Academic Writing Talk Episode 6: How Do you Write With Authority?
Transcript: Hi there and welcome back to the Writing Talk podcast. My name is Aure Schrock and I'll be your guide to academic writing today. In each episode of this podcast, I talk about a specific writing problem encountered by academic authors and how to solve it.
Today we're going to be talking about how to write with authority. I've noticed that early career academics oftentimes get a lot of negative feedback on their writing, not because they have bad ideas, but because the way that they're putting words on the page doesn't signal that they're part of the Academic Writing Club.
In the book, how to Fix Your Academic Writing Trouble, Inger Mewburn, Katherine Firth, and Sean Lehmann talk about how to write in “academicease,” which is their word for the way that academics write. They claim, and I agree with them, that academicease is needed to take a position, claim a genealogy, show you are smart, gather your posse, defend against attacks, and make points of your own. That is quite a laundry list of goals!
Oftentimes when I'm meeting with early career graduate students, I tell them to put on their confident professor hat… and I've actually created this hat! I had a hat made that says Confident Professor on it, and I tell them when they put this hat on, or imagine putting it on, they should think about themselves as the most confident professor they've ever encountered in their academic career. Imagine them standing at the front of the classroom. They probably don't know everything, but you trust them and believe that they do because of the way that they carry themselves… in the way that they answer your questions and anticipate your needs. In very much the same way your job as an academic writer is to exude confidence to show that you belong in the Academic Writing Club through your use of language.
And as I read Mewburn, Firth, and Lemon's book How to Fix Your Academic Writing Trouble, I realized that they were making a lot of the same points that I had been making as an academic writing coach myself. So today let's talk about a few of those good suggestions and how to put them into practice in your writing. And again, I've come up with a lot of these ideas on my own, but I've also merged them with ideas in How to Fix Your Academic Writing Trouble. So if you like them, please pick up that book!
One good suggestion is to signal your lineage and who you align yourself with. A lot of the time in academic writing, particularly in interdisciplinary academic writing, you need to signal what body of scholarship you're predominantly drawing from. Why is this? Because if you submit an article to an organizational communication journal, they're going to want to see organizational communication scholars cited. If you submit to an STS journal, they're going to want to see STS concepts and authors cited. So one good way to signal your affiliations and your academic lineage is by adding literature to support your main argument in mid-level analytics from a certain lineage of scholarship.
Don't just add literature because it is topically similar! This is why with a lot of clients, I ask them how they think about themselves as academic writers. Because if you think about yourself as a feminist sociologist, that's really different than if you think about yourself as an organizational communication scholar. It's not like one is vastly superior than the other, but you're going to be able to do different things with different bodies of literature.
Another thing that I'd suggest is to carefully select your words. For example, a lot of what I do as an academic editor is to strengthen verbs. This is maybe the opposite message that you got in grade school where you were advised to use adjectives and adverbs instead of verbs that have slightly different meanings. But strong verbs are how academics show that they're evaluating an idea in a certain way. In the book How to Fix Your Academic Writing Trouble, the authors suggest using Latinate forms of verbs rather than those of German origins. Even though I had taken Latin in high school, I didn't really realize until I read that that they're right. A Germanic verb phrase like “fill in” isn't quite as sophisticated as the Latinate version “complete” or “substitute.”
Another suggestion is to strategically incorporate theory. And how you do this depends on the format and genre of the writing you're doing, but the most commonplace is to have a strong literature review that's more than just a list. Sometimes I have to remind my clients who get accused of being “too descriptive” that they need to do the theory thing. And to do that, you have to start by reviewing literature in the literature review, and then actually change or augment how we think about that theory accurately reflecting reality. Because otherwise, why would we actually go through the trouble of reading an academic empirical article, were it not to derive insights that apply to situations elsewhere?
Finally, another suggestion that I've written about in my blog posts and articles is the importance of signposting. I've often said, and I was actually surprised to see this in How to Fix your Academic Writing Trouble because it's something that I've said for a long time. Academic writing is not a murder mystery. The reader must know who the killer is and they're not going to stick around to the final act to find out.
And there are two ways to signpost: explicit or implicit. Explicit signposting is something like: “as the reader may remember from the introduction…” When the reader sees that, they have to reflect on what happened in the introduction, and if they don't, maybe they'll flip back to it and refresh their memory. Implicit signposting is a little bit more subtle and it uses language to remind the reader of what happened before or what is coming soon. For example, if you're a scholar of neoliberalism, you probably want to use language to show (rather than tell) the reader how you think about that concept. So in sum, all of these techniques, whether signaling your lineage, word selection, strategically incorporating theory, or signposting, they all together give your writing a lot more confidence… and so when I talk about putting on your confident professor hat, this is what I'm talking about! You need to write with confidence and stand up on the power of your own ideas.
Because after all, academic writing is about you presenting an original idea or position. It's far more than just a summary of previous research or an analysis of existing data. And also just one final tip. Don't be afraid to write succinctly. A lot of the time what we think about is academic writing falls into academic cliches, overly tortured prose, obtuse statements, and so on. What can really cut through the clutter is a very clear and well-defined sentence that makes an original statement.
So that does it for this week’s The Writing Talk podcast, hope you found it helpful. Tune in next week because I’ll be talking with really cool academics I’ve worked with about their writing practices. I thought it would be kinda cool to talk with living breathing academics who are doing the kinds of writing that I advocate for. So we’ll be talking with topics such as how to integrate your theory into your analysis, and how to test out some of your ideas from your writing in the classroom, which I think is really vital and often overlooked in a lot of academic writing.
As always, if you have any questions or want to work with me on a specific writing project, you can always find me at indeliblevoice.com. Hope you tune in next time, and thanks for listening!