How ‘academic’ should academic writing be? Or: why form should follow function

The writing of this editorial was prompted by a recent experience one of us had at an academic conference in New Zealand. At the conference, a group of doctoral students had organised a session in which they discussed their experiences with the world of academia, particular with regard to writing and, more specifically, with so-called academic writing and academic publishing. In their presentations they provided highly perceptive and also highly critical analyses of the world of academic publishing and the way in which this world had been presented to them.

One thing they showed – and raised concerns about – was how academic publishing is very much skewed towards the English language, which makes anything that is written in another language automatically marginal and of little significance. The other thing they showed was how the rules of academic publishing had been presented to them as a strict, non-negotiable and highly uniform “regime.” In this regime, so they recounted, there are apparently very explicit rules about the proper structure of an academic paper, about the length and content of individual paragraphs, and about the writing style, particularly the importance of using a passive and dispassionate voice.

They found the encounter with this regime frustrating and limiting for their own formation as scholars. They also expressed concerns about the way in which the regime works as a filter through which some voices are heard while others a reduced to and can only exist as “noise” (on the distinction between “speech” and “noise” see Rancière, 2004).

The session reminded us of a story written by Franz Kafka called “Before the Law,” first published in 1915 in German as “Vor dem Gesetz.” The story is about a man who seeks “the law” and wishes to gain entry to it. There is, however, a doorkeeper at the doorway to the law who tells the man that he cannot go through at the present time. When the man asks whether he can ever go through, the doorkeeper says that it may be possible, but not yet now. The man waits at the door for years, even bribing the doorkeeper with everything he has. And while the doorkeeper accepts the bribes, he tells the man that he only does so “so that you do not think that you have left anything undone.” The man continues to wait until he is about to die. Right before his death, he asks the doorkeeper why, even though everyone seeks the law, no one else has come during the years he has been there. The doorkeeper answers “This gate was made only for you and I am now going to shut it.”

Kafka’s story seems to capture the experience of the students quite well in that they encountered the rules of academic publishing as a non-negotiable law that prevents them from entering the world of academic publishing on their own terms. Moreover, they encountered a strict gatekeeping of this regime, which means that the only way one can enter the realm of academic publishing is by passing the gatekeeper. This requires at the very least that one sticks to “the rules.” But even then, as the story suggests, there is no guarantee of success, which obviously adds to the experience of frustration. There is, of course, a whole industry of “helpful” courses and web-based resources that seeks to induct newcomers to the rules of the game. But the issue raised by the students is about the existence of the rules and the presentation of them as “the law,” to use Kafka’s phrase, not about what can be done to help them to facilitate entry.

Kafka’s story also seems to speak to our role as editors, because editors are generally seen as “gatekeepers” of the field (see, for example, James Simon & Fyfe, 1994; Primack et al., 2019). In previous editorials we have raised critical and “uncomfortable” questions about this dimension of our editorship (see Heimans et al., 2022; Takayama et al., 2022), and also about the particular issue of the “politics of English” (see Kettle et al., 2023) as we are well aware that we are not simply conduits of reviewer decisions, but play an active role in the decision making about what gets published in the Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education.

While we do agree that editors have an important role to play as gatekeepers of the content of publications – which can of course be done in restrictive ways, but also in pro-active and “opening” ways (see, for example, the eight challenges to the field of teacher education research with which we started our tenure as editors; see Biesta et al., 2020), it would be quite a different thing to suggest that editors should also be gatekeepers of the form of academic publishing. Such a role might be appropriate if it were true that there are indeed clear rules about what an academic paper should look like, how it should be written and structured, and which writing voice is the appropriate one. Yet, in our view, this idea is a problematic myth (see also, for example, Numbers & Kampourakis, 2015).

It is of course a very popular and very prominent myth, and also a very powerful one with real world effects, which explains why from the perspective of the students it appears as a non-negotiable regime. And whereas the whole industry of courses and resources we mentioned above, presents itself as help, so that newcomers do not think “that they have left anything undone,” it actually contributes to keeping the myth in existence and making it bigger, rather than that it helps to raise critical questions about what academic scholarship actually is, and which kinds of modes and modalities of communication might be conducive to it.

The reason why we use the word “myth,” is because the suggestion that there is only a very limited set of options for writing in an academic way, is part of the bigger idea that there is only a small number of ways for doing proper scientific research – and some would even say that there is only one way for doing proper scientific research. It is the myth of science as method, that is, the idea that what distinguishes scientific knowledge from everyday knowledge lies in the methods that have been applied to generate such knowledge. This idea is quite old and has been discussed in 20^th century philosophy of science as one of the answers to the so called “demarcation problem,” that is the question whether and if so how “science” can be distinguished from “everyday” knowledge (see, for example, Laudan, 1983). In 1975 Paul Feyerabend already argued strongly against the idea that proper science would be a matter of following a or the scientific method (see Feyerabend, 1975). Feyerabend rather argued that scientific research should be anarchistic, which literally means without form (an-arche), because it should be about discovery and going into unknown terrain, which is precisely the opposite of following particular, prescribed methods.

Bruno Latour, in his groundbreaking study Science in Action (Latour, 1988), made a similar point by showing that claims about methods and, more specifically, scientific methods are always made “after the event,” that is, when there is some clarity about what might count as knowledge or understanding or technology that works, but that when such knowledge and technology is still “in the making,” no decision can be made about which methods will lead to the results that, at a later point in time, are seen as valid, worthwhile or even true.

With this in mind, we are inclined to argue that the idea from late 19^th century modern architecture that “form should follow function” – introduced by the American architect Louis Henry Sullivan – should hold both for scholarly activity itself and for academic writing. It is not, therefore, that the form should decide what needs to be done or how academic papers should be written, but that the form of scholarly activity and academic writing should be functional for what one seeks to achieve. Rather than the promotion of an academic monoculture – in research and in writing – we would argue for the importance of pluralism, in research and in writing, because this is the best guarantee for anything interesting to occur. Of course, what counts as “interesting” is a judgement that is itself part of the scholarship and intellectual debate within a field, and even what counts as a field is part of this. So our argument is not an argument to do away with judgement, but it is an argument for judgement rather than for a methodical monoculture.

We are not just making these points in order to show how we conceive of our role as gatekeepers, and also not just to give our support to the concerns raised by the students mentioned above. We also do this in order to push back against the remarkable convergence we are seeing in the manuscripts that are submitted to our journal. They are becoming more and more identical in form and structure, and therefore increasingly less adventurous and, so we wish to highlight, also increasingly less significant for further scholarship in the field of teacher education. The convergence we are seeing is most likely the result of the way in which newcomers are inducted into the “orthodoxies” of educational and social science research – which also highlights the need to complement orthodox introductions to the field with unorthodox introductions (see on this Biesta, 2020, 2023) – but we also have the impression that there is a degree of “self-policing” going on, where newcomers, but perhaps also those who have been around in the field of research and publishing for a while, feel the need to comply with the alleged “standards” of academic publishing.

One worry we have in relation to all this, is that many people are also making money from the myth, particularly by offering their services to novice researchers by “helping” them to make sure that their writing meets the criteria of academic publishing. Again, this may appear helpful – although the help is only available for those who have the money to pay for such help – but it is actually help that reproduces the myth rather than debunking it.

The other worry we have, is that publishing companies also try to be helpful in providing guidance about how papers for submission to their journals might – or in some cases: should – be structured. This is another cause of the ongoing convergence of the format of academic writing. One thing that we believe is around the corner, or perhaps is already there, is that the more papers are structured in the same way, the easier it will become for artificial intelligence to do a first scan but perhaps even a full review of papers. It is along those lines that the gatekeeping of format – which, to make the point one more time always presents itself as “being helpful” – would actually slip into the gatekeeping of content, which would undermine the crucial and critical role of judgement. This is another reason why myths about what makes academic writing “academic” need to be scrutinised and debunked for the sake of scholarship that pushes boundaries, rather than becoming an exercise in ”painting by numbers.”

The upshot of all this is that we are open to a wide variety of writing formats. We have been actively promoting and pursing this in the pages of our journal (see, for example, the 50^th anniversary volume of the journal), and we do invite prospective authors to continue testing and pushing the boundaries of academic genres and regimes.