AI writing is not scholarship because it is not committed to the truth, has no intended audience, and draws on stochastic archives (as opposed to research). #WhatMakesWritingAcademic #WhatMakesAcademicWritingHumane
#AcWri
#AcademicWriting
Summary Drawing from critical realism and building on previous academic studies and writing theories and practices, the author advances approaches to academic writing that are both human and humane, by situating academic writing within the broader critical realist project of furthering human flourishing and emancipation; of what it means to be human; and of why things matter to people. Addressing what counts as human(e) in academic writing has become pressing, as concerns about machine-generated texts, such as Large Language Models like ChatGPT challenge understandings of truth, knowledge, and justice. Underlying the argument in this chapter is the assumption that writing in the academy is a social practice (specifically, a method of enquiry) that should be oriented towards epistemic virtues including commitment to truth and socially just standards of excellence. For academic writing to fulfil such commitments, the author argues that it needs to be human(e). For it to be human(e), it requires a writer–agent–knower to rationally judge between educative and harmful academic writing theories and practices, in the interests of human flourishing and emancipation. Keywords academic writing being human dharma emancipation explanatory critique flourishing knowledge truth ubuntu
My thoughts on "What Makes Academic Writing Human(e): A Critical Realist Response" in: Bouchard & Zotzmann, eds. #CriticalRealism in #AppliedLinguistics #CambridgeUniversityPress 2026
#AcademicWriting
#WhatMakesWritingAcademic
#WhatMakesAcademicWritingHumane
#GenAI
www.cambridge.org/core/books/a...
The course is organised in five blocks. The first covers extended introductions to other students and to feedback cultures, and it includes discussion of shared and differing experiences of and attitudes toward aca-demic writing. The second asks the question “What is good academic writing?” and puts students’ views about this into conversation with debates from the literature around clarity versus the need for specialised lan-guage. One goal of these discussions is to highlight some of the limitations of conventional scholarly writing (especially as articulated by Molinari 2022), so the third block then involves genre experiments and critical reflection on what are sometimes called “alternative” academic forms (see, e.g., Richardson 2002 or Ashmore, Myers, and Potter 1995). The fourth block is oriented to responsible reading, citing, and writing (including citational politics and, in late r iterations of the course, the use of AI tools in writing). The final block focuses on “finishing” and covers practical strategies for writing, editing, and finalising a writing project alongside discussion of how writing relates to thinking. Throughout, students work with t heir own writing projects, including article or chapter drafts as well as shorter experimental texts developed specifically for the course.Teaching Citational Politics as Part of Writing as Thinking
"if we care about citational politics we should also seek to diversify the nature of what is accepted as "academic writing"
#WhatMakesWritingAcademic (my day job also needs decolonising)
#DoctoralWriting
#AcademicWriting
#PhDLife
#CitationalPolitics
#UniversityOfVienna
kula.uvic.ca/index.php/ku...
AnOther/similar significant reason #AcademicWriting is de-valued by teachers, students, #HigherEducation is that it is not seen as a 'rhetoric of praxis', meaning it has/should have material effects on the world.
#CriticalRealism #AcWri #WhatMakesWritingAcademic
www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/1...
1 Introduction Ayanna Prevatt-Goldstein and David Mallows Part I: Framing the politics and practices of academic writing 2 Academic writing as political Julia Molinari 3 The turn to difference: doing academic writing and writing development differently Amanda French 4 Multimodal and embodied approaches to writing for access and inclusion Arlene Archer Part II: Generative AI and academic writing 5 Progressive academic writing literacies: the constructive use of machine translation and generative AI as graduate competences Mike Groves and Klaus Mundt 6 Student writing as ‘passing’ in a time of synthetic text Helen Beetham 7 Generative AI, academic writing and learning differences: can ChatGPT scaffold writing development? Adrian Wallbank Part III: The practices of academic writing 8 Exploring writing pedagogy with subject lecturers Gillian Lazar 9 Investigating feedback on students’ written work to understand subject lecturer expectations and support student writing Lena Grannell 10 Creating time and space to write through social writing Rowena Murray Afterword Lisa Ganobcsik-Williams
Getting a few things off my chest in Chaper 2:
*** Academic writing as political ***
Forthcoming @uclpress.bsky.social in May 2026:
✍️
Academic writing is never a neutral practice [...] its power [...] makes it a political act
✍️
#WhatMakesWritingAcademic #AcWri
uclpress.co.uk/book/critica...
Since it emerges, ‘academicness’ is not dependent on the presence or absence of specific features relating to language, genre moves or argument. If what made writing academic could be reduced to these specific features, then hoax academic papers such as those by Alan Sokal (Cuthbert, 2018; Franca & Lloyd, 2000; Sokal, 1996, 2008) and Ike Antkare (Labbé, 2010; Labbé & Labbé, 2012; Van Noorden, 2014) would count as academic in virtue of the fact that they display the features that standard academic writing programmes readily teach as ‘academic’ (such as the passive voice): despite displaying conventional academic forms, hoaxes promulgate ‘nonsense’ (Alvesson et al., 2017) and, in so doing, they fail to adhere to the standards of excellence (MacIntyre, 1985) inherent to socio-academic practices (SAPs). These SAPs include epistemic virtues such as a commitment to the truth (Connell, 2013), to academic integrity (Zgaga, 2009), to social justice (Case, 2013) and to innovation and research (Warnock, 1989). Such commitments require an ethical orientation towards honesty, an orientation that must be intentional and originate from an agent, in this case the writer. Neither an automated generator of academic jargon (C. Labbé, personal communication March 25, 2014; Labbé & Labbé, 2012) nor the deliberate human intention to mislead and distort disciplinary knowledge (Sokal, 2008) is commensurate with these standards of socio-academic excellence. It is in this sense that academic hoaxes do not count as academic because academicness cannot be reduced to its forms and because there are no inherent standards of excellence from which academicness can emerge. Clearly, however, those who published these articles, the editor-readers of Social Text and Springer (for Sokal and Antkare, respectively) believed them to be genuinely academic, probably because they based their judgements of academicness on the form of the texts (i.e. they looked and sounded academic). Sokal (2008) has document…
Said before the gpts were imposed on us:
'epistemic virtues such as truth, integrity, justice, innovation and research [...] require an ethical orientation towards honesty [...] that must be intentional & originate from [...] the writer.
#WhatMakesWritingAcademic
www.bloomsbury.com/uk/what-make...
"writing isn’t just academic. It’s survival. It’s the way we make space for ourselves in systems that would rather we stay invisible. The pressure to sound “neutral” is often the pressure to be less ourselves"
Should you pay to be yourself? #WhatMakesWritingAcademic
www.thecanary.co/discovery/fe...
Plato Under Review: What Is Going Wrong in Academic Philosophical Writing by Giacomo Pezzano Abstract This paper addresses the problem of stylistic pluralism in philosophical writing, arguing that its progressive narrowing to the form of the paper is not just an esthetic issue but can also have negative effects on the development of academic research itself. The contribution is divided into two parts (Sections 1–3 and 4–5). In the first part, after introducing the problem and outlining the main features of the philosophus academicus’s writing, two main forms of criticism of “paper-centrism” in academic philosophy are discussed—one more “anti-academic” and the other more “intra-academic”. In light of these criticisms, the issue of the relationship between form and content in philosophical writing is analyzed with particular respect to the problem of the sense of truth, arguing that style communicates philosophical values beyond content. In the second part, this thesis is illustrated by examining, as a case study, the specific sense of truth conveyed in Plato’s dialogues—first through a literary analysis of Platonic writing, and then through a thought experiment inspired by media theory. Finally, the ethical and epistemic concerns raised by the growing “mono-stylism” of philosophical writing are brought together into a unified framework, by proposing a preliminary sketch of an ethics of philosophical research and pointing to some possible examples of alternative research practices. Keywords: philosophical writing; ethics of research; metaphilosophy; media philosophy; philosophy and literature; dialogue
In case of interest, this has now been published #OpenAccess
#Philosophy #AcademicWriting #Truth #AcademicPublishing
#WhatMakesWritingAcademic
www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/14...
"No one can imagine pursuing an academic career by acting, living, or performing philosophically: there is no impact factor measure for such approaches—no place for the Diogenes of Sinope of today" (Pezzano)
#WhatMakesWritingAcademic
#Philosophy
#AcWri
Also enjoying this:
philpapers.org/rec/PEZTMI-
How standardised forms of #AcWri shape knowledge for better & for worse are further developed throughout:
- www.bloomsbury.com/uk/what-make... (also #OpenAccess)
- www.bloomsbury.com/uk/change-an...
#WhatMakesWritingAcademic
#DoctoralWriting #ResearchWriting
#AcademicWriting
#IMRaD
#AcademicSky
This is such a cathartic book, not just for its content but for its form.
Guide quotes, preambles, headings and endnotes are used explicitly to re-present knowledge in dialogue as human 'conversational praxis'.
Not yet read Wynter's original work but will have to.
#AcWri
#WhatMakesWritingAcademic
Q2. When I asked the gpt #WhatMakesWritingAcademic and it seriously failed the test by making things up, not citing relevant #OpenAccess literature, blatantly re-casting on the back of prompts, & by being so sycophantic in apologising for its oversights that it dug a deep hole for itself
#LTHEchat
One of my jobs is teaching #AcademicWriting to doctoral researchers.
That's a humongous responsibility, tbh, in an age of #censorship #PostTruth #AlternativeFacts #GAI
Commitment-risk-voice on #WhatMakesWritingAcademic is urgent.
I did interrogated the gpt:
academicemergence.press/current-conv...
Tahrir Hamdi is rousing - she brings Edward Said, bell hooks, Stuart Hall, IIan Pappé, et al. into a writing of resistance, what I'd describe as emancipatory #AcWri, where words have power to re-present reality & re-define #WhatMakesWritingAcademic
#2025 ✊🏼🕊
#Nakba
#FreePalestine
#ImaginingPalestine
A humanistic approach to #GAI:
"humans communicate on the basis of word-world
relationships, [...] AI technologies [are] to word-word'
#AcWri #ArtificialIntelligence #CompositionStudies #Humanities #CriticalRealism #WhatMakesWritingAcademic #Emancipation #AppliedLinguistics #HigherEd
rdcu.be/d3AMw
Nice thread - I like 'change the esteem machine' 👇 (change the esteem *regime* even better).
There are good reasons for having a healthy diverse ecology of academic writings. I wouldn't want it homogenised to any standard. Plus, readers also need to make the effort.
#WhatMakesWritingAcademic #AcWri
[4/end]
I strongly advocate for a theory of praxis because ‘things do not speak for themselves’. In an #AcWri context, this means inherited norms about #WhatMakesWritingAcademic need theorising because in some cases such norms may be harmful, ie they may stymie #HumanEmancipation (as defined by CR).
[2/n] What this means in practice is that:
a) academic writing should always be educative, truthful, and humane;
b) that there exist different approaches to and imaginaries of #WhatMakesWritingAcademic
From #STEM to #Feminism in #HipHop, others too are asking #WhatMakesWritingAcademic: surely range & reach of citations matter?
Seth, PJ (2023). The First Time I Heard: Black Feminist Approaches to Hip Hop Methodologies. Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies 23(5) 427-436.
doi.org/10.1177/1532...
... for example, #WhatMakesWritingAcademic seems to be providing a rationale for questioning "what scientific contributions may be lost due to the adherence to rigid standards of and [...] reliance on written communication"
#STEM #autism #NeuroDiversity
#AcWri
www.frontiersin.org/journals/edu...
I've no idea what a healthy citation rate/ratio is or how to judge its relative significance but #WhatMakesWritingAcademic has to date been cited 50 unique interdisciplinary times since 2022 (G-Scholar).
Each citing text helps me make sense/re-visit what I wrote.
www.bloomsbury.com/uk/what-make...
JOURNAL OF CRITICAL REALISM https://doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2024.2429225 A rational case for a critical realist theory of academic writing Julia Molinari Graduate School and Department of Languages and Applied Linguistics, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK ABSTRACT Academic writings– writings that take place in academic settings, from undergraduate essays to research monographs – are social practices and methods of knowledge enquiry. In virtue of being social and epistemic, they should be of concern to critical realists because of critical realism’s stratified approach to reality. By critiquing approaches to academic writing that can flatten reality, I propose that if academic writings were understood as ontologically stratified social practices, they could afford writers the rational judgement to make textual choices. Specifically, I show that there is the possibility to produce discourse that is different from standardized ‘objective’ and ‘transparent’ academic prose, which, inter alia, also has colonial roots. If academic writings were understood ontologically and epistemologically as practices and methods of enquiry that require writers (i.e. agents) to rationally judge what form their texts should take, this could further academic writing’s educative and emancipatory purpose of advancing knowledge and justice
It's shamefully tame compared to the titans I'm reading but this is my piecemeal ongoing contribution to engaged and emancipatory academic writing practices
#FinalProofs
There's more of this in the pipeline but it takes time to read-to-write
#WhatMakesWritingAcademic
#CriticalRealism
#SocialJustice
📢Academic writers:
what do you use to map your writings as a coherent whole, so you can see their connections & directions? I 've ended up with several discrete but concurrent writing projects and need to 'see' how they hang together in my world view of #WhatMakesWritingAcademic
Scriviner?!
#AcWri
Having said that, maybe the requirement to anonymise will end up favouring #GAI generated manuscripts instructed to be 'objective and 'formal' #Acwri #WhatMakesWritingAcademic
Cover of 'A short History of Ethics' Routledge
Ok, so MacIntyre disses Aristotle: Aristotle was 'not a nice man', more of a 'supercilious prig' aka snob (p. 66).
[ntm #WhatMakesWritingAcademic - I don't think 'prig' is on the #AcademicWordList & #GAI probably flags it as 'not academic' but I could be wrong ;-) #tleap #AcademicLiteracies #AcWri]
Some of the resources that inform my talks (not all, but some I recently used to teach)
Julia Molinari, October, 2024, wearing sunglasses and walking against a treed-backdrop
Both went ok as far as I'm concerned ⚡
They raised uncomfortable Q&As about whose standards, rules, reality, facts, epistemic virtues, and justice are served by how we write & publish academically.
#WhatMakesWritingAcademic
#AcWri
#tleap
#AcademicLiteracies
#SocialJustice
#METM24
#CriticalRealism
Title (required) Making the case for a critical realist theory of academic writing: does this matter for human emancipation? Abstract (required) Academic writing - writing that takes place in academic settings, from undergraduate essays to research monographs – matters because it is a method of knowledge enquiry. As such, and looking ahead, it should be of central concern to critical realism and its ontological project of ‘reclaiming reality’, especially as ‘artificially intelligent’ texts challenge the notion of a ‘human’ writer. Academic knowledge has a textual form, which, as Andrew Sayer highlights in his Appendix to Method in Social Science: A Realist Approach (1992), can influence how knowledge is re-presented. Moreover, since academic writing is also linguistic, my case for a critical realist theory of academic writing draws on Roy Bhaskar’s Enlightened Common Sense: The Philosophy of Critical Realism (2016), whereby an ontology of language pivots “on distinctions between the d
On re-imagining academic writing as an act of love Julia Molinari, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK Écrire est un acte d’amour. S’il ne l’est pas, il n’est qu’écriture. —Jean Cocteau In his existential book on the difficulty of being (La difficulté d’être), French writer, dramatist, poet, and film director Jean Cocteau refers to literary writing in ways that may help us re-imagine and humanise academic writing beyond performative and algorithmic tendencies. I have cited Cocteau (1957, p.151) in French in an act of what Suresh Canagarajah and other sociolinguists have referred to as “translanguaging”, the multilingual practice of communicating knowledge by drawing on one’s full linguistic repertoire to re-appropriate and democratise meanings by retaining their original voice, rhythm, and nuance. Translanguaging thus becomes a positive meaning-making practice that disrupts monolingual monopolies on meaning and replaces negative connotations of “linguistic interference” with gen
Sharing 2 talks I'll be giving in the coming months because they both excite & terrify me.
Informed critical & constructive reactions are much appreciated🙏🏼
#IACR2024
#METM24
warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/law/...
www.metmeetings.org/en/on-re-ima...
#CriticalRealism #AcWri #WhatMakesWritingAcademic #GAI
On this #PrimoMaggio #FestaDeiLavoratori, I wish to celebrate my #FreeLabour for #HigherEducation and #CriticalThinking:
#WhatMakesWritingAcademic
www.bloomsbury.com/uk/what-make...
Seemingly unrelated thoughts but connected to #WhyWeCantAffordTheRich?
I've been invited to a symposium on #WhatMakesWritingAcademic @ Warwick Uni, UK, & hope issue of #English #AcademicPublishing & #Capitalism come up:
www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?do...
#FestaDeiLavoratori #PrimoMaggio
I'm not with Barthes, who claimed 'the text's unity is in how/who reads it' ergo the 'author is dead'.
I think intentionality matters. I stand by my critique of the intentional fallacy in #WhatMakesWritingAcademic.
However, I must update this thinking for the #LLM as 'author'!
⏳
#CriticalRealism
