The Academic Writing Gap Nobody Talks About

Hi everyone, I'm Dr. Courtney Watson, and today's masterclass is on academic writing. So what we're gonna talk about today is how language that's used in your dissertation differs from the language that you use during your previous coursework. I get a whole lot of questions that are related to feedback that my clients and my students get from their dissertation directors and committee members. So what we're gonna talk about today is just what is academic writing? What does it mean to hear that your writing needs to be more academic for your dissertation than it was for your coursework? And how do we address that? What are some of the things that we do? So we'll have a few tips and tricks after we have a thorough exploration of the problem. So first off, what is academic writing? So academic writing, all it is, is just the language we use to convey our expertise in our discipline. So academic writing tends to be very discipline-specific. It's specialized. It often features jargon or acronyms. But what it does, the purpose of that academic writing and the words that we use, is that it— that type of language identifies you as an insider or an expert within your discipline. So that's why it's useful, that's why it's needed, and that's why you have to become very, very comfortable using it. So academic writing is like— it's made immediately distinctive by its tone and its weight and the gravitas of it, the vocabulary that you, that you use. And really, with the possible exception of legal writing, academic writing is the most formal of all writing styles by far. So, and the reason that it's so formal and there's so many so many different things that make it distinctive is because it's governed by the most rules. So anybody who's spent any time in grad school, particularly thinking about the writing, knows that there's lots and lots of rules that govern academic writing. And part of the difference that you see with coursework is even though all academic writing is, is very style-based, very rule-based, and governed by those style— the style guides, they are adhered to much more closely. So the rules and conventions are adhered to much more closely in dissertation writing than they ever were during your coursework. So I, I have lots of students who, you know, they do great in their coursework, clients that I work with, they've done great in their coursework, then they get to the dissertation phase and they just feel like they've hit a wall. Um, because maybe during their, during their coursework they were maybe doing everything right, getting all A's, having a really high GPA, thinking that everything is, is fine and great and well and good, but then they get to their coursework and they're Oh no, or then they get to their dissertation and they're like, oh no, something has gone awry here. And fear not, because it is not just you. This is a well-traveled passage for many a graduate student. So we'll talk about why. So the rules are a big part of what govern academic writing, so especially at the dissertation level. And some students are really well prepared to make that leap because their programs were real sticklers for their styles, which might be APA, might be Chicago, might be Harvard. So they're well prepared, but most are not. Most students, the writing that they do in, in their doctoral programs resembles the writing they may have done in college, may have done in their master's program, which was probably successful for them in the past. But then they get to the doctoral program, they get to writing the dissertation, and all of a sudden the work that they've done, the writing that they've done, what their writing style is, it's just, it's found wanting. It's found to be not good enough, and they're getting all of this negative feedback and they don't know why. So to talk about that, dissertations in general are a a really weird animal in academic writing, and part of that is because the expectations are really different. The expectations for your dissertation are very different from anything that you've written in the past, and the reason for that is because the purpose is also very different from anything that you've done in the past. So dissertation writing is different because expectations differ from the expectations of coursework. To talk about why, I, I go back to the comments that I get from my editing clients where they're like, everything was going great and then I hit the dissertation and now it's like nothing— I I can't do anything right with my writing. And they feel like the stakes have raised not by a degree or two, but by degrees of magnitude, orders of magnitude. And it's because they have. There is no other reason than the expectations have suddenly become much, much higher for the quality, the quality of your writing and the aptitude, the degree of aptitude that you express. So hopefully your coursework has given you, you know, the runway you need to build and develop your dissertation writing skills. But sometimes it hasn't. Sometimes it doesn't do, it hasn't prepared students to the degree that they now realize they need to be prepared. So I'm a professor, I've been a professor for well over a decade of graduate students. So I've been on many dissertation committees, I've chaired a few, and I just know that what I'm looking for in an assignment or a final paper from my students is very, very different from what my expectations are from, for a dissertation draft from my students or with the clients that I work with. I get many, many clients who come to me and they're like, like, all right, here's, here's the problem, here, here's what we're dealing with. So this is something that's very, very common. So if you're, if you're getting feedback, a lot of feedback about your writing, don't worry, we can, we can talk about how to fix it. So in your dissertation, your writing is expected to have graduated beyond the level of skills that you were asked to demonstrate in your coursework. So when you're thinking about your coursework, you're thinking about the course objectives, maybe the program objectives as well. And as long as in a course, as long as for an assignment you demonstrate A, B, and C, your knowledge of A, B, and C, you're all good, you're getting an A. But then when you take A, B, and C and you're suddenly asked to basically write a book about them, that changes the game a whole lot. So that's where a lot of people start to struggle. So it is a, a fairly substantial leap also in the level of skill and the level of literacy that you're expected to demonstrate when you're writing at the dissertation level. And the work that you're doing at this point is not being evaluated the way an assignment would be evaluated. Like, yes, there's probably a rubric, but not in the same sense that there was before. So instead of being judged the way or evaluated in the way that you would have been with an assignment, suddenly your work is being looked at a lot more closely. Your writing is being looked at a lot more closely, and it's being done in, in a scope that is much closer to that of an editorial review for a peer-reviewed journal article or work done for a book publisher, whether it's a chapter or an entire manuscript. So this comes with a whole new set of standards, and you're no longer being compared to just your classmates. You're being thought of as an academic peer, and that is a big leap to make. That's a big leap for anybody to make. And so the questions that are going through your dissertation advisor's mind, your committee chair's mind, your whole committee's mind is not, you know, what grade has this student earned on this paper, but rather, will this research that this scholar has done pass muster, and could it survive the crucible of the peer review process? So we know when we're thinking about peer-reviewed academic writing, what goes into an article that undergoes peer review and comes out the other side successful and reaching the point of publication. You're just— you want to take your writing from the way it is to just reaching that gold standard of academic research. And that's why it feels like the work you're doing it can feel so uphill and so arduous and so difficult, because you're no longer being evaluated as a student but rather an academic peer, which is a whole different ballgame with a whole different set of expectations. We know during the peer review process, which I've served as a peer reviewer before on a couple different academic journals, and it's just the work that is submitted and undergoes the editing process in peer review, especially the work that's successful and ends up being published, is just written at such a high level. So when you're thinking about you know, does my writing sound academic? Look at your writing, look at something you've written, and then look at something that has been published in one of the journals that you would probably be aiming for. Look at some of the, the work that you're citing and ask yourself, do these read at the same level? Something to keep in mind though, I always like to say that by the time an article, or particularly a book like an academic monograph, by the time those get published, it's practically a group project because you've read it and edited it to death. The editor has edited it. The peer reviewers have made all of their comments and generated all of their feedback. It's gone through copy editing. It's gone through like all the things. It's done all of the steps. And that's kind of like, that's kind of what you're being judged against. So you want to think about that and you want to think not like, oh, could this earn a grade in the class, but could this 'You know, could this be up for contention for publication? Like, is— would this be something that could possibly be published?' So that's kind of how— that's kind of the shift in mindset that you want to have. And that's something that the dissertation process really does for you as well. It takes you from the mindset of being a student to being a scholar or an active researcher, a working researcher. And so think about that and keep that in mind. One comment that I see a whole lot from my editing clients that I work with they get these, they get these comments, and some of them it's like, what does this even mean? I don't even know. I don't know how to interpret this. But the one that is probably the most common that I see that's related to writing is make your writing more academic, or make this sound more academic. And they're like, I, I don't even know what to do with that. I don't, I don't know how I'm supposed to interpret that. So this can— this comment can refer to a multiple of, a multitude of things. So it could be they might be referring to you know, your adherence to different styles and different style guides like APA or Chicago or Harvard or Turabian or whatever. Are you making the most of footnotes? Are your, you know, paragraph and chapter lengths appropriate? Is it structurally sound? It might be that, probably not, but it could be. More commonly it's like use of sources and how you're using your sources, and that's another shift that you make in this this writing that you're doing as you're going from being a student to being a scholar, it's no longer important, or it's no longer enough to be using sources to substantiate your claim or rationalize what you're saying or support your argument. It's really how you're using those sources. Are they being used appropriately? Are they being synthesized? Like, is your analysis synthesized? Are you putting the sources in conversation with each other? Are you really going in depth with your source material? And exploring it to, you know, the ultimate breadth and scope that you can. Something that I do see quite a bit with use of sources where a student will get a comment about making their writing more academic is that they'll make a claim and then they'll cite it, like in the parentheses they'll cite like 5 or 6 different sources. So they're just all stacked together. I don't let my students do this and I encourage my clients not to do this. As well, just because then you're not exploring the distinctions made by each source, and you're saying all of these just sort of agree with what I'm saying, but you're not saying anything distinctive. You're not talking about the specific contributions that each one of those sources is making. So you're really not using them— you're not using them to their best advantage for you. So that shows a lack of analysis, a lack of synthesis, and kind of a lack of care in your writing as well. And so you want to make sure that when you're using sources, they're really well incorporated. You introduce, you introduce them, you discuss them after. It doesn't look like it was just plopped in because you, you made a claim and you later realized that you needed to substantiate your argument. You want to make sure that your sources are timely, that they're well chosen, that they're well integrated. And when we talk about timely use of sources, unless you are referencing like a foundational study in your field or in your discipline, you want to make sure that the sources you're using are no more than 3 to 5 years old. You want them to be timely, you want them to be relevant, and you want to show that you know what the current conversations related to your topic are, what the current conversations in your discipline are. You want them to be as recent as possible because that's what's really making your paper different, or what's making your project different than all of the ones that came before it. You'll find lots of projects that have sources that are, are from 10 years ago because they were written, you know, 7 or 8 years ago. You want your stuff to be as, as timely as it can be, as recent as it can be. So keep that in mind as you're writing. So timely, well-chosen, well-integrated. Are you using sources enough? Are you using them too much? Are you using them too little? Too much is probably the easiest one to edit for. And this is something that when I'm working with my clients, I strongly encourage them because a lot of people like to use block quotes of like just very long quotes, anything over 40 words in their dissertations. And those really, you need to understand as a writer, you need to understand those really have limited utility in a published journal article. You will not, for the most part, you will not see more than a couple quotes like that in an article. They're just, they're not that useful. Useful. It just looks like they're taking up space. The reader's eyes skim over them. So you want to be really careful about what sources you use, how you use them, and just make sure that you're using those quotes effectively. I would say, if you're looking for a rule of thumb, I would say no more than maybe 5% of your entire dissertation should be quotations, with the exception of Chapter 4 when you're reporting out what the discussion was like. So when you're, you know, citing people from your own study, if you're doing a qualitative study, that's fine. But for the rest of your paper, especially like chapters 1 and 2 and 5, you really don't want to have an inundation of quoted material. Just use it carefully. Be very judicious because you have, you know, a limited amount of real estate in your dissertation and you want to make sure you're always getting the last word and that the primary voice being heard in the dissertation over and above all of the all of the citations you have and all the references you're using is yours. So just keep that in mind. Something else that is really clear to me when students are getting the comment to make their writing sound more academic, with a lot of the clients I work with, it comes down to a matter of drafting. And what they're doing is they're, they're submitting a first draft or even a second or third draft, and the writing's just not there yet. It's not polished to the level that it needs to be. By the time that an article, like a professional peer-reviewed article, gets published, it's been edited, you know, a couple dozen times by various people. So not just the writer, but like the writer, and then you'll have the peer reviewers' comments, the editor's comments, the copy editor's comments. So that's another thing that, that sort of separates out published work from work that's in progress or work that's just not ready to be submitted. So keep that in mind. You should not be submitting first drafts of any of your work. Like, even if it's, it's something that's like a milestone or just a checkpoint in your dissertation process, you want to make sure that the work you're submitting is at least a second or third draft, because it takes two or three drafts just to get through all of the little mistakes, just to get all of those out of your system and make sure that it's as clean and polished as it can be before the hard work begins of looking at, you know, developmental issues such as like, is the theory sound? Is the, is the conceptual framework going to support the paper, the question's good. So before you get it— get to any of the big questions, the big issues, you want to make sure that at least the writing that you're submitting at each phase is as clean as it can be. So keep that in mind. So a good section or chapter of a dissertation has likely been outlined, drafted, written, and revised multiple times. So make sure you're holding yourself to that standard with your writing. Some other things to consider when writing a dissertation to make your, your writing and your language sound more academic, a lot of work should go into the pre-writing you do before you even start with the actual writing. So what does that mean to be a good pre-writer and an effective pre-writer? One great place to start is with outlines. I know every project that I do as a scholar, I use extensive outlines. I can have, you know, for a 30-page chapter, I can have an outline that's maybe 10 pages long. That is not unusual. If I'm, if I'm writing a book, the outline might be 30 or 40 pages, uh, just because that's where I get a lot of my ideas out. That's where I do a lot of initial cleanup. That's where I find out where things work really well and other things aren't working at all. Just getting a lot of that early work done in the outline before I ever commit pen to paper, uh, to write it for real. And so make sure that you're outlining not just your whole manuscript, and not just your chapters, but also sections of your chapters. Like, you can outline down to the paragraph level, you can outline down to the sentence level. Something that I get a lot, I see a lot in my clients' work, just the people that I'm working with as their editor, they get feedback from their faculty that they need to work on their topic sentences and they need to work on their summative sentences. So the, the people who are evaluating, so the faculty members that are looking at it, they like what's in the paragraph, but they don't think that there's a good setup for the paragraph, and they don't think that this— the paragraph ends well either. And that's something that outlining will really, will really help you with, because then you know, like, what the goal is of each paragraph. And that sounds like it's getting really, really in the weeds, but at this level of writing, that's where you need to be, is really in the weeds. So, and just having a plan, it makes the process go a whole lot more smoothly. Something else that you want to think about: good writing is revising. Like, good writing is writing that has been reviewed and revised and reviewed again and revised again. Writing, like, particularly writing well, is an iterative process. So you have your initial draft, you go through, you do a developmental edit where you're looking at like the big picture problems, then you do a structural, mechanical, grammatical edit where you're looking at the little stuff, and then you do a citation edit to make sure that you're within the guidelines of, you know, the academic writing that you're supposed to be doing, that you're following your style book, if it's APA or Chicago or Harvard or whatever, and you're just— you're, you're checking all the boxes, you're doing all the things. I know when I'm editing someone's work, so when I'm working with my clients, that's really what my process looks like. I read everything they send me at least 3 or 4 times just because I want to get— I'll read it the first time just to get my initial impression The second time I'm looking at the big developmental issues, like with the— like, is the theory sound? Is there, you know, continuity and momentum throughout the draft? Does the writing flow? All of those things. Then I'm looking at like issues with grammar, diction, syntax, all of that. And then I'm looking at style. So I'm looking at APA or Chicago or Harvard, and does it align with all that? So, and that's the level if you're doing your editing yourself. That is as granular as you want to get with the editing. You want to get really, really in the weeds with it and just be very comprehensive and very thorough. And that is what also makes for very good writing. So revising makes a big difference. You should never be submitting a first draft. You really shouldn't be submitting a second draft or probably a third draft either. So you want to make sure that you're editing at the chapter level, the section level, the paragraph level, the sentence level. You want to be going through that writing with a fine-tooth comb and just seeing anything that doesn't, doesn't look right, doesn't sound right. You want to edit for repetition. And are you using the same words over and over again? And are you starting each sentence the same way? This is where we really get into like your style as a writer as well. Is it being well expressed? Can you hear the writer's voice when you're, when you're reading the piece? So those are all things to think about. Really think about how you're expressing each concept that you're writing about. Ask yourself, does this feel like it's ready to undergo the peer review process? Like if you were to submit it to a journal tomorrow, with the understanding that the peer review process is, is absolutely brutal. About 5%, depending on the, on the journal, at a top-tier journal it's about 5%, sometimes less than that, of articles that are submitted that eventually get published. So for every 100 articles they receive, they're going to publish maybe 5 of them. On a good day. So keep that in mind, like the competition out there is really fierce and writing a dissertation is an exercise in demonstrating that you understand that and that you're ready for it, you're prepared for it, your writing is prepared for it, your ideas are prepared for it. So just, just keep that in mind. And also when you're, when you're thinking about who is submitting to these journals and more than that who is getting rejected from these journals everybody who submits in their discipline is an expert. So it's not people who don't know what they're talking about who are getting rejected from journals and publishers. It's people who are also experts. So you're not being evaluated against just anybody. Your writing's not being evaluated against just some person who, who woke up and decided to write about your topic. Now, your writing is being judged against people who are your peers in the field. Who have maybe been doing it a lot longer than you have. So just keep that in mind, like, that is what your committee is trying to prepare you for, that's what your dissertation advisor is trying to prepare you for. If you want to be a published scholar in your field, it's really, it's not enough just to have a great idea. Like, you have to write about it really, really well too. So keep that in mind when you're thinking about the writing process and the drafting process and the editing process. So, and again, I say that as someone who is a professional editor and who does academic writing and editing basically every day of my life. So just, just keep that in mind. I've served as a committee member, a dissertation chair, a peer reviewer at academic journals, an editor, and so these are the things that I see every day. So I'm looking at things like language and vocabulary, clarity, is there a nice sense of continuity and momentum throughout? Because we know you're having these great ideas. Everybody who's writing at this level is having great ideas. It's just a matter of how are you expressing them. Are you, are you writing as cleanly and dynamically as possible? So those are just a few things to think about. If you have any questions, I will, I will be in our community, so please feel free to ask. And good luck, happy writing!