I hope you all had a wonderful MLK day. My wife and I did spend a bit of time during the holiday showing our 12 year old some clips from Dr. King and talking through the power and importance of his work. But I spent the glut of my three-day weekend on something else: Academic writing…
As I have mentioned before, I am excited to have chapters coming out in two different curated books this year. Chapter 1 will be all about the power of connection in, “International Perspectives on the Role of Technology in Humanizing Higher Education” published by the Centre for Advanced Research in Higher Education (HETL). Chapter 2 is more data / study driven, exploring a better way to approach student success through, “Early Warning Systems and Targeted Interventions for Student Success in Online Courses” published by the Digital Learning Lab out of the University of California at Irvine.
While I have been involved in curated chapter publications in the past, these two works are the biggest and most ambitious for me. It excites me to write chapters that are Goldilocks in nature – not too academic while also being academic enough – just right. Which brings me to my blog post today.
I realize that many of my faculty colleagues spend more time researching and writing than any other academic activity. I have a friend who is working on a PhD dissertation looking at just how much Professional Development professors engage in. As most PD is at the sole discretion of the individual professor, it may not be a surprise that more than 80% of that PD is discipline specific (vs specific to teaching, learning, innovation, administration, etc). But what did surprise me is how many of the more than 1,000 faculty surveyed suggested that PD comes in the form of literature review reading for papers they plan to submit. While that idea alone is likely worthy of another blog post, this suggests that between the act of researching personally and the act of reading others research for the purpose of PD, academics are engaging in reading and writing academic works most of the time.
Which brings me back to my curated books.
I spent the majority of this weekend reading through (blind) chapters of other authors. The editors from one of the two books have asked authors to work together to create the best possible chapters. This means checking for grammar, syntax, spelling, and the like. But far more importantly asks us to proof one another’s works for logic, credibility, and argumentation, etc.
However, in reading chapters from colleagues around the globe, it dawned on me what a microcosm of all academic writing / reading this was for me.
For now, let us put aside the idea that the majority of published works will never be read by more than a tiny fraction of people and in some cases, no one at all. The antiquated notion of journals requiring fee-based subscriptions, especially when considering the thousands of such publications in existence ensures that nobody will read most any of the works, whether important or not. Luckily, the books I am writing chapters for will be eBooks, available to anyone with a desire to download them!
But far more importantly, as someone who has been reading scholarly writing for decades, including a multi-year stint as the Director of an Academic Research group, working with dozens of professors at dozens of universities to create many, many publications, I struggle with the entire genre. And I believe this weekend is a great example of why. See if you agree.
Let me call out two chapters specifically. I could not tell you who wrote them even if I wanted to (blind reading, remember), so this is not an attack on any people. But these two chapters were a fantastic example of academic writing’s shortcomings.
Chapter A was about a quantitative study performed in another country. As such, I believe the writer is not a native English speaker, so there was a fair bit of grammar and syntax to mark. But the style is not what I want to talk about. It is the ‘academic-ness’ of the writing that I want to call out. The chapter was approximately 22 pages of text and another 5 pages of references. Do that math in your head for a moment and try to guess how many citations there were, per page.
It was staggering. The text had almost no flow and dozens of points were seemingly interrupted to tie them to some other study or paper. But then, as I delved a bit deeper, I discovered that many of the citations were papers, chapters, or articles exactly like the one I was reading, meaning that there were citations of (effectively) literature reviews as if those aggregations of work had proven any kind of point. The work was academic to the Nth degree. But by the time I read through it once, I struggled to see the main point and I struggled to connect many of the dots, because the sources and affiliations were just overwhelming. It reminded me of papers I had written in college assuming more citations would overwhelm the professor through “shock and awe”, ensuring me a good grade. While that worked on occasion, it also got me a few bad marks with professors noting that my paper did not actually make a point.
Chapter B was antithetical to the Chapter A. While this chapter saw a few citations, there were not nearly as many, and importantly, not nearly enough. The writer took incredible license drawing conclusions (therefore, as a result, etc) which were not genuinely conclusive. The arguments included sweeping generalizations (“all faculty have a tremendous heart for students” or “all faculty want to be responsible for finding new and emerging technologies to enhance the classroom experience”) without a single source or reference to back them up. (In honesty, they did not even pass the “smell” test much of the time as they seemed patently incorrect.) The work made predictions of how the entire culture of higher education’s teaching and learning would transform if only the findings from this extremely small instructor survey were simply adopted, carte blanche.
I got tired of writing, “reference?” over and over and over again. I struggled to the point where I started editing the work more like I do with my students than with a peer. I actually used the term ‘pollyanna’ more than once in describing the uber-optimistic, unsubstantiated future depicted. But there was one more significant issue.
I hearken back to my good friend Dr. Gordon Sanson. He retired as a full professor from Monash University a few years ago and worked with me at Saint Leo to really transform our teaching and learning story through technology and also through process changes. But over the years working with Gordon I can tell you his utter dismay at the “bad” research coming out of most liberal arts publications. As a scientist, used to rigorous standards for research, Gordon consistently came to me poking hole after hole in some of the seminal works and most of the small articles from education, communication, and instructional technology. And so, as I channeled my good friend over this past weekend, this particular chapter really pained the researcher in me.
The chapter was based on a “quantitative study” based survey of faculty at two institutions, yet there was no quantitative analysis instrument used to draw correlations, let alone conclusions. There were no numbers run – no F tests, no T tests, nothing. There were several ties made across answers and general topics, but no qualitative analysis used with thematic or semantic or rhetorical analysis…nothing. It appears the researcher interviewed a number of respondents, eyeballed the feedback, and made a ton of conclusions.
Sigh.
Don’t get me wrong. There were other chapters that were quite powerful. They were written well and detailed an appropriate number of sources and citations to make their case, while still providing a meaningful narrative for the reader. And obviously, I’m not saying which book this weekend’s review was for. You’ll need to read them for yourself and see if you can figure it out (although hopefully the review process will do as it is intended!).
I’m sure you get my point. Academic writing seems to take on the characteristics of these two articles a lot and it is frustrating to a person who finds value in the studies but also wants desperately for them to make a difference in our world. But I hope you will indulge me in one final point.
This week starts week 2 of my communication courses. We are discussing narrative and my students have been asked to watch a TED talk and comment on the narrative elements used by the speaker. But as occurs almost every term, my students start talking about the “believability” of the speaker. They take the (excellent) narratives he tells and transform them into credibility (just as Aristotle said they would), even though it really is not warranted. While the speaker does indeed have credibility, the students have absolutely no knowledge of his authority on any subject, yet they accept his message quite blindly.
I read recently that we now have the most educated, illiterate citizenry of all time. I don’t think it’s terribly controversial to suggest that we have more people who can read than ever before in our nation’s history, yet we have less people reading informational communication than ever before too. We have people who refuse to listen to points of view which oppose their leanings, ingesting messaging from only a few sources, many of which are not credible at all. But like my students, when the story is told, it is believed completely because it not only reinforces what is already believed, but it has the heir of authority.
Please hear me, I’m not saying to disbelieve everything. While I think healthy skepticism is a good thing, I know that other factors play into this. History is one. I think of guys like Michael Feldstein (@mfeldstein67) and Phil Hill (@PhilOnEdTech) whom I have read for years. They have a track record of no-nonsense, unbiased, deep-dive reporting. They do not have to cite sources every time they make a claim, because I know that they know what they are talking about. If a source is needed, they’ll cite it.
But in general, we have a nation of people who follow opinion journalists instead of news anchors, social media conspiracy theorists instead of investigative reporters, and influencers instead of authorities.
Could academic writing be linked to all of this? I think of education as a lighthouse of sorts. We should be modeling the best behaviors, while tying reality to theory whenever we can. Yet we seem to struggle to do so in our own writing. Has that erosion of quality writing, sound sourcing, and logical arguments pushed through to mainstream media? And if so, can we help reel it in and get it back?
I hope so. It’s important. It’s important for academic writing, but it may be a signal that we have to adjust and get it right for everyone else too.
Good luck and good learning.