#WhatMakesWritingAcademic
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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
Said before the gpts were imposed on us:

'epistemic virtues such as truth, integrity, justice, innovation and research [...] require an ethical orientation towards honesty [...] that must be intentional & originate from [...] the writer.

#WhatMakesWritingAcademic
www.bloomsbury.com/uk/what-make...
Since it emerges, ‘academicness’ is not dependent on the presence or absence of specific features relating to language, genre moves or argument. If what made writing academic could be reduced to these specific features, then hoax academic papers such as those by Alan Sokal (Cuthbert, 2018; Franca & Lloyd, 2000; Sokal, 1996, 2008) and Ike Antkare (Labbé, 2010; Labbé & Labbé, 2012; Van Noorden, 2014) would count as academic in virtue of the fact that they display the features that standard academic writing programmes readily teach as ‘academic’ (such as the passive voice): despite displaying conventional academic forms, hoaxes promulgate ‘nonsense’ (Alvesson et al., 2017) and, in so doing, they fail to adhere to the standards of excellence (MacIntyre, 1985) inherent to socio-academic practices (SAPs). These SAPs include epistemic virtues such as a commitment to the truth (Connell, 2013), to academic integrity (Zgaga, 2009), to social justice (Case, 2013) and to innovation and research (Warnock, 1989). Such commitments require an ethical orientation towards honesty, an orientation that must be intentional and originate from an agent, in this case the writer. Neither an automated generator of academic jargon (C. Labbé, personal communication March 25, 2014; Labbé & Labbé, 2012) nor the deliberate human intention to mislead and distort disciplinary knowledge (Sokal, 2008) is commensurate with these standards of socio-academic excellence. It is in this sense that academic hoaxes do not count as academic because academicness cannot be reduced to its forms and because there are no inherent standards of excellence from which academicness can emerge. Clearly, however, those who published these articles, the editor-readers of Social Text and Springer (for Sokal and Antkare, respectively) believed them to be genuinely academic, probably because they based their judgements of academicness on the form of the texts (i.e. they looked and sounded academic). Sokal (2008) has document…
November 17, 2025 at 5:17 PM
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
pacespaceou.bsky.social
Wee glance into the sorts of discussions we get into at #PACEspace 😱 {JM}:

kick-starting 2025 with a session on 'Commitment, Risk, and Voice' in #DoctoralWriting #ResearchWriting #AcademicLiteracies ✍️

@ougradsch.bsky.social

#ZombieNouns #Nominalisation #AcWri #PhDLife

#WhatMakesWritingAcademic👀
PACE Workshops Block 2 Session 1 Writing the Doctorate Commitment, risk, and voice Julia Molinari January 8th 2024 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) Book cover of The Scientist’s Guide to Writing, 2nd Edition: How to Write More Easily and Effectively throughout Your Scientific Career, Stephen B. Heard Starting points: Legions of undergraduates have been told that scientists should write in the passive voice (and never, ever, write “I”). This advice is wrong. The passive is prevalent in the literature – but it hasn’t always been, and the tide is shifting back towards the active (Heard, 2022, p. 174) 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
January 7, 2025 at 4:29 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
A humanistic approach to #GAI:

"humans communicate on the basis of word-world
relationships, [...] AI technologies [are] to word-word'

#AcWri #ArtificialIntelligence #CompositionStudies #Humanities #CriticalRealism #WhatMakesWritingAcademic #Emancipation #AppliedLinguistics #HigherEd
rdcu.be/d3AMw
ChatGPT and the separation between knowledge and knower
rdcu.be
December 15, 2024 at 7:11 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.bsky.social Pete Smith @reddite.bsky.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
[4/end]
I strongly advocate for a theory of praxis because ‘things do not speak for themselves’. In an #AcWri context, this means inherited norms about #WhatMakesWritingAcademic need theorising because in some cases such norms may be harmful, ie they may stymie #HumanEmancipation (as defined by CR).
December 3, 2024 at 7:33 PM
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
From #STEM to #Feminism in #HipHop, others too are asking #WhatMakesWritingAcademic: surely range & reach of citations matter?

Seth, PJ (2023). The First Time I Heard: Black Feminist Approaches to Hip Hop Methodologies. Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies 23(5) 427-436.

doi.org/10.1177/1532...
Shifting the Burden of Proof: Hiphopography and Critical Reflection as a Method Despite academic publications asking that we abide by rather narrow means of writing—neat abstracts, cohesive findings, and succinct conclusions, thereby excluding knowledge that may lend itself to alternative forms of representation (Molinari, 2022)—AD Carson recently had great success pushing the boundaries of academic disciplines. Carson worked with the University of Michigan Press to publish the first-ever peer-reviewed rap album. A combination of storytelling and academic scholarship that uses sampled and live instrumentation, repurposed music, film, news clips, and original rap lyrics to perform an engaging meditation on belonging and home, Carson (2021) recalled a moment in which his classmates said that it was “unfair” they had to write papers, learn different languages, and read required texts when “all he had to do was write rap songs.” Reflecting on his doctoral studies and the publication of his album, Carson offered the following:
November 27, 2024 at 9:31 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
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
It's shamefully tame compared to the titans I'm reading but this is my piecemeal ongoing contribution to engaged and emancipatory academic writing practices

#FinalProofs
There's more of this in the pipeline but it takes time to read-to-write
#WhatMakesWritingAcademic
#CriticalRealism
#SocialJustice
JOURNAL OF CRITICAL REALISM https://doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2024.2429225 A rational case for a critical realist theory of academic writing Julia Molinari Graduate School and Department of Languages and Applied Linguistics, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK ABSTRACT Academic writings– writings that take place in academic settings, from undergraduate essays to research monographs – are social practices and methods of knowledge enquiry. In virtue of being social and epistemic, they should be of concern to critical realists because of critical realism’s stratified approach to reality. By critiquing approaches to academic writing that can flatten reality, I propose that if academic writings were understood as ontologically stratified social practices, they could afford writers the rational judgement to make textual choices. Specifically, I show that there is the possibility to produce discourse that is different from standardized ‘objective’ and ‘transparent’ academic prose, which, inter alia, also has colonial roots. If academic writings were understood ontologically and epistemologically as practices and methods of enquiry that require writers (i.e. agents) to rationally judge what form their texts should take, this could further academic writing’s educative and emancipatory purpose of advancing knowledge and justice
November 25, 2024 at 7:19 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
serenissimaj.bsky.social
Having said that, maybe the requirement to anonymise will end up favouring #GAI generated manuscripts instructed to be 'objective and 'formal' #Acwri #WhatMakesWritingAcademic
November 1, 2024 at 11:12 PM
serenissimaj.bsky.social
Ok, so MacIntyre disses Aristotle: Aristotle was 'not a nice man', more of a 'supercilious prig' aka snob (p. 66).

[ntm #WhatMakesWritingAcademic - I don't think 'prig' is on the #AcademicWordList & #GAI probably flags it as 'not academic' but I could be wrong ;-) #tleap #AcademicLiteracies #AcWri]
Cover of 'A short History of Ethics' Routledge
October 25, 2024 at 6:54 PM
serenissimaj.bsky.social
Both went ok as far as I'm concerned ⚡

They raised uncomfortable Q&As about whose standards, rules, reality, facts, epistemic virtues, and justice are served by how we write & publish academically.

#WhatMakesWritingAcademic
#AcWri
#tleap
#AcademicLiteracies
#SocialJustice
#METM24
#CriticalRealism
Some of the resources that inform my talks (not all, but some I recently used to teach) Julia Molinari, October, 2024, wearing sunglasses and walking against a treed-backdrop
October 22, 2024 at 10:34 PM
serenissimaj.bsky.social
Sharing 2 talks I'll be giving in the coming months because they both excite & terrify me.

Informed critical & constructive reactions are much appreciated🙏🏼

#IACR2024
#METM24

warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/law/...

www.metmeetings.org/en/on-re-ima...

#CriticalRealism #AcWri #WhatMakesWritingAcademic #GAI
Title (required) Making the case for a critical realist theory of academic writing: does this matter for human emancipation? Abstract (required) Academic writing - writing that takes place in academic settings, from undergraduate essays to research monographs – matters because it is a method of knowledge enquiry. As such, and looking ahead, it should be of central concern to critical realism and its ontological project of ‘reclaiming reality’, especially as ‘artificially intelligent’ texts challenge the notion of a ‘human’ writer. Academic knowledge has a textual form, which, as Andrew Sayer highlights in his Appendix to Method in Social Science: A Realist Approach (1992), can influence how knowledge is re-presented. Moreover, since academic writing is also linguistic, my case for a critical realist theory of academic writing draws on Roy Bhaskar’s Enlightened Common Sense: The Philosophy of Critical Realism (2016), whereby an ontology of language pivots “on distinctions between the d On re-imagining academic writing as an act of love Julia Molinari, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK Écrire est un acte d’amour. S’il ne l’est pas, il n’est qu’écriture. —Jean Cocteau In his existential book on the difficulty of being (La difficulté d’être), French writer, dramatist, poet, and film director Jean Cocteau refers to literary writing in ways that may help us re-imagine and humanise academic writing beyond performative and algorithmic tendencies. I have cited Cocteau (1957, p.151) in French in an act of what Suresh Canagarajah and other sociolinguists have referred to as “translanguaging”, the multilingual practice of communicating knowledge by drawing on one’s full linguistic repertoire to re-appropriate and democratise meanings by retaining their original voice, rhythm, and nuance. Translanguaging thus becomes a positive meaning-making practice that disrupts monolingual monopolies on meaning and replaces negative connotations of “linguistic interference” with gen
June 4, 2024 at 7:47 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