What is good quality academic writing? Good quality academic writing comes in many forms; yet, not every piece of academic writing is of good quality. One place to start in evaluating the quality of academic writing is reflection upon a common pair of definitions for the word quality. The first regards quality as an assessment made objectively against a predefined measure. This first definition tends to dominate contemporary discussion on quality in academic writing. Quality in writing is seen in this light especially when the assessment is informed by a rationality informed by values of business, such as productivity and efficiency. Yet qualitative assessments may also be informed by other forms of rationality, like either the liberal ideals of scholarship and disciplinary knowledge or the critical ideals of contestation and critique. It is hard to keep these other reasons for assessment in mind when faced with the pervasiveness of market rationalities in higher education, They are important because they are what drive our disciplines forward. A second definition defines quality as an attribute or characteristic of something. We the writer and readers who are related through our reciprocal endeavour might see within this second definition a focus on pluralism in the concept of quality. That is, there are many qualities of academic writing, These qualities emerge through the affordances and constraints of different forms and processes, even different forms of rationality. A report of a quantitative study of the reproduction rates of urban rats exhibits different formal and methodological qualities from an arts-based inquiry into the role of dramatic art in a rural community. Under a research assessment regime they might officially be judged by the same standards. Extrinsic and univeral standards, however, are not likely to have been useful in their construction.
Developing sensitivity to the ways that different processes and media influence meaning gives academic authors greater control over how meaning is made from their texts. To assist in developing this sensitivity, the following chapter takes you on a journey through different writing genres. You may notice that it shifts between: a classical academic style with argument and citations; expository metanarratives that explains through text what has been done in the writing and why; personal reflection and narrative; and excerpts from other pieces of writing that show by example how different forms of written language offer different possibilities for conveying meaning. As you read look out for changes in form and interjections from other pieces of writing. Why are they here? What do they show? It was a conscious decision of the author to work in multiple genres, and bring together pieces of text that might not ordinarily sit together or be crafted from the same materials. Pluralism is a key concept for understanding quality in academic writing, as is understanding the limitations and possibilities of different media and genre.
Quality Assessments and Attributes
“The quality of mercy is not strain’d” begins Portia’s famous legal defence of Antonio in The Merchant of Venice. In a piece on quality in writing, critical political debates about identity and domination may be called to mind by starting with a quote from Shakespeare, and especially from this play. These might be the words of an important feminist symbol in historical literature, depending which interpretations of the play are favoured. Or they might be reproducing or critiquing an antisemitic trope written by imperialist Britain’s most celebrated author. How or whether these complexities add to the purpose of a piece of writing is something to reflect upon if you are analysing it as a piece of literature. My reason for using the quotation here is to encourage not literary but linguistic interpretation. The prosecution of academic work might argue that, unlike mercy, academic writing in the twenty-first century is “strained”. It does not drop like gentle rain from heaven. It is wrested from us under duress; mass produced, packaged up into transportable commodities, and sold on the exchange market of ideas. From an etymological perspective there are important differences between the word “quality” in Portia’s defence of mercy and the prosecution of “quality” common in contemporary academic debates about writing for publication. The Shakespearean quote discusses the quality of mercy; that is, mercy as an integral quality or characteristic of human behaviour. Quality as used in the phrase “the quality of academic writing” means something different. It is the standard defined through an evaluative judgement of the commodity of academic writing; that is, its degree of excellence measured against predefined standards or other examples of academic writing.
One definition is an association of quality with the attainment of quantifiable standards; the other definition is an association of quality with the integral characteristics or nature of things. When considering quality in the field of education, in which I work, the former definition dominates contemporary discussion. Furthermore, the term quality applied to many facets of culture is orientated towards the use of standards as a way of assessing market value in particular. The ‘quality’ imperative in education is part of the permeation of market values in all aspects of social life, since the mid-to-late twentieth century. Following suit, education has adopted this meaning in concepts like: quality teaching and learning; quality assurance in programme development or assessment; and higher education research quality assessment regimes. In countries with research assessment regimes, quality of academic writing is regularly assessed at the national level. For example, research is nationally assessed through the United Kingdom’s Research Excellence Framework (REF), Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) or New Zealand’s Performance-based Research Fund (PBRF) performance assessment. National research assessment is significant for academic writing because, through this kind of assessment of academic writing or outputs, academics are sorted and ranked. If an academic opts to work within the formal institutions of academia, this is not something that can be ignored. How the quality of academic writing is judged by these external assessments becomes part of the constraint imposed upon research. For example, the REF apparently values diversity in research, yet its introduction has further entrenched standardised research approaches and products (Laing et al. 2018). This occurs in academic writing when authors strive to publish in similar kinds of prestigious journals with higher citation indices and editorial board members from high ranking universities, because these publications are valued more highly than others. REF, ERA or PBRF results feed into other quality measures associated with competition amongst universities, like world university rankings or bibliometrics, which are quantitative measures of research impact. These measures of quality influence student enrolments and government funding regimes (Hertig 2016; Biancardi and Bratti 2019). It is not just the writing that is assessed, but also academics, academic institutions and even countries are ranked and sorted based on these assessments. These links mean that the quality of academic writing is a value traded in a market exchange, which contributes to the wealth of an economy.
Integrally connected to the material conditions of the lives of academics, the evaluation of academic writing through national research assessments and measurement against quality indicators cannot easily be disregarded. Quality assessment of their writing is an imperative that governs the lives of academics. It can even be absorbing, and for many academics, raising their personal bibliometric scores is part of an enticing competition. For me, too. But when I think about what is meaningful in my academic work, there are many other things I strive for besides achievement in quality standards, and PBRF-type exercises often feel like a distraction from more meaningful work. What matters more to me is that the conclusions or endpoints of academic work have use value. In classical Marxism there is a distinction made between use value and exchange value. National research assessments determine exchange value. Usefulness is an attribute or quality gained through rigour, robustness, or profundity in the way research is communicated as much as through any of the other processes of research. If academic writing is poor in the quality of usefulness, it will be weaker in how it is perceived and used in the world.
This is the fourth stanza of Marge Piercy’s (1973) poem ‘To Be of Use’, a poem I was given as a photocopy at the start of my doctoral study by my supervisor, Dr. Elody Rathgen. Rathgen was a former English teacher, who viewed the world through a literary lens. In a book review she wrote for the journal Gender and Education, she expresses her pleasure at the mingling of literature and academic theory in scholarly work (Rathgen 1993). It was apposite that this poem by Piercy, an activist poet, was Rathgen’s response to my expressed desire to do purposeful research that could be put to good use. Her sharing of this poem had use value beyond its connection with my aspirations. It is something I return to in my academic writing and do so again here in part because of the poem’s connection with the usefulness of academic labour, and the quality of usefulness. Through recognising usefulness, we can conceive of other qualities of academic writing, for example, educative qualities, pleasurable qualities, or authoritative qualities. Qualities are contextual. The poem also shows the interconnection between thought and its medium of communication. The kinds of aesthetic judgements that determine good poetry starkly contrast with quantitative measurement of the quality of academic writing. American artist turned educator, Elliot Eisner, raised awareness in education of its aesthetic dimensions. Eisner (2004) reminds us that our experience of the world is qualitative, that is, cognition prompted by the engagement of the senses with the qualities of the world. From this perspective, quality is not an external assessment but an integral attribute that can be revealed through being in the world. Furthermore, quality in one media is not the same as another. The quality of a line draw from hard to soft or tapered to nothingness is an attribute peculiar to the medium of expression. That is, even when quality is represented as singular it is pluralist. In writing, qualities vary from genre to genre, and in academic writing, from discipline to discipline.
Qualities and Canons in Sociological Thought
In the fourth edition of his book, Quality: A Critical Introduction, John Beckford (2017) describes the quality imperative. For Beckford, the quality imperative is a dominating quality movement that emerged in the 1980s from American thinking on improving industry and its application in Japanese commercial contexts. His book sweeps across the history of quality management in business and government production and services. The quality movement swept across many different facets of social life. What started as a revolution to improve the factory production of goods was applied to the provision of services in industry, and, ultimately, government. “Governments are under increasing pressure to achieve service levels equivalent to those of private organisation and have sought to modernise and enhance public offerings through the application of quality methods - sometimes in conjunction with private finance, privatisation or the creation of non-Governmental Executive Agencies” (Beckford 2017, p. 3). Private finance initiatives, privatisation of educational services, and private governance through trustees or governing boards have become commonplace in education. Closely following the trend in other public and government services, quality also became a pervasive ideal in educational discourse. Take, for example, Edward Sallis’s (2002) book, Total Quality Management in Education, which aimed to bring new quality assurance practices to the leadership of higher education institutions and schools; or the OECD’s Teachers Matter activity, initiated in 2002, which centred on establishing a common language and agenda of quality and change initiatives for the teacher workforces of 25 countries. The quality imperative is manifest in New Zealand’s education system through the key Ministry of Education (MoE) initiatives. An example is the MoE’s Best Evidence Synthesis, a programme of systematic reviews of research evidence on outcomes for learners in schools that meshed with quality performance indicators (Kaur et al. 2008; Boyask 2010). Quality in these cases is measurable against preconceptions of what constitutes effectiveness, efficiency, or productivity. These are concepts related to the neoliberalisation of social life. In other words, the extension of the quality movement to academic work is allied with the pervasive extension, in the mid to late twentieth century, of business and technocratic rationalities. These rationalities commodify academic writing, a trend that cannot be escaped, only negotiated. Negotiation is sometimes approached from the recognition that standards of quality in writing are not only allied with business interests; different forms of scholarship have their own traditions and expectations, against which judgements of quality are made.
Yesterday, I sat outside on a blustery and frankly quite chilly English summer day to discuss ‘the idea of the university’ with four colleagues. I convene a social theory reading group that has a mailing list of over fifty, including academics, university professional services staff and postgraduate students from my own and nearby educational institutions, all who made a deliberate decision to sign up to the group. It has been running since the beginning of 2011, when we started by reacquainting ourselves, or in some cases newly encountering, the sociological classics: Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Simmel. While my interest in the group stems from pleasurable memories of late evening seminars as a rebellious undergraduate enrolled on an interdisciplinary paper entitled ‘Socialism’, I can’t express the motivations for most people joining this group. Most of them have never attended a meeting. Yet, there is a small core of hardened social theory enthusiasts that keep the momentum going, and recently we have been considering and discussing the nature of universities.
The reading for yesterday was a piece by Gerard Delanty entitled The Idea of the University in the Global Era: From Knowledge as an End to the End of Knowledge? and we also watched the CRASSH 10th Anniversary Lecture Series on ‘The Idea of the University’ (a series of 6 lectures delivered at Cambridge University in 2011). The Delanty piece and the CRASSH lectures made reference to the history of universities and how they have been conceptualised over time by Kant, von Humboldt, Newman, Veblen, Jaspers and others, arguing that the university is historically and contextually specific, and right now its context is economic and technological globalisation. To generalise from yesterday’s reading and lectures, it seemed to me that despite this context, the idea of the university is dominated by the longing for a liberal university where arts and sciences freely interact, rather than compete, academics are considered scholars rather than technicians, and the state intervenes in our work only as a disinterested source of funding. The speakers at Cambridge acknowledged that this ideal is sorely tested within the current political, economic and social conditions, yet Stefan Colloni argued that such longing exists not just within the academy but is also a lingering and pervasive popular desire. These reflections upon the university lead me to hazard a guess at why our social theory reading group has so many invisible members. The members of the group live life as busy professionals at the business end of higher education. Reading social theory connects to our deepest desires for scholarship and intellectual freedom, even while our reality consists of validation committees, student evaluations and action planning. (Boyask 2013, unpaginated)
Market rationality is dominant but not all-encompassing in the thought and action of academic labour. There are spaces like my social theory reading group where thought and, even if not for the majority, action are influenced by different traditions. Yet it is not quite the case that while our actions are constrained, our desires range free. The texts chosen for reading were not based on quality indicators, but on socially produced judgements. The original reading selection of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim reflect a deeply embedded and socially sanctioned schema of what constitutes worthwhile knowledge in the field of social theory. The addition of Simmel reflects a slightly idiosyncratic interpretation of the sociological canon, although his ambiguous presence is consistent with his contribution to sociology. Simmel introduced to sociological thought the notion of the stranger, who is physically present in the group but strange to its activities. The syllabus for sociologist Michael Burawoy’s undergraduate class at Berkeley Introduction to Classical Social Theory suggests that the triadic canon of classical sociology was constructed by Talcott Parsons in his 1937 book The Structure of Social Action, by drawing parallels between the work of a group of sociologists, including Weber and Durkheim, who were unknowingly working towards convergence in a theory of social action. The canon was not established just within the pages of the text, but also through subsequent engagement with its argument, and an extended critique from the proponents of conflict theory. Hence, Karl Marx’s theories of historical materialism joined with Émile Durkheim’s division of labour and Max Weber’s rationalisation to become classical threads of thought in social science.
There has been further extension of the sociological canon through debate and critique. Argument that redefines the foundational ideas in sociology and includes a wider group of theorists have expanded the canon, such as the inclusion of George Herbert Mead and a symbolic interactionist tradition (Shalin 2015) or as in our own selection Georg Simmel in what Jaworski (1998, p. 4) argues is an “essentially contested” canon. Or the canon has extended through critique of inequities in judgement, such as Alatas and Sinha’s (2017) correction of the eurocentrism and androcentrism implicit in a canon that consists only of white ‘founding fathers’ of sociology. Regardless of the nature of the canon, its fabrication is based in some social agreement about what constitutes worthwhile knowledge and its appropriate means of communication. An understanding of, and appreciation for, the canon in all its variants shows that it can be conceived as another, less overt quality standard against which academic writing is evaluated. In fact, the desired ideal of scholarly writing and its processes of revision and peer review are co-opted as tools for objectively measuring quality into quality assessment regimes. This translation of the liberal ideal of academic debate into the real world of quality assessment and its market rationality makes review processes seem lesser, that is, less robust, rigorous, and significant. Yet a resistant reading reveals it as more than that.
As a teacher of educational research, I teach my class to be resistant to the polemics between positivistic and interpretive research paradigms or qualitative and quantitative research methodology. Martyn Hammersley (2018/1989) described these debates in his assessment of naturalistic research methods, motivated by rejection of quantitative methods in the 1960s–1970s by qualitative researchers because of their inadequacy for describing the complexities of the social world. He concludes that both positivistic and naturalistic observations depend on human inference, and that while proponents of qualitative research are justified in recognising problems in quantitative approaches, the foundations of qualitative research are not secure either. Just because a methodology does not “capture all the subtleties of social interaction… it seems unwise to rule out such theories on the grounds that they do not capture the full complexity of social life as we experience it” (Hammersley 2018/1989, pp. 219–220).
Objectivity is by no means nonparticipation (which is altogether outside both subjective and objective interaction), but a positive and specific kind of participation – just as the objectivity of a theoretical observation does not refer to the mind as a passive tabula rasa on which things inscribe their qualities, but on the contrary, to its full activity that operates according to its own laws, and to the elimination, thereby, of accidental dislocations and emphases, whose individual and subjective differences would produce different pictures of the same object. (p. 404)
The significance of this point for academic writing is that both objective and subjective assessment of its qualities can be held in mind concurrently. That is, through a pluralist conception of quality, I can participate in both the qualities of a liberal ideal of scholarship, with its collegial debate and peer review, and objective assessment of academic outputs in the competitive market exchange of ideas. This is not though a rose-tinted view, where I can have my cake and eat it too. The struggle between these two conceptualisations is real; it is evident in the 44 members of the social theory reading group who never attended meetings, and my own lengthy working days and elongated career that negotiates between research, teaching and programme management. While advocacy for change to the structures in which academic writing takes place is well beyond the scope of this chapter, a fairer and more satisfying approach would see a closer alignment and meshing of the sub-plans or rationality underlying these two different functions of research quality assessment.
Thinking Within the Constraints and Affordances of a Medium
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real. (Piercy 1973)
Where are the parallels when we teach and when students learn in the social studies, in the sciences, in the language arts? How must language and image be treated to say what we want to say? How must a medium be treated for the medium to mediate? How do we help students get smart with the media they are invited to use and what are the cognitive demands that different media make upon those who use them. Carving a sculpture out of a piece of wood is clearly a different cognitive task than building a sculpture out of plasticine clay. The former is a subtractive task, the latter an additive one. Getting smart in any domain requires at the very least learning to think within a medium. What are the varieties of media we help children get smart about? What do we neglect? (Eisner 2004, p. 8)
Where are the parallels when we teach and when students learn in the social studies, in the sciences, in the language arts? How must language and image be treated to say what we want to say? How must a medium be treated for the medium to mediate? How do we help students get smart with the media they are invited to use and what are the cognitive demands that different media make upon those who use them. Carving a sculpture out of a piece of wood is clearly a different cognitive task than building a sculpture out of plasticine clay. The former is a subtractive task, the latter an additive one. Getting smart in any domain requires at the very least learning to think within a medium. What are the varieties of media we help children get smart about? What do we neglect? (Eisner 2004, p. 8)
In the second version of the excerpt, the format changes. The bold text and lighter font colour emphasize a single phrase. The bolded phrase stands out against the rest of the text, which still retains its meaning as writing, but the writing has been recontextualised; that is, through conscious reworking its significance as expository text has been made less important. The lighter font colour gives it a different kind of significance. It is now a meaningful visual context in which the main point is embedded. A medium has material properties which can be employed in different ways to foster and enhance meaning. The example of formatting text is useful because the choices made by the author are visibly different, but differences in media or genre are not necessarily as obviously different.
The Medium of Academese Versus Content
Steven Pinker’s (1994) work on language in the discipline of cognitive psychology is controversial for educators because of its essentialism. That is, he takes the position that the rules and grammar of spoken language are intrinsic to humanity and passed on through our genetics. Most contemporary theories of learning regard development as socio-culturally produced and even for Pinker his evolutionary views on language do not extend to forms of language production that he regards as cultural. For example, he is critical of others who assume the rules of reading are innate, and that children will come to know reading through whole language and immersion approaches without direct and precise instruction. It is not clear in his well-known article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Why Academics Stink at Writing whether in his mind the rules of writing are innate or culturally produced. Yet he is an advocate for its rules and is critical of the many academics he accuses of communicating through academese. He describes academese as “…prose that is turgid, soggy, wooden, bloated, clumsy, obscure, unpleasant to read, and impossible to understand” (Pinker 2014, p. 3). His argument is that academese arises through the self-consciousness of the academic writer, who goes beyond communication of the idea, and uses tools of reflexivity like metanarrative and signposting. This is a provocative yet interesting suggestion; I believe my own writing has improved by using first person far less often than I used to. Pinker claims the presentation of the author in the text is in most cases unnecessary and obscures the line of argument. This argument should be regarded with caution though because it marginalises legitimate forms of expression, that is, the clarity he seeks is at the expense of subjective modes of representation. Yet there is something appealing and resonant about his critique.
In the works of Fellini, a predominant concept is the distinction between figure and ground. However, in Amarcord, Fellini denies pretextual capitalism; in La Dolce Vita he reiterates surrealism. The premise of pretextual capitalism holds that the task of the participant is significant form. (Cameron 2020)
You get that, right? Or are you not sure? It is more likely you will understand it when you know that the excerpt is random text produced by The Postmodernism Generator, a piece of website code. The code constructs short essays from terminology common to cultural and social theory, and organised by a recursive grammar, that is, a set of rules common to the grammar used in complex written text. The sentences appear to make sense, but without intellectual coordination these strings of words and combinations of sentences are nonsensical. There is a close relationship between thought and writing, but unfortunately in this case complexity in language does not equate with complexity in thought.
Final Thoughts/Writings
Many things affect the quality of academic writing. A writer has control over only some of them. It might not be obvious when sitting in front of a new document on the screen, but there are wider social and political forces at work in defining notions of quality. While academic writing is sometimes bogged down by the quality imperative that values academic work based on its exchange value, this is not the only way to perceive quality in writing. Judgements of quality can be made from other positions, informed by different rationalities. A pluralist concept of quality is particularly helpful because it opens spaces for new and challenging forms of writing. The quality imperative underpinned by market rationality is only one way of defining quality. A pluralist conception recognises the particularity of quality, how it manifests in different ways in different places and is defined by different traditions. Qualities are the integral attributes of things. Quality judgements can be based on richer and more profound realisation of attributes than just exchange value in a market economy.
Discussed earlier in this piece were the broader disciplinary qualities, such as the sociological canon (in all its multiplicity of forms), that as reference points may form the basis of quality judgements. From an aesthetic or materialist perspective, sensitivity to the qualities of process and medium and their interrelationships with form and content can inform quality judgements. Drawing from classical Marxism, use value is a judgement of quality that can be applied to academic writing, although even this has been co-opted by market rationality. Judgements of impact are increasingly included in New Zealand’s PBRF and have long been embedded in other national assessments such as the REF in the United Kingdom. Being aware of the pervasiveness of the market can help counter being overwhelmed by it, and hence foster producing, and valuing, academic writing that beats to a different drum.