Academic writing guide?

[davidgillon]

Does anyone have any recommendations for a guide on how to academic writing?

My sister, as her school's SENCO*, has to do a masters level Postgraduate Certificate in SEND*  (it's a legal requirement of the job), but the guidance she's had is pretty poor, roughly "Academic writing is very different, don't use first or second person and reference everything". Sadly I'm not exaggerating how skimpy it is - I read through it on Sunday morning in under 10 minutes, though it takes a couple of pages to say what I've reduced to a sentence. (I suspect they just haven't taken account of how unsupported people are when everything's being done remotely - three online days to date - and they haven't done academic work in several decades).

Obviously a slightly more useful guide might help her get a better idea of what's expected of her. So is there anything out there? It doesn't have to be subject specific, just cover academic writing in a more useful format.

* Special Educational Needs Coordinator

** Special Educational Needs and Development

 

Comments

[radiantfracture]

OWL at Purdue is a pretty good overall reference: https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/academic_writing/index.html

Most colleges will offer something on their websites, since academic writing is a foundational course taught in first year to almost every student. (These days! I wish they had done it when I was in school.)

[davidgillon]

Two references for OWL, that's definitely a point in it's favour, though I'm not sure how much difference there is between US and UK standards (referencing at least should be generally applicable as they're using Harvard). Thank you.

[green_knight]

The big difference in UK vs US academic writing isn't references but the obsession of Americans with topic sentences: you're supposed to sum up what you'll say at the front of a paragraph and then say it.

(Warning: rant)
This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. People from traditions who don't believe in topic sentences - like French or German scholars – (never mind languages) will be judged to be 'less good writers' because they don't conform to this arbitrary standard. Which, in the long run means that it's harder to break into 'serious academe' if you're not American.

... and that's on top of the discrimination people who are not male, white, and ivy league educated face.

[radiantfracture]

... you mean you don't have to use topic sentences?

Dear God Tell Me More

[hilarita]

Most UK academics will look at you blankly when confronted with that phrase. It's just not a part of most university's teaching.

[radiantfracture]

That sounds so refreshing. What do they teach about paragraph structure?

[hilarita]

I've had no instruction at university level about paragraph structure. There are study skills sessions around writing, and they may provide some guidance. I've always used the guidance I gave at school, which is that a paragraph is a short, coherent unit of thought. If you change topic, you should probably put another paragraph in.

Bear in mind I did my undergraduate 20 years ago, and the assumption was that you already knew how to write essays from school, but you might need to learn a bit about references. Also I studied at Cambridge, so other universities may do things differently. However, when I went to a session about small-group teaching for Humanities subjects at Oxford, there was a strong assumption that we were not there to teach students to write *in general*, but only to write about their subject. I somewhat disagreed with that, since there weren't any other places (at that point) that would teach them anything at all about writing academic English. (Though this is also getting on for 20 years ago now, so one might hope that there are a few more resources available to them now.)

I have encountered other models of writing paragraphs since, but I've felt no need to integrate them into my writing. Topic sentences are all very well if you wish to assume that there is only one right way to write a paragraph, but that seems a very large assumption. Even in scientific papers, we're moving away from passive voice, because we're becoming more aware that researchers are not interchangeable units, even when we're trying to present our material in a way that encourages replication of our results.

[slashmarks]

It depends on the field, and I think the easiest way to learn is honestly to read some papers in her field and ape that style. At the graduate level you are, ideally, turning out publishable research so you should be writing directly like published research, or a first draft of it, anyway. But that's not the same across different subjects - my linguistics writing style as an advanced undergrad doing graduate courses was very, very different from my history grad student writing style, and technical stuff like the format and information included in citations is also completely different.

If she's doing the certificate with a certain institution, at least in the US they would have a writing center or other writing tutoring services, and might have a graduate level department that can do online tutoring or similar, although their quality varies. I'd look into the school as a whole's support services for writing.

[davidgillon]

Thanks for this. It doesn't seem to be helping that the course isn't run directly through the university, but through a training company, and that that company mostly doesn't run university level courses. So every kind of help is at least one step further away than it should be *headdesk*

[slashmarks]

/facepalm Oh, jeez. Yeah, I'd say that's a warning sign for the program in general but if she's doing this for legal reasons it might not matter anyway? I'd possibly email the teacher and ask about writing support, they should know if there actually is anything available.

[green_knight]

Speaking with academic copyeditor hat on:
- definitely follow the institution's referencing guidelines. (Make your own cheat sheet. It'll save countless hours.] Almost everywhere has its own little quirks about how to employ commas and full stops and italics, the institution or the supervisor have the last word.
- most places have depositories for dissertations; read a couple that have been successfully defended at the institute (extra point if supervised by her supervisor).
- also read the supervisor's own writing, and some of the articles they've cited, to get a feel for what's normal in the field. How chatty or formal or lengthy are other writers?
- Depending on the field, first person may be ok, but 'reference everything' really means 'reference EVERYTHING'
Despite voices to the contrary (Smith, 1990, Jones, 2016), there is a general consensus that the sky is blue' (Davis, 2020, see also Harrison, 2012 and Whatchemacallit et al., 2018)
- double check and if necessary find a reputable source for 'common knowledge' (see above). It's very easy to think you know something and get caught out by a couple of hundred years or advancements in the field (don't, for instance, assume you know about the pecking order of hens. Biology has advanced A LOT beyond the 'common model'. [This is a real example from a book I edited recently. I now know a lot more about the complexities of the social life of hens than I did.]
- know the classics of the field and read up to the present day. A good bibliography has monographs, edited volumes, and journal articles, depending on the field there may be a sprinkling of newspapers (Guardian, NYTimes-level) or magazines like Nature. Many people read a bibliography to get an overview of the body of knowledge of a student, if it's mostly older articles there's a suspicion you didn't do current research [more than one plagiarist was caught this way], if it's mostly easily available material you give the impression of not having done any in-depth research involving a library.

- last but not least, googling for [article title].pdf and looking on google scholar often gives you access when you can't get stuff through your library online. She should have a JSTOR account anyway, but JSTOR is often awkward to read.

[davidgillon]

That strikes me as some extremely useful advice, thank you!

[jenett]

Check the school she's doing this through's library - either they should have some resources on their site, or they can do a quick consult and aim at something appropriate.

(Education academic writing is sort of wonky even by acadmic writing standards, and if one of my current work projects is anything to judge by, basically everyone, even people who've been doing it for 30 years, thinks they're doing it wrong.)

Purdue's OWL is a good start, and I also highly rec seeing if she can get a couple of examples of the kind of thing she's supposed to be producing (i.e. if a particular kind of report/writeup/case study, examples of that) and looking at examples from that.

[davidgillon]

Thanks for this, I think the point about everyone thinking they're doing it wrong may be particularly helpful! There are supposed to be a couple of examples available to her, but she's only found one of them so far, and it's incomplete - "See the examples for details of the five appendices that must accompany every submission", which is a hopelessly inadequate explanation at the best of times, but doubly so when there's only one appendix attached *headdesk*