Writing Better Essays 3:
“Expression: Getting it Right”
Hi. Welcome back to the last lecture in this series, which I’ve
called “Expression: Getting it Right”. “Right”, here, means right
for the purposes of academic writing, not right in any more
absolute sense than that. You’re already aware, I’m sure, that
what’s right in one setting is wrong in another, so what I want
to do in this lecture is to clarify what’s conventionally
expected in this academic setting. It’s different from the way
language is used in creative writing, in journalism, in public
speaking, in conversation – there are all sorts of other kinds of
discourse where the rules and the customs are different, and
the last thing I’d want to do is ask you to adopt this academic
discourse for every other purpose too. But I think it’s worth
looking at academic discourse for this hour, because there’s
quite a lot of anxiety around it, and quite rightly too – you’ll get
lots of comments on your expression, in the next few years,
that will assume that you’re part of this academic discourse
community, and that you already know its rules, and that you
share its values about how language should be used – and some
of those comments are going to be mysterious to you because
you don’t know what they’re about, and some of them are going
to be irritating if you don’t in fact share all of those values and
assumptions. Today I want to clear up the mysteries, as far as
I can in an hour, and also examine the assumptions that
underpin the academic style.
This term I’m using, “discourse”, is from linguistics, and I’m
using it because it means more than just tone, or just grammar,
it means the whole way of using language that belongs to a
particular setting – it includes WHAT kinds of things you say,
and we looked at that in the first lecture; it includes how you
organize what you say, which we looked at in the second
(notice, I’m signposting again, reminding you of where we’ve
been and telling you where we’re going next!); and discourse
also includes the tone and voice that you adopt, the kind of
vocabulary you choose, and the grammar and punctuation that
you use – all of which are choices that you make according to
the kind of audience you think you have. So those are the
things we’ll look at today, audience, voice, vocabulary, and
grammar and punctuation.
I’m sure you’re already aware that you speak differently when
you’re talking to different people in different contexts – to
your mates, to your grandmother, to your boss, to your tutor,
and so on – it’s not that you speak a different language, but
there are changes of tone and vocabulary, and that’s the sort
of thing I mean when I talk about voice. You adopt a kind of
voice in your essays, too, a written voice that’s not the same as
when you’re speaking. So we need to look at what an academic
voice is like, and more than that, what a written academic voice
is like. And its main characteristic is that it’s disembodied.
What your reader gets is not you, but your words on the page.
This has its good and its bad side. What’s good about it is that
it forces you to write clearly, precisely, informatively, helpfully
in the sense of constructing a text that’s going to be easy for
your reader to follow – all of this because you can’t go along
with your essay to explain anything in it that isn’t clear, when
your reader meets it. Tutors will often say that a student
makes much more sense in tutorials, when they’re speaking,
than in essays, and the student will agree, often it’s easier to
clarify something if you have your listeners there and you see
by their expression when they’re not following you, and they
can ask questions – but in writing you don’t have the chance to
respond and repair what you’ve said, so it’s got to be clear when
it leaves your hands. The disadvantage, or at least a lot of
people feel it as a disadvantage, is that the personality seems
to drain out of your writing, you may feel that it’s kind of
lifeless if you’re trying to push it into conventional structures
and kinds of expression that don’t come from you, especially if
you’re in a discipline that frowns on the use of “I”, so that you
seem to vacate the writing as you hand it in. In fact, it doesn’t
have to be like that, there are ways that you can say what you
want to say, even in academic discourse, and there are
academic authors who write really well, with a strong voice and
a clear engagement with what they’re saying. But there are also
academic writers who write very badly, often out of insecurity
about what’s needed to impress their colleagues, so they write
in a very convoluted way, and choked with jargon, in the hope
that readers will think, “He’s a formidable fellow, even if I
can’t understand him”. The people who write well are very often
older, more established academics who’ve reached the forest
canopy, so to speak, and can afford to express themselves with
confidence. So I certainly wouldn’t try to persuade you that
everything you read is going to be well written, but I can try to
persuade you that what you write is going to be ok, both with
your tutor and with you.
Let’s start with the idea that you can’t say “I” in an essay, and
if not, how do you express an opinion? In some disciplines you
will be told not to say “I”, and what’s behind that is the value
of objectivity – the idea that we’re not studying ourselves but
some other topic, and we’re trying to come to an unbiased
understanding of whatever it is, based on the evidence
available, and if you’ve done that, then your opinion is one that
any reasonable person would come to, and there’s no need to
say “I”. And your reader knows that it’s your opinion, if you
haven’t said that it’s somebody else’s. So instead of saying “I
think that Freud’s emphasis on sexuality was misplaced”, you
just say, “Freud’s emphasis on sexuality was misplaced”, and we
know that’s what you think. In this case, your view is not
absent from the essay, just your personal pronoun is.
On the other hand, there are quite a lot of occasions in
academic writing where you do say “I”. Signposting is one of
these, when you’re telling the reader what you’re going to do in
the essay: “I will explain Freud’s theory first, and then show
why it is misleading.” It’s got to be you doing this, who else
could it be? – and in most disciplines, it’s acceptable to say so.
In disciplines that strongly favour the impersonal voice, they’ll
say, instead, “This essay will explain Freud’s theory, and then
show why it is misleading” – as if the essay writes itself. I don’t
feel that this is really important one way or the other, but
what I don’t like to see is the really strained way that people
sometimes try to avoid saying “I” – expressions like “the
present author thinks blah blah blah…” or “it is the view of this
writer that blah blah blah”, or even “this is thought to be
wrong” instead of “I think this is wrong” or just “this is wrong”.
You may have heard people talk about writing in the passive or
the active voice, and if you’re not sure what that’s about, it’s
the difference between these two forms:
I think this
(active)
This is thought (passive)
In this case, they’re both intended to mean the same thing, but
the problem with using the passive is that it’s often unclear
who is doing the thing. The passive is when you say that
something is done, rather than saying that somebody does it –
for example, you could have an active sentence,
“Freud sought the reasons for most neuroses in the patients’
sexuality”
telling us that somebody did something, or you could put it in
the passive,
“The reasons for most neuroses were sought in the patients’
sexuality”,
which tells us what was done but not who did it. This can be
confusing, when the reader can’t actually tell whose views
they’re reading. On the other hand, it can be useful when you
want to emphasise what was done, rather than who did it, and
for this reason the sciences prefer the passive. They say
things like “The compound was mixed, then it was heated, then
it was poured into a dish and allowed to cool” because in science
they feel it shouldn’t matter who’s doing a procedure, what’s
important is what is done. So the passive is not an error, as
your computer grammar checker may lead you to believe (have
any of you noticed that your grammar checker complains if you
use the passive?). It’s a perfectly good form, but it’s used
more in scientific disciplines than in Humanities, which are
about people doing things. So you can see it’s not even possible
to talk about a single academic voice, it varies with the area
you’re in.
And that brings us to some differences between Humanities
disciplines, too, in the use of “I”. I said before that we’re not
writing about ourselves but about some other topic, but in
some disciplines we are writing about ourselves, in particular
ways. In Philosophy, for example, because it deals with
questions of ethics and questions of how we perceive things
and how we know things, you’re often consulting your own
conscience and your own mental processes for evidence of this.
That doesn’t mean that your whole self is invited to a
philosophy essay, it’s your rational self they want to hear from,
but with that limitation, it makes sense often to say “I”. Other
disciplines in which you are part of the answer to the essay
question include the ones where you’re analyzing the effect of
a work of art. If you’re asking “what does this work of art do,
and how does it do what it does?” as you do, often, in Cinema
Studies, Literature, or Art History, then you’re concerned with
the way a viewer or a reader responds to a work of art – how
does this poem make me feel, how does this film or this
painting affect me? You’re at the center of the answer, in a
way that you aren’t in History or Archaeology, where the topic
is out there at a distance from you. Even if you feel strongly
about it -- and you may have chosen to study a particular
period or topic because you do feel strongly about it -- that’s
not what you’re asked to write about. Your essay is about the
events, then, not about you, now. But literature and art work on
each present viewer, and it makes sense to say “I” when it’s
your response that you’re analyzing. You’ve still got to do it in
terms of the way that work has been created, to produce
those effects in you, in other words it’s still an essay about the
art, rather than about you, but you are invited to it, and in a
more holistic way than just the rational self in Philosophy.
Again, it’s possible to say “the viewer feels” rather than “I
feel” – or you can say “we feel”, which is a sort of compromise.
“We” is I the writer, and you the reader, who are viewing the
thing together. If in doubt, ask your tutor what is preferred.
So, those are aspects of the objective quality of the academic
voice, the apparent self-effacement of the writer, by writing
in the third person and sometimes in the passive. I say
“apparent” because there’s nothing self-effacing about trying
to publish, it’s actually a very self-assertive activity, so the
conventions we follow are a little paradoxical in that respect.
But it does get stranger still. Not only is the writer of an essay
disembodied, but the reader of it doesn’t exist at all. Now, I
don’t mean that nobody’s going to read your essay, obviously
your tutor is going to read it, but he or she reads not as
herself, but pretending to be an imaginary reader who knows
less about your topic than you do, and therefore needs to have
it fully and clearly explained. And this is where a lot of essays
fall down, because the reality is that you are a learner, writing
for a teacher, and you know that he knows what the question
means and why it was asked – after all, he asked it – and he
knows the material better than you do – so you might well think
that he doesn’t need you to identify what you’re talking about,
produce evidence and say where it came from, and so on – but
if you skimp on any of that, you get comments in your margins
like “what does this mean?” “whose view is this?” “Evidence?”
“When was this?” “What have you got in mind here?” “Can you
give an example?” “What do these initials stand for?” or
“Surely this needs some explanation?” You know he knows these
things, in most cases. And it’s equally puzzling, when you’re
writing only for your tutor, that your essay is expected to be
quite narrowly focused on the topic, whereas in tutorials you
can wander around in a topic, explore it, go down interesting
byways, speculate on things you can’t prove – talk about maybes
and what-ifs -- but not in an essay, where you have to order
your discussion carefully, omit anything that isn’t relevant to
the thesis you’re discussing, be as definite as you can, and back
up all your suggestions or else get rid of them. In tutes, you’re
a tentative learner, but in essays, you’re expected to write as a
teacher, teaching the material, and your ideas about it, to an
academic audience that knows less about it than you do. And
this is why I said before that your audience doesn’t exist –
there is no academic audience that knows less about your topic
than you do. Never mind – the idea is that you’re learning to
explain ideas effectively, and that’s useful, whatever your
field, because in life after uni nobody is going to ask you to tell
them what they already know, they’ll ask you to be the person
who finds out what they want to know and teaches it to them.
And having written essays, you’ll be used to asking yourselves
those questions that teachers ask themselves, like
• What does my audience need to know beforehand in order
to understand this idea? (background/ explanation)
• What information will they need in order to see the truth
of what I’m saying? (evidence)
• How can I show them what this information means?
(interpretation)
• How can I organize my presentation to make it easy for
them to follow? (structure & signposting)
If you’re just thinking about how to display what you know, you
don’t ask yourself these questions, but if you’re preparing to
teach it to somebody else, then you do. And that’s good.
It must be said, however, that the degree to which you can
assume your reader shares your knowledge of the material
varies from one discipline to another. The extremes are
probably represented by two comments a student showed me
one afternoon, on two essays he had just had back from his
tutors. On his History essay, the tutor had written, “You must
identify individuals, organizations, events. Don’t assume the
reader knows all about the topic.” On his English essay, the
tutor had written, “Don’t tell me what happens – I have read
the book!” In History you’re expected to identify the things
you name, and explain the events you refer to, as if your
reader were not familiar with them. In literature essays, on
the other hand, you’re entitled to assume that the reader has
read the text you’re commenting on, so you don’t have to retell
the story. Most disciplines are closer to History than to
English in expecting you to produce a self-contained piece. In
other words, there should be enough right there in your pages
to allow a reader to understand your argument, without them
having to go off and read the things you read. But because
these expectations do vary, and since a tutor in one discipline
may not know that it’s different in other subjects that you’re
studying – they only teach one thing -- you’d be wise to ask
each new tutor what he does require: ask something like
“Should I assume my reader is familiar with the material I’m
writing about, or should I explain the ideas, issues, and events
I refer to as I go along?”
You may find it helpful to try your drafts out on a real reader
who knows less about the topic than you do, that is, another
student. You may not want to swap drafts with somebody who’s
writing on the same topic, if you’re worried that they’ll pinch
your ideas. But where there’s a choice of topics, you may be
able to find someone in your tute who’s writing on a different
one, and arrange to swap your drafts and respond to each
other’s. Or you could swap with someone you know who’s
studying different subjects. You need to make it clear that
you’re not asking how good your draft is – people will usually be
nice and just say it sounds fine – but what you want to know is
how adequately this person has understood what you’re trying
to say. Get them to tell you what they think your main idea is,
whether there are places where they need more information,
or they’re not sure what you’re getting at, or they’re puzzled
by your wording. This is something that all publishing writers
do, because when you know what you meant it can be very hard
to see if someone else is going to have trouble understanding
the way you’ve put it. It can be hard at uni, to mesh in with
other people so you have drafts ready around the same time,
but it’s worth making an effort. You may be able to pair up with
someone in this lecture, and if you’d like some help with useful
questions to ask each other, come and talk to me and I can help
you with that. I have a handout.
O.K, the next aspect of voice that I think we should look at is
vocabulary, because a lot of people come to grief in first year
by aiming for an extreme of formality and sophistication in
their choice of language that doesn’t come off because they
don’t give themselves time to ease into the language of their
subjects, so they’re using a lot of words before they really
know what they mean. This is particularly a problem if you
make a habit of going to the thesaurus looking for fancier
alternatives to the words you know. People generally think of a
thesaurus as offering synonyms, but it doesn’t really. It offers
words that are associated in meaning, but most of them don’t
mean exactly the same thing. Sometimes it’s just a matter of
different shades of meaning, but even that can make a word
unsuitable to use as a substitute for the one you looked up. For
example, if you looked up “humorous”, you’d probably find
“sarcastic” among the synonyms, but sarcasm is a biting,
unpleasant kind of humour, and you couldn’t use that word to
describe lots of things that are funny, but not in that way. Or
if you looked up “suggest” because you felt you were using it
too often, and you wanted to vary your vocabulary, you might
find “insinuate” – but that doesn’t mean just saying something
indirectly, it means that you’re making a nasty suggestion in a
sneaky way, and it’s not often that you could use it instead of
“suggest”. So you need to be really careful – I wouldn’t want to
discourage you from extending your vocabulary, I think that’s
commendable, but it is risky, tutors aren’t generally tolerant if
you get it wrong; so the best way might be to try to be
conscious of new words in the things you read, and look those
up, and notice how they’re used in different contexts, until you
can make them your own. Your vocabulary will grow, as a result
of reading more, but if you misuse a word the effect is worse
than if you used a plainer, more familiar word correctly. It’s
frustrating, because you’re always being asked to put things in
your own words, and often you don’t own the words you need.
You’ll feel that you can’t put things as well as the author that
you’re wanting to quote, and you’ll just have to settle for
putting them worse – but at least it’ll be clear whether you do
understand what you’re talking about, and over time, you’ll
develop more options. And meanwhile, there’s nothing wrong
with short, plain words.
Something I see a lot, as well as people choosing the wrong
word because they want to write elegantly, is people choosing
words from a thesaurus because they’re trying to avoid
plagiarism. I really sympathise with this, but I’ve got to tell you
that it doesn’t work. It seems like it wouldn’t be plagiarism if
you take out a few of the original words and plug in some
synonyms from the thesaurus – but it is, because the sentence
is still substantially the same, and even worse, it’s now usually
meaningless, because those synonyms didn’t mean the same as
the words you took out, and worse still, it’s obvious that you’re
plagiarizing because you probably couldn’t have written such an
outstandingly meaningless sentence on your own. It’s a much
better strategy to read the thing and then look away from it,
and ask yourself “what did that mean?” and write that instead.
You often can’t do as well as the original, but you can often do
better than you thought you could, especially, again, if you try
to think how you would explain the idea to somebody who
doesn’t know it at all.
So, beware of thesaurus abuse. But you can still achieve a
reasonable degree of formality without resorting to that,
because formality is not so much a matter of what words you
choose, but more a matter of being precise, and of writing in a
way that doesn’t depend on any personal interaction between
writer and reader to be understood. So as well as being sparing
in the use of “I”, we don’t use “you” at all, because it sounds as
if you’re speaking to somebody in the room with you, rather
than writing, and we even avoid some forms just because they
sound like conversation – we don’t contract two words
together, like putting “did” and “not” together to make “didn’t”,
we write out the two words instead, “did not” (haven’t,
would’ve, etc) -- and we don’t use slang or local expressions
that readers from elsewhere wouldn’t understand. But mainly
we try not to rely on the vague expressions that are ok in
speech, because speech relies heavily on the assumption that
we already have a shared understanding of things, and we talk
in generalizations and simplifications that we can then pull
apart together if we’re not happy with them, but often we just
let them stand for the complexity that’s really there
underneath. For example, we talk about “society” as if there
was just one big group all pretty much the same, with the same
purposes and values – society demands this, society won’t allow
that – the reality is much more diverse and divided and
complicated, and if you make generalizations about society in
an essay you’ll get challenged for not being precise. Precision is
a value of academic life, and it’s also a feature of written
discourse, as opposed to spoken discourse.
The last big area we need to look at is grammar and
punctuation, which again is quite different in written discourse.
Of course there is no punctuation in spoken discourse, because
it’s purely a visual aid to meaning. It does for writing what
pauses, emphasis, and changes of intonation do for speech—
that is, it shows where the chunks of meaning begin and end.
But writing is not just punctuated speech, as you’d be aware,
but it’s a much tidier kind of language, with the ums and ahs
and repetitions removed, and it’s more precise, because you can
spend time deciding how you want to put something, and
because the choices you make bear the whole burden of
communicating your thoughts; as I said before, you can’t go
along too and explain yourself some more. Even when you’re
writing fiction, and you’re writing spoken dialogue between your
characters, you may choose sentence structures and
vocabulary that sound like speech, but it wouldn’t be the real
thing in all its sloppiness. Added to that, in the case of
academic writing, is, again, formality – we’re not trying to write
something that seems to reproduce spoken forms, that’s not
the illusion we’re after. In everyday conversation, we speak in
incomplete sentences, or in sentences that run on and on
together, and if you’re writing fiction or journalism you might
write those in order to recreate something that sounds like
real life communication (as, indeed, I have done throughout
these lectures: I’ve written scripts full of run-on sentences,
contractions, and “I” and “you”, because I’m going to read them
aloud and I want it to sound like I’m speaking rather than
reading! So, while these lectures are about academic writing,
they are not actually in academic writing). So, the rules I’m
going to give you in a moment are ones that you’ll see broken all
the time in literature and in journalism – not a problem, they
have their reasons for writing the way they do. But in
academic writing we stick to standard, formal sentence
structures that belong specifically to this discourse and would
sound funny elsewhere.
I think it’s worth knowing, whether you agree with it or not,
what kind of value academics place upon formality. Formality
can be used to exclude people who aren’t fluent in formal
discourse, and I think there’s good reason to reject this use of
it. However, it can also be used to recognize the seriousness of
the activity that people are engaged in together. It’s a bit like
formal dress – you might think it’s nobody’s business what you
wear into a restaurant, you shouldn’t be excluded because of
your clothes. Or you might think that dressing in a certain way,
like dressing formally for a wedding, shows respect for the
occasion. Academics think that a formal voice claims the right
to be listened to carefully and taken seriously, and
acknowledges the obligation to do the same for other scholars.
While colloquial expressions and contractions denote a relaxed,
leisurely conversation, formal discourse sits forward in its
chair, listening hard and framing its own utterances with care
and controlled energy. You may think this is mad, but whether
or not you agree with it, it’s useful to know that this is how
your tutors feel about it. If you’ve conformed to the rules of
grammar and punctuation, spelled properly and proofread
carefully, your tutor will see your essay as asking to be taken
seriously, and respond accordingly. On the other hand, if you’ve
sat up all night, wild-eyed with inspiration, feverishly written
the best thoughts you’ve had all year, and given the essay in
without proofreading it, your tutor will simply feel that you
didn’t take it seriously, so why should he?
OK, so what are these rules? I’m not going to tell you from
scratch how English grammar works, because if it’s your native
language, you already have nearly all of that knowledge. Even if
you don’t have the terminology to talk about it, you know it in
the sense that you’re mainly using the language fluently; and if
English isn’t your native language, you have studied the
grammar, most likely, and what I’d have to say would not be
new to you. What I want to do instead today is refer you to a
handout about the five most common errors in university
writing – the things you are actually likely to do wrong. Go now
and have a look at “The Five Favourite Errors” at
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/learning/assets/downloads/5Favourite-Errors.doc on La Trobe’s “Learning Page”, located at
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/learning/, where you can find lots
of other useful handouts on all aspects of academic study.
Good luck with everything! – and all the best,
Kate