What Makes Writing Academic - by Julia Molinari (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

This open access book argues that what makes writing academic emerges from socio-academic and historical practices rather than conventionalised stylistic, linguistic or syntactic forms. Using a critical realist lens, it re-imagines academic writings as 21st-century open systems that change according to affordances perceived by writers. By re-imagining how, which and whose knowledge emerges, conceptual spaces are created whereby writing practices can be pluralised and democratised.

Academic communication hinges on being able to write in certain forms but not others, which risks excluding knowledge that may lend itself to alternative forms of representation, such as dialogues, chronicles, manifestos, blogs, poems and comics. Moreover, because academic ability tends to be misleadingly conflated with writing ability, limiting how the academy writes to a relatively narrow set of forms (such as the traditional essay or thesis) may be preventing a range of abilities from emerging. Standardised forms require abstracts, introductions, main bodies and conclusions that are also predominantly monolingual and monomodal: this can narrow, distort, constrain or flatten epistemic representation, leading to a range of epistemic losses (as well as gains).

Based on examples from a range of academic writers, including students, and drawing on the history of academia, philosophy, socio-semiotic research, integrational and sociolinguistics as well as studies in multimodal and visual thinking, the book proposes that academic writings be re-imagined as multimodal artefacts that allow a wider range of epistemic affordances to emerge.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Knowledge Unlatched.

Review Quotes

"The book provides food for thought with its rich, deep, and wide historical, theoretical, and philosophical explorations of what makes (or does not make) writing academic, encouraging change-individually and collectively-and also in the wider academic and societal systems. Change is essential to create a just and humane academia, and that is the fundamental premise of both Molinari's research and of this book. As such, the book provides useful foundations for a different future writing pedagogy (and scholarly activity), one that is able to dismantle the imperialist and colonialist ideologies about what students should know and how they should represent their knowledge." --Canadian Journal of Discourse and Writing

"[What Makes Writing Academic] is an ode to the power of academic writing, treating it as an agent of change... It is about giving a voice to those students and scholars who are wondering how to share knowledge in a way that is not currently mainstream. Most importantly, it is an incredibly empowering book. It gave me, and hopefully all its future readers, the reasons, tools, arguments, counterarguments and ways forward to transform academic writing practices towards being more socially just." --Melina Aarnikoivu, Latiss: Learning and Teaching

"This book advances ideas about the production of academic knowledge, first developed in academic literacies research, by visiting them afresh using critical realism as an exploratory theoretical lens. Academic knowledge has always been produced with a range of genres using different communicative modes, so why, Molinari asks, has writing pedagogy got stuck in a narrow, one-size-fits-all view of what makes writing academic? " --Fiona English, Honorary Senior Research Associate, UCL Institute of Education, London

"The central question [of this book] challenges comfortable assumptions both within university writing programs and within the textbook industry. Molinari provides a thought-provoking historical account of composition studies that adds to our understanding of why the current-traditionalist assumptions of what writing is and how it should be taught is still with us." --Donald Judd, Professor of English, Pittsburg State University, USA

About the Author