Writing in the academy: constructing reputation, knowledge and students

Abstract

This presentation challenges the widespread view that writing is somehow peripheral to the more serious aspects of university life – doing research and teaching students. Instead it argues that universities are about writing and that specialist forms of academic literacy are at the heart of everything we do. Drawing on some of my research over the past ten years, I will explore what writing means in the academy and argue that it is central to constructing knowledge, educating students and to negotiating a professional academic career. Seeing literacy as embedded in the specific beliefs and practices of individual disciplines, instead of a generic skill that students have failed to develop at school, helps explain the difficulties both students and academics have in controlling the conventions of disciplinary discourses. Ultimately, and in an important sense, we are what we write, and we need to understand the distinctive ways our disciplines have of conceptualising issues, addressing colleagues and presenting arguments to be successful researchers and teachers.