Soulless academic writing happens on purpose

When we learn through science, it can feel like we have an exploding rainbow of ideas to share. But, academic writing isn't "allowed" to feel like that. Or is it!?! (Image: ritinhacorain/Pixabay)

Every semester, students in my courses and the graduate student scholarly writing program I co-run bemoan the bland, almost robotic vibe of academic writing. They are also usually quite worried that they will fail to reproduce it. They care about reproducing the tone and style of academic writing not because they want to, but because they feel like they must write this way to get a good grade, satisfy an advisor, get past peer reviewer gauntlets, etc.

And every semester, I tell them they're right -- a lot of academic writing is miserable to read. And trying to write like that is pretty miserable, too.

Fortunately, they do not actually have to imitate and perpetuate the worst versions of academic writing. But most of their training and conditioning says they do. So, of course, my argument that they have options must acknowledge what they are up against. Just look at the latest draft you received (from any student/trainee, at any level), and you'll see: students are acutely aware that making academic writing more engaging is really hard. Indeed, threading the needle between "rules" versus gatekeepers' preferences is a fine art that most students don't dare attempt.

But, we can do better. And, we can help our students do and write better, too.

This shift is especially important because writing is part of how we think and question, learn, and share knowledge (not just what we do after we're done "doing science"). If we only let ourselves (or our trainees) think in the ways that we know will get past funding and publishing gatekeepers, we are stuffing a lot of people and ideas into boxes that will never see the light of day. Resisting the soullessness of academic writing also matters because science is done, and written about, by real, live people. (Or at least, it should be!) You, and your students, are people with your own interests, biases, values, and motivations [1]. The same is true for the people we hope will read and use our science. We can just look around us and see a lot of the ethical and moral implications of pretending (and writing) otherwise.

The good news is that there are great resources for making this shift [2]. You'll especially want to look at (and recommend) some of these if you're helping a student or other developing writer. Given the near-infinite avalanches of stodgy scientific writing, students need help to find these alternative models. And when I say alternatives, I mean scholarly writing that acknowledges conventions enough to satisfy gatekeepers while expressing curiosity, humility, and the reality that science is done by humans not robots or AI.

There's one thing to do before you share those resources, though.

One of the most helpful things we can do for students is to let them in on a dirty secret. We have to acknowledge why (too much) academic writing sounds like it was written by objective "beings" who merely (and dispassionately) observed, recorded, and reported. Without this context for what "typical" academic-speak sounds like, it is almost impossible for people to opt out of it.

We encounter jargon, formality, and pretense of neutrality in most academic writing because that's the rhetorical strategy that set up academia as we know it (in the Global North, aka "western" world). A big part of the push to create universities, and then to make science itself "professional", came from elite Europeans who created the academy to produce politicians, clergy, and military officers [2]. That means certain people (White men with titles, land, and/or money) developed academic research and discourse as an exclusive realm. There are hosts of stories about who this system excluded, including tales like Beatrix Potter turning to children's books because she wasn't allowed to present her mycology research [4]. But, there are plenty more historical and modern examples of who this system still excludes [5].

How did this exclusionary system "trickle down" to scholarly writing? It didn't. That is, it didn't incidentally trickle anywhere -- scholarly discourse was deliberately established to assert that the rare few people allowed to do it were essentially savants channeling insights imparted to them. That is, the rhetoric of science has long and carefully insisted that the people doing it were objective and neutral. Not only do we know that's impossible [6], but there was an explicit side message that only certain identities and socioeconomic classes were capable of being objective, and thus they were the only people able to do the work of "higher learning." If only certain people can be "trusted" to understand the inner workings of the universe (as well as humankind), that means only certain people and types of knowledge can even be considered credible [7].

Put another way, credibility required being dispassionate. Overt racism, classism, and sexism shaped the boundaries, tacitly and expressly stating who was deemed sufficiently calm (and wealthy, pale, and male) to be credible academics and students. The people who created and benefited from this exclusive system carefully wrote in ways that reinforced their assertion that objectivity was necessary, possible, and preferred.

Today, some dimensions of higher ed have become slightly more accessible to people who historically were refused access. Even so, most people in academia perpetuate the rhetorical strategies that founded the academy.

The reasons why we keep writing this way are myriad, and include:

• The people who train us tell us this is how we have to write, because that's all they know how to do, or because they genuinely value and buy into the framing that professionalism can only be conveyed in the third person.

• The entire system around us (which is ourselves if we are faculty or administrators) is calibrated to keep us producing things that fit the mold (e.g., funders' priorities, editors and peer reviewers rejections, administrators' investments, etc.) [8].

• The alternative models that do exist are vanishingly rare and usually presented/discussed dismissively (e.g., papers written as first-person, natural history accounts of the turn of the century).

There's another major reason why developing writers both loath and imitate stuffy academic writing. Typical academic texts are incredibly different from how we speak when we are genuinely excited about or curious about the questions we pursue via scientific methods (let alone anything else in our lives). These texts are also universes away from the writing our students encounter in realms of their lives where they are engaged by text: social media, instant messaging, narratives in film, music, video games, and books, oral history and the rhetorics of diverse cultural backgrounds, etc. Of course, developing writers are going to notice these differences. Since the differences are stark, those differences are the obvious features to imitate.

To counter this, we must provide students with specific, detailed, and sustained coaching on what aspects of academic writing are:

• useful (e.g., IMRaD helps readers anticipate certain information in certain places),

• optional (e.g., contractions, ending sentences with prepositions),

• and which can be eliminated (writing solely in the third person).

If you're looking for specifics about how to help students shift to more engaging writing, see the notes below.

And, if you're working on making this shift yourself, there are two things you can do to start:

• Read some of the notes below, especially Heard 2022 and Sword 2012, and implement those ideas in your own writing. Aim for a bit more elegance, maybe slip in something humorous, and use the first-person.

• Make yourself a checklist to use when reviewing writing from students, coauthors, and in peer reviews. Your goal with this checklist is to make explicit (and habitual for yourself) the asking of one important question: What are your writing preferences and what aspects of writing can be chalked up to the writer's style and own interests (which need not be your own), and thus should be left alone? (And, as you'll read in Heard 2022 and Sword 2012, almost everything we think is a writing "rule" isn't.)

This post is based on material from my forthcoming book, Helping Students Write in the Sciences. Connect to more related resources here.

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NOTES

If you can't access any of these papers, just let me know; I'll send you a PDF.

[1] Here's a good starting point if you want to better understand how values connect to science (and scicomm!): Merkle BG, Bayer S, Shukla P, Valdez-Ward E. 2022. Sharing science through shared values, goals, and stories: An evidence-based approach to making science matter. Human-Wildlife Interactions 15: 1-17.

[2] Two great resources are:

• Heard, Stephen B. 2022. The Scientist’s Guide to Writing: How to Write More Easily and Effectively Throughout Your Scientific Career. 2nd ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Disclaimer, I'm co-writing a book with Steve for you, about how to teach writing in the sciences.

• Sword, Helen. 2012. Stylish Academic Writing. Illustrated edition. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

[3] See, for example:

• Hull AGT, Scott PB, Smith P. 1982. But some of us are brave: All the women are White, all the Blacks are men. The Feminist Press.

• Ideland, Malin. 2018. “Science, Coloniality, and ‘the Great Rationality Divide.’” Science & Education 27 (7): 783–803. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-018-0006-8

• Macfarlane, Bruce. 2007. “Defining and Rewarding Academic Citizenship: The Implications for University Promotions Policy.” Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management 29 (3): 261–73. https://doi.org/10.1080/13600800701457863

[4] British Mycological Society. (2020, June 17). Beatrix Potter: Pioneering scientist or passionate amateur [web log]. Retrieved from https://www.britmycolsoc.org.uk/education/news/beatr

[5] See:

• Chen, CC, Rao A, Ren IY. 2013. Glass ceiling for the foreign born: Perspectives from Asian-born American R&D scientists. Asian American Journal of Psychology 4(4): 249.

• Hull et al. 1982, again

• Singh GG. 2022. Prestige risks homogenizing and hampering academia. Nature 610: 630.

[6] See, for example:

• Treves A. 2019. Scientific ethics and the illusion of naïve objectivity. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 17(7): 1540-9295.

• Weber JR, Word CS. 2001. The communication process as evaluative context: What do nonscientists hear when scientists speak? Scientists and nonscientists benefit by recognizing that attempts at mutual influence, multiple frames of reference, and “objective” information in science communication are not neutral but evaluated with other social influences. BioScience 51(6): 487–495.

[7] See:

• Boucher CJ, Hammock GS, McLaughlin SD, Henry KN. 2013. Perceptions of competency as a function of accent. Psi Chi Journal of Psychological Research 18(1).

• Castleden H, Sylvestre P, Martin D, McNally M. 2015. “I don't think that any peer review committee…would ever ‘get’ what I currently do”: How institutional metrics for success and merit risk perpetuating the (re)production of colonial relationships in community-based participatory research involving Indigenous peoples in Canada. The International Indigenous Policy Journal 6(4).

• Crenshaw KW. 2013. Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. Pages 23-51 in Maschke K, ed. Feminist Legal Theories. Routledge.

• Deanna R, Merkle BG, Baxter I, Chun KP, Zuo R, Diele-Viegas LM, Geesink P, Aschero V, Navarro-Rosenblatt D, Bortolus A, Ribone PA, Welchen E, de Leone MJ, Oliferuk S, Oleas NH, Grossi M, Cosacov A, Knapp S, López-Mendez A, Auge GA. 2022. It takes a village: The importance of diverse networks in academic mentorship. Nature Communication 13: 1-7. 

• Halsey SJ, Strickland LR, Scott-Richardson M, Perrin-Stowe T, Massenburg L. 2020. Elevate, don’t assimilate, to revolutionize the experience of scientists who are Black, Indigenous and people of colour. Nature Ecology and Evolution 4: 1291–1293.

• Hernandez, J. 2022. Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous Landscapes through Indigenous Science. Penguin Random House.

• Payne K, Downing J, Fleming JC. 2000. Speaking Ebonics in a professional context: The role of ethos/source credibility and perceived sociability of the speaker. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 30: 367-383.

• Todd Z. (2012, May 12). Should I stay or should I go? [web log]. Retrieved from https://anthrodendum.org/2018/05/12/should-i-stay-or-should-i-go/. 

• Wilder CS. 2013. Ebony and ivy: Race, slavery, and the troubled history of America's universities. Bloomsbury Publishing.

• Wingfield AH. 2020. Systemic racism persists in the sciences. Science 369(6502): 351-351.
  

[8] See, for example:

• Chen CY, Kahanamoku SS, Tripati A, Alegado RA, Morris VR, Andrade K, Hosbey J. 2022. Meta-Research: Systemic racial disparities in funding rates at the National Science Foundation. eLife 11:e83071. 

• Docot D. 2022. Dispirited away: The peer review process. PoLAR 45: 124-128.