Being able to read academic writing efficiently and understand it is a key element of being able to

write it. So when I give you tips about recognizing elements of academic writing, those tips are
designed to help you build your own skills. See today’s other handout (“How to Read Academic
Papers without Freaking Out”) for specific tips for reading articles. This handout will give you
some practice in seeing strengths and weaknesses in writing.

Let’s start with George Orwell’s “Rules of Writing”:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in
print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an
everyday equivalent. [my addition: but only if the everyday equivalent is just as precise in
its meaning].
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous

Good and bad academic writing: student and professional

Remember the general principles of Academic vs Non-Academic writing on Table 8.1 in your
textbook (pg. 122). As that table suggests, there is more flexibility for good non-academic writing
than there is for good academic writing. Often, non-academic writing is more personal, leads
with low-level details or anecdotes and doesn’t clearly identify its central argument (its thesis).
Academic writing must do ALL these things, so be aware that much of the writing you are used
to reading contains habits that you should not imitate in when you are doing academic writing.

Review pages 11-12 (a reading from earlier in the course) for reminders about the principles of a
strong academic paragraph. To make these principles work, you have to understand high levels
versus low levels, and you must be able to write relatively concise sentences with clear grammar.
Note that poor sentences (see below) can be grammatically correct, on a technical level, while still
being horribly unclear and poorly written. Two easy “fixes” to identify and correct a poorly
written sentence:

 Is the sentence full of many 1-4 letter words (conjunctions, articles, prepositions, relative
pronouns, etc)? This usually means it is poorly structured and strung out. Repackage it so
there are more “heavy weight”, meaningful words and fewer short words.

 Is it clear which nouns go with which verbs? Are verbs and their accompanying nouns
close together (within a few words)? If not, the sentence will become hard to parse out.
Poor professional academic writing: Identify what makes these paragraphs hard to
understand.

Analysts of global integration have been rightfully concerned with elucidating global inequalities.
But increasing interconnectivity has also created possibilities for seemingly marginal people to
affect larger patterns of interrelation. By concentrating on how economic power is deployed by
dominant global actors, analysts of globalizing processes have largely overlooked the ways in
which quotidian acts such as consumer demand across the globe influence economic relations,
however asymmetrical those relationships might be.

Jeremy Prestholdt, ‘On the Global Repercussions of East African

Consumerism’, American Historical Review, 2004

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations
in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to
repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of
structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as
theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure
inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and
strategies of the rearticulation of power.
Judith Butler, “Further reflections on conversations of our time” Diacritics(1997).

Good professional academic writing (high level terms are highlighted, low-levels are
underlined):

Despite his many protestations, the narrator is not bored with the pathetic stories he is
forced to tell, nor is he simply disgusted by them. Rather, he is enchanted by a figure that has
fascinated poets, artists, and theologians through the ages: the suffering, tortured, dying woman.
By writing the Legend, he participates in a long history of desire for expiring women, their
speeches, their songs, their masks, and their corpses. Its roots lie in Greek tragedy, classical
rhetorical exercises, and hagiography. Its descendants are many: the operatic diva’s swan song,
the liminal women of Pre-Raphaelite painting, the Bohemian vogue for L’Inconnue de la Seine,
the iconic status of Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana. The appeal of tragic women is enduring,
but also prompts ethical repugnance. Augustine was notoriously disgusted with himself for
weeping excessively over the dead Dido, a poetic fiction who distracted him from his own
spiritual death. After Princess Diana’s demise, she was widely considered to have been martyred
by the public’s hunger for images of her and by the journalists and photographers who satisfied
that demand.

- Irina Dumitrescu, “Beautiful Suffering and the Culpable Narrator in Chaucer’s

Legend of Good Women”, The Chaucer Review 2017.

Social comparison is a second potential pitfall of using social network sites. Repeated self-
comparison has been linked to negative outcomes (White, Langer et all 2006) – particularly when
the comparison is to a superior other (Tesser, Millar 1988). Social network sites provide constant
opportunities for social comparison. When users compare their lived experiences with others’
curated self-presentations (ie perfect Pinterest projects; see Boyd & Ellison 2007 for a review of
self-presentation on social network sites), they may feel their lives are lacking and, thus, suffer
from envy and depression. Individuals who use social network sites more passively, such as by
viewing profiles without interacting with other users, may be at the greatest risk for social
comparison. Not only do they fail to reap the benefits of the connection-promoting use of these
sites, they may also lack the information about their connections’ real lives to recognize that the
selves put forth on social network sites are constructed. – p. 306, textbook

Poor student academic writing (note: these are examples that I wrote myself but they are
stylistically similar to student writing I’ve encountered)

Critical Response (Essay #2):

But how do we know that Garfinkle really thinks this about these issues? Garfinkle thinks
different things and sometimes it is said by him that his view is the dominant one. Social autism is
a term that ignores people with real autism, it is evident that it is offensive to name that. Garfinkle
just doesn’t get it, he keeps trying to make his argument that in the event of technology affecting
our lives, it will make us seem like we have a disorder when actually it is offensive to them to say
that.
- Lisa Simpson

Summary (Essay #1):

In the essay by Carl Sagan titled “The Fine Art of Baloney Detection”, argues that basically you
really need to know what baloney is if you’re gonna live your life. He points out that mediums are
always scamming people, trying to get money, and even though he feels sorry for them because he
understands since his parents died and he felt that empathy, he then goes on to explain why
Ramtha couldn’t be a real person and how this is the first thing to ask when people are saying that
they see supernatural things. It is then presented that the lies of childhood are put by Carl Sagan to
be inappropriate for adults, which is why you don’t believe them. He uses this idea to go into the
baloney detection kit.
- Hermione Granger

Strong student academic writing:

Critical Response (Essay #2):

Beyond the evidentiary failings of the essay, Garfinkle demonstrates a deep inability to step
outside his own worldview and consider the subject from a perspective beyond his own. The
intellectually elitist and ableist nature of the essay is the most obvious example of this. “Mediated
electronic interactions” Garfinkle claims, “create forms of what could be called acquired social
autism.” (5) This deeply offensive claim intimates that not only is Autism a neurotype possible to
be acquired, but that it is undesirable and that Autistics, by extension, are flawed. Many within the
Autistic community would argue fervently with this claim. Technology not only does not have the
ability to “create” autism, but it has in fact allowed Autistics to better interact with a world not
designed to cater to our neurotype, and facilitated the deep thought that Garfinkle believes is only
attainable through deep literacy.
Deep literacy has not, in fact, been a cornerstone of all society throughout history, as
Garfinkle claims. Deep literacy has been a cornerstone of privileged society. Those who have the
privilege of the intellectual capacity to engage with written word. Those who have the privilege of
sight, of the money to afford literature to engage with, the free time to sit and read, and the
neurotype to sit quietly and read without the mind wandering. Not all humans throughout history
have had the fortune to have all markers of privilege line up so that they are able to engage in the
deep literacy that Garfinkle believes is so important to the development of society, and yet society
still managed to develop. Politics still evolved, technology was still invented, and the world kept
turning. Returning to a critical lack of evidence prevalent in the essay, there is absolutely nothing
to suggest that society is somehow less literate today than it has historically been, and in fact, it
may indeed be more literate.
- Dayna Wilson