I tried something a little different yesterday when presenting Writing Process Reengineering to a group of researchers most of whom were already familiar with my approach. Normally, I begin with the nature of academic knowledge, situate the problem of writing within it, and introduce the paragraph as the “unit of academic composition”. Only at this point do I explicitly introduce the reader’s “difficulty”, and give the writer the task of alleviating it.

It’s possible, however, to turn this completely on its head. We can start by imagining a single minute of the reader’s attention, the act of reading an individual paragraph of our writing. From this we can imagine constructing the experience the reader is having, i.e., we can imagine the “the writing moment” that produced the paragraph. We can then imagine a series of such moments, which will produce a paper, and then begin to analyze the competence — philosophical, rhetorical, literary — that such a paper represents. That is, we move from the reader’s experience to the writer’s knowledge.

I sometimes advise students to imagine their teachers as they read their essays. Let’s consider just one paragraph, perhaps half a page of writing. Suppose the teacher were to raise a simple question: “Does this paragraph look like it took 27 minutes to write?” Does it seem like something another human being paid careful attention to for about half an hour. Do the words look like they were chosen deliberately, under orderly circumstances, for the purpose of presenting a particular idea? Did the writer have my experience as a reader during the foregoing minute in mind? Did the writer make a specific effort to use that minute of my time to utmost effect?

You don’t have to be a Marxist to understand that quality can sometimes be derived from quantity. Simply by understanding the reading moment as a one minute encounter with a paragraph (at least six sentences, at most two-hundred words) and the writing moment to be 27 times longer, we imply or suggest a standard of quality. Some paragraphs will be so good that we’d be impressed to learn it took only half an hour to compose. Others will be so sloppy that we cannot imagine a serious writer having given it more than five minutes of their attention.

These judgments can often be made without any estimate of knowledge the writer possesses. Even someone who is wrong about the facts can present their ignorance and error clearly. We do, of course, have to begin by attributing basic academic literacy to the writer, i.e., an ability to read and write scholarly prose at whatever level the student (or scholar) is at. But under a set of “normal” assumptions, I think our estimate of the time that might have been put into composing a paragraph can be quite meaningful.

This estimate, in turn, tells us what we can spend our writing time doing. Begin with a simple, declarative sentence that states something you know. Decide whether the reader will find it primarily hard to believe, understand or agree with. If none of these seem relevant, ask yourself why you’re going to write a whole paragraph supporting, elaborating or defending it. It’s possible you imagine your reader will be merely bored with your claim, for example, and you’d like to get them excited about it. In some cases, that’s a perfectly legitimate writing task.

Executing any of these tasks — supporting, elaborating, defending or motivating a claim (you may be able to think of others) — is the core activity of any writing process. It’s the thing you do again and again. The paragraph is the thing you make and, through deliberate practice, become better and better at making. Once you’re good at this. I.e., once you are good at making effective use of a single minute of your reader’s attention, you can begin to arrange those paragraphs into series: essays and papers and chapters. You can begin to plan 5 or 11 or 40 or 120 or 240 minutes of your reader’s attention. That’s what Writing Process Reengineering is all about.

A few years ago, a former colleague of mine was planning a module in a graduate program on academic writing at another university. He asked for my advice and we talked for an hour, after which he sent me his ideas about what he was going to do. I had, of course, said that the most important thing is to get the students writing, every day if possible. So I was struck by this part of his mail:

My experience tells me that the students will not have the necessary self-discipline to write every day for several weeks. So I will orient the course towards the more ‘teachable’ aspects, including such matters as planning, structure of articles, getting published, etc., rather than towards writing as such.

Here is the substance of my response:

You learn how to write by writing. It’s the only way. So I don’t have much hope for a writing program that begins, as you seem to, by giving up on the students’ discipline. If you don’t expect them to write, you can’t expect them to learn how to write, no matter how much you teach them. But if you can get them to write every day they will get better at writing, almost regardless of what you teach them. That’s my philosophy of writing instruction in a nutshell. I guess I’m saying I don’t believe writing has any merely “teachable aspects”; writing must be trained.

Students have to learn that an academic text has recognizable parts and you can certainly teach them various all-purpose outlines (I do this). But they also have to learn that those parts must be “built” and then “assembled” into a coherent whole, and that, in order to do this well, you have to plan, not just the content of the paper, but the structure of the weeks, days, and hours that will be spent writing. You have to work on your introduction at some point, for example, then stop, and then return to it. The same goes for every other part of the paper. And the only way to get this across is to get the students to feel it in their brains and in their hands.

The students must experience the joy of composing a good prose paragraph and the (sometimes transcendent) bliss of putting several paragraphs together persuasively. If you only teach them what an academic text is, and don’t bring them into contact with the process by which a text comes into being, your chances of success are (in my humble opinion) not very high.

“My experience tells me that the students will not have the necessary self-discipline,” you say. I have the same experience, of course. But my experience also says that some students will acquire that discipline if you provide an occasion for them to do so. More importantly, those that don’t acquire this discipline won’t learn how to write (any better than they already do) anyway. Those that do, however, are learning how to write as well as they can. By turning this into a straight “teaching” module, you might think you’re making do with what’s achievable. But I fear you are settling for achieving very little.

An engagement with the student’s self-discipline is fundamentally an engagement with their “authorial” persona, their literary authority as scholars, what I sometimes call their “writing selves”. If you do not attempt to engage with that core strength (their self-discipline) you are not likely to improve the part of them that writes. That is, you won’t make them into better writers, no matter how “true” the things you will tell them may be.

I think that last point is worth emphasizing. Scholarship is difficult in many ways. It takes a lot of thought, knowledge, and sometimes courage. But the writing itself is easy; you just have to do it. It requires no heavy lifting or special skills (you already know the language). What you are developing when you are developing your writing skills (as distinct from the other skills that make you a scholar) is a competence that is, let’s say, “right next to” your basic self-discipline. Writing gets done almost exclusively by, well, doing it. The most important to muscle to train when you write is your will. Writing perhaps, just is an act of will.

A student comes to see me. He has received a grade on a three-page assignment that he is not satisfied with. It’s not my class, of course, so it’s not my grade, and he’s not here to complain. I’m just the writing consultant, and my job is to help him figure out what he could do better next time. I don’t have to explain the grade, just propose solutions going forward. This turns out to be quite easy.

He tells me that he’s aware that this wasn’t his best work. He didn’t think he had enough time to do the assignment or was given enough space. (The class had been given one week to write three pages analyzing an assigned case.) He was also unclear about the essay form. (They had been instructed to write what was essentially a five-paragraph essay, with the stipulation that one paragraph had to present their theory.) He recognizes that the introduction and conclusion (the first and last paragraphs) could probably use some fleshing out.

In other words, he had already done my work for me. I tell him to set aside three hours over the next few days, in half-hour sessions. In each of the first five sessions, he simply has to rewrite one of the paragraphs of the essay he submitted. Make sure it’s at least six sentences long, I tell him, and at most two hundred words. The day before, make sure you identify the key sentence; then, when you’re writing, make sure that you stay on task. In the last session, read the whole thing out loud a few times and fix what you can. This will show you what is possible within the space you were given. It will also show you what one week + three hours can do. Don’t tell me you couldn’t have done those three hours of work before you submitted. (I don’t say this, of course. It’s in my voice. In my eyes. I think he understands.)

After you’ve done the work, I tell him, we can meet again and look at the new paragraphs. Then we can decide what you have to work on from here, or whether you should just keep writing more paragraphs, about more theories, and more cases. One moment at a time. Keep it simple. Okay, he says. Thanks … I guess.

PS. I lack the comic ability of the late, great Scott Eric Kaufman. Here’s a post on the same theme, just funnier.

I spent Saturday at the University of Essex attending the BALEAP/ALDinHE Joint One-day Conference (PIM) on Academic Literacies and EAP. It was an excellent conference and I have much to process in the weeks to come. (It was a good week on this score. Just before I left, I had my abstract for the BALEAP Conference in April accepted.) It was great to talk to others who are trying to help students master the art of academic writing and I’ll probably be writing some posts in the future about individual sessions or inspired by the conversations I got to have in the breaks. In this post I want to work through one particular thought that is likely to stick with me.

The conference closed with a panel discussion on the question ” Academic Literacies and EAP: Same or different?” during which a number of very interesting issues were raised. For example, it was pointed out that the Academic Literacies / EAP (English for Academic Purposes) distinction doesn’t map easily onto the Learning Development / EAP distinction, and this had something (though not everything) to with differences in professional background and institutional setting of the different practitioners. Someone else asked when we’d be able to do away with the term “international” to denote the mysterious, foreign “other” of university students in general. We even got into the question of whether academic writing practices are best seen as ways of reproducing or redistributing power through education. All in all, very stimulating stuff.

It seems to me that a great deal of common ground can be found if we think seriously about what we mean by “academic” and, perhaps, challenge a presumption that we, and our stakeholders, often make, perhaps unconsciously. When we talk about academic literacy, and English for academic purposes, we are often using that word to indicate the peculiar predicament of the student. As AL/LD/EAP practitioners, we are helping students to “meet their learning objectives” (often a euphemism simply for doing their assignments). From the point of view of the teaching programs, we are delivering better students, we are imparting “study skills”. The allure of the “deficit model” stems from this presumption, which construes the university as an exotic location with unfamiliar customs and standards. The more “foreign” the student, the more understandable it is that they would need various kinds of pre-sessional and in-sessional support in order to participate fully in the university experience.

But this makes “academic” skills something we need mainly in order to get through school. It makes them something that applies up to the day you graduate, after which you can forget them and use the knowledge that those skills merely helped you to acquire. I think this is the unfortunate consequence of favoring “ideological” over “autonomous” models of literacy, even when we do so, as Mary Lea and Brian Street suggest, to get beyond the “study skills model” of academic literacy. After all, the ideological situation of a student can be specified — and the situations of students in different disciplines and at different levels can even be differentiated. By thinking of “academia” as an ideological setting we position AL/LD/EAP as an ideological function and there’s a short road from this to being the mere service provider that I heard some participants distancing themselves from. The alternative, I’d propose, is to think of ourselves simply as educators (not ideologues).

(I’ve previously reflected on this question in terms of the usefulness of the metaphors of research as a “second language” or seeing our students as a members of a “foreign culture”.)

My suggestion is to think of academic literacy as an autonomous competence that is imparted (along with discipline-specific knowledge) by a university education. I am not sure that we’re doing anyone any favors by pluralizing literacy here, however. Though I understand the arguments for “academic literacies“, specific to disciplines and subjects, it seems to me that “being an academic” involves membership in a diverse but ultimately unified community.  Such membership has privileges for the individual and the existence of the community has value for the society as whole. When I defend the autonomy of literacy practices I do so because I think being literate, and, by extension, academically literate, makes people’s lives better and the existence of literate people makes life as such better. This is not a slight against those who lack such literacy: I also think musical ability makes people’s lives better and I am very appreciative of the existence of people who have this ability even if I don’t.

I need to end this post. The thought I’m getting to is that perhaps a number of apparently arbitrary features of our AL/LD/EAP practices, and perhaps some those that make us feel like members of different “tribes”, might be re-imagined as integral to our work if we think of “academic” skills as valuable in themselves.

Think, for example, of why we are so focused on English language competence. Is this just because we are the Hegemon? Could we not instead say that academia is an international endeavor that has, for a number of well-known historical reasons, settled on English as its common tongue and that English language competence is therefore simply part of academic literacy? To take this a step further: could we not say that writing clear, coherent prose paragraphs, in the familiar “dominant” essay form, is a valuable skill that connects the writer to other knowledgeable people through recognized conventions that facilitate communication and criticism. Finally, could we not argue that a university education gives the student the skills needed to read and write in the contexts that shape the knowledge we have as a culture? That is, academic literacy is simply the competence we need to participate in what was once called “the knowledge society”. This begins at university but does not end there.

I want to make it clear that, as in my example of musical ability, academic literacy, and indeed general literacy, does not have to be a condition of human dignity. In fact, that particular ideological function should be thoroughly critiqued. But I do think that we AL/LD/EAP practitioners can reasonably claim to be doing much more than help people get through school. Academic literacy is not the student’s predicament; it is the scholar’s competence. The individual and the society both benefit from its reproduction, i.e., its transmission to future generations through education. And in that sense, in fact, I don’t mind being a “handmaiden to the sciences”.

See also my posts on academic purpose, language, and writing.

“I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.”

Michel Foucault

In the old days, before there were journals, scientists would write letters to each other about their results. These would then be circulated and (if I recall my history of science correctly) the readers would add their own comments, sometimes the results of their own attempts to replicate those in the original letter. There was very little question back then about who your peers were.

Today we have too many peers to know exactly who we’re writing for, and even who we are. But that does not mean we can’t identify some of our readers concretely. I think too many academic writers see the journal literature as a completely anonymous authority, a faceless bureaucracy that you somehow have to force or fool into accepting your work.

In order to change this image of the journals, keep that old-fashioned circulation of letters in mind. As your research progresses, make a conscious effort to imagine your readers. Who might be interested in the results you are producing? Name these people, and learn something about them. Where do they work? Where do they publish? And don’t just imagine commmunicating with them. Write them emails. Seek them out at conferences. Arrange to visit their institutions.

Putting faces on your readership is a way of taking ownership of your writing. After all, it also requires imagining your own face on it. Publishing—which is to say, making your ideas public—is a way of communicating with other researchers. It is not just an exam you pass to impress your university administrators and further your career.

Much as I admire Foucault, I think his resentment (even ressentiment?) of academic writing is an unnecessary affectation. Why should sincere researchers, striving, shoulder to shoulder, in the pursuit of knowledge, leave anything to the police and the bureaucrats? We should insist on letting only our peers evaluate our “papers” (admittedly in another sense), i.e., those with whom we also sometimes speak face-to-face. It is their “morality” we should engage with when we write.

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*This is an old post from my retired blog.