#WhatMakesWritingAcademic
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serenissimaj.bsky.social
One of my jobs is teaching #AcademicWriting to doctoral researchers.

That's a humongous responsibility, tbh, in an age of #censorship #PostTruth #AlternativeFacts #GAI

Commitment-risk-voice on #WhatMakesWritingAcademic is urgent.

I did interrogated the gpt:
academicemergence.press/current-conv...
January 7, 2025 at 6:56 PM
serenissimaj.bsky.social
I just wasn't prepared for the emotion of my own child citing me in a 1st yr UG essay.

Luckily, we have different surnames.

This emotion-event is intersectionally layered - he said I 'have relevance' but he's not the #REF
#Academia #Parenthood #Research #sociology #WhatMakesWritingAcademic #HipHop
March 12, 2024 at 7:31 PM
serenissimaj.bsky.social
Tahrir Hamdi is rousing - she brings Edward Said, bell hooks, Stuart Hall, IIan Pappé, et al. into a writing of resistance, what I'd describe as emancipatory #AcWri, where words have power to re-present reality & re-define #WhatMakesWritingAcademic

#2025 ✊🏼🕊
#Nakba
#FreePalestine
#ImaginingPalestine
December 17, 2024 at 8:51 PM
serenissimaj.bsky.social
On this #PrimoMaggio #FestaDeiLavoratori, I wish to celebrate my #FreeLabour for #HigherEducation and #CriticalThinking:

#WhatMakesWritingAcademic

www.bloomsbury.com/uk/what-make...
May 1, 2024 at 10:33 PM
serenissimaj.bsky.social
Nice thread - I like 'change the esteem machine' 👇 (change the esteem *regime* even better).

There are good reasons for having a healthy diverse ecology of academic writings. I wouldn't want it homogenised to any standard. Plus, readers also need to make the effort.
#WhatMakesWritingAcademic #AcWri
reddite.eurosky.social Pete Smith @reddite.eurosky.social · Dec 4
I think awe need to change the esteem machine of academia :) I've nothing against more readable journals, but there's a role for technical language and journals. Baby, bathwater, all that.
December 4, 2024 at 8:31 AM
serenissimaj.bsky.social
How standardised forms of #AcWri shape knowledge for better & for worse are further developed throughout:

- www.bloomsbury.com/uk/what-make... (also #OpenAccess)

- www.bloomsbury.com/uk/change-an...

#WhatMakesWritingAcademic
#DoctoralWriting #ResearchWriting
#AcademicWriting
#IMRaD

#AcademicSky
February 26, 2025 at 8:33 AM
serenissimaj.bsky.social
[2/n] What this means in practice is that:

a) academic writing should always be educative, truthful, and humane;

b) that there exist different approaches to and imaginaries of #WhatMakesWritingAcademic
December 3, 2024 at 7:22 PM
serenissimaj.bsky.social
This is such a cathartic book, not just for its content but for its form.

Guide quotes, preambles, headings and endnotes are used explicitly to re-present knowledge in dialogue as human 'conversational praxis'.

Not yet read Wynter's original work but will have to.

#AcWri
#WhatMakesWritingAcademic
February 1, 2025 at 11:26 AM
serenissimaj.bsky.social
Getting a few things off my chest in Chaper 2:

*** Academic writing as political ***

Forthcoming @uclpress.bsky.social in May 2026:

✍️
Academic writing is never a neutral practice [...] its power [...] makes it a political act
✍️

#WhatMakesWritingAcademic #AcWri

uclpress.co.uk/book/critica...
1 Introduction Ayanna Prevatt-Goldstein and David Mallows Part I: Framing the politics and practices of academic writing 2 Academic writing as political Julia Molinari 3 The turn to difference: doing academic writing and writing development differently Amanda French 4 Multimodal and embodied approaches to writing for access and inclusion Arlene Archer Part II: Generative AI and academic writing 5 Progressive academic writing literacies: the constructive use of machine translation and generative AI as graduate competences Mike Groves and Klaus Mundt 6 Student writing as ‘passing’ in a time of synthetic text Helen Beetham 7 Generative AI, academic writing and learning differences: can ChatGPT scaffold writing development? Adrian Wallbank Part III: The practices of academic writing 8 Exploring writing pedagogy with subject lecturers Gillian Lazar 9 Investigating feedback on students’ written work to understand subject lecturer expectations and support student writing Lena Grannell 10 Creating time and space to write through social writing Rowena Murray Afterword Lisa Ganobcsik-Williams
November 17, 2025 at 7:16 PM
serenissimaj.bsky.social
AI writing is not scholarship because it is not committed to the truth, has no intended audience, and draws on stochastic archives (as opposed to research). #WhatMakesWritingAcademic #WhatMakesAcademicWritingHumane

#AcWri
#AcademicWriting
March 23, 2026 at 3:42 PM
serenissimaj.bsky.social
My thoughts on "What Makes Academic Writing Human(e): A Critical Realist Response" in: Bouchard & Zotzmann, eds. #CriticalRealism in #AppliedLinguistics #CambridgeUniversityPress 2026

#AcademicWriting
#WhatMakesWritingAcademic
#WhatMakesAcademicWritingHumane
#GenAI
www.cambridge.org/core/books/a...
Summary Drawing from critical realism and building on previous academic studies and writing theories and practices, the author advances approaches to academic writing that are both human and humane, by situating academic writing within the broader critical realist project of furthering human flourishing and emancipation; of what it means to be human; and of why things matter to people. Addressing what counts as human(e) in academic writing has become pressing, as concerns about machine-generated texts, such as Large Language Models like ChatGPT challenge understandings of truth, knowledge, and justice. Underlying the argument in this chapter is the assumption that writing in the academy is a social practice (specifically, a method of enquiry) that should be oriented towards epistemic virtues including commitment to truth and socially just standards of excellence. For academic writing to fulfil such commitments, the author argues that it needs to be human(e). For it to be human(e), it requires a writer–agent–knower to rationally judge between educative and harmful academic writing theories and practices, in the interests of human flourishing and emancipation. Keywords academic writing being human dharma emancipation explanatory critique flourishing knowledge truth ubuntu
February 12, 2026 at 10:22 AM
serenissimaj.bsky.social
My book is about how English academic writing could be different - more multilingual, multimodal, inclusive.

It exposes the contingency of its forms and how these can stymie the emergence of knowledges.

#WhatmakesWritingAcademic #AcWri #CrticalRealism #OpenAccess
www.bloomsbury.com/uk/what-make...
December 29, 2023 at 10:45 AM
serenissimaj.bsky.social
In case of interest, this has now been published #OpenAccess

#Philosophy #AcademicWriting #Truth #AcademicPublishing
#WhatMakesWritingAcademic

www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/14...
Plato Under Review: What Is Going Wrong in Academic Philosophical Writing by Giacomo Pezzano Abstract This paper addresses the problem of stylistic pluralism in philosophical writing, arguing that its progressive narrowing to the form of the paper is not just an esthetic issue but can also have negative effects on the development of academic research itself. The contribution is divided into two parts (Sections 1–3 and 4–5). In the first part, after introducing the problem and outlining the main features of the philosophus academicus’s writing, two main forms of criticism of “paper-centrism” in academic philosophy are discussed—one more “anti-academic” and the other more “intra-academic”. In light of these criticisms, the issue of the relationship between form and content in philosophical writing is analyzed with particular respect to the problem of the sense of truth, arguing that style communicates philosophical values beyond content. In the second part, this thesis is illustrated by examining, as a case study, the specific sense of truth conveyed in Plato’s dialogues—first through a literary analysis of Platonic writing, and then through a thought experiment inspired by media theory. Finally, the ethical and epistemic concerns raised by the growing “mono-stylism” of philosophical writing are brought together into a unified framework, by proposing a preliminary sketch of an ethics of philosophical research and pointing to some possible examples of alternative research practices. Keywords: philosophical writing; ethics of research; metaphilosophy; media philosophy; philosophy and literature; dialogue
June 5, 2025 at 6:05 AM
waking-kraken.bsky.social
Looks exciting, #WhatMakesWritingAcademic I'd use this with my students as I'm an Academic Skills Advisor and works with people who lack confidence and self esteem.
October 24, 2023 at 7:50 AM
serenissimaj.bsky.social
"writing isn’t just academic. It’s survival. It’s the way we make space for ourselves in systems that would rather we stay invisible. The pressure to sound “neutral” is often the pressure to be less ourselves"

Should you pay to be yourself? #WhatMakesWritingAcademic
www.thecanary.co/discovery/fe...
July 28, 2025 at 7:30 PM
serenissimaj.bsky.social
Bloomsbury have dropped the pbk price of #WhatMakesWritingAcademic to £20.29 until 10 Dec.

According one reviewer, "it is an incredibly empowering book" on how else academic writing could be.

In it, I also highlight its colonial, somewhat racist, roots.

#AcWri
www.bloomsbury.com/uk/what-make...
What Makes Writing Academic
This open access book argues that what makes writing academic emerges from socio-academic and historical practices rather than conventionalised stylistic, lingu…
www.bloomsbury.com
December 8, 2023 at 6:40 AM
serenissimaj.bsky.social
"No one can imagine pursuing an academic career by acting, living, or performing philosophically: there is no impact factor measure for such approaches—no place for the Diogenes of Sinope of today" (Pezzano)
#WhatMakesWritingAcademic
#Philosophy
#AcWri
Also enjoying this:
philpapers.org/rec/PEZTMI-
Giacomo Pezzano, The Medium Is the (Discriminatory) Message: The Medial Epistemic Injustices of Philosophy - PhilPapers
This paper brings the analysis of epistemic injustices and the perspective of media philosophy into dialogue by proposing the new concept of medial epistemic injustice. After introducing the topic, th...
philpapers.org
March 15, 2025 at 11:33 AM
serenissimaj.bsky.social
I've no idea what a healthy citation rate/ratio is or how to judge its relative significance but #WhatMakesWritingAcademic has to date been cited 50 unique interdisciplinary times since 2022 (G-Scholar).

Each citing text helps me make sense/re-visit what I wrote.

www.bloomsbury.com/uk/what-make...
November 27, 2024 at 8:54 PM
serenissimaj.bsky.social
Does any serious journal editor really worry about referencing & other style/accuracy?

It's just that I've seen papers reluctantly 'accepted with (major) revisions' that signficantly flout 'specifications' but were accepted because the 'idea' mattered.

#AcademicPublishing
#WhatMakesWritingAcademic
February 25, 2024 at 9:08 PM
serenissimaj.bsky.social
I'd love to be given time & resources to do proper critical discourse analysis (CDA) on why 'bad' academic writers such as Spivak, Bhaskar, Derrida etc. are deemed 'bad'.

I suspect lots of underlying #EpistemicInjustice (cf. M. Fricker): testimonial & hermeneutic.

#AcWri #WhatMakesWritingAcademic
February 12, 2024 at 8:48 PM
serenissimaj.bsky.social
"if we care about citational politics we should also seek to diversify the nature of what is accepted as "academic writing"

#WhatMakesWritingAcademic (my day job also needs decolonising)

#DoctoralWriting
#AcademicWriting
#PhDLife
#CitationalPolitics
#UniversityOfVienna
kula.uvic.ca/index.php/ku...
The course is organised in five blocks. The first covers extended introductions to other students and to feedback cultures, and it includes discussion of shared and differing experiences of and attitudes toward aca-demic writing. The second asks the question “What is good academic writing?” and puts students’ views about this into conversation with debates from the literature around clarity versus the need for specialised lan-guage. One goal of these discussions is to highlight some of the limitations of conventional scholarly writing (especially as articulated by Molinari 2022), so the third block then involves genre experiments and critical reflection on what are sometimes called “alternative” academic forms (see, e.g., Richardson 2002 or Ashmore, Myers, and Potter 1995). The fourth block is oriented to responsible reading, citing, and writing (including citational politics and, in late r iterations of the course, the use of AI tools in writing). The final block focuses on “finishing” and covers practical strategies for writing, editing, and finalising a writing project alongside discussion of how writing relates to thinking. Throughout, students work with t heir own writing projects, including article or chapter drafts as well as shorter experimental texts developed specifically for the course.Teaching Citational Politics as Part of Writing as Thinking
January 25, 2026 at 7:07 PM
serenissimaj.bsky.social
Q2. When I asked the gpt #WhatMakesWritingAcademic and it seriously failed the test by making things up, not citing relevant #OpenAccess literature, blatantly re-casting on the back of prompts, & by being so sycophantic in apologising for its oversights that it dug a deep hole for itself
#LTHEchat
January 15, 2025 at 8:27 PM
serenissimaj.bsky.social
At 4pm (UK) on Thursday 25 January, I'm giving a #IOEWritingSeminar on how the theory of #CriticalRealism helps me make sense of #WhatMakesWritingAcademic.

Chaired by my #OpenUniversity colleague Dr Jackie Tuck.

#AcademicLiteracies #AcWri #tleap #theory #OpenAccess
www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/events/2...
Critical realism and academic writing: why theory matters for practice
Join this event to hear Julia Molinari apply the theory of critical realism to examine academic writing as a potentially more diversified and just social practice.
www.ucl.ac.uk
January 7, 2024 at 8:41 PM
serenissimaj.bsky.social
... for example, #WhatMakesWritingAcademic seems to be providing a rationale for questioning "what scientific contributions may be lost due to the adherence to rigid standards of and [...] reliance on written communication"

#STEM #autism #NeuroDiversity

#AcWri

www.frontiersin.org/journals/edu...
In addition to navigating anxiety and self-doubt related to writing, neurodivergent students may experience writing challenges related to the need to “translate” or standardize their thoughts in order to “write for a neurotypical audience” in a rigidly structured style that varies by scientific discipline. This finding is supported by Tomlinson and Newman (2017) which found that one of the notable writing-related challenges for autistic students may be the need to translate their unique ways of thinking and knowing as they adhere to the norms of communicating with a neurotypical audience. Molinari (2022) argues that “standardization is exclusionary and this can lead to a range of epistemic losses and gains” (p. 3). This raises the question of what scientific contributions may be lost due to the adherence to rigid standards of and almost exclusive reliance on written communication. The students in this study reported that their visual, social, and oral presentation skills are marginalized in favor of the scientific writing required in their fields, with losses in productivity and enjoyment on the parts of the students. Additionally, the students suggested that the overreliance on standardized scientific communication may make the findings less accessible to a wide audience. We argue that broadening the conceptualization of what qualifies as scientific contributions or scholarly products may allow the scientific community to benefit from the unique strengths, approaches, insights, and creative potential of neurodivergent students.
November 27, 2024 at 9:07 PM
serenissimaj.bsky.social
📢Academic writers:

what do you use to map your writings as a coherent whole, so you can see their connections & directions? I 've ended up with several discrete but concurrent writing projects and need to 'see' how they hang together in my world view of #WhatMakesWritingAcademic
Scriviner?!

#AcWri
November 2, 2024 at 10:01 AM