similar
concerns of academic literacies, is a recognition that there is a ‘multiplicity’ of
factors that contribute to phenomena (such as language development or, in our
case, particular conventions in academic writing practices). For deep structural
change to occur in any social practice, it may not be enough to notice a crack
and presumably pick away at it until it gets bigger and the system eventually
collapses, or engage in serendipitous acts of linguistic resistance, because this
approach may not reveal or may even remain silent on the underlying causal
factors that led to the structures that allowed a crack to form in the first place.
Rather, in order for an agent, in our case, an academic writer, to stand a chance
of writing in diverse ways, they need knowledge of the nature of the complex
structures they belong to in virtue of being a student, an academic, or a teacher,
so that they might become empowered to identify what caused these structures
and where the levers of change might be located. The complex stratified ontology
that critical realism reveals indicates that change is simply not possible at all
levels of reality: the structural level of the REAL, for example, remains largely
beyond the reach of any single individual. Whilst it is easy to see that there are
 Critical Realism 123

‘cracks’ in the system that can be picked at – signalled, for example, by a rise
in cases of plagiarism, which indicates dysfunctionality in academic writing
practices that might warrant more creative pedagogies – it is much harder to
know what to do about and with those cracks. Crucially, it is hard to know
who has the power and agency to do something about them. A critical realist
response involves going beyond noticing that something is wrong to knowing
where to put pressure on the system through a deep knowledge of the system. A
student writer alone cannot pick at a crack and resist. Nor can a writing teacher
employed on a casual and fixed-term contract, for example, because they will
more likely teach to the default standard of templates and conventions. But a
student writer equipped with agency and a knowledgeable teacher with a secure
and permanent contract that allows them the time and the resources to engage
with writing scholarship and connect with writing communities might be able
to action the pressure needed for change.
To begin appreciating the significance of complexity theory and its relevance
to what makes writing academic, we must also distinguish between a ‘complex’
system and one that is ‘complicated’. This distinction is important because it
affects how events are analysed and understood. A complicated system can
be explained in terms of its constituent parts whereas a complex one cannot.
For example, a bicycle is complicated, but it is not complex. A sailor’s knot is
complicated, but it is not complex. This is because although both a bicycle and
a knot are intricate and are made of many inter-connected mechanical parts, a
full understanding of what these parts are and how they connect to each other is
sufficient to explain how the bicycle and the knot, as whole systems, will work.
This allows us to predict what will happen when we turn the pedal or move the
handlebars on the bike or when we pull at the loose end of the knot. Complex
systems, on the other hand, do not allow for such predictions because their
‘whole is greater than the sum of their parts’ (Beckett & Hager, 2018). Complex
systems include social phenomena, such as education and economics, whose
constituent parts inter-relate to such an extent that they cannot be explained in
isolation and without a full account of how they relate and interact to other parts:
the reasons for rising inflation rest as much on human purchasing behaviour
and psychology as they do on the mechanics of price increases and the value
of national currencies. This means that in a complex system, changes in the
constituent causal parts are not directly proportional to changes in the whole i.e.
changes in individual spending habits (one of several causes of inflation) do not
provide a full explanatory account of why inflation occurs. This now explains
what is meant when complex systems are described as non-linear: cause and
124 What Makes Writing Academic

effect are disproportionate in the sense that the whole effect cannot be explained
by an isolated cause.
Here is another illustration of what is meant by non-linearity in complex
systems. The seemingly simple act of dropping a single coin in a fairground
coin pusher can lead to a disproportionate effect whereby the entire mass of
accumulated coins suddenly drops. What caused the drop, though, was also
the cumulative pressure of the mass of coins that were already in the system,
the time it took for this pressure to accumulate, the timing of dropping the
coin in the first place, the amount of pressure and precision exerted by the
machine and the position of the new coin in relation to the other coins. From a
complexity perspective, that single coin played a relatively small part in causing
the whole mass to drop. Moreover, the effect of this huge drop results in the
player winning a prize that by far exceeds the value or investment in time and
energy of dropping the initial coin. It is in this sense that cause and effect are
disproportionate and non-linear. By contrast, a complicated system is said to
be linear because a change in a constituent part can more straightforwardly
explain a change in the whole. For example, by taking the pedal off the bike, the
crankshaft can’t properly turn.
Rather than an aggregate composed of concatenated parts that add up to
a whole, as skills-based, cookie-cutter and template approaches to writing
encourage, academic writing is a complex social system of dynamic inter-
relations whose multiple causes cannot be reduced to its constituent parts in
a linear, i.e. mechanistic, manner. On a complexity account, academic writing
becomes non-linear because what makes it academic as a whole (its effect)
cannot be reduced to any specific part (the cause). This can be illustrated
with reference to the effect that conventional academic forms can have on
representations of knowledge. For instance, the use of personal or non-personal
language (discussed in Chapter 1), such as the active or passive voice, can have
a disproportionate effect on how knowledge is re-presented. The personal,
active voice in ethnography, realized by the use of ‘I’, for example, indexes that
the researcher, not the ‘reality’, influences what counts and does not count as
‘data’. ‘I’ thus becomes more than a grammatical item (a personal pronoun). It
becomes an epistemological rhetorical device to signal the positionality of the
researcher, a statement about the researcher’s orientation towards their area of
research: it signals that the data aren’t ‘out there’ and that it is the researcher who
confers upon their samples the status of ‘data’. As Thomson (2013) reminds us,
‘[t]hey aren’t data until we make them data’ and it is our choice of personal or
impersonal language that signals where we stand, i.e. how we position ourselves
 Critical Realism 125

with regard to whether we deem something to count as data or not. Even when
I claim ‘these are samples of x, y, z’ without rhetorical recourse to personal
pronouns, my choice of language, in the guise of the impersonal demonstrative
deictic (these) and the present simple (a tense that allows you to describe an
event as an established fact), signals my objective stance towards the data. It
does not signal that the data are objectively ‘out there’, but that I think and am
saying that they are. By not using personal pronouns, a particular ontological
stance also emerges, namely that ‘data are out there’, they exist. Similarly, if I
claim: ‘here is how I have established that samples x, y, z can be part of my
data set’, a more epistemological stance emerges, namely ‘this is how I know
they are data’. From a complexity perspective, the use or non-use if ‘I’ causes a
disproportionate effect in terms of how knowledge is represented. The simple,
almost-imperceptible and seemingly innocuous grapheme – I – generates
enormous ontological and epistemological effects! Moreover, these effects
cannot be reduced to the single use of the pronoun ‘I’ because there are far
greater causes that determine whether writing, as a complex whole, is perceived
as having a subjective or objective orientation towards its object of enquiry.
These causes include the disciplinary paradigms that establish methods and
methodologies for how research is conducted, the assumptions about the role
of the researcher in the research process and the language of the text as a whole
(Hyland, 2002).
Crucially, in a complex social practice such as writing and what makes
it academic, the effects cannot be reduced to their causes. This explains why
popular skills-based textbook descriptions of academic writing as ‘linear’ make
no sense: they make no sense because what makes writing academic cannot be
reduced to any single factor, such as structure, vocabulary, syntax or language
itself. There is multiplicity of factors which explain an effect, what philosopher of
mind Jerry Fodor (1974, 1997) refers to as ‘multiple realisability’. This signals that
a ‘heterogeneity of realisers’ is involved in explaining how something as complex
as life itself is possible. This multiple realizability, however, does not commit
us to a relativistic ‘anything goes’ approach to what makes writing academic,
as practice-based approaches might suggest because, as argued throughout
Chapter 3 and above with reference to Judd, although there are multiple ways
to represent knowledge, a critical realist writing pedagogy requires that writers
be committed to the truth of their claims rather than wedded to any particular
form to make those claims.
It is at this point that the concept of ‘emergence’ becomes a useful heuristic
to explain how complex phenomena can be explained non-reductively and why
126 What Makes Writing Academic

insisting that any particular feature of language that forms part of a dynamic
complex system is more academic than any other is confusing and misleading.

Emergence Affords Novelty

Emergence is a widely debated philosophical and scientific concept and, like
complexity theory, it is key to understanding critical realism. For our present
purposes, emergence can be simply understood in the terms outlined by
philosopher Jaegwon Kim (2006, p. 548):
[A] purely physical system, composed exclusively of bits of matter, when it
reaches a certain degree of complexity in its structural organisation, can begin
to exhibit genuinely novel properties not possessed by its simpler constituents.

Examples of emergent properties include water, pain and consciousness

(Chalmers, 1996, 2006). Much philosophical debate centres on whether these
properties are weakly or strongly emergent (which I explain below), but at the
core of the debate is the extent to which an emergent property (a whole) can be
reduced to its parts, or constituents. For example, to what extent can a complex
property like human consciousness be reduced to and explained by the chemical
composition of the brain? This is referred to by philosopher David Chalmers as
the ‘hard problem’ of science. It is also referred to in the literatures on emergence
in terms of what constitutes the ‘supervenient base’ from which complex
phenomena emerge (Eaton, 1994; Hohwy & Kallestrup, 2008). For example,
what makes a work of art ‘beautiful’ emerges from a complex set of interactions
between variables (such as the materials used to create, the symmetry, aesthetic
theories, cultural background of the viewer and so on). These variables and
their interactions are referred to as the supervenient base, namely the physical
and social properties that give rise to a complex phenomenon, such as beauty.
This debate extends to critical realist understandings of the nature of social
phenomena and can be understood in the context of methodological and
collective individualism referred to earlier in this chapter (Kaidesoja, 2009),
namely the extent to which social phenomena such as poverty emerge from
individual or collective behaviours.
Arguably, water is an example of a weakly emergent complex phenomenon:
it is emergent because it is a liquid that comes into existence from two gases,
hydrogen and oxygen. Its psycho-physical property of liquidity is novel because
it is not contained in the property of a gas and, as such, it cannot be reduced to
its constituents (Wongsriruksa et al., 2012). Liquidity, therefore, is an example of
 Critical Realism 127

a complex (rather than complicated) novel property because its characteristics

are not possessed by its simpler gaseous constituents: in fact, it is the term
‘water’, rather than the chemical designation of H2O, that is the emergent
property. Emergent properties are further characterized by the fact that claims
can be made about them that cannot be made of their constituents: we can
describe water as thirst-quenching but cannot say the same about hydrogen or
oxygen. Water is arguably ‘weakly’ emergent because the science of chemistry
can provide stratified, finely grained explanations, or ‘bridges’ (Fodor, 1974),
that can account for why two gases can result in a liquid. In other words, the
science of chemistry allows us to predict that when two atoms of hydrogen
combine with one atom of oxygen, water results. A complex phenomenon such
as consciousness, on the other hand, can be considered as ‘strongly’ emergent
because it is not possible to explain or predict its manifestation from the parts
of its constituent supervenient base (there is heated debate in philosophical
circles about whether there are any strongly emergent phenomena at all. See, for
example, debates between physicalist philosophers of science and mind, such as
Patricia Churchland, and philosophers of consciousness, such as Philip Goff and
David Chalmers).
My contention is that academicness, namely what makes writing academic,
be understood in a similar way: it is a weakly emergent property that is novel
because it does not share the properties of its constituent, or supervenient,
base. This base coincides with the three layers of stratified reality represented in
Figure 1 from which academicness can be traced and explained. The SAPs that
can make writing academic, referred to in Chapter 3, such as a commitment to
the truth, knowledge and to social justice, can be understood as novel properties
that are multiply realized by the range of constituents that exist within the
complex and stratified interactions at the level of the REAL, the ACTUAL
and the EMPIRICAL. This allows me to claim that the graphic dissertation of
Sousanis (2015) is academic on a weakly emergent account: although few of
its academic characteristics, as a whole, can be traced back to its constituent
parts (he has no topic sentences or paragraphs and very few in-text references),
its parts do explain why it is academic. It is academic because Sousanis
complied with the fundamental requirements of research practice, such as being
evidence-based, theory-led, (visually) argumentative and making an original
contribution to knowledge. These requirements make his dissertation academic
at the emergent level rather than at the supervenient level of its parts. This has
significant implications for teaching, assessment and academic misconduct
practices. Since these requirements belong to the deep structural level of the
128 What Makes Writing Academic

REAL and are therefore less likely to be changed than what can be changed at
the level of the ACTUAL, they are sufficient to anchor and constrain what makes
a text academic. They do not entail an ‘anything goes approach to academic
writing’. Quite the opposite. They show that when writing, or any other method
of enquiry, is understood as transitive, it simply acts as an EMPIRICAL proxy
for representing the REAL, in this case knowledge of visual thinking and of
interdisciplinary philosophies. This commits me to claiming that any method of
enquiry that enacts a genuinely socio-academic practice can lead to an academic
text.
For example, what makes Harron (2016)’s PhD thesis academic (as a whole)
cannot be traced back in a linear way to any specific words or arrangement
of her text (the parts), as might be done in an IELTS essay or academic hoax.
Instead, what makes it academic are the SAPs that emerge from the interaction
of her agency as a writer (particularly her values and her academic need to meet
the requirements of a doctorate in Mathematics) and the range of opportunities
available to her in the intransitive textual environment, such as threshold concept
3.0 (Villanueva, 2015). What emerges from this interaction is a novel entity,
a thesis that is unique but that can be explained by its constituent parts and
interactions thereof because it met the knowledge requirements of Princeton
University. But it is also a thesis that re-sets the ‘requirements of a doctorate
in mathematics’ by transforming this knowledge: Harron’s thesis re-configures
the standards of excellence of a doctorate to include social justice in the field of
mathematics because she has introduced a new standard of excellence: being
accessible to an audience that transcends her examining committee.

Open Systems Afford both Change and Novelty

Complexity is further related to the notion of permeable open systems and what
emerges from them. Thinking of academic writings as open systems allows us to
see that they are permeable (Molinari, 2021b). As such, they are subject to change
whilst also remaining recognizable and stable because they remain systems. A
human body is an open system because it emerges from countless variables and
their interactions none of which it shares its properties with, when considered as
a whole. For example, a human body can be described as tall, slim, large, heavy
and so on, but its constituent cells, limbs and degree of attractiveness cannot.
This is because a human body emerges from an identifiable and relatively finite
supervenient base of multiple realizers that interact physically, chemically
and biologically in a permeable system that is nevertheless open to multiple
 Critical Realism 129

mechanisms and variables that continue to enter the system: what makes a
human being tall or short or having any other kind of physical characteristic can
be explained by some of these variables and their interactions, but not all. Once
a human body has emerged from its supervenient biological base, a distinct and
relatively unpredictable phenomenon can be said to have emerged, i.e. a social,
political, psychological human being, not just a biological body, whose specific
characteristics, such as personality and looks, can be explained in a weakly
emergent sense at the cellular level but whose overall essence is unlikely to have
been ‘written in the genes’, so to speak. That human essence is an emergent
property.
Academic writings (like human beings) are similarly open to variables
which have causal relevance. These variables include the purposes, languages,
values, agencies and literacies of researchers (the writers) as well as myriad
environmental structures (e.g. SAPs, epistemic virtues, institutional conventions
and constraints). In this sense, academic writings are not ‘closed’, meaning that
their characteristics are not determined by finite criteria that are impermeable to
the complexities and contingencies of academic social reality. On the other hand,
an IELTS essay could be described as ‘closed’ because all it needs to be successful
are isolated features, such as standardized paragraphs or linguistic devices, that
do not reflect the naturally occurring influences that shape academic writing
and affect language choice, such as disciplinary genres, citation practices and the
writer’s voice (Ivanič & Simpson, 1992).

Conclusions

Whilst there are several limitations to the critical realist project, or, at the very
least, there are areas that require further theorization – such as the specific nature
of the generative mechanisms that take place between the three stratified realms
of reality (the REAL, the ACTUAL and the EMPIRICAL) and how writers might
be further empowered to shape their academic texts according to their values
and their knowledge – it nevertheless offers a fresh conceptual space within
which to radically re-think academic writing practices so that they can become
genuinely transformative and educative. This transformation is warranted by
a human need to respect the agencies, knowledge, values, abilities, capabilities
and literacies of diverse writers and to uphold standards of academic excellence,
which include universities’ missions to further knowledge through social justice.
This chapter has argued that the social philosophy of critical realism affords
130 What Makes Writing Academic

these possibilities because it allows us to think of academic writing as a complex

open system where both change and novelty become the norm and not the
exception in the pursuit of epistemic justice.
 5

Foundations for a Future Writing Pedagogy

Introduction

Figure 2 Sousanis (2015, p. 66 © Harvard University Press).

Often, when caught up in the day-to-dayness of my own teaching microcosm,

I need to remind myself of why academic writing is troubled and why it
needs changing. This is not because I ever doubt the problem or because
there is a shortage of colleagues who also recognize that it is a problem,
but because it isn’t always seen as a problem at the macro structural level
132 What Makes Writing Academic

of institutional, disciplinary and higher educational decision-making. It has

taken me a decade of teaching, assessing, course design, research and finding
like-minded communities of writing scholars and practitioners to recognize
it as a problem. Had I not researched, I would have believed everything I read
in popular ‘how to’ textbooks and would never have scratched beneath the
surface of feedback and advice that tells writers their writing is ‘not academic’
or that it is ‘unclear’, such as ‘don’t use personal pronouns or start a sentence
with but’: much of this feedback is either unwittingly misguided or wilfully
fake because so much evidence has been published and is available on ‘bad
writing’ advice (see, for example, Ball and Loewe (2017) or the zombification
of academic writing (Sword, 2009)). Unfortunately (because I think my
professional life would have been easier if I had gone along with the ‘academic
writing is logical, linear and objective’ status quo), during this research
process, I have become aware of trouble and fake news where many don’t
see it – the ‘need-to-learn the rules’ (i.e. ‘my’ rules) brigade has power, either
through silent collusion or through institutionally sanctioned recognitions,
such as awards and promotions; it has resources; and it can silence dissenting
voices by mocking them as idealistic anarchists who have no standards, or by
side-lining and ignoring them. It creates what Bourdieu calls ‘censorship and
the imposition of form’ through symbolic power (Bourdieu & Thompson,
1991, pp. 138):
The metaphor of censorship should not mislead: it is the structure of the field
itself which governs expression by governing both access to expression and the
form of expression and not some legal proceeding which has been specially
adapted to designate and repress the transgression of a kind of linguistic code.
This structural censorship is exercised through the medium of the sanctions
of the field, functioning as a market on which the prices of different kinds
of expression are formed; it is imposed on all producers of symbolic goods,
including the authorised spokesperson, whose authoritative discourse is more
subject to the norms of official propriety than any other and it condemns
the occupants of dominated positions either to silence or to shocking
outspokenness.

In the UK field of EAP, the field with which I am familiar through paid
teaching practice and labour, this censorship manifests itself by ensuring
that academic writing practitioners remain at the service of an outsourced
commodity operating via what Ding and Bruce (2017) have called ‘the edge of
academia’: even when EAP units are on the university payroll, they nevertheless
 Foundations for a Future Writing Pedagogy 133

remain marginalized as ‘handmaidens to the proper disciplines’ because of

limited opportunities to conduct systematic research on academic writing.
This is because EAP centres are bound by and committed to commercial
imperatives that are more tangible and monetizable than the epistemic virtues
of deliberation and reflection, virtues that underpin an educational praxis that is
orientated towards nuance and is more likely to push back against the ideologies
underpinning template-driven, performative, ‘one-size-fits-all’ cookie-cutter
approaches to academic writing. These commercial units, therefore, see
little need to invest in writing scholarship of teaching and learning (Braxton
et al., 2002; Davis, 2019; Hutchings & Shulman, 1999), preferring instead to
rely on popular textbooks and well-crafted ready-to-use internet resources
as their main source of knowledge, despite the fact that even John Swales
(1980) and others have shown many textbooks to be ‘educational failures’
because they compound popular knowledge to suit the commercial interests
of publishers and not the academic literacy needs of writers. The failure to
develop procedural knowledge through scholarship prevents the practice and
theory of academic writing from having equal disciplinary status as a method
for representing and creating academic knowledge because it maims from
the outset the agency needed to transform practice. In the US field of writing
studies, a field I have learned about through unpaid scholarship and intellectual
labour, this censorship manifests itself through maintaining deficit models of
literacy, such as the five-paragraph essay, which encourages writers to ‘perform’
academicness (Warner, 2018) and through de-contextualized, impersonal and
universal approaches to writing instruction (Wardle, 2017; Williams, 2017),
which frame writing as an autonomous, universal and transferable skill. Since
academic writing is a method of enquiry and the main academic proxy for
enacting SAPs, a lack of institutional investment and parity in its scholarship
amounts to censorship.
In light on the above, this chapter is a reminder of why academic writing
practices need changing in the first place, but it goes further. It identifies the
‘levers of change’ needed to do this. These levers include a material – not
vocational or vicarious or voluntary – commitment to writing scholarship: a far
greater range of pedagogies and assessments that include more than language,
and deficit models thereof, needs to emerge. Tinkering around the edges won’t
make this happen: radical, systemic and macro-structural transformation is
needed if higher education writing practices are to be socially just, educationally
transformative and epistemically complete.
134 What Makes Writing Academic

Why Change: Rationales for Re-thinking Writing Practices

The reasons why universities need to change their academic writing practices
have been addressed throughout this book, but as we draw towards a close,
now is the time to summarize them and distil their implications so that the
alternatives can gain visibility and credence and hopefully earn their place at
the academic writing table. In what follows, I list twelve key changes needed
to lay the foundation of a future writing pedagogy that is open, non-linear,
transformative and humane. I do this by extending previous arguments with
new reflections and suggestions. At the end of each key change, I draw on
my teaching experiences and on writing scholarship to suggest what kind of
academic text might emerge if the change were implemented. Having listed
all the changes, I offer three examples of how a future critical realist writing
pedagogy might allow for a greater range of texts to count as academic.

Change 1. Towards Multimodal and Multilingual Textual Ecologies

First and foremost, ‘academic writing’ is a misnomer. As we have seen, it makes
more sense to refer to this transitive method of enquiry in the plural, as academic
writings. But I propose we go even further and remove the noun ‘writing’ all
together: academic ‘texts’ would be by far more fitting because a ‘text’ can be
understood as a ‘communicative event’ that nevertheless must satisfy certain
criteria. These criteria include coherence, argumentation and intentionality
(Titscher et al., 2002, pp. 20–30), all of which, as we saw in Chapter 3, are
equally features of non-linguistic texts. Much of what academic writers do is
multimodal: Carson’s PhD included music, voice and rhythm, as well as a written
exegesis; Sousanis’s EdD was a visual argument with words to support it; in the
arts, particularly, writing plays a minimal role (Ravelli et al., 2013); and in the
sciences, applied sciences and social sciences writers are increasingly required to
communicate their knowledge visually, interactively and creatively to a range of
audiences via social and other digital media (Andrews et al., 2012). Moreover,
as multimodal scholars remind us, all writing is multimodal (Ball & Charlton,
2015) so narrowing its meaning to a designator (‘writing’) that might suggest it
is not is misleading, especially since language itself only partially defines what
writing is (Canagarajah, 2013a, p. 1):
Writing is multimodal, with multiple semiotic features (space, visuals),
ecological resources (objects, people, texts) and modalities (oral, visual and
 Foundations for a Future Writing Pedagogy 135

aural) contributing to its production and interpretation. Language is therefore

only one of the resources that goes into writing. If text construction, circulation
and reception involve diverse social, semiotic and ecological resources, we
have to ask if we should continue to define writing according to language
considerations alone.

Indeed, as evidenced in Chapter 2, the etymology of writing includes ‘drawing’.

The implication of what Canagarajah says is that by de-privileging the high status
that language – including the English language – enjoys in academic writing
practices, we can move towards an ecology of multimodal texts. This would
have far-reaching ethical implications for English second or additional language
writing instruction, too, because it would provide opportunities for writers
whose main academic language is not English to communicate their knowledge
by harnessing the skills they may already have, such as digital composition,
art and multilingualism (understood here as a modality that de-centres the
hegemony of English – see also Canagarajah [2018]). An ecology of multimodal
and multilingual texts might go some way towards re-calibrating the imbalance
of power and removing the barriers to epistemic access created by convergence
towards English as the dominant language in academia. The multimodal
pedagogies described in Archer and Breuer (2015) and Palmeri (2012) provide
rich insights into how the linearity of traditional academic writing prose can
be disrupted to become more recursive and open to creating meanings. The
rich body of work on multilingualism and translanguaging referred to in Wei
(2016), Canagarajah (2011, 2013b, 2013c), Ávila Reyes et al. (2020) and Zenger
et al. (2014) further offers several insights into what multilingual classrooms
might look like if they were given space to mobilize, or mesh, all the resources of
communication available to writers in the joint endeavour to enhance meaning-
making and equality of access in the process of composing texts.

Emergent academic text

Academic e-newsletter
Why? Because it would afford flexibility, creativity, collaboration,
interdisciplinarity, and a fair amount of writer agency in creating, composing,
editing, entertaining, informing, collaborating, communicating to a diverse and
multilingual student community and bringing about change within/empow­
ering the academic community it is aimed at (e.g. information about access to
health services). See pedagogic example on page 149 for a fuller account.
136 What Makes Writing Academic

Change 2. Academic Writing as Composition

Secondly, all texts are compositions and composing is a creative process. The
resulting composition is equally creative because it could have been otherwise.
Composing and composition, process and product, are also recursive rather
than linear because they rely on the selection and ordering of elements that, like
a musical symphony or work of visual art, overlap, repeat and intertwine in a
process that recalls the creative methods of counter-mapping and creative non-
fiction (see, for example, work by sociologist Patricia Leavy). In this sense, even
the linearity of the most conventional academic essay or PhD thesis, with its
five-paragraphs or default IMRAD (Introduction, Methods, Results, Analysis,
Discussion) sequence is a form of composition, albeit one that has fossilized into
a template. The US tradition of Rhetoric and Composition has long argued for
thinking of writing as a form of ‘composition’ but Palmeri (2012) has taken it to
the next level by arguing for multimodal composition that transcends the tyranny
of the alphabet. There is much in this well-established field of writing studies
that we can learn from. By drawing on (rather than fetishizing) the richness
of the classics, writing scholars in this tradition have been able to harness the
insights that history affords with regard to different ways of thinking about
writing. US Composition Studies is more process and activity-oriented, it reveals
the ‘tangible ways in which learning to write within a discipline involves much
more than learning particular forms or vocabularies but rather relates to socially
preferred ways of knowing and acting’ (Tardy & Jwa, 2016, p. 61). So much so,
that recent trends in Composition Studies are increasingly focusing on teaching
students about writing, the assumption being that teaching students to write
academically is potentially self-defeating. This is because of ‘the impossibility of
teaching a universal academic discourse’ (Downs & Wardle, 2007, p. 552) and of
‘teaching genres out of context’ given that writing is a disciplinary activity that
requires a purpose, or ‘exigence’ (Wardle, 2009, p. 767).

Emergent academic text

Infographic/poster
Why? Because it would afford a range of multimodal compositional skills,
both digital and paper-based; agentic skills and abilities, such as drawing and
graphic design; opportunities to consider a wide range of semiotic features,
such as colour, fonts and layouts to convey meaning.
 Foundations for a Future Writing Pedagogy 137

Change 3. Academic Texts Must Afford Thinking

Performativity as Macfarlane has described it is anathema to thinking. It
encourages the use of language for display purposes and relies on ‘serviceable
templates’ to jump through the hoops of assessment, hollowing out and
demeaning the act of authentic knowledge creation and communication in its
wake. When mechanical skills are foregrounded at the expense of cultivating the
more complex SAPs that make academic writings and text genuinely academic,
thinking suffers, hoaxes get published and academic misconduct cases rise. This
is unacceptable in a place of higher learning and it raises very uncomfortable
questions about the purpose of university in relation to thinking and learning,
especially given the internationalization of English-speaking universities and
the EAP markets that they have created (Yun & Standish, 2018).

Emergent academic text

Blog/living document
Why? Because it would afford both the academic writer and the reader
opportunities to think together in a public or other shared space; knowledge and
expertise would grow through accountability and justification of viewpoints as
interaction via comments grows.

Change 4. University Must Take Responsibility for Academic

Misconduct and Proctoring
Anecdotally, in February 2021, I received a university email looking for ‘expressions
of interest to join the growing team of academic misconduct officers’ and stating
that this was ‘an opportunity to get an insight into other parts of the School’. The
wording and tone of this email struck me as odd, yet it was a reminder of how
normalized and embedded misconduct has become in the business discourses
of higher education: the university has ‘officers’, which at best connotes that an
office clerk is in charge of judging student writing and at worst, it conjures up the
image of a police constable, further connoting that the job of the university is to
root out and punish, not educate and prevent; it is a ‘growing’ team seemed to
echo the neoliberal enchantment with the imperative of growth. Why do I never
receive emails offering an opportunity to ‘understand’ the economic, social and
138 What Makes Writing Academic

pedagogic conditions that have led to such a ‘growing team’ of plagiarism police in
the first place or on the extent to which there may be links between cheating and
assessment design and breakdowns in trust, including disenchantment, between
students and the institution (Bretag, 2018; Harper et al., 2019; Peters, 2018)? The
‘plagiarism declaration’ forms students are required to sign after they have either
self-declaredly admitted to reading university guidance on avoiding plagiarism
or to having had sufficient ‘training’ on what is a highly complex issue amount to
the same kind of performativity denounced by Macfarlane (2021b). Plagiarism
software tools are far more likely to ‘detect’ (another policing metaphor) writing
that exhibits mechanistic performativity which in turn leads to an ever-ending
spiral in which savvy writers become increasingly adept at gaming the system in
order to not be caught (e.g. by paying an essay mill to write a plagiarism-proof
essay). The Covid-19 pandemic of 2020–22 has further seen a proliferation of
private proctoring surveillance services (Mckenna, 2021; Weller, 2021) to monitor
online behaviours in assessments being conducted online and from home. What
all of this indicates is that traditional academic writing practices and the ways
in which they are assessed are more likely to be the problem because they lend
themselves to a culture where cheating is desirable and possible (Medway et al.,
2018).

Emergent academic text

Reflective assignments
Why? Because these would afford opportunities for writers and their readers
to talk around the texts that are being written. Reflective assignments include
portfolios of practice, exegeses to explain the how/why of an experiment or
artefact and other holistic approaches that might combine written and oral
accounts of research.

Change 5. Re-think Writing as a Fallible Proxy for Representing

Knowledge
Writing is a method of enquiry that is transitive. This means that it is a proxy
for knowledge. It is not knowledge understood as the intransitive reality that
it seeks to investigate. As such, it can never provide a full representation of
reality. Other research methods, such as laboratory experiments or statistical
 Foundations for a Future Writing Pedagogy 139

analyses, are equally transitive, functioning as proxies for the reality they are
investigating. In virtue of being a proxy, writing must be held to account with
regard to assumptions about what it can and cannot represent. The following
account of epistemic virtues is taken from a book on the history of science
written by Lorraine and Peter Galison (Daston & Galison, 2010) and I share
it here to highlight the inherent subjectivity and fallibility of any epistemic
proxy, including writing. I do so with the explicit intention of de-centring the
privilege that writing has as a method of communicating knowledge: this does
not amount to eliminating writing as method of enquiry but to re-positioning it
within an ecology of methods that have parity to equally contribute in making
knowledge visible.
Before the 1800s, artists and scientists worked together to depict idealized
paradigms of reality. They were driven by a pedagogic imperative that reified
the epistemic virtue of ‘truth-to-nature’ and worked together with ‘four eyes’
to capture what they considered to be the ‘essence’ of nature. This involved
interfering in the representation of nature by airbrushing out anomalies in order
to select those features which they deemed to be representative of a species. Art
allowed them to do this because the artist could, as directed by the scientist,
correct, embellish, give more prominence to or ignore one or other details of
a plant or human anatomy. This was seen as the prerogative of the pedagogue
and scientist (or natural philosopher) who was invested with the authority to
embellish nature in this way in order to illustrate textbooks. The 1900s, on the
other hand, reified the epistemic virtue of ‘eliminating the self ’, believing that
machine-mediation, such as the telescope, afforded the ability to see objects
‘as they really were’. This coincides with the gradual elimination of the self in
writing, as we saw in Chapter 2, but it also cultivates other epistemic virtues that
indicate that the ‘self ’, understood here as the researcher, is very much present
in the research process: in order for reality to be represented as ‘objective’ and
untainted by the pedagogic motives of the natural philosopher-cum-artist, the
scientific self needed to be ‘patient’, ‘persevering’, ‘slow’, ‘methodical’, ‘reasonable’
and ‘diligent’ (recall Newton ‘stumbling across a fact’ because of these virtues).
But this scientific self was still interfering in their representation of nature
because their subjective methods still mediated between the self and the object:
however patient, slow and diligent, the scientist was still viewing reality second-
hand, through a proxy, i.e. the mechanics of a machine and relying on only
two eyes now, meaning that any representations of reality remained even more
partial. Although scientists were increasingly able to report their knowledge with
140 What Makes Writing Academic

high levels of accuracy, the level of detail that machine-mediation afforded also
meant that it could no longer be straightforwardly communicated for pedagogic
reasons (because textbooks needed to simplify reality for the purpose of teaching
it) or for dissemination purposes across the scientific community (because a
wider and more educated readership now meant a more discerning audience).
Instead, this highly specialized knowledge needed to be ‘ventriloquized’, meaning
it had to be separated from the self so that it could speak ‘on behalf of nature’
by making decisions about what aspects of this nature to communicate. This
‘ventriloquizing’ needed a self to be able to speak on behalf of nature, and so,
yet again, the self could never be eliminated. This is why sociologists of science
Latour and Woolgar (1986, p. 28) have claimed that scientific communication
necessarily misrepresents reality because it will always be a partial proxy for
reality:
[T]here has been a growing dissatisfaction with outside observers’ reliance on
scientists’ own statements about the nature of their work. Some participants
have themselves argued that printed scientific communications systematically
misrepresent the activity that gives rise to published reports.

Ventriloquizing requires judgement, namely deciding what to ventriloquize

and how much. The epistemic virtue of ‘trained judgement’ characterized the
scientific virtues of the 1900s and beyond and was founded on the premise that
there is always a self who judges and interprets reality. The intransitive objects
of reality – the facts, so to speak – are represented through classifications,
rankings and orderings that are determined by the values and judgements of a
self. It is in this sense that science is fallible, social and subjective, making any
method or proxy that is deployed to communicate it equally fallible, social and
subjective. This includes the fallibility of the proxy of academic writing. It is this
fallibility that provides a rationale for questioning its reliability as a method of
representation.

Emergent academic text

An animation of writing as a method of enquiry

Why? Because it would afford the composer an opportunity to reflect on what is
lost and what is gained in representing knowledge via the medium of language.
It provides opportunities to justify choices in how knowledge is represented
and opens up possibilities for learning new ways to represent that knowledge .
 Foundations for a Future Writing Pedagogy 141

Change 6. Question the Politics, Ethics and Ideology of Writtenness

Writing is inherently ideological. It is one method for representing the world, of
which there are many, the logic of which has been extended by universities to
a ‘totalitarian’ conclusion, namely that it is the only way of measuring thinking
and of representing and disseminating knowledge. Moreover, this logic has been
extended to privileging one type of writing, the ‘objective’ and ‘formal’ type, at the
expense of others. The conflation of writing with thinking amounts to what Turner
(2018) calls an ‘ontological complicity’. The fact that English, through political and
economic expediency rather than any inherent superiority of its language and
academic culture, has come to dominate the standards to which academic writing
is held further indicates that its script can never be ‘neutral’ or ‘objective’ (Bennett,
2010; Lillis & Curry, 2010b) because bias and injustice ensue (Politzer-Ahles et al.,
2016). In virtue of remaining the standard against which other epistemologies are
measured, such as those of the Global South (Collyer et al., 2019), academic writing
encapsulates and perpetuates the value of ‘writtenness’, a highly contentious and
slippery property which, as implied in Chapter 3, can amount to a ‘fraud’ and
can lead to the publication of hoaxes when left unchallenged. Writteness has been
likened to Received Pronunciation (RP) and its discriminatory effects. Measuring
the standards of English spoken by the diverse global majority against the putative
superiority of RP, spoken by around 3 per cent of the British population, creates
‘language regimes’ and continues to fuel accent wars (Donnelly et al., 2019; Orelus,
2017) that are reminiscent of the literacy wars referred to in Richardson (1997).
Exposure to the underlying assumptions of writtenness can, at the very least, create
a space within which diverse forms of writing and textual expression can enter
the arena as potential contenders for academic legitimacy. Pedagogic approaches
to co-designing writing tasks (Bovill, 2020) could generate opportunities for the
literacies of students to emerge as legitimate forms of communication.

Emergent academic text

Student-led peer reviews, assessments and

criteria designs
Why? Because designing assignments, co-creating criteria, reading and
commenting on the work of others as ‘partners’ provides opportunities to
explain and justify ideas followed by feedback that is relevant to communities
who are learning from each other. Feedback between peers affords the
emergence of democratic syllabi that respect the literacies of the community.
142 What Makes Writing Academic

Change 7. Remind Ourselves That Clarity Is Often in the Eye of the

Beholder
Writtenness is further imbricated with the equally contested notion of ‘clarity’
in academic writing. This, too, like the notion of accent and standards, ignites
controversy, often originating in the Anglo-American tradition of analytic
philosophy (Law, 2014). ‘Western’ standards of clarity are rooted in formal logic,
language, positivism and the British Enlightenment via the legacy of philosopher
John Locke, for whom words could be chosen in the interests of ‘precision and
economy’ (Turner 2018). However, as noted by Peters (2008, p. 828):
‘[C]larity’ in philosophical discourse also has its history and … ‘normal forms of
academic scholarship’ have become ‘normalised’ or institutionalized and are in
the process of changing again, especially in response to the rise of the electronic
journal. The use of ‘normal’ here betrays a politics of philosophy writing and a
deep history of the politics of writing in philosophy that still embraces the false
dichotomy of Analytic and Continental philosophy in its material forms and
perpetuates the myth of a universal form of writing and the dream of a universal
form of language called philosophy.

However, notions of what counts as ‘clear’ are being revisited because of the
affordances of new technologies, as the quotation above suggests and because
of the epistemic injustices enacted through assessment practices that judge a
diverse student body against the ideological literacy standards of writtenness
(see, for example, McArthur [2020]). Researcher Carmichael-Murphy (2021)
refers to ideologies that lead to the assumption that there is only one standard
of clarity, that of the ‘Western’ gaze. In her higher education blog post on
decolonizing the PhD, Carmichael-Murphy reflects on the barriers faced by
racially minoritized students who are still expected to refer predominantly to a
‘Western’ canon of knowledge in their research even though it may seem wholly
‘unclear’ to them (simply because it is not a form of literacy they are familiar
with). The requirement to reference ‘Western’ literatures potentially also risks
stifling the emergence of new knowledge by requiring that non-‘Western’
researchers remain within the boundaries of traditional ‘Western’ thought:
The stance taken here is not to discard Western philosophy, but to reject fixed
hierarchies of knowledge which ‘other’ alternative ways of knowing. If the
original contribution of the thesis is to add to the discipline, does this mean that
a thesis should also cement what is already ‘known’? By failing to identify the
boundaries of our thought and expression we stifle the emergence of new and
alternative knowledges.
 Foundations for a Future Writing Pedagogy 143

Sperlinger et al. (2018) have similarly shown how literacy exclusion at

university leads to epistemic injustice. They point out that literatures that are
derided by the ‘West’ for being unclear and outright ‘bad’ (such as the writing
of Gayatri Spivak [1987]) are, in fact, perfectly understood by those who may
share the experiences or be familiar with the ideas these authors are discussing.
The assumption that clarity is a universally recognizable and definable property
of written texts raises troubling questions about who universities are actually for
and what kinds of texts students should be reading and writing. Moreover, by
insisting that ‘Western’ standards of what counts as ‘clear’ writing are the most
desirable, writing instruction re-enforces the very mechanisms of exclusion and
injustice that led to those standards becoming dominant in the first place.

Emergent academic text

A manifesto
Why? Because it would afford the opportunity to challenge and provoke
assumptions by declaring a position, intention and ethical orientation towards
a contested idea. It would develop the socio-academic practice of critical
engagement with relevant scholarship and a chance to explore authorial voice.
See pedagogic example on page 150 for a fuller account.

Change 8. Hold Writing as a Socio-academic Practice to Account

Socio-academic practices refer to the specifically academic social practices
of higher education and to the standards of excellence to which they aspire.
They concern what and whose purposes and values are served by a university
education, as evidenced throughout Connell (2019), de Sousa Santos (2017) and
Sperlinger et al. (2018). Their focus on what is valued in the pursuit of knowledge
through a higher education closely aligns them with epistemic virtues and vices.
As we head towards considering what levers of change are available to agents
who wish to transform academic writing practices, the SAPs of the neo-liberal
and capitalist university must be mentioned. The following remarks are brief
and can be read as promissories for a future conversation. These are inspired
by a thought-provoking and controversial reflection by educationalist Bruce
Macfarlane (2021a) who argued that activism and social justice have been co-
opted as SAPs by neoliberal universities. Traditionally, activism fell outside the
144 What Makes Writing Academic

remit of the SAPs of the university because it was the prerogative of grassroots
movements which approached change from the bottom-up, from ‘the street’, so
to speak (see, for example, Choudry [2020] on ‘activist knowledge’). It certainly
was not the mission of the traditional Humboldtian university, which was
explicitly oriented towards the SAP of research excellence and methodological
rigour in the pursuit of scientific knowledge (modern universities are, of
course, also oriented towards research and scientific knowledge, but my point
here is one of emphasis, namely that ‘social justice’ was not visible in the
mission statements of past universities). The recent prominence of Black Lives
Matter, LGBTQ+, Athena Swan (a measure to promote women in academia),
decolonization, EDI (a measure to promote Equality Diversity and Inclusion in
academia) and ‘social justice’ movements, as a whole, have traditionally not been
part of the university’s mission. Regardless of whether activism, understood as
the pursuit of social justice and human rights, should or should not be ‘what
or who universities are for’, it remains, in critical realist terms, one of the de
facto realities of several university visions. This makes social justice a twenty-
first-century socio-academic practice and, because of this, writing practices
must be held to account by being given the space to be transformed so that they
can become agents of change in virtue of their transitive status as methods of
enquiry. Pedagogies that allow academic writings to be transformed so that they
can function as levers of change are more likely to further the cause of justice
because they would allow new and emergent ecologies of knowledge to break
free from the chains of their current encapsulations: Carson (2017) ensured the
oral culture and rhythms of the communities he was researching could be read/
listened to by those communities. He did not want the accounts and the histories
of these communities to be transcribed into the straightjacket of standard and
impersonal academic writing prose. The knowledge that has emerged from
his thesis may in turn become the knowledge that is needed to transform and
dismantle the socially unjust imperatives of the university, which either exclude
from the outset those whose literacies do not conform or impose a standard of
‘Western’ academic literacy as a pre-condition for accessing university in the
first place. In her call to reclaim the PhD as an ‘open dialogue’, Carmichael-
Murphy seems to share a similar sentiment:
Knowledge should be accessible to stakeholders, not guarded by shareholders.
Universities continue to accrue knowledge in the form of physical theses, only ever
read by people who are also constructing theses. A prime example of knowledge
being ‘known’ but not comprehended. This is where public engagement becomes
 Foundations for a Future Writing Pedagogy 145

a vital source of agency for the prospective PhD; but public engagement should
not be conflated with public good. Academic communication with the public
thus far, has been didactic; accumulating shared knowledge which is simply
formalized by the researcher and the university. So, perhaps, the PhD should be
reclaimed as an open dialogue with the world.

If academic writings are to become ‘open dialogues’ (see, for example,

Abdulrahman et al. [2021]) as part of a socially just pedagogy, their genres need
to change so that what makes writing academic can include a far greater range
of communicative practices.

Emergent academic text

Dialogues, tetralogues and metalogues

Why? Because these would afford opportunities for public engagement and
dissemination across diverse interdisciplinary communities. Writers with
different disciplinary and cultural perspectives in dialogue on shared concerns,
clarifying as required, explaining, interjecting, suggesting synchronously on
the page. See pedagogic example on page 151 for a fuller account.

Change 9. Re-thinking Writing Requires Threshold Concepts

Another reason to re-think writing practices is that research in writing studies
has shown there are several ways of defining academic writing and that there
are multiple exemplars of what academic writing looks like. An understanding
of these threshold concepts significantly extends the narrow and flattened
definitions favoured by deficit approaches to academic writing instruction.
Understanding that academic writing is multimodal and that it mediates
activity, for example, is a far cry from describing it as ‘objective’ and ‘linear’.
These studies index the richness of the academic writing landscape pointing to
further evolutions in the ecology of academic texts.

Emergent academic text

The comic and the graphic essay

Why? Because these would afford opportunities for their authors to engage
multimodally in communicating their meaning in ways that represent their
histories, literacies and identities (e.g. threshold concepts 2.4 and 3.2).
146 What Makes Writing Academic

Change 10. Change Academic Practices and Standards

Further reasons to change writing practices include the fact that what makes
these practices academic in the first place is changing. Recall the discussion on
practices from Chapter 1: if the practices change, then so must the skills needed
to enact the practices. This is because the skills are external to the internal
standards of excellence of a practice. Skills are the means to an end. Thinking of
skills as means to an end also entails, for example, that if the skill of writing a six-
sentence paragraph is no longer achieving the standards of excellence needed to
give voice to the dialects of an indigenous community or to convey the urgency
for environmental reform, then the skills of paragraph-writing may need to
be replaced with the skills of digital composition, animation and social media
engagement.
Several writing scholars, including Paré (2018), Paltridge and Starfield (2020),
Badenhorst et al. (2021) and Mewburn (2020), are challenging academia to a
radical re-think of its traditional genres, particularly with regard to dissertation
writing and its relevance to the world of work. This is because the traditional
paper-based thesis may no longer be fit-for-purpose since it rarely reflects the
kinds of worlds that newly minted research graduates inhabit. Even if a graduate
remains in academia, they will be expected to communicate through a range
of literacies that are multimodal. Their audiences will be equally diverse and
will transcend the narrow pool of specialists in their research fields. Moreover,
research also shows that the majority of university graduates do not go on to have
careers in academia (Hancock, 2020). What this entails is that university students
(and their parents) measure the investment they make in higher education
against their chances of securing employment. This socio-structural reality has
become an intransitive one, to use critical realist terminology, and it amounts
to a real socio-academic practice, one that is based as the epistemic virtue (or
vice) of ‘employability’. As such, students have limited power throughout the
duration of their studies, at least, to dismantle the economic imperatives at the
level of the REAL that position them as consumers (Naylor et al., 2020). And
once they have been positioned as consumers, they are more likely to demand
that a university education equip them with skills that are transferable to the
job market. Whether or not this requirement should impact on the kind of
writing they do at university has a bearing on whether the traditional ‘big book’
400-page doctoral thesis (Eco, 2015), for example, is still relevant. Whatever
changes emerge in academic writing practices, these should not come at the
 Foundations for a Future Writing Pedagogy 147

expense of the complexities of a ‘thinking university’ (Beckett & Hager, 2018;

Bengtsen & Barnett, 2018): the challenge, rather, is to ensure that any changes
to writing requirements, such as those of the PhD thesis, maintain the standards
of excellence inherent in the SAP and epistemic virtues that a PhD or any other
marker of academic excellence needs to meet (Andrews et al., 2012).

Emergent academic text

The digital thesis

Why? Because this would afford writers the agency and autonomy to shape their
knowledge in ways that serve their futures. Writers would develop the skills
needed to communicate complex knowledge in the interests of composition
and creative recursiveness rather than the linearity of standard writing.

Change 11. Ecrire: Reclaiming the Art of Writing

A penultimate reason for the need to change academic writing practices is
what I referred to in Chapter 1 as the aesthetic rationale. This should not be
confused with vanity projects that pit spurious notions of ‘good’ writing against
‘bad’ writing nor does it mean that paying attention to the beauty of form
diminishes the truth of the content. Rather, it needs to be understood within the
broader and well-established tradition of how form and content are inextricably
bound (Nussbaum, 1990). The history of writing, including scientific and
academic writing, can be read as a chronicle of which forms best afford the
communication of knowledge. As Taub (2017) evidences, prose is a relatively
late comer (fifth century) to the art of communicating scientific knowledge and
even once prose did establish itself as the most ubiquitous form of literacy in
‘Western’ academia, it still provided writers with choices: letters, encyclopaedia
entries, commentaries, biographies, dialogues and chronicles are just some of
the genres deployed throughout history to communicate knowledge. Charles
Bazerman’s influential and compelling body of work (Bazerman, 1988, 2007,
2015) chronicles the evolution of the eighteenth-century experimental journal
article to highlight how changes in form affect content and how changes in
content become ‘encapsulated’ in genres. This encapsulation can ossify and
become performative. It therefore needs to be ‘rattled’ so that the information
chain can be broken and knowledge can continue to be shaped, allowing new
148 What Makes Writing Academic

forms to emerge. Writers can and do reclaim the art of writing by drawing on
the broad pool of genres that is available to them at the level of the REAL, as
evidenced throughout, for example, Phillips and Kara (2021). The example of an
emergent academic text that can reclaim the art of écrire, below, is inspired by
stand-up academic and anthropologist Kate Fox (2021).

Emergent academic text

Humorous writing
Why? Because this would afford writer-researchers to negotiate through
humour the ‘in-between spaces’ that exist in inter-disciplinary and inter-
methodological academic discourse. Humour allows writers to “interrupt the
traditional hierarchy in which monologic, ‘detached’ academic discourse is
the best way of showing that you are gathering and disseminating knowledge”
(Fox, 2021, p. 160).

Change 12. Respect a Writer’s Right to Flourish

Last but not least, writers, as agents in their own right, have a human
right to express themselves in accordance with their abilities (what they
are physically able to do) and with their capabilities, understood as the
approach to human rights and ethics pioneered by Amartya Sen: this
approach highlights the human right to material, emotional and educational
resources that enable them to flourish (Nussbaum, 2011; Robeyns, 2016).
As long as higher education remains dependent on (and reduced to)
monolingual (English) and monomodal (language) proficiency and as long
as we continue to measure academic success (almost) exclusively against
language proficiency, then we will necessarily judge as ‘deficient’ students
who come to university with diverse multilingual, multimodal, dyslexic,
autistic, artistic, social, cultural and physical repertoires. Moreover, if
language is an expression of socio-cultural identity (Evans, 2014; Holmes,
1992), then by insisting on linguistic homogeneity, we are asking for ‘cultural
and social’ homogeneity. And by asking everybody to speak and write in the
same way, just as was once the case with RP (Received Pronunciation), we
are creating the conditions for a homogenized academy that communicates
via a mono-literacy.
 Foundations for a Future Writing Pedagogy 149

Emergent academic text

Code-meshed and translanguaged writing

Why? Because this would afford opportunities for writers’ to harness a fuller
range of meaning-making resources and ensure their linguistic repertoires
and identities were visible in their writing. Readers would need to cooperate
to make more effort to decode meaning and writers would need to ensure
they were intelligible. Deviation from standard norms and expectations
become justified in terms of “rhetorical and communicative functionality”
(Canagarajah, 2011, p. 414).

The above provides a non-exhaustive list of reasons to consider change in

our academic writing practices. In what follows, I offer three glimpses of what
a future critical realist writing pedagogy might begin to look like. My intention
is to provide a nascent rationale for making a far greater range of texts count as
academic in virtue of the socio-academic practices (SAPs) and epistemic virtues
(EVs) that motivate them and because of the positive (socially just) impact that
they may bring about.

Example 1. The Newsletter

Authentic task* prompt: form an editorial team to write, review, edit and publish
an e-newsletter to help a student community and aimed at a student readership;
draw on your collective socio-semiotic knowledge and skills to convey knowledge
and information that is relevant to your readers in both content and form; design
an interactive tool (e.g. a survey) to generate and collect feedback; reflect on your
individual contribution and on the impact of the newsletter.

*Task can be adapted to suit undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral

requirements and can be set as individual or collaborative.

Example assessment criteria

Learning Outcomes: communicate knowledge intelligibly, multimodally and

multilingually
Impact of text Semiotic resources Reflection
Did the text lead to Were the most fitting What did you learn?
change? resources used for your What worked and why?
What kind and for whom? readership?
150 What Makes Writing Academic

Who did it benefit, harm, Was the communicative What would you do
include, exclude? aim achieved? How? differently?
How will you follow up/ What peer/readership Did you enjoy this task?
build on this task? feedback did you receive? Why?

Educational principle: to represent, create, innovate, transform knowledge

collaboratively. Critical realist principle: to harness writer skills (EMPIRICAL)
for the creation of text (ACTUAL) by mobilizing knowledge of which genres,
threshold concepts and linguistic affordances are available in the textual
environment (REAL) in order to bring about positive change in a community
(EMERGENT ACADEMICNESS). See Figure 1 on page 105.
Pedagogic principle: multilingualism and multimodality as methods for
representing knowledge.
Scholarship: task ideas and rationales inspired by Bezemer and Kress (2008),
English (2011) and Canagarajah (2011).
What makes the text and task academic: it fulfils the socio-academic practice
(SAP) of writing for an authentic audience and is motivated by the epistemic
virtue (EV) of benefitting the community.

Example 2. The Manifesto

Authentic task* prompt: identify what ‘clarity’ means to you, your knowledge
area, your discipline and your audience. Refer to relevant literature and examples.
Compose a manifesto using a range of socio-semiotic resources to create a list of
tenets designed to provoke thinking about what clarity is. The aim is to challenge
prevailing assumptions, persuade your readers of the alternative; indicate your
ethical orientation and epistemic values, and use it as tool that can be re-visited to
guide your own writing practices and understandings.

*Task can be adapted to suit undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral

requirements and can be set as individual or collaborative.

Example assessment criteria

Learning Outcomes: to challenge assumptions knowledgeably and purposefully

Impact of text Semiotic resources Reflection
Did the text lead to Were the most fitting What did you learn?
change? resources used for your What worked and why?
What kind and for whom? readership?
 Foundations for a Future Writing Pedagogy 151

Who did it benefit, harm, Was the communicative What would you do
include, exclude? aim achieved? How? differently?
How will you follow up/ What peer/readership Did you enjoy this task?
build on this task? feedback did you receive? Why?

Educational principle: to critique received wisdom.

Critical realist principle: to develop an authorial voice (EMPIRICAL)
for the creation of text (ACTUAL) that mobilizes knowledge of what genres
are available in the textual environment (REAL) in order to stimulate deeper
thinking (EMERGENT ACADEMICNESS). See Figure 1 on page 105.
Pedagogic principle: understanding genre, its purpose and its readership.
Scholarship: task ideas and rationales inspired by Hanna (2014) and Hodgson
et al. (2018).
What makes the text and task academic: it fulfils the socio-academic
practice (SAP) of critical engagement with relevant scholarship and is motivated
by the epistemic virtue (EV) of questioning established knowledge.

Example 3. The Dialogue

Authentic task* prompt: you are going to explain your disciplinary

understandings** of a complex idea and/or threshold concept to someone who is
not as familiar as you are with this knowledge. Record or imagine a conversation
between you and them in which you explain, exemplify, re-cast, your understanding
in response to your interlocutor’s questions, objections, re-formulations and counter-
examples. Write this conversation as a play, radio interview, children’s story or
other genre that affords dialogue.

*Task can be adapted to suit undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral

requirements and can be set as individual or collaborative.

** Recalling the example of Lucia, the psychology student who was excluded from
her class because she was unfamiliar with the jargon of academic psychology, this
writing task would provide an opportunity for her to remain in her psychology
class and work with other students to mutually explain their understanding of
psychology. The benefit to Lucia would be that she remains in the psychology
class and in so doing, develops her understanding of the discipline through
written dialogue. The benefit to her more academically-trained peers would
be that they learn about situated experiences of psychology from Lucia and
hone their own academic skills of communicating complex knowledge through
dialogue with readers who have different understandings.
152 What Makes Writing Academic

Example assessment criteria

Learning Outcomes: to critically explain disciplinary concepts to different

audiences
Impact of text Semiotic resources Reflection
Did the text lead to Were the most fitting What did you learn?
change? resources used for your What worked and why?
What kind and for whom? readership?
Who did it benefit, harm, Was the communicative What would you do
include, exclude? aim achieved? How? differently?
How will you follow up/ What peer/readership Did you enjoy this task?
build on this task? feedback did you receive? Why?

Educational principle: to understand and communicate complex ideas

to those who are less familiar with them in order to understand them better
yourself.
Critical realist principle: to mobilize the writer’s linguistic skills
(EMPIRICAL) in creating a text (ACTUAL) that demonstrates knowledge of
reader expectations in the textual environment (REAL) in order to bring about
mutual understanding of complex ideas (EMERGENT ACADEMICNESS). See
Figure 1 on page 105.
Pedagogic principle: increase awareness of the communicative affordances
of the dialogue as an academic genre.
Scholarship: task ideas and rationales inspired by English (2011, 2015).
What makes the text and task academic: it fulfils the socio-academic practice
(SAP) of writing for an authentic audience and is motivated by the epistemic
virtue (EV) of transforming understandings of existing knowledge.

Pedagogies as Levers of Change:

Investment in Scholarship and Pedagogy

Resistance to change has many causes. It includes a toxic mix, or perfect storm,
of contentment with the status quo, fear of the unknown, unfamiliarity with the
alternatives, lack of resources and opportunities and lack of agency. To paraphrase
Laurel Richardson, resistance can also take the form of defensiveness:
If comics and rap count as academic writing and I can’t do it, what happens to
my identity, my prestige, my status – my place in the pecking order – ME?

Richardson took her academic field of sociology to task for writing in boring,
linear and de-personalized prose suggesting instead that poetry better captured
 Foundations for a Future Writing Pedagogy 153

the rhythms and voices of the sociological reality she was investigating (see
Chapter 1). Her fellow sociologists argued that poetry was not an appropriate
method of enquiry because it lacked validity. What they overlooked, though,
was that all methods of representing reality are proxies for that reality and, as
such, they are all, to varying degrees, fallible. This is why different research
methods and methodologies are chosen or discarded depending on the object of
enquiry. In fact, Richardson had not suggested that they too adopt poetry as their
preferred method of enquiry: she was simply making the point that it was one of
her chosen methods and that it afforded validity as a methodological proxy for the
social reality she was researching (namely as a way of transcribing her interview
data so as to evoke as closely as possible the rhythms and emotions of the women
she had been interviewing). Similarly, advocating for a re-configuration of what
makes writing academic, based on the warrants afforded throughout this book,
does not imply that all academic writers should rap or draw their research or
that teachers of academic writing, trained to teach the genre of linear prose,
should lose their jobs because their skills are no longer required: those skills
will be required for many futures to come, but they are likely to become part of
a broader ecology of skills as new forms of writing emerge. As Sousanis reminds
us in opening this chapter, ‘linear sequences have their strengths, but they are
not the only possibility’. The visual argument of his graphic dissertation can be
read through the theoretical lens proposed by Jude Fransman, who shares her
rationale for re-imagining the conditions of possibility for the PhD by mobilizing
the metaphor of a map. Maps are ‘open systems’ that allow us to organize reality
rather than reproduce it; they are open to change because they are not determined
by a single use or purpose (Fransman, 2012, p. 140):
The map is […] detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification.
It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an
individual, group or social formation.

Although she does not draw on critical realist philosophy to argue this, she
is nevertheless describing what is one of the defining properties of an open
system, namely their permeability, which is what makes them ‘susceptible to
modification’ and, therefore, open to change.
What I am similarly suggesting is that we harness the permeability afforded
by academic texts understood as open systems to open up possibilities for re-
configuring what makes them academic based on our values, on a range of SAPs
and EVs that extend beyond tired and anachronistic notions of ‘objectivity’,
‘linearity’ and ‘reliability’. For change to happen, university leadership, teachers
154 What Makes Writing Academic

and students need to democratically activate the judgemental rationality of their

agencies to trigger change at the level of the ACTUAL, which is the transitive and
epistemological level of reality agents have direct access to and which requires
deep knowledge at the level of the REAL to be effective. Writing pedagogies can
be the levers of change that teachers, students and academic writers can activate
to open the spaces needed for these possibilities to emerge. I argued in Chapter
4 that academic texts are open systems in virtue of their social complexity. This
makes them porous whilst still remaining stable enough to warrant their status as
‘systems’. By being porous, they have the inbuilt capacity to allow new skills and
practices to enter their systems without the system collapsing. For this reason,
academic texts are located at the level of the ACTUAL, where change is possible.
When new academic texts emerge, they do not replace the old ones: a graphically
drawn or musically performed thesis does not pose a threat to the traditional
monograph, but remains very much within the system of academic knowledge
production because it still has to comply with reality at the level of the REAL
within which university structures are historically, economically and socially
bound to enacting specific SAPs. This includes, for example, the requirement to
reference research, gain ethics committee approvals and justify methodological
frameworks, none of which rule against using comics, to mention one of any
number of semiotic resources, as a scientific research method (Al-Jawad, 2015).
Levers of change include new pedagogies and access to relevant
scholarship. They can be understood as ‘cracks in the system’ that need to be
both pro-actively and collectively created and then picked away at so that the
old foundations either collapse or become replaced by the new ones. Levers
require several structural conditions for agents to activate them. The next
section limits itself to considering the two conditions with which I am most
familiar and have had access to as a salaried permanent teacher of academic
writing with no contractual obligation to do research: these levers are
scholarship and pedagogy. It is important to declare my positionality because
my own agency to enact pedagogical change at the level of the ACTUAL is
also subject to material opportunities and constraints afforded at the level of
the REAL. These differ from the material opportunities and constraints of
someone who is casually employed or of an academic manager or professor,
for example, each of whom is likely to have varying degrees of agency, such
as access to budgets, and varying degrees of autonomy to activate a range
of levers of change, such as research time built into their workloads or
membership of committees where they can contribute to making decisions
about scholarship and pedagogy. Positionality with regard to agency is crucial
 Foundations for a Future Writing Pedagogy 155

because each level of professional status comes with different opportunities

and constraints that agents are more or less free to act upon.

Change through Scholarship

If teachers and assessors of academic writing are to be equal partners in laying
the foundation of a future and open academic writing pedagogy that transforms
practices and closes the theory versus practice gulf between ‘what goes on in the
classroom’ and ‘what is said in the research journals’, then writers and teachers
of academic writing at all levels and across all disciplines must have access to
scholarship. I locate scholarship at the level of the REAL because it is part of the
intransitive ontological reality, i.e. it exists whether or not we choose to or can
engage with it. As agents, we can choose to ignore this reality, but that doesn’t
change its ontological realness. By ‘access’ I mean material access in the form
of access to a library and to open resources but I also mean ‘access’ in the form
of contractual terms, whereby employers support and value the scholarship of
teaching and learning (SoTL) as part of employment terms and conditions at
the level of the REAL that enable academic staff to flourish through professional
growth and fulfilment (Braxton et al., 2002; Hutchings & Shulman, 1999).
Material investment in SoTL is likely to inspire teachers who have the curiosity
and the disposition to bridge the theory–practice divide to join communities
of writing practitioners and researchers engaged in sharing and disseminating
their work. This would also serve to bridge the knowledge gap between teachers
of academic writing working on the ‘edge of academia’ and those teaching and
researching ‘the proper disciplines’.
But it is not just access to knowledge that practitioners need: however much
scholarship one engages with, a teacher of academic writing is unlikely to be
knowledgeable of every academic genre at the level of the REAL. This is why
Sam, my semi-fictitious student from Chapter 1, was confused. She had clearly
been taught, to the best of her teachers’ knowledge, that academic writing was
pretty much the same, formulaic and transferable across the disciplinary board.
This is why Sam was unable to then make sense of the differences in standards
and expectations that they ended up encountering on their degree programme.
Even when teachers do become familiar with studies that have identified
some of the skills and practices students need to write at university, it remains
difficult to decide what a general academic writing course, such as those taught
by EAP or in Academic Writing Centres and Library Services, should select,
prioritize and then teach. One answer to the general versus specific academic
156 What Makes Writing Academic

writing conundrum is provided by Wardle (2017). She argues that students be

taught general principles about writing and what it means to be an author so
that they can critically transfer knowledge of writing, rather than skills, to other
contexts. This would avoid the ‘rigid’ and ‘inappropriate’ application of rules
from one context to another and would educate students in a reflective and
mindful approach to writing whereby they notice disciplinary conventions in
their readings and are able to then infer relevant patterns rather than accumulate
a set of rules. But who can teach the teachers to teach their students in this
way? The solution, for Elizabeth Wardle, is to create MA (Master’s)-level degree
programmes that teach university teachers about both the theory and practice of
academic writing. As Downs and Wardle (2007, p. 554) claim: ‘Having a major
… dramatically changes a field’s standing in the academy’. Indeed, as argued
in Molinari (2013), MAs in Creative Writing abound yet those in Academic
Writing do not.1 This seems highly incongruous given the challenges that all
academic writers deal with and the high-stakes audit culture that academic
writing is invested in, from undergraduate writing assignments all the way to
the high-impact writing that academics are expected to publish in order to fulfil
the requirements of the REF (the 4-yearly UK Research Excellence Framework
that determines the extent to which research departments receive government
funding and that creates promotion pathways).
In addition to the more traditionally published literatures on academic writing
referenced throughout this book, there are online communities of scholars whose
work is possibly more readily and freely accessible to anybody with an internet
connection. These scholars freely share their own and each other’s knowledge
and resources, they form reading groups and organize seminars, have journals
and blogs and, via social media, fulfil the prophecy of the ‘networked university’
described by Nicolas Standaert in Barnett (2012). There are simply too many of
these ‘networked resources’ to list and any selection is necessarily at the expense
of equally generous and thorough scholarship, but three examples of where
scholarship on a more nuanced, creative and socially just approach to academic
writing is regularly evidenced, updated and shared are:

●● the blog of independent writing scholar Dr Helen Kara ([Link]

com/), who publishes research on creative methods and indigenous
knowledges;

1
Notable exceptions in the UK are an MSc in Chemistry and Scientific Writing [accessed 27
December 2018] at the University of Warwick and an MA in Academic Writing Development and
Research [accessed 27 December 2018] at Coventry University.
 Foundations for a Future Writing Pedagogy 157

• the blog of The Hidden Curriculum Team ([Link]

wordpress. com/), whose book on the hidden landscape of doctoral
writing chronicles opportunities and possibilities for writers rather than
foregrounding rules and conventions (Elliot et al., 2020);
●●the blog of Professor Pat Thomson ([Link] net/), who enacts
her agency by triggering the levers of change that her status as an academic
supervisor, writer, teacher and tenured professorship affords her.

Change in academic writing practices that re-configures what makes writing

academic can be actioned via access to such and other scholarship and by giving
degree-level status to the complex intellectual and methodological work carried
out by the practice of writing as a method of enquiry. Change is also actioned
when scholars join collectively to build communities of knowledge and practice
(Lave & Wenger, 1991) that are networked and therefore amplify the chances of
triggering levers of change that an individual alone would not have the power
to do. Through scholarship, agents can become invested with the agency needed
to action the levers of change between the levels of the EMPIRICAL and the
ACTUAL of a critical realist stratified reality. What this means in practice is that
knowledge of academic writing scholarship at the level of the REAL can enable
a writer at the level of the EMPIRICAL to mobilize their knowledge of all the
possible genres (at the level of the REAL) that can then become available at the
level of the ACTUAL.

Change through Pedagogy

If you teach academic writing or if you are a student of academic writing, at any
level of university instruction, you will hopefully have experienced some very
good practice. You may have had a mentor or tutor or supervisor or even have read
some inspiring and liberating work on teaching that spurred you on to become
the best writer, or composer of texts, that you could be. Equally, like Sam, you
may have had some frustrating, confusing and unnecessarily time-consuming
experiences. Either way, you will have become aware of how important pedagogy
is to becoming a happy, fulfilled and confident academic writer. Several such
pedagogies exist. What they tend to have in common is a meaningful purpose,
authentic content and a genuine commitment to your flourishing. From a
critical realist perspective, this also means writing and teaching writing from
a position of knowledge that ensures these three qualities – meaningfulness,
authenticity and genuineness – enact a socially just pedagogy. Without these
158 What Makes Writing Academic

three qualities, academic writing is unable to fulfil its transformative educational

imperative, which is to change the world for the better. Meaningfulness can
be understood as writing that is knowledge or content-informed, writing that
means something to someone somewhere; authenticity can be understood as
writing that has a purpose, such as a newsletter to inform a community, a blog
to share scholarship, or a PhD thesis that is inclusive because it broadens its
readership (Harron, 2016); and genuineness can be understood as the opposite
of ‘performativity’, that hollowed-out semblance of an academic text that is more
akin to écriture than to écrire.
As part of his critical realist pedagogy to enact change for social justice, Donald
Judd triggers the levers of change by cautioning against generic academic writing
instruction that lacks a subject matter and that purports to teach transferable
skills. Specifically, Judd takes the socio-academic practice of critical thinking to
task, arguing that in order to write well, we must also understand what we are
reading. This is because change in the social world cannot take place without
a deep understanding of the REAL social structures that constitute the world
(Judd, 2003, pp. 126):
The traditional lack of a subject matter in writing courses is both a strength
and a weakness. Sophisticated writing cannot be divorced from a degree of
sophisticated understanding of a concrete subject matter. Even if you apply formal
logic to your writing and detect logical fallacies and conflicting assertions in an
argument, while important, this will not necessarily lead to a more sophisticated
understanding and, thus, to more sophisticated writing. ‘How could someone
learn’, asks Frank Smith (1990: 97) ‘to detect conflicting assertions in a chemistry
text, an article on chess, or to estimate for repairs to an automobile, without
an understanding of chemistry, chess or automobile mechanics, in which case
contradictions would be immediately apparent?’. The answer of course, is that
one cannot. A pre-requisite to using critical thinking skills is an adequate
grounding in the subject matter about which one is thinking critically. …. It
may be unrealistic to expect that your writing will get progressively better when
you are writing about several unrelated topics over the course of an academic
term because little opportunity is given to you to develop a more sophisticated
understanding of those topics.

Since most generic academic writing instruction, such as IELTS, EAP and
other academic writing services, tends to teach writing about ‘several unrelated
topics’, it is no surprise that students do not develop sufficient disciplinary
knowledge to be exposed to the genres of their disciplines and to become
confident critical academic writers.
 Foundations for a Future Writing Pedagogy 159

Judd goes on to make the case for an interdisciplinary approach to the teaching
of academic writing because this is the only way that a deep understanding of
social phenomena can be gained. Without this understanding, the levers of
change cannot be activated (Judd, 2003, p. 132):
Critical thinking involves understanding a process/product as simultaneously
interconnected to or interpenetrating multiple structures, both social and
natural. Students often have a tendency to see the workings of the world as
fragmented and disconnected. For example, if we consider a phenomenon like
‘homelessness’ we might say that is only a social problem, not an economic or
medical one. By ignoring the impact of the economic system on unemployment,
the connection between homelessness and the economic system is lost. By
seeing the interconnections between homelessness, the economic system, the
welfare system, the health system, the educational system, etc. students begin to
understand the issue in a much more complex fashion than before.

Both Judd (2003) and Bernard-Donals (1998) refer to writing as ‘an agent of
change’ because it is a transitive method of enquiry. Like all methods of enquiry,
it aims to understand reality in order for something to happen to that reality
(which can include anything from publishing it, to sharing it and transforming
it). For writing to be an agent of change, writers must understand the structural
realities at the ontological level of the REAL. This understanding is likely to
ensure they write meaningful, authentic and genuine texts, which, in turn, can
have a material and transformative impact on the world. In this sense, a critical
realist understanding of what makes writing academic is its capacity to ‘mediate
activity’ (Threshold concept 1. 5) because it enables things to happen.
The references to ‘interconnectedness’ and ‘complexity’ in the above
quotation further align with the critical realist approach to curriculum design
discussed in Mirzaei Rafe et al. (2020). Indeed, interdisciplinary praxis is the
foundation of a critical realist pedagogy because only an interdisciplinary praxis
founded on knowledge of science, sociology and philosophy can realistically
enhance the agency required to trigger the levers of change (Mirzaei Rafe et
al., 2020, p. 3): ‘The thinking curriculum of CR [Critical Realism] is therefore a
dynamic, predominantly collective interdisciplinary enquiry between “the real”,
“the actual” and the “empirical”’.
I conclude this section with reference to two more fully developed pedagogies
that have the potential to trigger the levers of change needed to reconfigure what
makes a text academic. This is because they engage students with knowledge at
the level of the REAL, thus empowering them to make writing choices such as
160 What Makes Writing Academic

those advocated by Carmichael-Murphy (2021), who argues for a de-colonial

re-configuring of what and whose knowledge writers should be allowed to
represent and how they should represent it. The first pedagogy is by UK scholars
Lomer and Anthony-Okeke (2019) and the second is by Australian scholar
Manathunga (2017, 2020a).

An Active Blended Learning Model

In their article on ‘ethically engaging international students’ in higher education,
Lomer and Anthony-Okeke (2019) push back against the deficit model discussed
in Chapter 1 by proposing an ‘engaged’ and ‘ethical’ pedagogy based on the work of
Madge et al. (2009). This pedagogy seeks to dismantle imperialist and colonialist
ideologies about what students should know and how they should represent their
knowledge. Instead of asking students to demonstrate their knowledge via the
traditional academic essay format, students’ knowledge and critical thinking was
assessed on their blog writing and their level of interaction and engagement with
other students. Students were required to share, comment, explain and analyse
their chosen topics via a series of posts that they managed and curated creatively.
This pedagogic choice speaks directly to laying the foundation of a future pedagogy
that reconfigures what makes writing academic on at least two fronts: first, it
indexes teacher agency in identifying the levers of pedagogical change needed to
enact such an assessment; and secondly, it empowers students by developing their
own creative agencies as knowers and writers. In the spirit of sharing scholarship
that builds networked communities that can collectively activate the levers of
change, information about the authors’ ‘pedagogies for internationalization’ has
been made available here: [Link] home. blog/

Creating Space for Southern Knowledge Systems

Mindful of what de Sousa Santos (2009) refers to as the ‘ecology of knowledge’
and of the sociologies of absence that this ecology exposes when it becomes
apparent that only some knowledges make it into the curriculum, Manathunga
(2020b) enacts her agency as a doctoral supervisor by modelling and encouraging
in her students ‘gentle reflection, deep listening and courageous radical action’
as a way for Southern, Transcultural and Indigenous knowledge systems to
emerge and become visible. This involves a series of pedagogical, as well as
epistemological, commitments, such as defining your standpoint as a writer and
knower (what I referred to earlier as ‘positionality’) and knowing history, what
 Foundations for a Future Writing Pedagogy 161

Manathunga refers to as ‘deep’, ‘slow’ and ‘ancient’ time. This ensures writers are
able to identify the events, violences, values and cultures that have led to what is
visible in the present. Her blog post on ‘decolonising doctoral education’ shares
examples of doctoral writers who have shaped their texts to fit the knowledge
they are representing. For example, Manathunga refers to a Cambodian doctoral
researcher who wrote her thesis as a memoir because she had to literally rely on
her memory to allow the knowledge of her Cambodian grandmother’s memory
to emerge as knowledge. All this has been shared via the Hidden Curriculum
team and further signals the power of networked communities to trigger
change by making this kind of knowledge visible: [Link]
[Link]/2020/07/09/decolonising-doctoral-education-sociologies-of-
emergence

Conclusions

For academic writers and their teachers to become agents of change in both
their own practices and in re-configuring what makes writing academic, new
pedagogies need to emerge. The foundations of such pedagogies require writers
and teachers to have the agency and material conditions to be able to lay them
in the first place: one way of ensuring that teachers of academic writing are
empowered to lay such foundations is to ensure they are securely employed and
that they are supported in scholarly enquiry. I have identified two key levers that
can help activate this agency: scholarship and pedagogy itself. Scholarship can act
as a lever of change because it affords deep knowledge of the structures operating
at the level of the REAL. This knowledge is needed if agents are to engage in
transformative practices that allow for change at the level of the ACTUAL.
Pedagogy can act as a lever of change because it can provide opportunities for
interdisciplinary knowledge, which is REAL knowledge (in critical realist terms),
to be the focus of a writing curriculum. Interdisciplinary knowledge enables
writers as knowers to create texts that are more likely to become ‘agents of change’
because they represent the knowledge needed to transform reality for the better
at the level of the ACTUAL. Examples of pedagogies that might engage students
with this kind of deep learning were given together with examples of the kinds
of academic texts that would allow this knowledge to emerge. I have suggested
that what makes writing academic are texts that afford the emergence of socio-
academic practices (SAPs) and epistemic virtues (EVs) aimed at transforming
knowledge in the interests of social justice.
162
 Signing Off

So, where does all this leave us?

Before I answer this, let me first summarise the gist of these five chapters.

The Gist

Set in the context of twenty-first-century neoliberal educational practices and

commodification, I have argued that what makes writing academic are its
emerging SAPs, not the unhinged will of the writer or the decontextualized rules
and surface features of the textual environment. Having framed academic writing
in the tradition of EAP and American Composition Studies, both of which are
influential in shaping academic writing discourses and have spawned a highly
lucrative textbook industry, I endorsed the view that academic writing is a social
practice that has a history and is therefore contingent. This contingency implies
that it can be different to how it is conventionally portrayed by EAP and other
study skill approaches to academic writing.

The Detail

Reductive approaches to writing have undesirable aesthetic, socio-cultural and

ethical implications, including the denial of a writer’s humanity, understood in
terms of the literacies, backgrounds and range of knowledge repertoires that
they (could) bring to their academic texts. Specifically, I have challenged the
histories that conflate writing with the alphabet and with higher-order thinking,
arguing instead that writing did not have to be conflated with the alphabet and
that although it has been, this does not mean that alphabetic cultures are better at
thinking than oral or visual cultures. I have also highlighted that within academic
164 What Makes Writing Academic

writing cultures there is a thriving diversity of genres, yet modern-day standards

of English academic writing seem to have evolved from and reified only one, the
experimental article. Cherry-picking the histories that have colluded with the
idea that writing raises consciousness and that academic writing is ‘objective’
amounts to an ideological stance, and ontological complicity, that leads to unjust
practices, such as the exclusion of knowledge that is not presented ‘objectively’
in alphabetically written forms. Moreover, reductive approaches that reify a
particular paradigm of academic writing – the alphabetic and ‘encapsulated’
one that reduces writing to specific terminologies and genres – allow hoaxes
and IELTS essays to count as academic. These are not academic because they
transgress the values of academic integrity – such as a commitment to the
truth – which is an emergent SAP. Rather, what makes writing academic are the
ways in which writers knowledgeably interact with their textual environments
to allow SAPs to emerge. These environments include threshold concepts that
trouble and re-configure what we think makes writing academic. In considering
the role that argument also plays in our understandings of what makes writing
academic, I claimed that whilst arguments can make writing academic, there is
no requirement for them to be propositional (i.e. linguistic) or logical because
most academic arguments are substantive and inductive. Because of this
non-reductive nature, argument, too, can be considered as a socio-academic
practice SAPs that emerges from the interaction of the writer with their textual
environment.
In Chapter 4, I introduced the philosophy of critical realism as a macro
theory to argue that academic writing is a transitive and epistemological method
of enquiry that belongs to the realm of empirical reality. This makes it as (in)
fallible as any other method of enquiry that is essentially a proxy for reality
because it is not reality itself. This commits us to the conclusion that academic
writing can never be ‘objective’ because it is a method of human enquiry and
representation and is, therefore, by definition, always subjective. This is why I
have also located the writer within the realm of the empirical alongside their
various other methods of enquiry. This level of reality is epistemologically real.
In other words, it exists, but it can vary, in the sense that writers have relative
freedoms to choose their methods of enquiry, have different values, skills and
abilities, and diverse worldviews (ideologies).
The specific genres that are in circulation at the level of the ACTUAL, such as
traditional genres and those discussed in Chapter 3, are also epistemologically
real because they are the result of human agents who have chosen to make
them manifest by bringing them in, so to speak, from the infinite pool of genres
 Signing Off 165

available in the textual environment (REAL). The level of the ACTUAL contains
the texts that actually exist in academia and that have to varying degrees been
sanctioned as ‘academic’. For example, Sousanis, Carson and Harron all received
their doctorates, despite them having been drawn, rapped and written for three
different audiences. These, despite being wildly different in their forms, are
considered to be academic not in virtue of their surface features but in virtue
of their compliance with the deep institutional requirements at the structural
level of the textual environment, which is ontologically REAL. By contrast, the
level of the EMPIRICAL is epistemologically real because it is a transitive level
of reality, one that can change according to the choices of the agent.
Where change is much slower and even impossible is at the level of the REAL.
This is the ontological level of reality. In critical realism, this is the level of deep
structures, ones that are historical, institutionally embedded and entangled
in the deep-seated disciplinary traditions of academic institutions. It includes
institutional practices that no amount of agency can change, such as the need
to do research in order to be awarded a PhD or the fact that language and the
alphabet are here to stay.
The three realms of reality – the REAL, the ACTUAL and the EMPIRICAL –
form an open system. In virtue of being porous and permeable, meaning that
new knowledge can ‘filter through’ at each level, opportunities for change
become possible at the level of the ACTUAL. This requires agents to identify
those opportunities for change, which I have referred to as ‘levers’ and ‘cracks’,
following Mason and Street. In order for agents to identify and action these
levers, they must exert their rational judgement and have deep knowledge
of the level of the REAL because they need to know what is available at the
ontological level in order to introduce meaningful change at the epistemological
level. For academic writers and their teachers to become agents of change in
both their own practices and in re-configuring what makes writing academic,
new pedagogies need to emerge. The foundations of such pedagogies require
writers and teachers to have agency to be able to lay them. I have identified two
key levers that can help activate this agency: scholarship and pedagogy itself.
Scholarship can act as a lever of change because it affords deep knowledge of
the structures at the level of the REAL. This knowledge is needed if agents are
to engage in transformative practices that allow for change at the level of the
ACTUAL to take place. Pedagogy can act as a lever of change because it can
provide opportunities for interdisciplinary knowledge, which is knowledge at
the level of the REAL, to be the focus of a writing curriculum. Interdisciplinary
knowledge enables writers as knowers to create texts that are more likely to
166 What Makes Writing Academic

become ‘agents of change’ because they represent the knowledge needed to

transform reality at the level of the ACTUAL. In Chapter 5, several examples
of pedagogies that engage students with this kind of deep learning were given
with an indication of how, at the level of the ACTUAL, each pedagogy has the
potential to bring about change that is socially just: twelve reasons for change
and pedagogic examples were given. I then referred the reader to an ethical
pedagogy for international students whereby postgraduate researchers were
assessed on their collaborative blog writing rather than on their ability to write
an academic essay; and the choice of a memoir for the genre of the doctorate
meant that a Cambodian doctoral researcher’s knowledge could emerge in ways
that would otherwise not have been possible had she been required to write her
thesis for the traditional IMRAD structure, for example.
Overall, I encouraged writers and their teachers to engage with academic
writing communities led by writing scholars who generously share their
knowledge and resources as part of a collective and collegial project dedicated to
helping academic writers flourish.

Where to Next?

Because of its focus on change and its commitment to transformative practices

that further the mission of education, which is to be emancipatory and
transformative, critical realist theory lends itself to providing a rationale for
continuing to transform pedagogies in the interests of ethics and social justice.
This is because it theorizes academic writing as an open system – not a straight-
jacket, a pigeon hole, a skill, a generic practice, or a subservient ‘handmaiden
to the disciplines’, but as a full-blown agent of change. This is powerful. And
scary. Open systems are potentially unpredictable and unwieldy: ‘I’ve created
a monster,’ comes to mind because the possibilities at the level of the REAL are
infinite and those at the level of the ACTUAL are simply the tip of the ice-berg.
Critical realism allows us the freedom to imagine what else might be possible
at the level of the ACTUAL in a future university, similar to those imagined in
Barnett (2012).
Writing understood as a method of enquiry and agent of change is clearly
already being enacted at the level of the ACTUAL, as the many doctoral theses
referred to indicate. But critical realism is a complex theory and it is perhaps
for this reason that it has had such little uptake in academic writing pedagogies.
Another reason might be that, as already highlighted, resistance to change is
 Signing Off 167

common for a range of reasons, including ideological ones: transforming

academic writing practices means relinquishing some of our deeply held beliefs
about professional standards, identities and competencies. In her book Fields of
Play, Laurel Richardson articulates this resistance well.
Arguing that what makes writing academic are its SAPs has raised as many
questions as I hope it has resolved. I leave you with the questions that I would
like further research to investigate:

●● What are the limitations of critical realist theory as a praxis for writing in
the academy? For example, how and who classifies what belongs to the level
of the EMPIRICAL, the ACTUAL and the REAL?
• Who judges the ‘judgmental rationality’ of agents who are invested with the
power to trigger the levers of change needed to transform what happens at
the level of the ACTUAL? And who ‘invests them’ with this power?
• And, related to the above, what are the generative mechanisms of the
transitive epistemological realities of the REAL and the ACTUAL, i.e. can
change ever occur at the intransitive ontological level of the REAL? For
example, what are the levers that might change existing threshold concepts
or technologies or institutional practices? How and who could trigger these
levers? Roy Bhaskar’s alethic version of the truth might hold the key to this
as it is an attempt to bridge the objective truth at the level of the REAL and
the subjective interpretivist truth at the level of the ACTUAL (Groff, 2000);
• What new SAPs (Socio-Academic Practices), EVs (Epistemic Virtues)
and TCs (Threshold Concepts) might emerge from the open system
that academic writing is, especially with regard to the epistemologies of
the South, but also to other epistemologies, such as technological and
algorithmic ones (Introna, 2016)?
• What, if any, pedagogical differentiations might be needed at undergraduate,
Master’s and doctoral levels with regard to choice of genres at the ACTUAL
level? For example, are the possibilities at the level of the ACTUAL suitable
for all levels of knowledge communication?
• What, if any, disciplinary differentiations are needed with regard to choice of
genres at the ACTUAL level? For example, could a scientist write a memoir
to explain scientific theories?
●● And, finally, what might be the constraints on what makes writing
academic? Would these all be at the level of the REAL, as I seem to
have implied, or are there constraints at the level of the ACTUAL and
EMPIRICAL?
168 What Makes Writing Academic

These questions are the beginnings of new conversations that I hope to be

part of.
Thank you for reading me,
Julia
 Afterword
Suresh Canagarajah

In every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected,

organized and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose
role is to avert its powers and its dangers, to cope with chance events, to evade its
ponderous, awesome materiality.
(Foucault 1972b, p. 216)

Academic publishing conventions are treated as normative by most scholars.

They think of the existing textual and publishing conventions as perhaps the
most logical for learned or research discourse. Some scholars talk of these
conventions as universally valid for that reason. Others justify them as merely
instrumental. That is, these conventions are treated as value-free and neutral,
simply a means to an end – presumably the rich and diverse ends of scholars
around the world. However, scholars who work from non-privileged contexts
almost always realize that these writing and publishing conventions are not
innocent. I had to learn this the hard way. After my doctoral studies in the
United States, I returned to teaching in my native Sri Lanka, thinking that my
training in academic research and writing conventions would help me contribute
to the wider scholarly community on local knowledge. I quickly found that an
expertise in academic writing conventions was not sufficient for me to engage
in publishing. Access to the resources required for publishing according to those
conventions was not equally available to everyone. Also, the conventions didn’t
favour the communication of knowledge that mattered to us in terms of how
we wanted them conveyed. Finally, the conventions distorted our voices and
identities, and compelled us to write according to an ethos that was alien to us
and to our scholarly persona.
Foucault’s statement in the epigraph points to the politics of academic
writing conventions. Firstly, the conventions are not a neutral medium. They
constrain and control the messiness, unpredictability, and complexity of life
and experiences. This inevitably leads to some distortions. Not surprisingly,
170 What Makes Writing Academic

this distortion is skewed to favour certain social groups. That is because it is

the privileged who do the selection, organization and redistribution of these
discourse conventions. There is therefore a relationship between the groups that
define these conventions, their knowledge and their power; hence, the troubling
nexus between knowledge and power, with academic writing/publishing
conventions playing a critical role in sustaining this unfair nexus.
I like to add a personal touch and embodied voice in this afterword in support
of Julia Molinari’s project to democratize and pluralize academic writing. I draw
from the experiences of my colleagues and myself in trying to publish from
Sri Lanka, which I have narrated more elaborately in my book A Geopolitics of
Academic Writing (Canagarajah, 2002b).
Consider the requirement to frame one’s research or scholarly contribution in
terms of the state of the art. The obligatory literature review. It often appears in
the beginning of an article, before one develops one’s own argument or findings,
and is supposed to demonstrate the importance of one’s research findings. It is
presented as a harmless convention of ‘joining the conversation’. How can readers
assess if one’s knowledge is new or significant if authors don’t demonstrate
how it fits the current disciplinary discourses, it is argued. In the canonical
definition of research articles, John Swales (1990) considers the literature review
the burden of the opening move, which he calls ‘Create a Research Space’. It
involves ‘Establishing a Territory’ (identifying the body of discourse framing the
study), ‘Establishing a Niche’ (showing a gap in the existing literature), and then
‘Occupying the Niche’ (showing how one’s contribution furthers this discourse).
In Sri Lanka, we had many problems in meeting this requirement. To begin with,
we didn’t have the latest publications in any discipline to be able to review them
closely for our articles. Journals and books are expensive, as a few multinational
publishers monopolize academic publishing and raise the prices to favour their
profit motivation. If journals and books are expensive for libraries in the United
States and United Kingdom, they are beyond reach for scholars in the Global
South. Therefore, when my colleagues and I submit articles from Sri Lanka,
reviewers and editors in the West often turn them back by saying that they are
‘inappropriately framed’. What this means is that we failed to start our article by
entering the current state of the knowledge as scholars in the West understand
it. They compel us to frame our research in relation to a list of publications they
consider critical for that area of scholarship.
Even in the cases where we gain access to some of the publications the editors
and reviewers helpfully suggest for our consideration, we find that they pose
rhetorical and ideological constraints on what we want to write about. Consider
 Afterword 171

the example when I first wanted to publish about publishing inequalities as shaped
by material inequalities and unequal access to scholarly resources. ‘Publishing
on publishing’ was not a thing in any discipline at that time in the 1990s! There
was no literature to review. So I started off with a personal narrative on how
I returned from the United States with a knowledge of academic conventions,
but couldn’t adopt them because of material inequalities in Sri Lanka. I cited
from news media and popular journals that had reported on the dire academic
conditions for scholars in the Global South. I also didn’t know under which
discipline a publication on academic publishing would fall. So I sent the article
to a journal on writing scholarship. The reviewers turned back my submission
saying that the focus of my argument was not clear because it was not framed
in terms of any existing scholarly literature. What they forgot was that there
was no scholarship on such a topic at that time. Finally, on the suggestion of the
reviewers, I tried to frame my article on the studies in writing scholarship on the
differences and difficulties for second-language students. However, I realized
how this literature distorted my argument. My article was not about language
differences. It was actually about material differences that exceeded language
or cultural diversity. Framing publishing inequalities as a linguistic or cultural
problem can actually end up blaming the victim. It will appear as if scholars in
the periphery are unable to publish simply because they adopt grammatical or
discoursal conventions that are different. If they only learn the proper language
and conventions they will be successful, it might be interpreted. In that sense,
this would not be the problem of the publishing industry, but of the individual
scholars. Thus, framing local knowledge in terms of publications available in
the field involves filtering out the critical edge in our argument, distorting the
significance or compromising our positions.
If we adopt a longer historical lens on academic writing conventions, we
will find that they have not been static, absolute or universal. They have been
changing in relation to material conditions, even in the West. In the earliest
scientific publications in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of
London in the seventeenth century, the research articles started with a ‘Dear
Editor’, written in first person, and narrating the experiment that the scholar
undertook (see Atkinson, 1996). The writing adopted a narrative and temporal
progression. There was no literature review to speak of, because it took many
more years for findings to sediment into established knowledge and states of
the art. The bulk of the articles at this time related to methodology, as research
instruments were not universal or universally accessible. In what Shapin (1984)
calls ‘communal witnessing’, the authors had to narrate the assembling of the
172 What Makes Writing Academic

research instrument and experimental procedures so that they could satisfy

the empirical requirement of making their research visible for replication. As
research progressed, literature review became more critical to demonstrate
one’s own unique contribution. The methodology section became reduced in
significance and space as instruments and methods became standardized.
The literature review is now undergoing further changes. John Swales
(1990) observes that the explosion of journals and disciplines has created
some confusion about what exactly is the state of the art. There are multiple
conversations going on from different theoretical perspectives on the same
topic or subject. Furthermore, the disciplinary discourses are more layered,
with bodies of work or states of the art on every subtopic or sub-discipline.
The confusion is quite evident in novice scholars even in the West. They often
cite the publications they are most familiar with or have immediate access to,
unaware of the pedigree of a term, construct or paradigm. Swales (1990) and
Bazerman (1988) therefore observe a structural change underway in the genre
of research articles. They observe that literature review is now not limited to
one place in the article (i.e. in the opening section, as it was traditional), but
occurs in more diversified manner at different points in the text as relevant to
the ongoing discussion. That is, authors see the need to bring up a relevant body
of literature as it pertains to the subtopics or themes both in the framing section
and the concluding discussion on the significance and interpretation of their
findings.
What this example of the literature review suggests is that genre conventions
have continued to change in relation to material and historical conditions. Not
only did the academic writing conventions evolve under different conditions at
different historical periods, it is still changing. This illustration of the trajectory
of the literature review is one among many genre conventions I can suggest for
their diverse realizations and evolutions over time. Such examples demystify
academic publishing conventions. There is nothing universal or absolute about
the academic genre. It has changed before, and it is still changing in relation to
diverse social and historical conditions.
Other conditions such as technological, rhetorical and epistemological shifts
are also initiating dramatic changes in academic writing currently. However, it
is important for all of us to engage in these changes to nudge them in favour
of greater democratization and inclusivity in academic communication and
publishing. We cannot treat such genre changes as impersonal, neutral or
automatic. Foucault would remind us that there is always a politics in knowledge
construction, even if the social players, media, and platforms are different. It is
 Afterword 173

for this reason that books such as this that theorize diversification and chart new
ways forward are much needed. I am in solidarity with scholars like Julia who
are working to diversify academic writing so that all scholars can have a voice,
share knowledge more equitably, and conduct a healthy and fair exchange of
knowledge. If there is one thing that the recent pandemic teaches us, it is that
any activity that doesn’t assume human interdependence is going to be costly for
all of us. Monopolization of knowledge, isolation of certain communities from
networks of knowledge production, and deliberate or unwitting distortion of
knowledge that favours one’s own values and interests will have dire implications
for our collective human future. Let us work towards more open and fair
scholarly exchanges through academic publishing.
 References

Abdulrahman, H. K., Adebisi, F., Nwako, Z., & Walton, E. (2021). Revisiting (inclusive)
education in the postcolony. Journal of the British Academy, 9(s1), 47–75. [Link]
org/10.5871/jba/009s1.047
Adler-Kassner, L., & Wardle, E. A. (Eds.). (2015). Naming what we know: Threshold
concepts of writing studies. Utah State University Press.
Aitchison, C. (2017, 27 July 2017). How are we to understand plagiarism in doctoral
writing? Doctoral Writing SIG. [Link]
how-are-we-to-understand-plagiarism-in-doctoral-writing/
Al-Jawad, M. (2015). Comics are research: Graphic narratives as a new way of
seeing clinical practice. Journal of Medical Humanities, 36(4), 369–74. [Link]
org/10.1007/s10912-013-9205-0
Alexander, O., Argent, A., & Spencer, J. (2008). EAP essentials: A teacher’s guide to
principles and practice. Garnet Education.
Allen, S. (2015). Beyond argument: Essaying as a practice of exchange (S. H. McLeod,
Ed.). The WAC Clearinghouse and Parlor Press. [Link] and www.
[Link]
Alvesson, M., Gabriel, Y., & Paulsen, R. (2017). Return to meaning: A social
science with something to say. Oxford University Press. [Link]
oso/9780198787099.001.0001
Alvesson, M., & Sandberg, J. (2013). Constructing research questions doing interesting
research. SAGE Publications Ltd.
Andrews, R. (2003). The end of the essay. Teaching in Higher Education, 8(1), 117–28.
Andrews, R. (2010). Argumentation in higher education: Improving practice through
theory and research. Routledge.
Andrews, R., Borg, E., Davis Boyd, S., Domingo, M., & England, J. (Eds.). (2012). The
SAGE handbook of digital dissertations and theses. SAGE.
Anson, C. M., & Moore, J. L. (Eds.). (2016). Critical transitions: Writing and the question
of transfer. Fort Collins: The WAC Clearinghouse and University Press of Colorado.
[Link]
Appiah, K. A. (2016a). Mistaken identities [Radio Broadcast]. J. Frank; BBC Radio 4.
[Link]
Appiah, K. A. (2016b, 9 November 2016). There is no such thing as Western civilisation.
The Guardian. [Link]
civilisation-appiah-reith-lecture
Archer, A. (2016). Multimodal academic argument: Ways of organising knowledge
across writing and image. In A. Archer & E. O. Breuer (Eds.), Multimodality in
 References 175

Higher Education (Vol. 33, pp. 93–113). Brill. 1850–9999. [Link]

[Link]/ BLDSS
Archer, A., & Breuer, E. (Eds.). (2015). Multimodality in writing: The state of the art
in theory, methodology and pedagogy. Brill, 1850–9999. [Link]
[Link]/ BLDSS.
Archer, A., & Breuer, E. (Eds.). (2016). Multimodality in higher education (Vol. 33). Brill.
1850–9999 [Link] BLDSS.
Archer, M. (1995). Realist social theory: The morphogenetic approach. Cambridge
University Press.
Archer, M. (1998). Critical realism: Essential readings. Routledge.
Archer, M. (2000). Being human: The problem of agency. Cambridge University Press.
Archer, M. (2002). Realism and the problem of agency. Alethia, 5(1), 11–20. [Link]
org/10.1558/aleth.v5i1.11
Archer, M. (2003). Structure, agency, and the internal conversation. Cambridge
University Press.
Arendt, H. (1953). Ideology and terror: A novel form of government. The Review of
Politics, 15(3), 303–27. [Link]
Arnheim, R. (1969). Visual thinking. University of California Press.
Arnheim, R. (1974). Art and visual perception: A psychology of the creative eye
(Expanded and rev. ed.). University of California Press.
Atkinson, D. (1996). The philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London,
1675–1975: A sociohistorical discourse analysis. Language in Society, 25(1), 333–72.
Atkinson, P. (2013). Ethnographic writing, the avant-garde and a failure of nerve.
International Review of Qualitative Research, 6(1), 19–35. [Link]
irqr.2013.6.1.19 %J
Ávila Reyes, N., Navarro, F., & Tapia-Ladino, M. (2020). Identidad, Voz y Agencia:
Claves para una Enseñanza Inclusiva de la Escritura en la Universidad. Archivos
Analíticos de Políticas Educativas, 28(98). [Link]
Baber, Z. (1995). The new production of knowledge: The dynamics of science and
research in contemporary societies., Michael Gibbons, Camille Limoges, Helga
Nowotny, Simon Schwartzman, Peter Scott, Martin Trow. Contemporary Sociology,
24(6), 751–2. [Link]
Back, L. (2016). Academic diary: Or why higher education still matters. Goldsmiths Press.
Badenhorst, C., Amell, B., & Burford, J. (Eds.). (2021). Re-imagining doctoral writing.
Colorado: The WAC Clearinghouse; University Press of Colorado. [Link]
org/10.37514/INT-B.2021.1343
Bailey, S. (2006). Academic writing: A handbook for international students (2nd ed.).
Routledge.
Bakhtin, M., & Holquist, M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays. University of
Texas Press.
Ball, C. E., & Charlton, C. (2015). All writing is multimodal. In L. Adler-Kassner & E.
A. Wardle (Eds.), Naming what we know: Threshold concepts of writing studies (pp.
42–3). Utah State University Press.
176 References

Ball, C. E., & Loewe, D. M. (Eds.). (2017). Bad ideas about writing. WVU Libraries.
[Link]
Ball, P. (2004). Critical mass: How one thing leads to another. Heinemann.
Bammer, A., & Joeres, R.-E. B. (Eds.). (2015). The future of scholarly writing: Critical
interventions (1st ed.). Palgrave Macmillan.
Barber, C. (1993). The English language: A historical introduction. Cambridge University
Press.
Barnett, R. (1990). The idea of higher education. The Society for Research into Higher
Education & Open University Press.
Barnett, R. (2012). The future university: Ideas and possibilities. Routledge.
Barnett, R. (2013). Imagining the university. New York, NY: Routledge.
Barthes, R. (1967, Web. 3 December 2012). The death of the author. Aspen: The
Magazine in a Box 5+6. [Link]. [Link]
death_authorbarthes.pdf
Bazerman, C. (1988). Shaping written knowledge: The genre and activity of the
experimental article in science. University of Wisconsin Press.
Bazerman, C. (Ed.). (2007). Handbook of research on writing history, society, school,
individual, text (1st ed.). Routledge.
Bazerman, C. (2015). Social changes in science communication: Rattling the
information chain. In A. G. Gross & J. Ruehl (Eds.), Science and the Internet:
communicating knowledge in a digital age (pp. 267–81). Baywood Publishing
Company Inc.
Becker, H. S. (1986). Writing for social scientists: How to start and finish your thesis,
book, or article (2nd ed.). University of Chicago Press.
Beckett, D., & Hager, P. (2018). A complexity thinking take on thinking in the
university. In S. S. E. Bengtsen & R. Barnett (Eds.), The thinking University: A
philosophical examination of thought and higher education (pp. 137–53). Springer.
[Link]
Bengtsen, S. S. E., & Barnett, R. (2017). Realism and education: A philosophical
examination of the ‘realness’ of the university. In Y. H. Waghid (Ed.), Reader in
philosophy of education (pp. 121–37). JUTA & Company, Ltd.
Bengtsen, S. S. E., & Barnett, R. (2018). The thinking university: A philosophical
examination of thought and higher education. Springer. [Link]
com/lib/nottingham/[Link]?docID=5376066
Bennett, K. (2009). English academic style manuals: A survey. Journal of English for
Academic Purposes, 8(1), 43–54. [Link]
Bennett, K. (2010). Academic discourse in Portugal: A whole different ballgame?
Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 9, 21–32.
Bennett, K. (2015). The transparency trope: Deconstructing English academic
discourse. Discourse and Interaction, 5–19. [Link]
Bereiter, C., & Scardamalia, M. (1987). The psychology of written composition. Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates.
 References 177

Bernard-Donals, M. F. (1998). The practice of theory: Rhetoric, knowledge, and pedagogy

in the academy. Cambridge University Press.
Bernstein, S. N., & Lowry, E. (2017). The five-paragraph essay transmits knowledge.
In C. E. Ball & D. M. Loewe (Eds.), Bad ideas about writing (pp. 214–9). WVU
Libraries. [Link]
Besley, T. A., & Peters, M. A. (Eds.). (2013). Re-imagining the creative university for the
21st century. Sense Publishing.
Bezemer, J., & Kress, G. (2008). Writing in multimodal texts: A social semiotic account
of designs for learning. Written Communication, 25(2), 166–95.
Bhaskar, R. (1989). Reclaiming reality: A critical introduction to contemporary
philosophy. Verso.
Bhaskar, R. (1998). The possibility of naturalism: A philosophical critique of the
contemporary human sciences (3rd ed.). Routledge.
Biesta, G., Filippakou, O., Wainwright, E., & Aldridge, D. (2019). Why educational
research should not just solve problems, but should cause them as well. British
Educational Research Journal, 45(1), 1–4. [Link]
Björkvall, A. (2016). Ploughing the field of higher education: An interview with
Gunther Kress. In A. Archer & E. O. Breuer (Eds.), Multimodality in higher education
(Vol. 33, pp. 21–30). Brill.
Blair, A., J. (2008). The rhetoric of visual arguments. In C. A. Hill & M. H. Helmers
(Eds.), Defining visual rhetorics (pp. 41–62). Lawrence Erlbaum; Taylor and Francis
e-Library.
Blommaert, J. (2010). The sociolinguistics of globalization. Cambridge University Press.
[Link]
Blommaert, J. (2013). Ethnography, superdiversity and linguistic landscapes: Chronicles of
complexity. Multilingual Matters.
Blommaert, J., & Horner, B. (2017). Mobility and academic literacies: An epistolary
conversation. London Review of Education, 15(1), 2–20. [Link]
org/10.18546/LRE.15.1.02
Bond, B. (2020). Making language visible in the University: English for academic purposes
and internationalisation. Channel View Publications. [Link]
com/lib/nottingham/[Link]?docID=6267101
Boughey, C. (2013). The significance of structure, culture and agency in efforts to
support and develop student learning at South African universities. In R. Dunpath &
R. Vithal (Eds.), Access and success in higher education. Pearson Educational.
Boughey, C., & McKenna, S. (2021). Understanding higher education: Alternative
perspectives. African Minds. [Link]
education/
Bourdieu, P., & Thompson, J. B. (1991). Language and symbolic power. Polity.
Bovill, C. (2020). Co-creation in learning and teaching: The case for a whole-class
approach in higher education. Higher Education, 79(6), 1023–37. [Link]
org/10.1007/s10734-019-00453-w
178 References

Braxton, J., Luckey, W., & Helland, P. (2002). Institutionalizing a broader view of
scholarship through Boyer’s four domains. ASHE-ERIC higher education report. Jossey-
Bass higher and adult education series.
Bretag, T. (2018). Academic integrity. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of
Business and Management. [Link]
acrefore/9780190224851.001.0001/acrefore-9780190224851-e-147
Cameron, L., & Larsen-Freeman, D. (2007). Complex systems and applied linguistics.
International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 17(2), 226–40. [Link]
j.1473-4192.2007.00148.x
Canagarajah, S. (2002a). Critical academic writing and multilingual students. University
of Michigan Press.
Canagarajah, S. (2002b). A geopolitics of academic writing. University of Pittsburgh
Press.
Canagarajah, S. (2011). Codemeshing in academic writing: Identifying teachable
strategies of translanguaging. The Modern Language Journal, 95(iii), 401–17. https://
[Link]/10.1111/j.1540-4781.2011.01207.x 0026-7902/11/401–417
Canagarajah, S. (2013a). The end of second language writing? Journal of Second
Language Writing, 22, 440–1. [Link]
jslw.2013.08.007
Canagarajah, S. (2013b). Literacy as translingual practice: Between communities and
classrooms. Routledge.
Canagarajah, S. (2013c). Translingual practice: Global Englishes and cosmopolitan
relations. Routledge.
Canagarajah, S. (2018). Materializing ‘competence’: Perspectives from international
STEM scholars. The Modern Language Journal, 102(2), 268–91. [Link]
[Link]
Canagarajah, S. (2019). Transnational literacy autobiographies as translingual writing.
Routledge.
Canagarajah, S. (2021, 27–28 May 2021). Negotiating norms in academic writing
[Lecture]. Stockholm University (online). [Link]
ktq2GkQ4
Canagarajah, S., & Lee, E. (2013). Negotiating alternative discourses in academic
writing and publishing: Risks with hybridity. In L. Thesen & L. Cooper (Eds.),
Risk in academic writing: postgraduate students, their teachers and the making of
knowledge (pp. 59–99). Multilingual Matters.
Carel, H., & Kidd, I. J. (2014). Epistemic injustice in healthcare: A philosophical analysis
[journal article]. Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, 17(4), 529–40. [Link]
org/10.1007/s11019-014-9560-2
Carmichael-Murphy, P. (2021). It’s time to decolonise the doctoral degree. WONKHE.
[Link]
Carr, W. (1998). What is an educational practice? In M. Hammersley (Ed.), Educational
research: Current issues (Vol. 1, pp. 160–76). The Open University/Paul Chapman
Publishing.
 References 179

Carson, A. D. (2017). Owning my masters: The rhetorics of rhymes & revolutions [Rap
Podcasts, Clemson University]. Preme & Truth. [Link]
com/
Case, J. M. (2013). Researching student learning in higher education: A social realist
approach. Routledge.
Chalmers, D. J. (1996). The conscious mind: In search of a fundamental theory. Oxford
University Press.
Chalmers, D. J. (2006). Strong and weak emergence. In P. Clayton & P. Davies (Eds.),
The Re-emergence of emergence: The emergentist hypothesis from science to religion.
Oxford University Press. [Link]
action?docID=430431
Chanock, K. (2014). ‘Telling’ insights from experience: Establishing resonance with
readers, theory, and participants [cases, learning advisers, narrative]. [Link]
[Link]/[Link]/jall/article/view/316</div>
Choudry, A. (2020). Reflections on academia, activism, and the politics of knowledge
and learning. The International Journal of Human Rights, 24(1), 28–45. [Link]
org/10.1080/13642987.2019.1630382
Clark, W. (2006). Academic charisma and the origins of the research university.
University of Chicago Press; University Presses Marketing [distributor]. Table of
contents [Link]
Cocteau, J. (1957). La Difficulté d’être. Editions du Rocher.
Coleman, D., Starfield, S., & Hagan, A. (2003). The attitudes of IELTS stakeholders:
Student and staff perceptions of IELTS in Australian, UK and Chinese tertiary
institutions.
Collier, A. (1994). Critical realism: An introduction to Roy Bhaskar’s philosophy. Verso.
Collini, S. (2012). What are universities for? Penguin.
Collins, H. (2019, 9 May2019). Deat of the author? AI generated books and the
production of scientific knowledge. LSE Impact Blog. [Link]
impactofsocialsciences/2019/05/09/death-of-the-author-ai-generated-books-and-
the-production-of-scientific-knowledge/
Collyer, F., Connell, R., Maia, J., & Morrell, R. (2019). Knowledge and global power
making new Sciences in the South. Monash University Publisher.
Connell, R. (2013). The neoliberal cascade and education: An essay on the market
agenda and its consequences. Critical Studies in Education, 54(2), 99–112. https://
[Link]/10.1080/17508487.2013.776990
Connell, R. (2019). The good university: What universities actually do and why its time
for radical change (1st ed.). JM: Zed Books.
Costelloe, T. (2018). Giambattista Vico. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy.
Coulmas, F. (1989). The writing systems of the world. Basil Blackwell.
Cousin, G. (2006). An introduction to threshold concepts. Planet, 17(1), 4–5. https://
[Link]/10.11120/plan.2006.00170004
180 References

Cox, M. (2014). In response to today’s ‘felt need’: WAC, faculty development, and
second language writers. In T. Myers Zawacki & M. Cox (Eds.), WAC and second
language writers: Research towards linguistically and culturally inclusive programs and
practices (pp. 299–326). The WAC Clearinghouse Parlor Press. [Link]
edu/books/l2/[Link]
Coxhead, A. (2011). The academic word list 10 years on: Research and teaching
implications. TESOL Quarterly, 45(2), 355–62.
Crystal, D. (1988). The English language. Penguin.
Crystal, D. (2003). The Cambridge encyclopedia of the English language (2nd ed. ).
Cambridge University Press.
Cuthbert, R. (2018, 26 November 2018). Fake research and trust in the social sciences.
SRHE News Blog. [Link]
social-sciences/
d’Agnese, V. (2017). The eclipse of imagination within educational ‘official’ framework
and why it should be returned to educational discourse: A Deweyan perspective.
Studies in Philosophy of Education, 36, 443. [Link]
s11217-016-9511-x
D’Agostino, F. (2012). Disciplinarity and the growth of knowledge. Social Epistemology,
26(3–4), 331–50. [Link]
Daston, L., & Galison, P. (2007). Objectivity. Zone Books.
Daston, L., & Galison, P. (2010). Objectivity. Zone Books.
Davis, M. (2019). Publishing research as an EAP practitioner: Opportunities and
threats. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 39, 72–86. [Link]
[Link]/10.1016/[Link].2019.04.001
Dawkins, R. (1998). Intellectual impostures: Book review. Nature, 394(9 July), 141–3.
DBIS (2016). Success as a Knowledge Economy: Teaching Excellence, Social Mobility and
Student Choice. D. f. B. I. a. Skills. [Link]
higher-education-success-as-a-knowledge-economy-white-paper.
de Sousa Santos, B. (2009). A non-occidentalist West?: Learned ignorance and
ecology of knowledge. Theory, Culture & Society, 26(7–8), 103–25. [Link]
org/10.1177/0263276409348079
de Sousa Santos, B. (2017). Decolonising the university: The challenge of deep cognitive
justice. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. [Link]
DeFrancis, J. (1989). Visible speech: The diverse oneness of writing systems. University of
Hawaii Press.
Derrida, J., & Spivak, G. C. (1976). Of grammatology. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Devitt, A. J. (1996). Genres and the teaching of genre. College Composition and
Communication, 47(4), 605–15.
Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education: An introduction to the philosophy of
education. The Free Press Simon and Schuster.
Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. Touchstone, Kappa Delta Pi, Simon &
Schuster.
 References 181

Ding, A. (2016, 25 January 2016). Neoliberal EAP: Are we all neoliberals now?
Teaching EAP: Polemical. Questioning, debating and exploring issues in EAP. https://
[Link]/2016/01/25/neo-liberal-eap-are-we-all-neoliberals-now/
Ding, A., & Bruce, I. (2017). The English for academic purposes practitioner: Operating
on the edge of academia (P. Macmillan ed.). Palgrave.
Donati, P., & Archer, M. (2015). The relational subject. Cambridge University Press.
Cover image [Link]
Donnelly, M., Baratta, A., & Gamsu, S. (2019). A sociolinguistic perspective on accent
and Social mobility in the UK teaching profession. Sociological Research Online,
24(4), 496–513. [Link]
Doody, A., Follinger, S., & Taub, L. (2012). Structures and strategies in ancient Greek
and Roman technical writing: An introduction. Studies in History and Philosophy of
Science, 43, 233–6.
Downs, D., & Wardle, E. (2007). Teaching about writing, righting misconceptions:
(Re)envisioning ‘first-year composition’ as ‘introduction to writing studies’.
College Composition and Communication, 58(4), 552–84. [Link]
stable/20456966
Eaton, M. M. (1994). The intrinsic, non-supervenient nature of aesthetic properties.
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 52(4), 383–97. [Link]
org/10.2307/432026
Eco, U. (2015). How to write a thesis. The MIT Press.
Eisenstein, E. L. (1983). The printing revolution in early modern Europe. Cambridge
University Press.
Elbow, P. (1994). What do we mean when we talk about voice in writing? In K. Yancey
(Ed.), Voices on voice. Perspectives, definition, inquiry (pp. 1–35). National Council of
Teachers of English.
Elliot, D. L., Bengtsen, S. S. E., Guccione, K., & Kobayashi, S. (2020). The hidden
curriculum in doctoral education. Palgrave Pivot. [Link]
41497-9
Emig, J. (1977). Writing as a mode of learning. College Composition and
Communication, 28(2), 122–8. [Link]
English, F. (2011). Student writing and genre: Reconfiguring academic knowledge.
Continuum.
English, F. (2015). Writing differently: Creating different spaces for student learning.
In A. Chik, T. Costley, & M. C. Pennington (Eds.), Creativity and discovery in the
University writing class: a teacher’s guide. Equinox.
Erard, M. (2018). The deep roots of writing: Was writing invented for accounting and
administration or did it evolve from religious movements, sorcery and dreams?
Aeon.
EUROSTAT (2019). Disability Statistics. P. a. s. conditions. Online publications https://
[Link]/eurostat/statistics-explained/[Link]?title=Disability_statistics,
European Union
182 References

Evans, V. (2009). How words mean: Lexical concepts, cognitive models, and meaning
construction. Oxford University Press.
Evans, V. (2014). The language myth: Why language is not an instinct. Cambridge
University Press.
Fairclough, N. (1992). Discourse and social change. Polity.
Fairclough, N. (2001). Language and power. Pearson Education.
Fantl, J. (2017). Knowledge How. In Edward N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition). [Link]
knowledge-how/
Feak, C., & Swales, J. (2013). Tensions between the old and the new in EAP
textbook revision: A tale of two projects. In N. Harwood (Ed.), English language
teaching textbooks: Content, consumption, production (pp. 299–319). Palgrave
Macmillan Limited. [Link]
action?docID=1588738
Fischer, A. (2015). ‘Hidden features’ and ‘overt instruction’ in academic literacy
practices: A case study in engineering. In T. Lillis, K. Harrington, M. R. Lea, & S.
Mitchell (Eds.), Working with academic literacies: Case studies towards transformative
practices (pp. 75–85). The WAC Clearinghouse/Parlor Press. [Link]
edu/books/lillis/
Fischer, R. S. (2005). A history of writing. London: Reaktion Books.
Fish, S. E. (2017). Winning arguments: What works and doesn’t work in politics, the
bedroom, the courtroom, and the classroom. HarperCollins.
Fitzmaurice, M. (2010). Considering teaching in higher education as
a practice. Teaching in Higher Education, 15(1), 45–55. [Link]
org/10.1080/13562510903487941
Flores, N., & Rosa, J. (2015). Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and
language diversity in education. Harvard Educational Review, 85(2), 149–71. https://
[Link]/10.17763/0017-8055.85.2.149
Fodor, J. (1974). Special sciences (Or: The disunity of science as a working hypothesis).
Synthese, 28(2), 97–115. [Link]
stable/20114958
Fodor, J. (1997). Special sciences: Still autonomous after all these years. Philosophical
Perspectives, 11, 149–63. [Link]
stable/2216128
Foucault, M. (1969). What is an author. Lecture presented to the Société française
de Philosophie on 22 February 1969. [Link]
HarasztosAgnes/Foucault_WhatIsAnAuthor.pdf
Foucault, M. (1972a). The archaeology of knowledge. Routledge.
Foucault, M. (1972b). The discourse on language. In The Archaeology of Knowledge (pp.
215–37). Pantheon.
Fox, K. (2021). A funny turn. In R. Phillips & H. Kara (Eds.), Creative Writing for Social
Research (pp. 159–66). Policy Press.
 References 183

Franca, L., & Lloyd, E. (2000). Sokal hoax: The sham that shook the academy. University
of Nebraska Press. [Link]
action?docID=3039287
Fransman, J. (2012). Re-imagining the conditions of possibility of a PhD thesis. In R.
B. Andrews, Erik; Boyd Davis, Stephen, Domingo, Myrrh and England, Jude (Eds.),
The SAGE handbook of digital dissertations and theses (pp. 138–56). SAGE.
Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed (30th anniversary ed.). Continuum.
Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford
University Press. Table of contents only [Link]
ecip0710/[Link]
Friesen, N. (2017). The textbook & the lecture: Education in the age of new media. Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Galtung, J. (1981). Structure, culture, and intellectual style: An essay comparing
saxonic, teutonic, gallic and nipponic approaches. Theory and Methods/Théorie
et méthode, 20(6), 817–56. [Link]
abs/10.1177/053901848102000601
Gelb, I. J. (1952). A study of writing. The foundations of grammatology. Routledge &
Kegan Paul.
Gelb, I. J. (1963). The study of writing (2nd rev. ed.). University of Chicago Press.
Good, G. (1988). The observing self: Rediscovering the essay. Routledge.
Goody, J. (1977). The domestication of the savage mind. Cambridge University Press.
Gourlay, L. (2012). Media systems, multimodality and posthumanism: Implications
for the dissertation? In R. B. Andrews, Erik; Boyd Davis, Stephen, Domingo, Myrrh
and England, Jude (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of digital dissertations and Theses (pp.
85–100). SAGE.
Gourlay, L. (2016). Multimodality, argument and the persistence of the written text.
In A. Archer & E. O. Breuer (Eds.), Multimodality in higher education (Vol. 33, pp.
79–90). Brill.
Graff, G., & Birkenstein, C. (2006). ‘They say/I say’: The moves that matter in academic
writing (1st ed.). W. [Link] & Company.
Grafton, A. (1997). The footnote: A curious history (New ed.). Harvard University Press.
Groarke, L. (2015). Going multimodal: What is a mode of arguing and why does it
matter? Argumentation, 29, 133–55. [Link]
0
Groff, R. (2000). The truth of the matter: Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism and the
concept of alethic truth. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 30(3), 407–35. [Link]
org/10.1177/004839310003000304
Grove, J. (2016, 29 September 2016). Mature students ‘do better with non-written
assessment’: Academic attainment of disadvantaged students can be improved if
they can decide how they are assessed, study claims. Times Higher Education. https://
[Link]/news/mature-students-do-better-non-written-
assessment
184 References

Gutkind, L. (1997). The art of creative nonfiction: Writing and selling the literature of
reality. Wiley.
Hadley, G. (2015). English for academic purposes in neoliberal universities: A critical
grounded theory. Springer. 1850–9999. [Link] BLDSS
Halverson, J. (1992). Havelock on Greek orality and literacy. Journal of the History of
Ideas, 53(1), 148–63. [Link]
Hamilton, M., & Pitt, K. (2009). Creativity in academic writing: Escaping from the
straightjacket of genre. In A. Carter, T. Lillis, & S. Parkin (Eds.), Why writing
matters: Issues of access and identity in writing research and pedagogy (pp. 61–79).
John Benjamins Publishing Company. [Link]
Hanauer, D. I., Sheridan, C. L., & Englander, K. (2019). Linguistic injustice in the
writing of research articles in English as a second language: Data from Taiwanese
and Mexican researchers, 36(1), 136–54. [Link]
Hancock, S. (2020, 17 February 2020).The employment of PhD graduates in the UK:
what do we know? HEPI: Higher Education Policy Institute. [Link]
[Link]/2020/02/17/the-employment-of-phd-graduates-in-the-uk-what-do-we-know/
Hanna, J. (2014). Manifestos: A Manifesto. The 10 traits of effective public declarations,
an Object lesson. The Atlantic. [Link]
archive/2014/06/manifestos-a-manifesto-the-10-things-all-manifestos-need/372135/
Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and
the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–99. [Link]
org/10.2307/3178066
Harding, S. (1995). ‘Strong objectivity’: A response to the new objectivity question.
Synthese, 104(3), 331–49. [Link]
Harper, R., Bretag, T., Ellis, C., Newton, P., Rozenberg, P., Saddiqui, S., & van
Haeringen, K. (2019). Contract cheating: A survey of Australian university staff.
Studies in Higher Education, 44(11), 1857–73. [Link]
8.1462789
Harris, R. (1986). The origin of writing. Duckworth.
Harris, R. (1989). How does writing restructure thought? Language and Communication,
9(2/3), 99–106.
Harris, R. (2000). Rethinking writing. Athlone.
Harris, R. (2011). Integrationist notes and papers 2009–2011. Bright Pen.
Harris, R., & Taylor, T. J. (1989). Landmarks in linguistic thought: The Western tradition
from Socrates to Saussure. Routledge.
Harron, P. A. (2016). The equidistribution of lattice shapes of rings of integers of cubic,
quartic, and quintic number fields: An artist’s rendering: Based on the original story
by Manjul Bhargava and Piper Harron [A Dissertation presented to the faculty
of Princeton University in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy,
Princeton University].
Harwood, N. (2005). What do we want EAP teaching materials for? Journal of English
for Academic Purposes, 4(2), 149–61. [Link]
jeap.2004.07.008
 References 185

Hathaway, J. (2015). Developing that voice: Locating academic writing tuition in the
mainstream of higher education. Teaching in Higher Education, 20(5), 506–17. http://
[Link]/10.1080/13562517.2015.1026891
Havelock, E. A. (1976). Origins of Western literacy. Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.
Havelock, E. A. (1982). The literate revolution in Greece and its cultural consequences.
Princeton University Press.
Hayot, E. (2014). The elements of academic style: Writing for the humanities. Columbia
University Press.
Healey, M., Matthews, K. E., & Cook-Sather, A. (Eds.). (2020). Writing about learning
and teaching in higher education: Creating and contributing to scholarly conversations
across a range of genres. Elon University.
Helms-Park, R., & Stapleton, P. (2003). Questioning the importance of individualised
voice in undergraduate L2 argumentative writing: An empirical study with
pedagogical implications. Journal of Second Language Writing, 12, 245–65.
Henderson, J. (2018). Styling writing and being styled in university literacy practices.
Teaching in Higher Education, 1–17. [Link]
HESA (2020a). Widening participation: UK domiciled full-time HE undergraduate
student enrolments by participation characteristics, academic years 2018/19 to
2019/20. H. Education. [Link]
HESA (2020b). Higher Education Student Statistics: UK, 2018/19. H. Education.
[Link]
numbers
Hirst, P. H. (1998). Educational theory. In M. Hammersley (Ed.), Educational research:
current issues (Vol. 1, pp. 149–59). The Open University/Paul Chapman Publishing.
Hocking, D., & Toh, G. (2010). EAP writing: Reflections on divergent perceptions and
expectations among tutors and students. Asian Journal of English Language Teaching,
20, 161–83.
Hodgson, N., Vlieghe, J., & Zamojski, P. (Eds.). (2018). Manifesto for a post-critical
philosophy. Punctum books. [Link]
Hogan, P. (2015). Recovering the lost métier of philosophy of education? Reflections
on educational thought, policy and practice in the UK and farther afield. Journal of
Philosophy of Education, 49(3), 366–81.
Hohwy, J., & Kallestrup, J. (2008). Being reduced: New essays on reduction, explanation,
and causation. Oxford University Press.
Holbrook, A., Burke, R., & Fairbairn, H. (2020). Linguistic diversity and doctoral
assessment: Exploring examiner treatment of candidate language. Higher Education
Research & Development, 1–15. [Link]
Holmes, J. (1992). An introduction to sociolinguistics. Longman.
Horner, B., & Lu, M.-Z. (2013). Translingual Literacy, Language Difference, and Matters
of Agency. College English 75(6), 586–611.
Hountondji, P. J. (1995). Producing knowledge in Africa today the second Bashorun M.
K. O. Abiola distinguished lecture. African Studies Review, 38(3), 1–10. [Link]
org/10.2307/524790
186 References

Hurley, P. J. (2000). A concise introduction to logic (7th ed.). Wadsworth/Thomson

Learning.
Hutchings, P., & Shulman, L. (1999). The scholarship of teaching: New elaborations,
new developments. Change, 31(5), 10–15. [Link]
Hyland, K. (2002). Options of identity in academic writing. ELT Journal, 56(4), 351–8.
Hyland, K. (2006). The ‘Other’ English: Thoughts on EAP and academic writing. The
European English Messenger, 15(2), 34–57.
Hyland, K. (2016). Teaching and researching writing (3 ed.). Routledge.
Hyland, K., & Feng (Kevin), J. (2017). Is academic writing becoming more informal?
English for Specific Purposes, 45, 40–51. [Link]
esp.2016.09.001
Hyland, K., & Hamp-Lyons, L. (2002). EAP: Issues and directions. Journal of English for
Academic Purposes, 1(1), 1–12.
Ingraham, B. D. (2005). Ambulating with mega-fauna: A scholarly reflection on
Walking with Beasts. In R. Land & S. Bayne (Eds.), Education in cyberspace (pp. 45).
Routledge Falmer.
Introna, D. L. (2016). Algorithms, governance, and governmentality: On governing
academic writing. Science, Technology, and Human Values, 4(1), 17–49. [Link]
org/DOI:-10.1177/0162243915587360
Ivanič, R. (1998). Writing and identity: The discoursal construction of identity in
academic writing. John Benjamins.
Jenkins, J. (2016). Correspondence from Jennifer Jenkins. English Language Teaching
Journal, 70(1), 122. [Link]
Jones, J. (2014). Slavoj Žižek charged with plagiarizing: A white nationalist magazine
article. Retrieved 23 March 2016 from [Link]
[Link]
Judd, D. (2003). Critical realism and composition theory. Routledge.
Kaidesoja, T. (2009). Bhaskar and Bunge on social emergence. Journal for the Theory
of Social Behaviour, 39(3), 300–22. [Link]
5914.2009.00409.x
Kamler, B., & Thomson, P. (2006). Helping doctoral students write: Pedagogies for
supervision. Routledge. Table of contents only. [Link]
ecip0610/[Link]
Kaplan, R. B. (1980 [1966]). Cultural thought patterns in inter-cultural education. In K.
Croft (Ed.), Readings on English as a second language (pp. 399–418). Winthrop.
Kara, H. (2015). Creative research methods in the social sciences: A practical guide. The
Policy Press.
Kiley, M., & Wisker, G. (2009). Threshold concepts in research education and evidence
of threshold crossing. Higher Education Research & Development, 28(4), 431–41.
[Link]
Kim, J. (2006). Emergence: Core ideas and issues. Synthese, 151(3), 547–59.
 References 187

King, A. (2010). The odd couple: Margaret Archer, Anthony Giddens and British social
theory. The British Journal of Sociology, 61, 253–60. [Link]
4446.2009.01288.x
King, B. (1991). Reviewed Work(s): Visible speech: The diverse oneness of writing
systems by John DeFrancis. Linguistic Society of America, 67(2), 377–9. [Link]
[Link]/stable/415119
Knapp, S., & Michaels, W. B. (1982). Against theory. Critical Inquiry, 8(4), 723–42.
[Link]
Knorr Cetina, K., Schatzki, T. R., & Von Savigny, E. (Eds.). (2001). The practice turn in
contemporary theory. Routledge. [Link]
[Link]?docID=235322.
Kripke, S. A. (1972). Naming and necessity. Blackwell.
Krishnan, A. (2013). Organizing Science: A Further Reply to Fred D’Agostino. Social
Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, 2(3), 19–21.
Kruse, O. (2006). The origins of writing in the disciplines: Traditions of seminar writing
and the humboldtian ideal of the research university. Written Communication, 23(3),
331–52. [Link]
Kuhn, L. (2008). Complexity and educational research: A critical reflection.
Educational Philosophy and Theory, 40(1), 177–89. [Link]
5812.2007.00398.x
Kuhn, T. (1962). The structure of scientific revolutions. University of Chicago Press.
Kunju, H. W. (2017). IsiXhosa ulwimi lwabantu abangesosininzi eZimbabwe: ukuphila
nokulondolozwa kwaso [Rhodes University]. [Link]
Kuttner, P., Sousanis, N., & Weaver-Hightower, M. B. (2017). How to draw comics the
scholarly way: Creating comics-based research in the academy. In P. Leavy (Ed.),
Handbook of arts-based research (pp. 396–422). Guilford Press.
Labbé, C. (2010). Ike Antkare one of the greatest stars in the scientific firmament.
Université Joseph Fourier LIG Laboratory, 1–14. [Link]
PDF/[Link]
Labbé, C., & Labbé, D. (2012). Duplicate and fake publications in the scientific
literature: How many SCIgen papers in computer science? Scientometrics, 1–19.
[Link]
Latour, B., & Woolgar, S. (1986). Laboratory life: The construction of scientific facts (2nd
ed.). Princeton University Press.
Laurillard, D., Stratfold, M., Luckin, R., Plowman, L., & Taylor, J. (2000). Affordances
for learning in a non-linear narrative medium. Journal of Interactive Media in
Education, 2 (Art. 2), 1–19. [Link]
Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Egitimate peripheral participation.
Cambridge University Press.
Law, J. (2003). Making a mess with method. 1–12. available online [Link]
[Link]/fass/resources/sociology-online-papers/papers/law-making-a-mess-with-
[Link]
188 References

Law, J. (2004). After method: Mess in social science research. Routledge. Table of contents.
[Link]
Law, S. (2014). Introduction. Think, 13(36), 5–9. [Link]
S1477175613000274
Le Ha, P. (2009). Strategic, passionate, but academic: Am I allowed in my writing?
Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 8(2), 134–46. [Link]
org/10.1016/[Link].2008.09.003
Lea, M., & Street, B. (1998). Student writing in higher education: An academic literacies
approach. Studies in Higher Education, 23(2), 157–72.
Leedham-Green, E. (1996). A Concise history of the University of Cambridge. Cambridge
University Press.
Leung, C., Lewkowicz, J., & Jenkins, J. (2016). English for academic purposes [Article].
Englishes in Practice, 3(3), 55–73. [Link]
Lillis, T. (2001). Student writing: Access, regulation, desire. Routledge.
Lillis, T. (2013). The sociolinguistics of writing. Edinburgh University Press.
Lillis, T., & Curry, M. J. (2010a). Academic writing in a global context: The politics and
practices of publishing in English. Routledge.
Lillis, T., & Curry, M. J. (2010b). Academic writing in a global context: The politics and
practices of publishing in English. Routledge.
Lillis, T., & Curry, M. J. (2015). The politics of English, language and uptake: The case of
international academic journal article reviews. AILA Review, 28, 127–50.
Lillis, T., Harrington, K., Lea, M. R., & Mitchell, S. (Eds.). (2015). Working with
academic literacies: Case studies towards transformative practices. The WAC
Clearinghouse/Parlor Press. [Link]
Lillis, T., & Tuck, J. (2016). Academic literacies: A critical lens on writing and reading in
the academy. In K. Hyland & P. Shaw (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of English for
academic purposes (pp. 30–43). Routledge.
Little, D. (2018, 22 May 2018). Social generativity and complexity. Understanding
Society. [Link]
[Link]
Lomer, S., & Anthony-Okeke, L. (2019). Ethically engaging international students:
Student generated material in an active blended learning model. Teaching in Higher
Education, 24(5), 613–32. [Link]
Lunsford, A. A. (2015). 2.5 writing is performative. In L. Adler-Kassner & E. A. Wardle
(Eds.), Naming what we know: Threshold concepts of writing studies (pp. 43–4). Utah
State University Press.
Macfarlane, B. (2021a). The conceit of activism in the illiberal university. Policy Futures
in Education, 19(5), 594–606. [Link]
Macfarlane, B. (2021b). Methodology, fake learning, and emotional performativity.
ECNU Review of Education. [Link]
MacIntyre, A. (1985). After virtue: A study in moral theory (2nd ed.). Duckworth.
 References 189

Madge, C., Raghuram, P., & Noxolo, P. (2009). Engaged pedagogy and responsibility: A
postcolonial analysis of international students. Geoforum, 40(1), 34–45. [Link]
org/[Link]
Malpas, J. (2002). The weave of meaning: Holism and contextuality. Language &
Communication, 22(4), 403–19. [Link]
5309_02_00017-4
Manathunga, C. (2017). Intercultural doctoral supervision: The centrality of place, time
and other forms of knowledge. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 16(1),
113–24. [Link]
Manathunga, C. (2020a, 9 July 2020). Decolonising doctoral education: Sociologies
of emergence? The hidden curriculum. [Link]
com/2020/07/09/decolonising-doctoral-education-sociologies-of-emergence/
amp/?__twitter_impression=true
Manathunga, C. (2020b). Decolonising higher education: Creating space for Southern
knowledge systems. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in the South, 4(1), 4–25.
[Link]
Marin, L., Masschelein, J., & Simons, M. (2018). Page, text and screen in the university:
Revisiting the Illich hypothesis. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50(1), 49–60.
[Link]
Mason, M. (2008). What is complexity theory and what are its implications for
educational change? Educational Philosophy and Theory, 40(1), 35–49. [Link]
org/10.1111/j.1469-5812.2007.00413.x
Matsuda, P., & Tardy, C. (2008). Continuing the conversation on voice in academic
writing. English for Specific Purposes, 27, 100–105.
Matthews, D. (2014). Focus on recruiting foreign students reveals ‘mission drift’. The
Times Higher Education. [Link]
recruiting-foreign-students-reveals-mission-drift/[Link]
Mays, C. (2017). Writing complexity, one stability at a time: Teaching writing as a
complex system. College Composition and Communication, 68(3), 559–85. http://
[Link]/stable/44783580
Mbembe, A. (2008, 9 January 2008). What is postcolonial thinking? An interview
with Achille Mbembe. Eurozine. [Link]
thinking/
McArthur, J. (2020). Assessment for social justice: Achievement, uncertainty and
recognition. In C. Callender, W. Locke, & S. Marginson (Eds.), Changing higher
education for a changing World. Bloomsbury.
Mcculloch, S. (2017). Hobson’s choice: The effects of research evaluation on academics’
writing practices in England. Aslib Journal of Information Management, 69(5),
503–15. [Link]
McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of man. Ark, 1987.
Medway, D., Roper, S., & Gillooly, L. (2018). Contract cheating in UK higher education: A
covert investigation of essay mills. 44(3), 393–418. [Link]
190 References

Mewburn, I. (2020, May 13). Where I call bullshit on the way we do the PhD. The thesis
whisperer. [Link]
academia-haunt-you/
Meyer, J., & Land, R. (2006). Overcoming barriers to student understanding: Threshold
concepts and troublesome knowledge. Routledge. Table of contents [Link]
gov/catdir/toc/ecip064/[Link]
Meyer, J., Land, R., & Baillie, C. (2010). Threshold concepts and transformational
learning. Sense Publishers.
Mckenna, S. (2021). Technology should not stop us trusting students. WONKHE
[Link]
(Accessed 30 September 2021).
Mirzaei Rafe, M., Noaparast, K. B., Hosseini, A. S., & Sajadieh, N. (2020). An
examination of Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism as a basis for educational practice.
Journal of Critical Realism, 1–16. [Link]
Molinari, J. (2013). Holiday question 1: Why are there so few academic writing courses?
patter. [Link]
Molinari, J. (2014, 3 April 2014). Academic ghostwriting: To what extent is it haunting higher
education? The Guardian. [Link]
blog/2014/apr/03/academic-proofreading-write-essays-universities-students-ethics
Molinari, J. (2019). What makes writing academic: An educational and philosophical
response Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, University of Nottingham.
Molinari, J. (2021a). Playing with #acwri: A play on academic writing. In R. Phillips
& H. Kara (Eds.), Creative writing for social research: A practical guide (pp. 20–4).
Policy Press.
Molinari, J. (2021b). Re-imagining Doctoral Writings as Emergent Open Systems. In
C. Badenhorst, B. Amell and J. Burford (Eds.), Re-imagining doctoral writing (pp.
49–69). The WAC Clearinghouse; University Press of Colorado. DOI: 10.37514/
INT-B.2021.1343.2.02
Moore, T., & Morton, J. (2005). Dimensions of difference: A comparison of university
writing and IELTS writing. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 4, 43–66.
Morris, R. (2010). Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea.
Columbia University Press. [Link]
action?docID=895096
Moynihan, M. (2015, 24 September 2015). Mafia author Roberto Saviano’s plagiarism
problem. Retrieved 22 March 2016 from [Link]
author-roberto-savianos-plagiarism-problem?ref=scroll
Mulvey, B. (2021). Pluralist internationalism, global justice and international student
recruitment in the UK. Higher Education. doi:10.1007/s10734-021-00750-3.
Myers Zawacki, T., & Cox, M. (Eds.). (2014). and second language writers: Research
towards linguistically and culturally inclusive programs and practices. The WAC
Clearinghouse, Parlor Press. [Link]
 References 191

Naylor, R., Dollinger, M., Mahat, M., & Khawaja, M. (2020). Students as customers
versus as active agents: Conceptualising the student role in governance and quality
assurance. Higher Education Research & Development, 1–14. [Link]
07294360.2020.1792850
Neculai, C. (2015). Academic literacies and the employability curriculum: Resisting
neoliberal education? In T. Lillis, K. Harrington, M. R. Lea and S. Mitchell (Eds),
Working with academic literacies: Case studies towards transformative practices (pp.
401–12). The WAC Clearinghouse/Parlor Press.
Nesi, H., & Gardner, S. (2012). Genres across the disciplines: Student writing in higher
education. Cambridge University Press.
Nixon, J. (2012). Universities and the common good. In R. Barnett (Ed.), The university
of the future: Ideas and possibilities (pp. 141–51). Routledge.
Nussbaum, M. C. (1990). Love’s knowledge: Essays on philosophy and literature. Oxford
University Press.
Nussbaum, M. C. (2011). Creating capabilities: The human development approach.
Belknap.
O’Dwyer, S., Pinto, S., & McDonough, S. (2018). Self-care for academics: A poetic
invitation to reflect and resist. Reflective Practice, 19(2), 243–9. [Link]
80/14623943.2018.1437407
Olson, D. (1977). From Utterance to text: The bias of language in speech and
writing. Harvard Educational Review, 47(3), 257–81. [Link]
pdf/10.17763/haer.47.3.8840364413869005
Olson, D. (1994). The World on paper. Cambridge University Press.
Olson, D. R. (2001). Psychology of Writing Systems. International Encyclopedia of the
Social & Behavioral Sciences, Elsevier Science Ltd.: 16640–11663.
Ong, W. J. (1982). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. Methuen.
Ong, W. J. (1986). Writing is a technology that restructures thought. In G. Baumann
(Ed.), The Written word: literacy in transition: Wolfson College Lectures 1985 (pp.
23–50). Clarendon. [Link]
ONS (2019). Participation Rates in Higher Education: Academic Years 2006/2007 –
2017/2018 (Provisional) D. f. Education. [Link]
government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/843542/Publication_
[Link]
Orelus, P. W. (2017). Accentism exposed: An anticolonial analysis of accent
discrimination with some implications for minority languages. In P. W. Orelus (Ed.),
Language, race, and power in schools: A critical discourse analysis (pp. 127–37).
Routledge.
Orman, J. (2016). Scientism in the language sciences. Language & Communication, 48,
28–40. [Link]
Palmeri, J. (2012). Remixing composition: A history of multimodal writing pedagogy.
Southern Illinois University Press.
192 References

Paltridge, B., & Starfield, S. (2020). Change and continuity in thesis and dissertation
writing: The evolution of an academic genre. Journal of English for Academic
Purposes, 48, 100910. [Link]
Paquot, M. (2010). Academic vocabulary in learner writing: From extraction to analysis.
Continuum.
Paradis, J. (1987). Montaigne, Boyle, and the essay of experience. In G. Levine & A.
Rauch (Eds.), One culture: Essays in science and literature (pp. 59–91). University of
Wisconsin Press.
Paré, A. (2017). Re-thinking the dissertation and doctoral supervision/Reflexiones
sobre la tesis doctoral y su supervisión. Infancia y Aprendizaje Journal for the Study
of Education and Development, 11–21. [Link]
102
Paré, A. (2018). Re-writing the doctorate: New contexts, identities, and genres. Journal
of Second Language Writing, 43, 80–4. [Link]
jslw.2018.08.004
Parker, K. N. (2017). Response: Never use ‘I’. In C. E. Ball & D. M. Loewe (Eds.), Bad
ideas about writing (pp. 134–8). WVU Libraries. [Link]
badideas/
Parnell, J. E. (2012). Complexity theory. In R. N. L. Andrews, E. Borg, S. Davis Boyd, M.
Domingo, & J. England (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of digital dissertations and theses
(pp. 120–37). Sage.
Paxton, M. (2013). Genre: A pigeonhole or a pigeon? Case studies of the dilemmas
posed by the writing of academic research proposals. In L. Thesen & L. Cooper
(Eds.), Risk in academic writing: Postgraduate students, their teachers and the making
of knowledge (pp. 148–65). Multilingual Matters.
Pennycook, A. (1996). Borrowing others’ words: Text, ownership, memory, and
plagiarism. TESOL Quarterly, 30(2), 201–30.
Peters, M. (2008). Academic writing, genres and philosophy. Educational Philosophy
and Theory, 40(7), 819–31. [Link]
5812.2008.00511.x
Peters, M. (Ed.). (2009). Academic writing, philosophy and genre. Wiley-Blackwell.
Peters, M. (2017). Manifesto for the postcolonial university. Educational Philosophy and
Theory, 1–7. [Link]
Peters, M. (2018). Academic integrity: An interview with Tracey Bretag. Educational
Philosophy and Theory, 1–6. [Link]
Peters, M. A., Jackson, L., Hung, R., Mika, C., Buchanan, R. A., Tesar, M., Besley, T.,
Hood, N., Sturm, S., Farrell, B., Madjar, A., & Webb, T. (2021). The case for academic
plagiarism education: A PESA Executive collective writing project. Educational
Philosophy and Theory, 1–24. [Link]
Peters, M. A., McLaren, P., & Jandrić, P. (2020). A viral theory of post-truth. Educational
Philosophy and Theory, 1–9. [Link]
Pettersson, J. S. (1994). Evolutionary accounts of writing and the disobedient history of
scripts. Language & Communication, 14(2), 129–53.
 References 193

Phillips, R., & Kara, H. (Eds.). (2021). Creative writing for social research: A practical
guide. Policy Press.
Politzer-Ahles, S., Girolamo, T., & Ghali, S. (2020). Preliminary evidence of linguistic
bias in academic reviewing. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 47, 100895.
[Link]
Politzer-Ahles, S., Holliday, J. J., Girolamo, T., Spychalskae, M., & Harper Berksonf,
K. (2016). Is linguistic injustice a myth? A response to Hyland. Journal of
Second Language Writing, 34, 4–8. [Link]
jslw.2016.09.003
Postman, N. (1993). Technopoly: The surrender of culture to technology. Vintage Books.
Pratt, D. (2011). Modelling written communication: A new systems approach to modelling
in the social sciences. Springer.
Prinsloo, M., & Breier, M. (1996). The social uses of literacy: Theory and practice in
contemporary South Africa. Benjamins.
Raimes, A. (1991). Out of the woods: Emerging traditions in the teaching of writing.
TESOL Quarterly, 25(3), 407–30.
Ramage, J., Callaway, M., Clary-Lemon, J., & Waggoner, Z. (2009). Argument in
composition. Parlor Press. [Link] [Link]
referenceguides/ramage-argument/
Ravelli, L., Paltridge, B., Starfield, S., & Tuckwell, K. (2013). Extending the notion of
‘text’: The visual and performing arts doctoral thesis. Visual Communication, 12(4),
395–422. [Link]
Reimann, N., & Jackson, I. (2006). Threshold concepts in Economics: A case study. In
J. Meyer & R. Land (Eds.), Overcoming barriers to student understanding: Threshold
concepts and troublesome knowledge (pp. 115–33). Routledge. Table of contents.
[Link]
Richardson, L. (1990a). Narrative and sociology. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography,
19(1), 116–35. [Link]
Richardson, L. (1990b). Writing strategies: Reaching diverse audiences. Sage.
Richardson, L. (1997). Fields of play: Constructing an academic life. Rutgers University Press.
Richardson, L., & St. Pierre, E. A. (2005). Writing: A method of inquiry. In Denzin,
Norman K. & Lincoln, Yvonna S. (Eds.), The Sage handbook of qualitative research
(3rd ed., pp. 959–78). Sage Publications Ltd.
Robeyns, I. (2016). The capability approach. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition).
Robinson, K. (2001). Out of our minds: Learning to be creative. Capstone.
Rodríguez, R. J. (2017). Leave yourself out of your writing. In C. E. Ball & D. M. Loewe
(Eds.), Bad ideas about writing (pp. 131–3). WVU Libraries. [Link]
[Link]/badideas/
Roozen, K., & Erickson, J. (2017). Expanding literate landscapes: persons, practices, and
sociohistoric perspectives of disciplinary development. Computers and Composition
Digital Press/Utah State University Press.
194 References

Roque, G. (2015). Should visual arguments be propositional in order to be arguments?

Argumentation, 29, 177–95. [Link]
Rose, M. (1985). The language of exclusion: Writing instruction at the university.
College English, 47(4), 341–59. [Link]
Rose, M. (1989). Lives on the boundary: The struggles and achievements of America’s
underprepared. Free Press; Collier Macmillan Publishers.
Rose, M. (2005). The mind at work: Valuing the intelligence of the American worker.
Penguin Random House.
Ross, S. (1962). Scientist: The story of a word. Annals of Science, 18(2), 65–85. https://
[Link]/[Link]
Rowland, S. (2008). Collegiality and intellectual love. British Journal of Sociology of
Education, 29(3), 353–60. [Link]
Rüegg, W., & Ridder-Symoens, H. d. (Eds.). (1992–2011). A history of the university in
Europe (Vols. 1–4). Cambridge University Press.
Russell, D. R. (2002). Writing in the academic disciplines: A curricular history (2nd ed.).
Southern Illinois University Press.
Russell, D. R., & Cortes, V. (2012). Academic and scientific texts: The same or different
communities? In M. Castello, C. Donahue, & G. Rijlaarsdam (Eds.), University
writing: Selves and texts in academic societies. BRILL. [Link]
com/lib/nottingham/[Link]?docID=868547
Russell, D. R., Lea, M., Parker, J., Street, B., & Donahue, T. (2009). Exploring notions of
genre in ‘academic literacies’ and ‘writing across the curriculum’ approaches across
countries and contexts. In C. Bazerman, A. Bonini, & D. Figueiredo (Eds.), Genre in a
changing world: Perspectives on writing (pp. 395–423). WAC Clearinghouse/Parlor Press.
Said, E. W. (1978). Orientalism. Penguin.
Said, E. W. (1993). Culture and imperialism. Chatto & Windus.
Said, E. W. (1994). Representations of the intellectual: The 1993 Reith lectures. Vintage.
Saussure, F. d., Baskin, W., Meisel, P., & Saussy, H. (2011). Course in general linguistics.
Columbia University Press.
Sawyer, R. K. (2001). Emergence in sociology: Contemporary philosophy of mind and
some implications for sociological theory. American Journal of Sociology, 107(3),
551–85. [Link]
Schmandt-Besserat, D. (2001). Evolution of writing. International Encyclopedia of the
Social & Behavioral Sciences. Elsevier Science Ltd.: 16619–25.
Scott, M. (2000). Agency and subjectivity in student writing. In Jones, Carys, Turner, Joan &
Street Brian (Ed.), Students writing in the university. John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Scott, M. (2013). A chronicle of learning: Voicing the text (pp. 171–91). University of Tilburg.
available from [Link]
Scott, M., & Lillis, T. (2007). Defining academic literacies research: Issues of
epistemology, ideology and strategy. Journal of Applied Linguistics, 4(1), 5–32.
Scribner, S., & Cole, M. (1981). The psychology of literacy. Harvard University Press.
Sellars, W. (1963). Science, perception and reality. Routledge & Kegan Paul; Humanities
Press.
 References 195

Shanahan, D. R. (2015). A living document: Reincarnating the research article [This

article is part of the series New ways to publish research findings.]. Trials, 16(151).
[Link]
Shapin, S. (1984). Pump and circumstance: Robert Boyle’s literary technology. Social
Studies of Science, 14(4), 481–520. [Link]
Shor, I., & Freire, P. (1987). A pedagogy for liberation: Dialogues on transforming
education. Bergin & Garvey Publishers.
Sigmund, K. (2017). Exact thinking in demented times: The Vienna circle and the epic
quest for the foundations of science. Basic Books, Hachette Book Group.
Smith, R. (1999). Paths of judgement: The revival of practical wisdom. Educational
Philosophy and Theory, 31(3), 327–40. [Link]
tb00469.x
Sokal, A. D. (1996). Transgressing the boundaries: Toward a transformative
hermeneutics of quantum gravity. Social Text, 46(47), 217–52. [Link]
org/10.2307/466856
Sokal, A. D. (2008). Beyond the hoax: Science, philosophy and culture. Oxford University
Press.
Sousanis, N. (2015). Unflattening. Harvard University Press.
Sousanis, N. (2016). The power of images [Interview]. [Link]
videos/37781
Sowton, C. (2016). Contemporary academic writing: A comprehensive course for students
in Higher Education. Garnet Publishing Ltd.
Sperlinger, T., McLellan, J., & Pettigrew, R. (2018). Who are universities for?: Re-making
higher education. Bristol University Press.
Spivak, G. C. (1987). In other worlds: Essays in cultural politics. Methuen.
Street, B. V. (1984). Literacy in theory and practice. Cambridge University Press.
Swales, J. M. (1980). ESP: The textbook problem. The ESP Journal, 1(1), 11–23.
Swales, J. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. CUP.
Swales, J. M., & Feak, C. B. (2012). Academic writing for graduate students: Essential
skills and tasks (3rd ed. ). University of Michigan Press.
Sword, H. (2009). Writing higher education differently: A manifesto on style. Studies in
Higher Education, 34(3), 319–36. [Link]
Sword, H. (2012). Stylish academic writing. Harvard University Press.
Tardy, C. M. (2016). Beyond convention: Genre innovation in academic writing.
University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.
Tardy, C. M., & Jwa, S. (2016). Composition studies and EAP. In Hyland, Ken & Shaw,
Philip (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of English for academic purposes (pp. 56–68).
Routledge.
Tarnay, L. (2002). The conceptual basis of visual argumentation – A case for arguing in
and through moving images. ISSA Proceedings 2002 –. Retrieved 11 November 2017,
from [Link]
visual-argumentation-a-case-for-arguing-in-and-through-moving-images/
196 References

Taub, L. (2017). Science writing in Greco-Roman antiquity. Cambridge University Press.

Thesen, L., & Cooper, L. (Eds.). (2013). Risk in academic writing: Postgraduate students,
their teachers and the making of knowledge. Multilingual Matters.
Thomas, K. C. (2018, 28 April 2018). The accidental cartoonist: Learning the craft of the
graphic essay. The Sociological Review. [Link]
[Link]
Thomson, P. (2013). Do we ‘collect’ data? or – beware the ontological slip …. patter.
[Link]
showing/
Thomson, P. (2018a). Getting to grips with ‘the paragraph’. patter. [Link]
net/2018/11/05/getting-to-grips-with-the-paragraph/
Thomson, P. (2018b). Me, myself and I. patter. [Link]
myself-and-i/
Thomson, P. (2018c). Troubling writing as ‘representation’. In B. Jeffrey & L. Russell
(Eds.), Writing for ethnography. Tufnell Press.
Thomson, P. (2021, 5 July 2021). The problem with gap talk. Patter. [Link]
net/2021/07/05/the-problem-with-gap-talk/
Titscher, S., Meyer, M., Wodak, R., & Vetter, E. (2002). Methods of text and discourse
analysis. SAGE.
Toulmin, S. 1964 (1969). The uses of argument. [S.l.]: Cambridge University Press.
Toulmin, S. (1958). The Uses of Argument. Cambridge University Press.
Tribble, C. (2015). Writing academic English further along the road. What is happening
now in EAP writing instruction? English Language Teaching Journal, 69(4), 442–62.
[Link]
Tseronis, A. (22 May2013). Argumentative functions of visuals: Beyond claiming and
justifying. OSSA Conference Archive, Paper 163, 1–17. [Link]
ossaarchive/OSSA10/papersandcommentaries/163
Tuckett, A. (2013, 19 June 2013). Adult learning in the global university.
mms://[Link]/haveseminar
Turner, J. (2004). Language as academic purpose. Journal of English for Academic
Purposes, 3, 95–109. [Link]
Turner, J. (2010). Language in the academy: Cultural reflexivity and intercultural
dynamics. Multilingual Matters.
Turner, J. (2018). On writtenness: The cultural politics of academic writing (1st ed.).
Bloomsbury Academic. [Link]
Tusting, K., McCulloch, S., Bhatt, I., Hamilton, M., & Barton, D. (2019). Academics
writing: The dynamics of knowledge creation. Routledge.
Van Noorden, R. (2014, 24 February 2014). Publishers withdraw more than 120
gibberish papers. Nature: International Weekly of Science. [Link]
news/publishers-withdraw-more-than-120-gibberish-papers-1.14763
Van Norden, B. W. (2017, 31 October 2017). Western philosophy is racist: Academic
philosophy in ‘the West’ ignores and disdains the thought traditions of China,
 References 197

India and Africa. This must change. Aeon. [Link]

philosophical-canon-is-xenophobic-and-racist
Vertovec, S. (2007). Super-diversity and its implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies,
30(6), 1024–54.
Vico, G. (1959 (1725, 1730, 1744, 1928)). La scienza nuova. Letteratura italiana Einaudi.
[Link]
Villanueva, V. (2015). 3.5 Writing provides a representation of ideologies and identities.
In L. Adler-Kassner & E. A. Wardle (Eds.), Naming what we know: Threshold
concepts of writing studies (pp. 57–8). Utah State University Press.
Vinkers, C. H., Tijdink, J. K., & Otte, W. M. (2015). Use of positive and negative words
in scientific PubMed abstracts between 1974 and 2014: Retrospective analysis. 351.
[Link]
Wardle, E. (2009). ‘Mutt Genres’ and the goal of FYC: Can we help students write the
genres of the university? College Composition and Communication, 60(4), 765–89.
[Link]
Wardle, E. (2017). You can learn to write in general. In C. E. Ball & D. M. Loewe (Eds.),
Bad ideas about writing (pp. 30–3). WVU Libraries. [Link]
badideas/
Warner, J. (2018). Why they can’t write: Killing the five-Paragraph essay and other
necessities. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Warnock, M. (1989). Universities: Knowing our minds. What the government should be
doing about higher education. London, Chatto & Windus Ltd.
Wei, L. (2016). New Chinglish and the post-multilingualism challenge: Translanguaging
ELF in China. In Journal of English as a Lingua Franca, 5, 1.
Weller, M. (2021, 28 April 2021). Proctorio – Unis as custodians. The Ed Techie: Martin
Weller’s blog on open education, digital scholarship & over-stretched metaphors. http://
[Link]/edtech/proctorio-unis-as-custodians/
Williams, B. T. (2009). Shimmering literacies: Popular culture & reading & writing online.
P. Lang.
Williams, B. T. (2017). Literacy practices and perceptions of agency: Composing identities.
Routledge/Taylor & Francis Ltd.
Williams, B. T., & Zenger, A. A. (2012). New media literacies and participatory popular
culture across borders. Routledge.
Wimsatt, W. K., & Beardsley, M. C. (1946). The intentional fallacy. The Sewanee Review,
54(3), 468–88. [Link]
Wingate, U. (2012). ‘Argument!’ helping students understand what essay writing is
about. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 11, 145–54.
Wingate, U., & Tribble, C. (2012). The best of both worlds? Towards an English for
academic purposes/academic literacies writing pedagogy. Studies in Higher Education,
37(4), 481–95. [Link]
Wittgenstein, L., & Anscombe, G. E. M. (1953). Philosophical investigations. Basil
Blackwell.
198 References

Wittgenstein, L., & Russell, B. (1922). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Logisch-

Philosophische Abhandlung) … With an introduction by Bertrand Russell. Ger. & Eng.
London.
Wolff, J. (2007, 4 September 2007). Literary boredom. The Guardian. [Link]
[Link]/education/2007/sep/04/[Link]
Wongsriruksa, S., Howes, P., Conreen, M., & Miodownik, M. (2012). The use of physical
property data to predict the touch perception of materials. Materials & Design, 42,
238–44. [Link]
Woodard, R. D. (2001). Writing Systems. International Encyclopedia of the Social &
Behavioral Sciences. Elsevier Science Ltd.: 16633–40.
Womack, P. (1993). What are essays for. English in Education, 27(2): 42–8.
Wright, J. (2011). Causal mechanisms generating writing competency discourses in
a radiography curriculum in higher education. Journal of Critical Realism, 10(2),
163–91.
Wylie, A. (2003). Why standpoint matters. In R. Figueroa & S. G. Harding (Eds.),
Science and other cultures: Issues in philosophies of science and technology (pp. 26–48).
Routledge.
Yun, S., & Standish, P. (2018). Technicising thought: English and the
internationalisation of the university. In S. S. E. Bengtsen & R. Barnett (Eds.),
The thinking university: A philosophical examination of thought and higher
education. Springer. [Link]
action?docID=5376066
Zamel, V. (1998a). Questioning academic discourse. In V. Zamel & R. Spack (Eds.),
Negotiating academic literacies: Teaching and learning across languages and cultures
(pp. 187–98). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Zamel, V. (1998b). Strangers in academia: The experiences of faculty and ESL students
across the curriculum. In V. Zamel & R. Spack (Eds.), Negotiating academic literacies:
Teaching and learning across languages and cultures (pp. 249–64). Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates.
Zenger, A., Mullin, J., & Peterson Haviland, C. (2014). Reconstructing teacher roles
through a transnational lens: learning with/in the American University of Beirut.
In T. Myers Zawacki & M. Cox (Eds.), WAC and second language writers: Research
towards linguistically and culturally inclusive programs and practices (pp. 415–37).
The WAC Clearinghouse Parlor Press. [Link]
Zgaga, P. (2009). Higher education and citizenship: ‘The Full Range of Purposes’.
European Educational Research Journal, 8(2), 175–88. [Link]
eerj.2009.8.2.175
 Index

academic literacies 10, 12, 20, 93, 99, 100, logical 32, 91
116, 119, 122 multimodal 3, 6, 10, 42, 52, 57, 71,
see also Theresa Lillis and Brian Street 84–5, 93, 97, 100, 134–6, 146,
academic misconduct 149–50
ghostwriting 43, 101 narrative 95–7
plagiarism x, 43–4, 76, 99, 101, 117, objective 8–12, 18, 35, 44, 56, 60, 64,
123, 138 69–70, 72, 100, 103, 106–10, 112–18,
proctoring 137–8 125, 132, 139, 141, 145, 164, 167
academicness 12–13, 70, 73–6, 78–81, 83–5, propositional 89, 94, 96
87, 99–101, 105, 117, 127, 133, 150–2 recursive 10, 12, 25, 57, 94, 135–6, 147
Académie Française 61 retroductive 109, 110, 116
academy 3, 17, 20, 33–4, 37, 39, 50, 58, 69, rhetorical See genre
73, 80, 113, 117, 148, 156, 167 substantive 92, 94, 96, 98, 164
Accademia della Crusca 61 visual 3, 79, 88, 94–5, 104, 127–8, 134,
access ix, x, xiii, 5, 19, 33–4, 62, 103, 112, 153
128, 135, 144, 154–7, 169–72 assessment ix, 6, 23, 24, 66, 71, 104, 127,
active voice 31, 124 133, 138, 14–2, 149–50, 152, 160
see also grammar Athena Swan 144
activism 79–80, 143–4
actual See knowledge Bazerman, Charles 15, 57, 62–4, 66–7, 79,
affordance 3, 11, 35, 57, 71, 83, 85, 103, 147, 172
112, 142, 150, 152 Bhaskar, Roy 10, 33, 99, 102–4, 109, 114,
agency 2, 15, 27, 29–31, 34, 43, 64, 73, 118, 167
79, 80–1, 85, 100, 102, 104–6, 109, Black Lives Matter 144
114–15, 118–19, 120, 123, 128, 133, BLM See Black Lives Matter
135, 145, 147, 152, 154, 157, 159,
160–1, 165 capitalism 107, 117
alienation xi, 25, 56 CARS See genre > create a research space
alphabet x, 17, 35, 45, 47–55, 57, 64, 68, Carson, A.D. See genre > alternative
70, 72–3, 85–6, 136, 163–5 Cartesian See Descartes
analytic dualism 102, 106 censorship 62, 132–3
argument change x, xi, 3, 4, 12–13, 20, 27–9, 40, 46,
abductive 110 50, 63, 73, 77, 83, 99, 100, 102–6,
clear See clarity 108–12, 114, 116, 118–24, 128–30,
deductive 46, 54, 66, 89–91, 94, 96, 110 133–5, 143–50, 152–61, 165–7, 172
formal 2, 9, 10–11, 18, 26, 32, 39, 78, Chinese 47–8, 51–2
90–2, 94, 98, 110, 141–2, 158 clarity 14, 32, 67, 76, 142–3, 150
haptic 104 see also argument and transparency trope
inductive 12, 89, 91, 93–4, 98, 110, 164 climate change 111, 117–18
linear 9–13, 32, 45, 57, 73, 93–4, commodification 42, 163
115–16, 120–5, 128, 132, 134–6, composition See Rhetoric and
145, 147, 152–3 Composition/Writing Studies
200 Index

conventions See rules and standards Equality, Diversity and Inclusion [EDI] 144
Covid-19 pandemic 2, 138 ethics 42–3, 141, 148, 154, 166
critical realism ix, x, 3, 6, 13, 18, 99–103, see also values
105–7, 109, 111–17, 119–23, 125–7, European statistics agency 4
129, 159, 165–6 EUROSTAT See European statistics
agency
DBIS See Department of Business and
Industry (UK) fake 43, 75
Department of Business and Industry see also hoax
(UK) [DBIS] 4 feminism 8, 28, 70, 78–9, 83
decolonization Fodor, Jerry 13, 80, 125, 127
colonial 17, 38, 45, 69, 160 see also Multiple Realizability
imperial 160 Fricker, Miranda 71, 80, 86
deficit 26, 35, 37–9, 133, 145, 160 see also epistemic injustice
see also remedial
Derrida, Jacques 53, 67, 75–6, 87 Galilei, Galileo 62, 78
Descartes 34, 46, 109 genre
Dewey, John 22, 27, 39–41, 94 abstract 3, 78
disability 4 acknowledgments 65
discipline xi, 5, 9, 10, 14, 24–7, 30, 33–4, alternative
39, 43, 67–8, 81, 91–3, 110, 133, Carson: 78–9, 84, 88, 100–1, 134,
136, 142, 150–1, 155, 158, 166, 144, 165
170–2 Harron: 78–9, 81, 114, 128, 158,
diversity x, 3, 4, 5, 10, 13–14, 38–9, 40, 42, 165
45, 72–3, 80, 83, 89, 100, 122, 164, Sousanis: 15, 37, 79, 88, 127, 131,
171 144, 153, 165
biography 57, 147
EAP See English for Academic Purposes blog 3, 38, 137, 158, 160–1, 166
English for Academic Purposes [EAP] chronicle 3, 62–3, 91, 147
5, 6, 9, 10–13, 17, 20, 23–4, 32–6, citations 66, 129
38–44, 69, 78, 87, 93, 95, 97, 107, comic 3, 91, 145, 152, 154, 174
115, 132–3, 137, 155, 158, 163 commentaries 57
ecology 41, 72, 135, 139, 145, 153, 160 create a research space (CARS model)
education ix, x, xi, xii, 3–7, 10, 14, 17, 21, 11, 170
24, 27, 33, 37, 38–44, 61, 68–72, 77, creative non-fiction 70
80, 93–4, 97, 101, 103, 105, 116–18, dialogue 3, 14, 24, 30, 62, 63, 78, 81, 84,
132–3, 142–3, 146, 148, 150–2, 91, 104, 145, 151–2
158–61, 163, 166 digital 134, 136, 146–7
see also training dissertations 78, 104, 127, 146, 153
emergence 80, 102, 120, 122, 125–6, EdD 134
141–2, 161 essai 60
weak and strong 126–7, 129 see also Montaigne
English, Fiona xii, 19, 24 essay 1, 3, 6, 10–11, 19–20, 23–4, 27,
see also re-genring 32, 36, 38, 40–1, 43, 57, 60–1, 63,
epistemic fallacy xi, 11, 108–10 70, 76, 78, 91, 93, 98–9, 101, 104,
epistemic injustice See Fricker, Miranda 107, 117, 128–9, 133, 136, 138, 145,
epistemology 8, 11, 17–19, 107 160, 164, 166
EDI See Equality, Diversity and Inclusion ethos 10, 86, 89
epistemic virtue 149–53, 161, 167 experimental article 60, 63, 72, 164
 Index 201

findings 64, 66, 78, 79, 171–2 higher education ix, x, xi, 4–7, 17, 24, 33,
humour 148 37–9, 44, 69, 72, 77, 80, 93, 101, 116,
IMRAD 136, 166 132–3, 137, 142–3, 146, 148, 160
infographic (poster) 136 Higher Education Institution [HEI] 4
interview 151, 153 Higher Education Statistics Agency
introduction 3, 19, 36, 65, 136 (UK) [HESA] 4
journal article 1, 147 history 3, 5, 8, 10, 13–14, 36, 45–51, 53–5,
letter 57, 62, 63, 91, 147 57, 59–61, 63, 65, 67–72, 76, 91,
literature review 95, 170–2 102, 104, 110, 121, 136, 139, 142,
logos 10, 86 147, 160, 163
main body 3 hoax 10, 17, 43, 74–8, 98–9, 108, 112,
manifesto 3, 83, 84, 91, 143, 150 116–17, 128, 137, 141, 164
memoir 70, 161, 166–7 see also fake
methods 31, 63–4, 66, 78–9, 88, 95, 97, homogeneity 37–8, 107, 148
108, 136, 172 humanism 14, 41, 46, 60–2, 67
newsletter 91, 135, 149, 158 human Rights 144, 148
pathos 10, 86 Hyland, Ken 20, 23, 23, 33–4, 39–40, 66,
PhD 1, 15, 28–9, 75–6, 78–9, 81, 101, 125
114, 136, 142, 144–5, 147, 153, 158,
165 ideology 4, 6–7, 13, 22–3, 29, 38, 45, 51,
poem 1, 30, 31, 57, 70, 79, 84, 89, 92, 53, 57, 67, 68–73, 80–1, 84, 97, 103,
101, 104, 152–3 106, 113, 133, 141–2, 160, 164, 167,
see also poetry 170
prose 2, 13, 14, 24, 30, 31, 33, 38, 54, IELTS See International English Language
57, 70, 73, 78, 79, 135, 147, 152, 153 Testing System
rhetoric 14, 36, 60, 64, 67, 70, 100, IMRAD See genre > IMRAD
107–8, 113–5, 124–5, 149, 170, intellectual work See knowledge
172 intentional fallacy 76–7
thesis See PhD and EdD interdisciplinarity See knowledge
ghostwriting See academic misconduct International English language Testing
Global North xi System [IELTS] 1, 23, 36, 42–3,
Global South 37, 141, 170–1 78, 98–9, 107, 109, 116–17, 128–9,
grammar 9, 12–13, 17, 20, 33, 55, 67, 79, 158, 164
82, 98–100, 104 international students See
Greek internationalization
eudamonia 80 internationalization 4, 5, 33, 42, 63, 137,
phronesis 21, 80 160, 166
poiesis 21–2
praxis 21–2, 27, 29, 133, 159, 167 knowledge
technê 21 ACTUAL 103–7, 109–12, 118–19,
γράφω (writing/drawing) 50 127–52, 154, 157, 161, 165–7
Gutenberg Revolution 58 data 8, 14, 58, 79, 91–2, 94–5, 124–5,
see also Printing Press 153
democratize 3, 9, 14, 38, 57, 69, 101,
Harris, Roy 47–53, 67, 87–8, 114 141, 154, 170, 172
Harron, Piper See genre > alternative dialectic 111, 118–19
HEI See Higher Education Institution ecologies of 83, 89, 117, 144
HESA See Higher Education Statistics EMPIRICAL 104–9, 112, 114, 119,
Agency 127–9, 150–2, 157, 165, 167
202 Index

epistemology and ontology 8, 11, 13, LGBTQ+ 144

17, 18–20, 24, 102, 104–5, 107, 109, Lillis, Theresa 10, 18, 20, 23, 27, 33, 37, 39,
111, 113, 118, 122 45, 69, 84, 121, 141
essentialist 8, 22, 25, 82 linguistics (including sociolinguistics) 3, 5,
exclusionary 3, 17, 23, 25, 37, 45, 52–3, 38, 48, 53, 67, 87, 120, 121
69, 71–2, 143, 164 literacy x, xiii, 2, 4, 6, 12–13, 22–3, 25, 27,
indigenous xi, 156, 160 33, 35–7, 41, 45, 47–8, 53–6, 68, 71,
intellectual work 22 79, 85–7, 90, 99, 100, 133, 141–4,
interdisciplinarity xi, 5, 7, 14, 79, 93, 147–8
117, 128, 135, 145, 148, 159, 161, 165 Locke, John 34, 142
(in)transitive 103–4, 106–11, 113–16,
119, 128, 134, 138–40, 144, 146, MacIntyre, Alasdair 27–9, 31, 74, 80
154–5, 159, 164 Marxism 103
pluralize 8, 14, 170 mechanism x, xi, 100, 103–4, 108–9,
prediction 2, 7, 92, 115–16, 122–3, 127, 111–13, 118, 120, 129, 143, 167
129, 166, 169 monolingualism 3, 12, 17, 37–8, 44, 71,
procedural 11, 21–2, 26, 107, 133 148
propositional 11, 21, 26 monomodality 3, 37–8, 44, 97, 148
REAL 103–7, 109–12, 118–19, 127–9, Montaigne, Michel de 60, 61, 64, 67
150–2, 154, 157, 161, 165–7 multiculturalism 35, 37–8
reflexivity 117 multilingualism 12–15, 17, 24, 35, 37–8,
reliability 30, 140, 153 57, 63, 69, 72–3, 134–5, 148, 150
situated 26, 31, 70, 72, 151 multimodality 3, 6, 10, 13–15, 17, 35–7,
stratified 13, 102–4, 109, 111–12, 118, 41–2, 52, 57, 71, 73, 84–5, 93, 97,
122, 127, 129, 157 100, 134–6, 145–6, 148–50
validity 30, 90–2, 153 Multiple Realizability 124–5, 128, 159
warrant 80, 91–4, 98 see also Fodor, Jerry
worker ix, 1, 37 myth of transience 11, 24, 26, 118
see also skill and Rose, Mike
language(s)
alphabetic See alphabet Newton, Isaac 63–4, 97, 139
cuneiform 48, 55
dominant xi, 135 objective See knowledge
English (second and additional) 7, 35, 135 Olson, David 45, 47, 50–1, 53–4, 65, 67, 114
field-dependent 92–3 Ong, Walter 55–6, 79, 90
French 15, 31, 32, 50, 61, 69 ontological complicity 57, 141, 164
Greek See Greek see also Turner, Joan
ideographic 70 ontology 11, 13, 17–20, 24, 102, 104–5,
indigenous xi, 84, 146 107, 109, 111, 113, 118, 122
isiXhosa 84 open system 3, 13, 50, 91, 101, 112,
Italian 15, 86 119–20, 122, 128, 130, 153–4,
Latin 12, 49, 50, 59, 61–3, 65, 69 165–7
lingua franca 42, 69, 84
logographic 48–9, 52–3 paragraphs 6, 11, 19, 22–3, 36, 53, 82, 95,
phonetic 48–9, 51–2 108, 127, 129, 133, 136, 146
pictographic 48–9, 52 passive voice 2, 13, 18, 20, 31, 35–6, 74,
representational 48 107–8, 124
syllabic 48–9 see also grammar
symbolic 47, 50 pedagogy 13, 22, 24, 41, 115–18, 125, 131,
lexis 26, 61, 99 133–5, 137, 139, 141, 143, 145, 147,
see also vocabulary 149, 151–5, 157–61, 165–6
 Index 203

emancipatory 38, 118, 166 RP See Received Pronunciation

performativity rules 1, 21, 23–4, 29–31, 35–8, 43, 46, 51,
Lunsford 43, 83 78, 80, 100, 103–4, 132, 156–7, 163
Macfarlane 43, 83, 99, 137–8 see also standards
personal pronouns 2, 19, 34, 36, 117,
124–5, 132 Said, Edward 46
see also grammar Socio-academic practice [SAP] 74, 77,
Philosophical Transactions (Royal 80–1, 83, 85, 87, 91, 98, 111, 127–9,
Society) 63, 92, 171 133, 137, 143–4, 147, 149, 151–4,
philosophy 161, 163–4, 167
hard problem of science 126 scholarship xi, 3, 7, 43, 68, 93, 106, 123,
of mind 13, 80, 125 133, 142–3, 150–2, 154, 155–8,
of sociology 10, 13–14, 30–1, 89–91, 160–1, 165, 170–1
97, 102, 159 science 8, 21, 57, 62–3, 65–8, 70, 91, 97,
plagiarism See academic misconduct 103, 126–7, 134, 139–40, 159
power x, 6, 8, 19, 27, 29, 33–5, 38, 40, 46, scientific paradigm See science
67–9, 79, 82–3, 86, 100, 102–3, 109, semasiography 51, 53
112 semiotics 3, 25, 35, 41, 53, 71, 80, 87–8,
practices (social) 14, 20–1, 23, 46, 68, 83, 97–8, 104, 134–6, 149–50, 152, 154
143 service industry 33, 36, 38–9, 43–4, 107,
Printing Revolution 181 132, 137–8, 155, 158
see also Gutenberg Revolution shallow consensus 9, 10, 12
proctoring See academic misconduct skills
autonomous 22, 56, 69, 70, 133
readers (audience) 23, 60, 63–4, 67, 71, Myth of transience see Myth of
74–7, 79–81, 84, 87, 91, 94, 108, transience
112, 138, 140, 149–52, 158, 170 transferable x, 6, 7, 12–13, 17, 20, 31,
reality ix, x, xi, 8, 30, 46, 64, 67, 87, 89, 91, 39, 41–2, 93, 118, 133, 146, 155,
98–104, 106–14, 116–19, 122, 124, 158
127, 129, 138–40, 146, 153–5, 157, social justice ix, x, xi, 3, 5, 8, 33, 46, 74,
159, 161, 164–6 80–1, 101–3, 111, 116, 127–9,
reduction/ism 12, 100 143–4, 158, 161, 166
see also essentialism SoTL See scholarship
re-genring 24 Sousanis, Nick See genre > alternative
see also English, Fiona standardization See standards
relativism ix, 99, 100, 110, 115 standards 1, 3–4, 11–12, 19, 24, 28–31,
see also Relativist Turn 35–8, 41–4, 51, 57, 60–2, 66–74, 78,
Relativist Turn 67 83, 91, 93, 100–1, 103–4, 109, 129,
see also relativism 132, 141–3, 146, 149, 155, 172
remedial 25–6, 33 see also conventions and rules
see also deficit standards of excellence 27–31, 74–5,
representation See language 79–80, 88, 100–1, 128, 143, 146–7
rhetoric Street, Brian x, 20, 22, 38, 45, 69, 99, 121, 165
logos, ethos, pathos see genre structure x, 2, 13, 31, 102–4, 106–7, 109,
Rhetoric and Composition Studies 5, 17, 111, 113, 117–22, 129, 154, 158–9,
113–14, 136 161, 165
Richardson, Laurel 2, 23, 26, 29–31, 70, student ix, x, xi, xii, 1–7, 9, 11–12, 15,
92, 97, 113, 141, 152–3, 167 18–19, 22–5, 32–43, 58, 65–6,
Rose, Mike 11, 21, 24 68, 70, 72, 75, 77–8, 81–2, 84, 93,
Received Pronunciation 37–8, 141, 148 106–7, 109, 115–23, 135–8, 141–3,
see also Writtenness 146, 148–9, 151, 154–61, 171
204 Index

subjective See knowledge truth 8, 30, 33, 42, 46, 64, 74–5, 77–8,
success ix, 37, 42, 129, 148, 171 80–9, 91, 96–8, 109–12, 117, 125,
supervenience 126–9 127, 139, 147, 164, 167
supervenient base See supervenience Turner, Joan 6, 22–4, 28, 35, 37–8, 42–3,
supervisor 1, 3, 34, 75, 157, 160 45, 57, 64–5, 67, 69, 94, 141–2
Swales, John 11, 24, 133, 170, 172 see also Writtenness and ontological
complicity
teacher xi, 3, 5, 11, 13, 28, 32, 34, 36, 41,
58, 81, 89, 113, 114, 116, 122–3, university
153–7, 160–1, 165–6 Enlightenment 45, 93, 142
text x, 2–5, 11–12, 17–18, 23, 30, 32, 35–6, Humboldtian 65, 68, 144
40, 43, 51, 54, 57, 65–7, 70, 73–87, Mediaeval 58, 61
89, 95, 99, 100–1, 104, 108, 112, Renaissance 58–9, 61
114, 116–17, 128–9, 134–9, 141–54,
157–9, 161, 163, 172 values 5, 6, 21, 27–8, 38, 45, 70–1, 73, 79,
see also textual environment 80
textual environment 7, 15, 79, 80–5, 87, see also ethics
91, 98, 100–6, 111–12, 128, 150–2, vocabulary 13, 25–7, 75, 96, 104, 125
163–5 see also lexis
theory voice 2, 10, 14, 18, 23, 31, 39, 49, 63, 74,
Cartesian 34, 46, 109 79, 107–8, 124, 129, 134, 143, 146,
cognitive 5, 22, 24, 55, 86, 109, 151, 153, 169–70, 173
115–16
complexity 10, 25, 66, 76, 80, 95, 99, West (The) 8, 21, 45, 48–9, 51–5, 57–8,
120–6, 128, 154, 159, 169 65, 68, 76, 85, 99, 142–4, 147,
constructivism/constructivist 106, 108, 170–2
115–17, 119 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 67, 75–8, 87–8
expressivist 99, 100, 115–17 writer xi, 1–7, 11, 13–15, 23, 25, 27–9,
idealism 109, 115 34–9, 41–4, 63–4, 67, 71–4, 77–88,
macro 13–14, 131, 133, 164 91, 96, 98–101, 103–23, 125, 128–9,
positivism 89–90, 97, 106, 115, 142 132–5, 137–8, 140, 145, 147–50,
standpoint 8, 10, 26, 104, 160 152–66
thinking Writing Studies 10, 73, 82–3, 103, 133,
consciousness 34, 39, 56, 68, 72, 86, 136, 145
90 see also Rhetoric and Composition
critical 24, 158–60 Studies
higher order x, 17, 45, 57, 72, 86, 163 writing
Thomson, Pat xii, 6, 7, 22, 26, 28, 93, 124, academic see academicness
157 creative 93, 156
threshold concept 73, 80–5, 91, 98, 104, method of enquiry 103–5, 107–11,
128, 145, 150–1, 159, 164, 167 113–14, 118, 128, 133–4, 138–40,
training 39–40, 138 144, 153, 157, 159, 164, 166
see also education and Dewey, John Writtenness 28, 37–8, 141–2
translanguaging 24, 72, 88, 135, 149 see also Received Pronunciation,
transparency trope 87 Turner, Joan and ontological
see also clarity complicity
205
206
207
208
209
210