Academic writing and tacit knowledge

Abstract

The genre of academic writing is discipline dependent, so that neither specialists in academic writing nor practising academics in a discipline can, independently of each other, provide students with the necessary help to develop the ability to write in their academic disciplines. Furthermore, the rules are largely tacit, i.e. they are not explicitly expressed, and expressing them explicitly can have serious effects on good disciplinary writing. The problems of introducing students into good academic writing in their disciplines are therefore not simple and it is suggested that, as words constitute the fundamental building blocks of writing, a better understanding of the problems arising in academic writing can come from a deeper understanding of words, including their translation into different languages. It is furthermore suggested that the difficulties arising from the largely tacit nature of academic writing may be overcome by students and tutors discussing students' descriptions of their work.

Keywords:

• academic writing
• tacit knowledge
• use of words
• translating

Acknowledgements

My thanks are also due to all who have guided me in this endeavour; above all Colleen McKenna and Phyllis Creme at the UCL Centre for the Advancement of Learning and Teaching, Tamsin Haggis of Stirling University, and Sally Mitchell of the Writing in the Disciplines Initiative at Queen Mary University of London. I would like to thank Bill Hutchings of the Centre for Excellence in Enquiry Based Learning, University of Manchester, for the so very apposite quotation from T.S. Eliot, and dedicate this paper to him on his retirement.

Notes

1. An interesting development is the Writing and Learning Mentor (WLM) project at UCL, an action research project which aims to support the development of undergraduate writing across the disciplines, using peer-assisted learning techniques.

2. I wish to thank Professor Brian Street for an advance copy of T. Donahue, M. Lea, J. Parker, D. Russell and B. Street, ‘Exploring notions of genre in “academic literacies” and “writing in the disciplines”: approaches across countries and contexts’, a paper which provides an up-to-date account of research and practice in the field. It even uses the word ‘tacit’ twice, without, however, pursuing that issue.

3. T.M. Lillis (2008) of the Open University, in a private communication, writes: ‘I can't think of any work which adopts this approach or at least frames it in this way. I guess much of the work on academic literacy … focuses on explicating the tacit practices of academics but doesn't necessarily build this process of articulation into an approach which seeks to make such knowledge and practices visible to the participants’.

4. As Professor Street has pointed out to me, from a linguistic perspective it is, of course, more than words; it has to do with discourse, sentence structure etc. whilst from a multi-modal perspective it is also about layout, visual representation, etc. But most of these are usually explicitly recognised; what is so often ignored is that underlying all of these are words!