If I were to ask you what rules of writing you have learned over the years, I imagine you would come up with a list similar to the ones produced each semester by my students. Many of the rules will stem from the way you learned to write essays for timed tests, like the ACT or SAT, such as "always include a topic sentence in the first paragraph," "have at least three body paragraphs," and "repeat your thesis statement in the conclusion." Some of the rules will stem from the pet peeves of your previous teachers, such as "never start a sentence with however, because, or and." And some of the rules will stem from nowhere, being born of pure whimsy and fairy dust: "Never use you in a college paper."
If I were now to ask you to take the rules you just came up with and create a rubric—a scoring sheet, like teachers use—and then I asked you to grade three random essays from any magazine, textbook, or anthology, chances are, you would soon find yourself doling out Cs, Ds, and maybe even Fs. If you're anything like my previous students, you'll do so with a laugh, maybe even a cackle, taking odd pleasure in giving poor grades to published authors.
When I ask why you gave such a low grade to an otherwise interesting and entertaining essay, you'll probably say something like, “I really like the essay, but there’s no thesis statement anywhere.” Or, “It’s a funny story, but she’s all over the place, and there really isn’t a conclusion. It just ends.”
Or, at least, that's what my students have said. When we ponder how these professionally-written essays could receive such bad grades, it doesn’t take much prodding on my part for the proverbial light bulb to appear above my students’ heads. They can see for themselves that there is a real disconnect between these so-called rules of writing and the reality of what actually makes writing good.
For the remainder of the semester, I ban the word rule from our discussions. It becomes a four letter word, and we discuss what makes writing good, interesting, or intriguing by using terms like norms, conventions, traditions, expectations, and common practices.
But I still invoke the word rule from time to time. Like all teachers, I have my pet peeves when it comes to academic writing, and I have the right (and the audacity) to articulate my pet peeve as a rule, and one that I strictly enforce: You can't force people to read your writing. It's your job to make them want to read it.
There are exceptions to the rule, of course: your mom, your supervisor, your professor, and maybe some of your classmates will have no choice but to read your writing. But for the most part, no one else has to read it. If you can make people want to read and continue reading your writing, then you will have succeeded as a writer.
Getting someone to pay you to read your writing is nice too, but neither money nor fame are necessary for you to consider yourself a successful writer. If you write a college essay that your roommate enjoys, then you’ve made it. You're a success.
If I were to ask you what you think of when you hear the phrase academic writing, will boring be the first word you lob at me? Or will you list things like grammar, correctness, neatness, formal, hard, lame, and old-fashioned?
You wouldn't be wrong. Too often—based on the papers I have read, the textbooks I have perused, and the classrooms I have visited—these are the same words I might be tempted to use as well. But then I have to remind myself that this is a choice. How did we, as a society, get to this place where we accept and even expect academic writing to be boring and trite, something we have to muddle our way through until we can get to the good stuff: the poems and the plays and the Facebook posts and the magazine articles and the books we love—the types of writing that we think are so decidedly un-academic?
But are they really not academic?
It depends on who you are talking to. Some professors, like myself, choose to embrace academic writing in the broadest of senses: literally anything you turn in for a grade at school could be considered academic writing. I know teachers who keep a classroom Facebook page, and every update and post from their students is considered academic writing. This, of course, befuddles those on the other end of the spectrum who cling to a narrow sense of the term and view academic writing as a neat list of pre-approved genres, such as research papers, lab reports, theses, and dissertations, all with their unbendable rules, such as thesis statements, use of Standard Academic English, correct grammar, and adherence to certain citation standards.
Fortunately, those professors don't have the final say on what constitutes academic writing, so I will continue to believe and preach that any writing that helps you achieve your academic, professional, and personal goals should be considered academic. If you want to be a professional blogger, then blogs are academic writing. If you want to be a poet, then poems are academic writing. Police reports, lab reports, newspaper articles, instruction manuals, PowerPoint presentations, short stories, comic books, movie scripts—you name it: they can all fall under the purview of academic writing.
Be that as it may, most first-year writing courses are designed as “service” courses to the university. The powers-that-be—committees, deans, regents, trustees, chairs, alumni, and a bunch of other people who make way more money than me—collectively shape what is taught in these courses, usually in the form of “course objectives” and “learning outcomes,” which include expectations for traditional academic genres and conventions to be taught. That isn’t to say there isn’t room to discuss poetry or Facebook etiquette, but most instructors of first-year writing courses are tasked primarily with teaching such things as analytical essays and research papers (i.e. the "boring" stuff).
I'm okay with this. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what your instructor has you write—it could be a play or an instruction manual—the realities at the heart of any writing project are the same: that writing is a process; that your writing will be read by actual people; that particular types of writing (i.e. genres) have their own conventions, norms, and expectations; that language is constantly evolving and changing; and that the common denominator of academic writing doesn’t have to be that it’s boring. Why not write lab reports that are compelling? Why not write book reviews that tug at the professor’s heartstrings? Why not write research papers that dig into an issue in new and unexpected ways?
You have it in you to be an intriguing writer. Academic writing should foster that, not discourage it.
The first step in making this happen is to stop seeing yourself as a student with a writing task and to start seeing yourself as a writer with a student task. If that’s how you already perceive yourself, then you’re ahead of the curve, and you’ll continue writing things people want to read. Even if it’s a twelve-page analysis of a sixteenth-century poem no one has ever heard of—they'll want to read it.
If that currently isn’t how you see yourself—if you don’t think of yourself as a writer—then I hope you’ll have patience. It will happen. Eventually, you’ll write something that pleases you. Others will have great things to say about it. You’ll feel a sense of pride. And then you’ll be hooked. You’ll stop worrying about rules and correctness, and you’ll be driven by the desire to write things that are intriguing and compelling. As a professor, that’s my number one goal. If I can get you to self-identify as a writer and to want to write things that people actually want to read, then it doesn’t matter which genres you learn or what grade you receive.
Now go.
Be intriguing.
Write something that people will actually want to read!
(And if you're still not sure how to do that, keep reading. The next chapter is awesome.)