Keet Winter | Away with dry academic writing
For the first academic essay I wrote, my professor deducted a point for making a joke in the title. According to him, this did not meet the requirements of academic writing style. Since that point deduction, I have been obediently doing what is expected of me. But I no longer enjoy writing for the university.
An academic text, according to the UvA website, must be clearly written, contain a clear research question, and have an appropriate structure. Wordplay and other creative expressions do not fit these requirements. The creativity of an academic text in academia, it seems, is in the originality of the topic.
An academic text should be unambiguous. But the rigid academic form makes writing feel like a fill-in-the-blank exercise: name your main question, refer to sources, announce what you are going to do, do it, and say what you did. This makes everything sound bland, and academic writing is often garbled and long-winded.
The words “academic” and “creative” may seem like contradictory terms, but, of course, they are not. Working out a thought on paper is, by definition, creative. There are also plenty of examples of texts that break with the rigid template of academic writing, yet are considered by many to be full-fledged, sometimes even brilliant academic works. The work of French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy is a good example – his work reads almost like a novel. Texts that vary from a rigid academic writing style are often the ones I find most inspiring. This is why I am saddened to find that my fellow students and I have fallen into somewhat of an inspiration-free rut when it comes to the writing style of our assignments.
In September, in addition to studying philosophy, I started the Creative Writing course. There and in other writing courses, you learn pretty much the opposite of what you did in college. The golden rule: show, don't tell. Above all, don't announce or explain anything; the reader is smart enough to pick out the essence of the text for themselves. If, as a writer, you don't preface everything, the text becomes more exciting for the reader.
I studied philosophy because I wanted to be a writer, and many of my favorite authors have studied philosophy, including Lieke Marsman, who recently wrote an article for the NRC about the “imitation syndrome”: due to the ubiquitous high workload in our society, we tend to imitate each other more and more, she argues. We do what is expected of us while in reality, we are jaded and uninspired.
I recognize this feeling from writing papers for my studies. Therefore, I advocate a more artful academic writing style because I am convinced that this will lead to more passionate academics. Let's use word jokes in our titles, and apply the principle of “show, don't tell” to our theses. This would make academic texts more stimulating to read. Of course, the clarity of the piece should not suffer from the writing style, but more creativity in science would only enhance the reading and writing pleasure of students and academics.
Keet Winter is a philosophy student at the UvA. This was her last column for Folia.
Folia is always looking for good columnists. Do you have a sharp pen and an opinion about student affairs and the university? Send an email to redactie@folia.nl.
