A month into my new role at NAFSA, I’ve been debating on what to present for my first blog post. Ultimately, after reading multiple articles in different fields and others’ blogs espousing various opinions on several topics and then trying to compare everyone else’s thoughts, I decided – why not focus on writing?
Everyone writes differently. Even the same person will change their writing style over time - consider a child first learning how to write in elementary school, a junior or senior in high school writing college admissions essays, an undergraduate progression towards "becoming more academic", a graduate student learning how to "be more critical", or a faculty member striving to effectively articulate their work for their students, fellow staff, university administration, and peers at academic and professional conferences. However, this does not simplify what we do as professionals. Writing is a skill that takes considerable time and effort to do well (see Berlatsky, 2016 or Strunk & White, 2000). While there are some who write exclusively in their own field, others choose to write across disciplines and utilize varied formats to reach more diverse audiences. But in doing the latter, does the essential message behind the writing change? Or in trying to find our voice for different audiences, do we lose our ability to communicate altogether? This seems increasingly relevant as international education is in itself a discipline that is, by its very nature, informed by evidence from other fields.
The debates over effective writing have been echoing across academe for a while, with some referring to a longstanding tradition of academics trying to impress (Rothman, 2014; Clayton, 2015) where others decry the use of "academese" (Pinker, 2014) and "jargonitis" (Sword, 2012). In one study, Oppenheimer (2006) actually designed a series of experiments which found that when students were given less complex texts to read they actually reported higher evaluations of the writing and overall perceptions of the author's intelligence. When presented with needlessly complex language, students were more negative in their judgments, ultimately making a conclusion from the evidence presented - "write clearly and simply if you can, and you’ll be more likely to be thought of as intelligent" (p. 153). When serving as an editor on peer-reviewed publications, or in attending a research presentation at a conference, how often have we struggled to understand what point the author is trying to get across? Reliability and validity are issues that often come up in critical discussions of research (with both praise and criticism), but what about when we approach research and our writing with the intent to be understood and showcase what we have learned (and topics for future studies) rather than to try to confuse everyone with all the acronyms and jargon we have ever heard. What methods can be used other than the traditional 45-minute research session or a 10-page peer-reviewed journal article? Or using alternative formats for lectures that don’t involve PowerPoints and instead make students actively reflect on what is being covered and contribute in discussions? Do Open Access publications provide as much in contributions to the field as in other more prestigious academic journals now run by for-profit publishing corporations? (See Gusterson, 2012) Will such contributions still be valued by our peers and our higher education institutions?
And what about future academics? An article written earlier this year in The Chronicle of Higher Education showed a rising interest in ‘nontraditional dissertations’ in the Humanities (Patel, 2016). Rather than writing what amounts to a 200 page book for their PhD, some graduate students have chosen to present their PhDs in alternative formats such as a film, a website, a collection of articles, computer games and programs, and even a comic book depending on their topic and their plans post-PhD. Research provides more evidence of this evolution in graduate student writing styles in the humanities and other subjects. Research conducted at North Carolina State University by Autry and Wojcik (2016) examined the dissertation genre to help students, faculty, and administrators grasp how dissertations are successfully produced within different fields at the university. After examining 396 submitted dissertations from 2014-2015, the report identified the majority of dissertations to fit into one of four main categories:
- Simple Traditional (aka monograph);
- Complex Traditional (i.e. an extension of the monograph reporting results from more than one study);
- Topic Based (these tend to be more theoretical with sub-topics addressing the main issue of interest); and
- Research Article (i.e. compilation of research articles which report on multiple studies).
Distribution between the different types of dissertations varied widely across the university’s 10 colleges, with Engineering tending towards research articles whereas Education favors the simple traditional/monograph style. Yet, again, what happens when the research spans disciplines? Would a student’s dissertation on STEM education that is written in the Research Article format be counted as an Engineering or an Education dissertation? Or is it left out as an outlier?
If anything, research doesn’t provide us with all the answers. It actually leads to more questions. So in writing up our research and presenting to our peers, academic colleagues, administration leaders, and students – are we getting our message across? Is it an issue of accessibility or are we speaking different languages where we know what we mean but others might not understand us? Are we getting bogged down by our discipline specific jargon, or uplifted by being part of the “in-crowd” in international education? Maybe it is more of an issue of translation and we still need to find a common language.
References
Autry, Meagan Kittle, and Karissa Wojcik. 2016. Dissertations at NC State University: A guide to understanding what dissertations look like. Report. Raleigh, NC: NC State University, The Graduate School. Direct Link
Berlatsky, Noah. 2016. Why most academics will always be bad writers. Vitae blog. Direct Link
Clayton, Victoria. 2015. The needless complexity of academic writing. The Atlantic (Online), 26 Oct 2015. Direct Link
Gusterson, Hugh. 2012. Want to change academic publishing? Just say no. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Commentary blog post. Direct Link
Oppenheimer, Daniel M. 2006. Consequences of erudite vernacular utilized irrespective of necessity: Problems with using long words needlessly. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 20(2), pp. 139-156. Direct Link
Patel, Vimal. 2016. Ph.D.s embrace alternative dissertations. The job market may not. The Chronicle of Higher Education, Graduate Students (Online). Direct Link
Pinker, Steven. 2014. Why academic writing stinks. The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Chronicle Review (Online). Direct Link
Rothman, Joshua. 2014. Why is academic writing so academic? The New Yorker (Online), 20 Feb 2014. Direct Link
Strunk, William, and E.B. White. 2000. The elements of style. 4th ed. New York: Pearson. Link
Sword, Helen. 2012. Inoculating against jargonitis. The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Chronicle Review (Online). Direct Link