During a biscuit break I picked up a copy of DECOLONISING THE ARTS CURRICULUM: PERSPECTIVES ON HIGHER EDUCATION that had been left on our seats. The Problem with Academic Writing by Karen Harris stood out to me. Having struggled throughout my academic career with writing (the expectations, the process, the reality) I felt like I was being spoke to rather than at with this piece.
I like its reflective nature, poetic questions and rhythmic alliteration.
It made me want to come to this course from a completely honest place; to try and perhaps to fail at attempting to communicate in a way that feels natural, honest and useful. So here I am.
What if there was a break with tradition? What if written language were presented not as a stale and immutable set of laws but as a musical instrument: one that students could shape and refine and transform, to make it sing and sparkle, to pain it with personality?
If decolonising the curriculum is about questioning top-down impositions and the requirements to conform, unquestioningly, to a pre-set template…has the time come to challenge standard notions of academic language? Could this enable us to encourage a genuine multiplicity of voices and a true affirmation of unique identity, rather than joyless uniformity?
30th January 2020 at 6:10 pm
TBH this quote makes kind of my hair stand on end. The BA programme on which I teach (and from which I graduated in 2008) was set up by a Cambridge-educated historian (now no longer course leader) and we encourage students to write in plain, clear, precise English and to reference correctly. As far as I’m aware, the ‘laws’ of academic writing amount to nothing more than this – i.e. students and scholars already have the freedom to refine, transform, make academic language sing and sparkle, imbue it with their own personality, etc., as one would a musical language (I like the image). You only need to think of really wonderful academic writers – Stefan Collini (on our reading list) would be a good example for me – that is, authors who not only communicate complex ideas but manage to do so in a way that makes their reception a positive pleasure, to see the truth of this. The thing is though, it isn’t easy – you have to work very hard at it (as you would drawing well, for instance); I speak here as someone who, having worked hard at it for many years, recently earned praise from my PhD examiners for the quality of my prose. Hey, the research was fruitful and interesting and I had a good structure, so I didn’t have to break my back practically over every sentence – but I did, both for the love of it and out of respect for the craft. As you can imagine, I’m therefore alarmed by the sense I get from some of my colleagues that writing needs merely to be ‘intelligible’, that we shouldn’t worry too much about syntax or punctuation – or, indeed, inadequate referencing; that academic writing is simply documentation and that it’s somehow oppressive (or even ‘colonial’) to insist that it’s done well. Beyond any dismay I might feel at the degradation of what I like to think of as my ‘craft’, the important point here is that mastering the ‘rules’ (which are pretty simple and straightforward) allows students to participate in an ongoing global conversation among scholars across disciplines (which is what structured academic writing essentially amounts to), while at the same time making their own research transparent for anyone who wants to engage with it. That is, it’s about communication – for which a few ‘rules’ are necessary. It’s a bit like having to learn the highway code if you want to drive a car.
Apologies for the lengthy comment – first time!