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
"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...
![book cover design featuring a stark contrast between text and imagery. The title "Risk in Academic Writing" appears prominently in white text against a deep blue background at the top, followed by the subtitle "Postgraduate Students, their Teachers and the Making of Knowledge."
Starting points: ‘How to Books’ on academic writing […] tend to over-generalise, over-simplify, de-skill students […] implicitly and explicitly perpetuating a restricted and deficit model of student competence and language use. The Guides […] tend to focus on how students can imitate existing conventions based on massively problematic assumptions about student homogeneity and the stability of the disciplines (Thesen and Cooper, 2013, p. 4)](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:eohd3dwrkvb5fvlovcchugif/bafkreiheuf3aal6bmctky6mk5iowsczds5j4hwjwga7jvpae2sp454lmgm)
![Image of a newspaper article depicting an orange brain against an orange brick wall to represent how writers become alienated from their writing.
Starting points
Academic writing: why no 'me' in PhD?
[…] by removing the first person point of view and the active voice from your writing, what you're actually doing is removing yourself. […]
This is a big problem since more than half of the academic writing that already exists is on subjects that are difficult to understand for most non-academics. And when you remove the distinctive self (or voice) from your writing, it can become unbearable to read. When you alienate the 'I' from your dissertation, you are taking a big risk: turning your writing into a mere juxtaposition of facts and figures.
https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2013/apr/19/academic-writing-first-person-singular](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:eohd3dwrkvb5fvlovcchugif/bafkreighkam6yawrx5q7mtoxiqje6fgohv3t34vj26brylrvtzpfwqaxqq)
