Academic writing has always been an integral part of education at schools and universities. It's often seen as a good way of training students to prepare for further writing after they graduate, especially those of the academic sort. However, no one's really thought about whether student academic writing really prepares for success in writing for the "real world", and I think the tensions between academic writing as a student and academic writing as a professional should be explored.
This topic, on first thought, seems pretty trivial. Why wouldn't student academic writing prepare you well for professional academic writing? As a student, you're obviously learning how to write when you're writing. You write an essay, hand it in, get it graded, then receive feedback from your teacher. Maybe you could have phrased this better, maybe you could have provided more information that would provide more explanation.
When I was in primary school, I learnt about the "PEEL" structure: Point, Evidence, Explanation, Link. First, you have a topic sentence where your state your point. Then you provide evidence for that point, then explain how the evidence links to your point and why it shows that your point is correct. Lastly, you tie the paragraph together and link back to your initial point.
However, why is it that we are asked to write in this way? What are we really trying to achieve with this kind of writing? When we are writing about a topic, why do we try so hard to be clear, structured and persuasive?
The reason why we write like this is because we want to score the points, to tick all the boxes. We want to show the teacher with the utmost clarity that we understand the topic well. The purpose of our academic writing isn't to write about the topic or change the ideas of the reader, but to show the reader the ideas of us, the writer. And it's pretty important to distinguish between the two. With student academic writing, the centre of focus is in us as the writer, and not in the reader or in the writing itself. However, in professional writing, what we require is the opposite.
Frankly speaking, our teachers read what we write because they are paid to do it. If it weren't for the money, the chances that they would still be interested in our writing is 0%. And why should they care? The things we write as students provide no value to the reader at all. And when we graduate from school, if we keep on writing in the same way, we're only going to meet with disappointment when we realise that no one cares about our work.
So what do we need to change when we transition from writing as a student to writing as a professional?
Firstly, we need to focus on the reader, and not on ourselves. It's over if your reader doesn't care about the things you're writing about, because they won't read it. So you need to make sure that the things you're writing about is of interest to your readers, and to do that you first have to know what they care about. Stop thinking about writing in terms of showing off what you know, and think of your writing as a way to change what your readers think. Find a topic or a problem that your readers care about, and write to help them change their thinking on that topic, or to fix the problem.
Secondly, we need to think in terms of argument, not explanation. As students, we often get asked "why do you think this?", and then we attempt to explain what is going on in our minds. This question is what teachers use to understand what is going on in our heads, in order to evaluate our learning progress. But once we graduate from school and become professionals, no one cares about what you think. What they want isn't to understand what goes on in your head, but to refine and improve their own ideas that are occuring in their heads. Therefore what you need to do isn't to provide an explanation, but an argument. Focus your attention on your reader's way of thinking, and try to add value to their thoughts and ideas. Only then will they find your work valuable and helpful.
That's not to say that we shouldn't learn academic writing at school. Frankly speaking, there isn't much we can do to improve the situation. It's true that writing at school hones and refines our writing technique, and we do require feedback in order to improve on our writing. However, I think the most important thing we need to do is to know the difference between writing as a student and writing as a professional, and make sure that we don't write like a student when we're writing as a professional.
Above are some thoughts on the disparity between what we learn in school and what is really helpful in society, structured around the topic of academic writing. A lot of inspiration was taken from a Youtube video titled "The Craft of Writing Effectively". It's the first lecture of a writing course by UChicago, and its purpose is to teach people how to succeed at academic writing. After watching this lecture, I thought that it would be a good idea to write a bit about it, because it's not something we often think about.
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