7.1 What Is Academic Writing?
Academic writing is often thought of as the writing done by smart people. It is both revered and feared. It is revered because it is considered the brain product of disciplinary experts, a discourse community with which students aspire to be associated. With its elite status and high prestige, academic writing is something all students are expected to master in school, both to ensure academic success and to command respect in the academic community.
At the same time, academic writing is viewed with trepidation because it employs a discursive style that many students find unfamiliar and alienating. This style is highly valued in the academic community and widely used as a barometer of competence in academic communication and a key measure of academic success. Given the high-stakes nature of academic writing and the challenges it presents, it is no wonder that students, especially those for whom English is an additional or foreign language, are overtly apprehensive about it.
Consider, for example, the following two sets of brief texts. Text 7-1A is from a history trade book (Crowe, 2003, p. 21) and Text 7-2A from a secondary biology textbook (Horton et al., 2000, p. 400).
Text 7-1A
The intense media coverage in the weeks between Emmett's death and the trial of his killers focused worldwide attention on the legal proceedings that would be held in a sleepy little town in the Mississippi Delta, exposing to the world the cruel racial intolerance that existed in the South.
Text 7-1B
After Emmett died and before his killers were tried, the media covered the story a lot; so people all over the world were very interested in finding out how the trial went. The trial was held in a sleepy little town in the Mississippi Delta and because the trial was widely reported, the world now knew that people in the South were very intolerant of other races.
Text 7-2A
Bacteria that perform chemosynthesis using sulfur compounds live along portions of the mid-ocean ridges, where superheated water either seeps or blasts from the crust, as shown in Figure 14-7.
Text 7-2B
Bacteria use sulfur compounds to perform chemosynthesis. They live along portions of the mid-ocean ridges. In the mid-ocean ridges, superheated water either seeps or blasts from the crust. This is shown in Figure 14-7.
In both sets of texts, version A employs a writing style that is markedly different from version B, with the former being associated with a more academic style and the latter a more everyday style. This stylistic difference is the result of different language choices. In Text 7-1A, the focus is on the historical event (media coverage of the Emmett Till murder trial). The excerpt consists of three long noun phrases linked by a verb (focused) and a non-finite clause (exposing to…). Each noun phrase contains several units of information that are repackaged into separate sentences in Text 7-1B, as shown in Table 7-1. Also note that two causal relations are established in the sentence —one within clause between intense media coverage and worldwide attention and the other using a non-finite clause (between intense media coverage and exposing to the world). These logical-semantic relations are implicit in Text 7-1A because it does not use causal or consequential conjunctions, but become explicit in Text 7-1B with the addition of so and because.
Table 7-1 Comparison Between Text 7-1A and Text 7-1B
Similarly, in the second text set, four actions (use, live, seep/blast, show) are presented in four separate and seemingly equally important sentences in Text 7-2B, where the relationships among them are not clear. In Text 7-2A, the four sentences are integrated into one clause complex through the addition of connectors (that, where, as) that show logical-semantic relationships among them.
This brief comparison illustrates some of the key differences between a more academic style of writing and a more colloquial, or everyday, style of writing. The colloquial style is presumed to be more familiar to students because it is used in their everyday informal social interactions with friends and family members. The academic style, on the other hand, is understandably less familiar to students, particularly those who have little prior experience with it in or out of school.
While the comparison highlights some key features of academic writing, it does not tell the whole story about it. To do so, we will need to first define what academic writing is. Simply put, academic writing is the writing done for the purpose of accomplishing academic tasks in the contexts of schooling and disciplinary socialization. This means that there are as many different kinds of academic writing as there are different kinds of academic tasks. In academic settings, we write letters, memorandums, argumentative essays, journal articles, conference abstracts, technical reports, research articles, lab reports, grant proposals, reading responses, powerpoint presentations, policy briefs, pamphlets, commentaries, book or manuscript reviews, blogs, emails, and many others. This means that academic writing exists on a stylistic continuum with many different varieties. Indeed, the forms of academic writing vary across disciplines, tasks, genres, and contexts. Each of these forms has a distinct purpose and marshals language (and other semiotic) resources in a way that is appropriate for realizing that purpose in the particular context of communication. Students, as members of the academic community, are expected to be able to read and write the kinds of texts that are integral to the social practices of academicians (or disciplinary experts).
Despite the importance of academic writing to school success and disciplinary socialization, many students, especially those learning English as an additional or foreign language, struggle with comprehending and composing academic texts. Heng (2017) tracked 18 Chinese freshmen and sophomores studying at three different four-year institutions in New York City over the course of one year. She reported that the students found writing challenging because they had to grapple with writing expectations different from those in China, such as writing significantly longer essays, incorporating original ideas, privileging critical analysis over rote memorization, using a formal prose style, and developing argument in a linear fashion. You (2004) cited one study that reported that of the 147 English major master students surveyed in China, half were unable to write their bachelor's theses in proper academic writing styles.
One major source of writing struggles for these students is language. In other words, it is unfamiliarity with the language patterns and conventions of academic and disciplinary texts — above and beyond unfamiliarity with the topic of the text — that contributes principally to the difficulties students experience in school learning and disciplinary socialization. These problems, as pointed out in Chapter 1, are manifested in the ways language is used to present information, enact reader-writer relationship, organize discourse, and integrate sources. In the next section, we examine some of the key discursive features that make academic writing at once academic and challenging for students.