Fall 2024: Post 02 - Academic Writing

I teach academic writing at college. This is the style of writing that students have to do to earn good grades in their various college courses and to eventually earn their degree. Unfortunately, too many of my students don't seem to understand what academic writing is, so I want to provide my definition. However, sometimes it's easier to explain what something isn't rather than what it is.

Fortunately, I have a fine example of poor academic writing from one of my favorite bloggers: Josh Bernoff, who writes the blog Josh Bernoff, based on his book Writing Without Bullshit: Boost Your Career by Saying What You Mean. Mr. Bernoff is a professional writer and editor, and his blog talks about how to be a better writer than you already are.

In a recent blog post "This impenetrable opening paragraph violates every writing principle simultaneously", Bernoff gives an example of the kind of prose that good writers avoid, and as it happens, his example was written by two university academics: Michael M. Crow, president of Arizona State University, and William B. Dabars, an ASU professor and administrator. Bernoff quotes the entire opening paragraph from their recently published book The Fifth Wave: The Evolution of American Higher Education:

Building on the arguments of our previous foray into this topic, this book envisions the emergence of the Fifth Wave in American higher education—a league of colleges and universities, spearheaded initially by a subset of large-scale public research universities, unified in their resolve to accelerate positive social outcomes through the seamless integration of world-class knowledge production with cutting-edge technological innovation and institutional cultures dedicated to the advancement of accessibility to the broadest possible demographic representative of the socioeconomic and intellectual diversity of our nation. The Fifth Wave primarily augments and complements the set of American research universities, which, for reasons that will readily become apparent, we term the Fourth Wave, but will also comprise networks of heterogeneous colleges and universities whose frameworks are underpinned by discovery and knowledge production, and institutional actors from business and industry, government agencies and laboratories, and organizations in civil society.

This is not the kind of writing I will teach students this term; yet, this is what many of my students think academic writing is all about: dense, jargon-laden prose that only book nerds and specialists can plow through. Sadly, too many academicians write like this. I suppose they think it makes them sound smarter and more educated, or perhaps that's the style they learned from their professors and mentors. Whatever the case, this is NOT the style of writing that I teach. Rather, I teach that the best academic writing is clear, engaging, and difficult only when the material is difficult — and as it happens, the material Crow and Dabars are discussing is not really that difficult. I teach writing in the style of Bernoff's revision of the above paragraph. Bernoff says it this way:

American universities have reinvented themselves four times. It’s time to do it again. 

We propose a league of educational institutions, led by a few visionary public research universities. They will adopt a set of core principles: the pursuit of positive social outcomes, continued excellence in research, and adoption of videoconferencing and other technological classroom and networking tools. And they must have as their overarching goal the desire to empower and expand opportunities for students of all races and classes. This is only possible when educational institutions of all kinds work together with leaders from industry, government, and other institutions.

Isn't that better? I think so, and I'll bet you do, too. This sounds as if real people wrote it — not a couple of robots from the basement of the university library. Bernoff sounds more real because he uses real language. For instance, he avoids puffed-up jargon when simpler language says it just as well. He uses first person we (the book has two authors, so plural) instead of this book as in the original version. Many academicians tell students not to use first person — I or we — in academic writing, but that's the first step towards stilted, turgid prose (you're reading this on a computer, so google turgid if you don't know what it means, and make it a habit to learn new words). I will teach you how to use first-person in your academic writing. It really does make for more readable prose.

However, I also remind my students that some of their college professors don't like first-person in academic writing. For those professors, students should write uglier prose like the above, and those teachers will have to read it. That seems fair punishment.

Academic writing is a mainstay of Western intellectual culture, especially academic culture and conversation. In their book Clear and Simple as the Truth (2011), authors Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner call this kind of writing the Classic style, and their title pretty much captures their point about this style of writing: it is as clear and simple as the truth. As they say it, "a natural language is sufficient to express truth; and the writer knows the truth before he puts it into language" (3). 

(Teaching moment: note that I just used an outside resource to support my point about academic writing. First, I paraphrased Thomas and Turner's definition of the Classic style, and then I used a quote from their book to further support, amplify, explain, and expand the point I just made. In both cases, I documented my source. Of course, I told you the source of my quote, but even when I paraphrased in my own words, I told you the source of my idea. Note also that I made my point in my words first (academic writing is a mainstay …), and then I supported my point with outside sources. If you read carefully, you'll see that this is the main pattern in the academic essays we will read this term: make your point in your words and then support it with outside authority using their words. You should use this pattern. Also note that I did not use strict MLA style to document my source. This is a blog post, so I used hyperlinks to point you to my sources. MLA does not yet use hyperlinks, though it does use URLs on the Works Cited page, so I reserve MLA style for academic essays.) 

So here is the lesson about academic writing: learn something worth someone else knowing, and then share that knowledge in language that makes it as easy as possible for your reader to understand. That's academic writing as I teach it. It's what I try to do in my blog posts and academic essays. The writer should always work harder than the reader.

I have written this post for two main reasons: first, to explain what we're studying this term, and second, to introduce you to blogging in the college classroom. I use blogging as a space for writing that is less formal than most academic writing while still trying to be learned and intelligent. Blogging is a step up — or two steps up — from most social media such as texting but more casual than academic papers. It's a good middle ground where we can discuss academic issues without dressing up, but without dumbing down, either. Note that I cited my sources above and even provided a link so that you can access the original documents that I used. I expect the same of your posts.

I also expect you to leave comments on your colleagues' posts, so learn how by leaving a comment for me in this post. Make a substantive comment. "This is so true" and "I agree" are not substantive comments, unless you clarify why this post is true or false or why you agree or disagree with it. Expand the conversation. Be intelligent and thoughtful. As a writer, your job is to bring value to the reader. If you don't do that, then you wasted the reader's time, and you will earn a failing grade from me.

If you can't figure out how to leave a comment, google "post comments on blogger". Google knows the answer and explains things in language that makes it easy to understand. Google Help is actually a pretty good model for academic prose, or in Thomas and Turner's words, the Classic style. Pay attention to how Google does it: they have the knowledge, and they share it in easy to understand language. You should strive to do that: learn something valuable and share it with others. That's what writers do. Anything else is bullshit.

Fall 2024 Post 01: Introduction to Keith Hamon

I'm writing with you this term, so here's an introduction to me.

I've worked in education all of my professional life. I have a doctorate from the University of Miami in composition and rhetoric, and I expected to teach college English forever. However, life has a way of shifting. My first job in 1982 at a branch campus of the University of Houston transitioned me into educational technology. I set up an academic support center and computerized it. This was back in the days before you could even get a degree in computer science, so lots of different people in different academic departments were doing computers. I installed the computers in The Communication Center that I directed and networked them to the campus network. The World Wide Web did not exist then, so we used FTP and IRC to communicate with other users, but mostly, we used word processing to write papers. And yes, they were papers. We still printed everything to give to a teacher. As you may have noticed, I don't do that anymore. In my classes, we write online documents, not papers.

I left the University of Houston for Mercer University here in Macon to set up, computerize, and network another academic support center. In 1989, I moved across town to Wesleyan College to become their Director of Information Technology. In 1995, I went to Monroe County (GA) Public Schools to build a county-wide network and put all their teachers, staff, and students on the Web. In short, I had completely shifted from teaching English to full-time educational technology, which is why I use so much technology in all my classes now.

Though technology was my day job (I liked it and it paid more), I still really loved teaching English, so I always taught adjunct classes—mostly at Georgia College and State University. In 2011, I retired from the State of Georgia and took a full-time teaching job at a college in Florida. I didn't like the school much, so I won't mention its name, but I started looking for another position within six months, and in 2015,  Middle Georgia State University offered me a position teaching English composition and literature. I took the job, moved back into my Macon home, and here I am working with you.

In Summer 2022, I retired again. After all, I'm 73 years old (my birthday is Oct 09, the first day of class), and I want to do some other things in life besides work full time. I've started playing pickleball, for instance. Still, I'm teaching part-time, and ours is the only class I'm teaching this term. I look forward to it.

That sums up my professional life, but I can also give you a few personal facts: I'm married to a beautiful Bahamian woman — we celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary this past August 30 — and we have two sons, both grown and gone. Almost eight years ago, our youngest son and his then-wife gave us our first and only grandchild, a thoroughly lovable girl named Madeline, or Maddie, as most of the family is calling her. I am head-over-heels in love with her, and if you stand in one place long enough, then I will bombard you with a thousand pictures. She's worth it. This past Christmas, Maddie and I were in Nassau with my wife's family. Life is good.

This is my introduction to the class. It's an example of the kind of introduction I want you to write for the class. Help us connect to you as a real person. And yes, you can add a picture.

Leave a brief comment to my post, and make sure that you are logged into your Google account so that I can identify you. Anonymous comments are bad form — too much like trolling. Let's treat each other with kindness and respect.

Fall 2022 Post 14: Blogging as a Tool for Learning

I have written for as long as I can recall.

Of course, for the first forty years I wrote on paper: scraps, lined yellow pads, journals, blank typing paper. For the past 20 years, I have written mostly on computers. For the last 12 years, I've written on my blogs—first, a personal blog about my family, and then a professional blog. I'll talk mostly about the professional blog since my personal blog is closed to public access. My professional blog is called Learning Complexity, and I invite you to read the last post I wrote. Yes, I know it's an overly long post, but I'm working out my ideas there, and that can take some extra time and space.

Learning Complexity is where I learn. I explore all my new ideas on this blog first, and then later, I identify and rework the good ideas, the ones that stick, into scholarly articles and presentations. But I don't write anything professionally that isn't written first in my blog. See, I believe and practice what I preach to my students: I write first to learn what I think about some issue, and then I rewrite my best ideas into academic essays that I'm comfortable sharing professionally. By the time I actually write something for publication, I have already written and rewritten it several times in my blog.

Now, lots of the stuff that I write in my blog is never published or presented professionally. It isn't good enough. I make lots of mistakes in my blog, but that's okay. My blog is where I'm working out my ideas. It's where I'm writing through lots of ideas to learn what I really think about some issue. I'm fortunate to have a group of scholars who read my blog and who often leave comments about my formative ideas. Likewise, I read their blogs to keep up with their new thoughts. Thus, our blogs are extended conversations we have to help each other with new ideas. I find value in their thoughts, and they seem to find value in mine — at least, enough value to keep reading and commenting. By the way, I've never actually met most of my readers, but they have become my good friends over the years. Think of our blogs as online coffee shops where we gather from time to time to discuss interesting ideas.

For the past year, I've been writing about complexity and narrative, what I call rhizo narratology. It's a tough line of thought for me that was prompted by my inability to understand why so many of my family and friends admire Donald Trump, who I saw as a disaster for America and the Republican Party. Trump was a polarizing figure in America, so most of you know passionate people on both sides of the arguments about his presidency. I've written a few silly posts that I no longer accept. Still, I had to work through those silly ideas to get to the better ones. I'm pleased to say that I have a much better understanding of how seemingly bright people can look at the same facts and see entirely opposite realities. My new understanding about the stories people tell about Donald Trump (both for and against) has not changed my assessment of his presidency, but it has given me a more sympathetic view of the people who saw him as the savior of America. I think I can understand why they felt that way, but given my initial bias, I had to think really hard and do lots of research to understand their point of view. In other words, I had to write a hell of a lot to finally learn something. That writing has made me a better person. Likewise, writing will make you a better person.

But first you have to write, even the silly stuff. Here's something you can learn from someone who has been writing for nearly 60 years: it's a lot easier to fix a silly or poor idea that you've written down than to fix an idea that you haven't written down. Write your ideas down, even if they are silly. You can fix them later. I do, and it's worth doing. Writing is how I learn.

Fall 2022 Post 12: No bad sentences

This post continues the previous post about shouting, because nothing shouts louder than poor, hard to understand sentences. Poor sentences shout, "Hey! I don't know how to write, and I don't care enough about my reader to fix my poor sentences." Poor sentences shout a profound lack of respect for the topic, the language, and, mostly, the reader. It's like showing up for a first date dressed in a tee-shirt, cut-off sweatpants, and flip-flops. You are signaling to your date that you really don't care enough about them to dress up. You probably won't get a second date.

In his post "No bad sentences," Josh Bernoff notes that even the best of writers write poor sentences from time to time, but no one gets to read them because great writers edit, edit, edit before they publish. You, too, should edit before you publish your essay to your teacher. If you have a good friend who can write well, then share your essays with them. Better yet, take your essay to the Writing Center or the Student Success Center. These centers will help you both in person and online. Use them.

There is no shame in writing poor sentences, but there is great shame in not fixing them, especially since you don't have to fix them by yourself.

Fall 2022 Post 11: Shouting

We are nearing the end of the term where I find it appropriate to talk about cleaning up your academic essays to make them more readable, more acceptable to an academic audience. As is often the case in this blog, I'm prompted by a post from Josh Bernoff entitled "Cheer down: How to create drama in your prose without shouting," in which Bernoff discusses the bad writing habit of shouting, or shouting, DAMN IT!!!!

I just shouted by using italics, bold, underlining, colored font, background highlighting, all caps, profanity, and exclamation points in a post that should be more academically toned. As Bernoff notes in his post, this kind of shouting is really poor form, especially in academic writing, and is a sure sign of a novice writer. This kind of shouting undermines your credibility as a writer, which is the worst thing that can happen to an academic writer. If your readers lose faith in you — especially your teachers — then your relationship with your readers and your grades will suffer. Bad news.

Shouting in writing is not always a sign of poor form. Advertisers shout all the time to get your attention quickly and focus it on some product or service that someone wants you to buy. As it happens, sex and money are the top two attention getters, so a company such as Burger King will use sex to focus your attention on their burgers. The exact relationship between eating Burger King hamburgers and hot sex is never quite explained, but apparently gullible men will buy their burgers anyway and hope.

But this is not the kind of writing that we do in college, and most of you will never write ads for a company. Unfortunately, almost all of you text, and people who text are very fond of shouting — mostly through unusual grammar, punctuation, and spelling — LOL!!!

All of you know what LOL means because you've seen it in your own texts or the texts you read. You use it daily. That's fine in your text messages to your besties and beasties, but it is just awful in ur academic writing. See? And did I mean your or you're. I'm not quite sure, and neither are you. Bad form.

In his post, Bernoff is not writing to an academic audience, so he does not mention the number one form of shouting in academic essays: non-standard grammar, punctuation, and spelling. Most students regularly turn in essays with grammar, punctuation, and spelling that shouts to the teacher: "Hey! I'm a novice writer who can't do any better." When you submit an essay with unusual grammar, punctuation, and spelling, then you are telling your teacher one of two things:

1. You're incompetent. You can't spell, and you don't even know that you can't spel. See?
2. You don't care. You know that you can't spel, but you don't care enough to run spell check to correct the errors.

This is similar to when I used to schedule in-person conferences to discuss my students' work with them. If a student showed up to my office poorly or barely dressed and smelling like last night's party, then I assumed that either they didn't know any better or they didn't care. Neither message builds trust between that student and me, nor does it encourage me to work with them and spend any more time with them than is absolutely necessary. This almost never works in the student's favor.

So what's wrong with shouting? Just as with someone shouting at you on the sidewalk, shouting in your essays draws the reader's attention away from what you are saying to how you are saying it. This almost never works for you in an academic essay. So don't do it. Rather, keep your reader's attention focused on what you are trying to say rather than on how you are saying it.

Fall 2022 Post 10: The Local Maximum Paradox in Writing

Mountains Beyond Mountains

I've just learned another lesson from my favorite blogger Josh Bernoff. In a recent post entitled "The local maximum paradox: why you often must go backwards to find fulfillment," Bernoff claims that the popular advice to always be pushing forward is not always so productive. In this post, he's giving a life lesson rather than a writing lesson, and he uses the mathematical concept of the local maximum, which is a maximum point of measurement (could be height, weight, or anything else) "within some neighborhood that need not be (but may be) a global maximum" (Wolfram MathWorld). Early in life, Bernoff was a mathematical prodigy, so he likes mathematical examples, even in writing. So what's his point, and how does it apply to writing?

Bernoff says that in our life pursuits we often aim for some high goal such as becoming a nurse, a computer programmer, or a business owner. We often make this choice when we are at some low point professionally: such as a recent high school graduate. We push and push to become a nurse, for instance, and when we attain that high status, we have a new viewpoint from which to view life, and we see that there are other, higher ambitions that we couldn't see before, but that we now want to achieve. The problem is that to get to those higher peaks, we often have to travel downward from the peak we've worked so hard to achieve. This can feel like going backwards, but it's the only way to start climbing the other peaks.

Some of you in this class are facing this same paradox. You have climbed a peak in your current profession attaining some status and position through hard work and effort, but now you see a higher peak, or at least a more attractive peak, that you want to achieve. To get there, you have to return to college, starting at the bottom in a freshman English class, and start climbing again. This can be a most daunting task, but it is about the only way to climb the other peak: walk down from your current peak.

Writers often face this local maximum paradox, as I did about six months ago with a children's novel that I wanted to write for my five-year-old grandaughter. I'm writing a 40 thousand word fantasy novel for pre-teens (she'll be about that old before I can finish it and find a publisher, if at all). It's about a girl, of course, who is on an adventure with two companions: a boy sasquatch and an older male rabbit. They start in Georgia, bound for northern Ontario, Canada, and I got them as far as a mountain in North Carolina. I have written the beginning and the ending of the novel, but I'm stuck midway in North Carolina. I can't figure out how to get from that mountaintop to the Blue Mountains near the Georgian Bay. So I've stopped writing for six months, and now I'm beginning to think that there ain't no good path from here to there. I may have to go backwards and start over again.

As you can imagine, I don't want to do that. I've written some pretty good stuff to get to North Carolina, and I don't want to delete thousands of words, but I'm beginning to accept that I can't go forward from here. I'll have to turn around, backtrack, and forge a new path, losing all those fine words I wrote. Of course, it breaks my heart and discourages me, but if I want to continue writing this story, then I'll have to do it.

My students often find themselves in the same paradox with their academic writing. As they near completion of a writing assignment, they realize that they've made a mistake. Perhaps they misunderstood the assignment, and now they see that they are about to turn in the wrong essay. Or perhaps they read an authoritative essay that changes how they interpret their topic, and what they thought was one way is now another way. For whatever reason, they realize they are about to crest the wrong peak with the wrong essay, and they can see a better peak in the distance, but the only way to get there is to climb down the peak they are currently on.

The problem is: they are almost finished. They have 900 words of a 1000 word essay. They really don't want to abandon all that writing. They know that what they have is not their best writing, but at least it's almost done. So what do they do?

You may be surprised that I say this, but in some cases students should settle for poorer writing and probably a poorer grade. If students are facing this dilemma the night before the paper is due, then they have little option but to turn in something, even if it isn't their best. Turning in something is almost always better than turning in nothing.

However, if they are writing a few days prior, then they can notify their professor, explain their situation, and ask for an extra day or two so that they can submit a better essay. I will certainly give them more time, as will many professors. Remember, all professors prefer to read better essays than poorer essays. Promise us better, and we'll probably give you the time. However, don't promise us the day after the essay was due. We are already suspicious of you by then and in little mood to be gracious. Communicate up front.

Fall 2022 Post 09: Tone in Academic Writing

Sometimes Josh Bernoff writes a string of posts that all speak to me. His September 30, 2022, post entitled "Tone matters. Yours should be authoritative, but not boring" addresses an important issue for my writing classes: tone. Tone is a problem for many of my students who have mastered the casual familiarity of texting but not the authoritative tone of academic writing. Bernoff has some enlightening points to make about tone in nonfiction writing, and I explore his comments in this post, applying them specifically to academic writing.

Tone Is Always Important

First, Bernoff defines tone in terms of the reader/writer relationship, which is very important to the way I teach academic writing. He says, "Tone is the way in which an author’s prose choices communicate the author’s relationship with the reader." This relationship is tricky for many students because academic documents are written mostly for people we don't know very well, if at all, and thus, we are often unsure about the relationship we should have with them.

Compare this to texting where we usually are writing to people with whom we have a clear relationship: friend, sibling, parent, boss, lover, colleague, or whatever. We already understand the relationship, and most of us are adept at using a tone that fits that relationship. Moreover, when we use a tone that doesn't fit the relationship — like telling our friends to clean-up their rooms — then our friends are usually quick to let us know that they don't like our tone and that we'd best change it.

But much academic writing is written for people we don't know well and may never know, so our relationships with them can be obscure. Moreover, most academic writing is supposed to be written from a position of relative authority. By relative authority, I mean that the writer is supposed to know more about the topic than the reader. Readers usually read nonfiction to gain expanded or new knowledge about something that interests them, and they will quit reading if they come to suspect that the writer doesn't have any new, useful information to share. But college reverses this usual reader/writer relationship forcing students to write to a teacher who usually knows more about the topic than the student does (there are exceptions, often with humorous results — at least, humorous for the students if not the teacher). When we are forced to write for someone who knows more than we do about the given topic, then we know that we are not writing for the purpose of helping someone learn more about some topic in which we have valuable expertise or experience; rather, we are writing for the purpose of being judged by a teacher who knows more about the topic than we do. No one likes being judged, so most students don't like writing for their teachers. That's one reason why I always give my students a different audience: so that they can write from a position of relative authority. You don't have to know everything about a given topic — your academic major, for instance — but you do have to know more than your audience.

So what is an appropriate tone with an academic audience? Bernoff says that we must be authoritative but not boring. The correct tone in an academic essay says, "These are the things that I know. I discovered them through research, experience, and expertise [which I document for you]. I am sharing them because I want you to benefit." This authoritative tone implies that the writer is worth reading because the writer is knowledgeable and wants to enrich the reader's life with some useful information.

Note that the first and most important job of the authoritative tone is to convince the reader that you, the writer, know what you are writing about. Losing the confidence of your reader is a disaster for an academic writer: academic readers will stop reading you and teachers will give you poor grades. So the first principle of solid academic writing is to learn something relevant and useful to your reader and to back it up with documentation. Basically, you say something like: I believe X and so does Albert Einstein, as he says here: "blah blah blah" (204).

The second job of the authoritative tone is to focus on the content, not the writer. If you use personal experience to make your point, keep the focus on the point and not on yourself. Remember: your reader is trying to learn about which major they should choose and how. They are not so interested in learning about your anguish and angst in choosing your major, so don't dwell on it. Mention your personal experiences if necessary, and then move on to how your experience is useful to the reader.

And how should you not be boring? Bernoff has some fine suggestions based on his years of writing nonfiction, so look them over.

I'll close by again comparing and contrasting the texting that you do daily with the academic writing that I'm asking you to do. Texting means that you are already a writer; however, you are not likely texting to academic readers and academic issues; thus, your tone in texting is not appropriate for your academic essays. This means that most of you will have to write and then rewrite several times your essays to find the correct tone that captures an authoritative yet engaging relationship with your academic readers, including your teachers.

Leave a comment about your own approach to tone in your academic essays and how it contrasts with your texting tone.