Today’s Plan:
- Writing?
- How to Read an Academic Article
How to Read an Academic Article
Last class I went over how I read for engagement, moving away from casual reading (just gaining information or enjoying a story) to critical reading (not in the sense of adversity or disapproval, but in the sense of learning how the sausage got made). I provided a heuristic, a set of questions, to help us through a critically engaged reading.
What is Peer-Review?
This weekend I’ll ask you to use this process to read a peer-reviewed, academic article. Academic articles are published in specialized journals. Everything published in these articles goes through a (n agonizing and miserable) review process to ensure quality. First you submit an article, then a desk editor decides if it aligns with the journals priorities. If it does, then they assign 3 professors from around the country to “blind” read and review the article. Those three professors provide extensive feedback and a recommendation that the article be 1) published after revision, 2) revised and resubmitted, or 3) rejected. (At this point, I have published about 17 articles–four were immediately approved, thirteen were R&R’d, and one got rejected. Still mad about it). The process can take anywhere from two months to two years to go from submission to publication. This is why your faculty *really* care about you using “peer-reviewed sources” because those words are imbued with stress, agony, blood, and triumph.
Why Can Academic Articles Feel Impenetrable?
Okay. I think I mentioned this last class–academic articles are difficult to read for a couple of reasons. The biggest is that they are not public-facing, let alone student-facing. Think about the review process I just described: Who is the audience for these pieces? In practice it is for those 3 blind readers who will determine the article’s fate. Pieces are aimed at other professors in the field. Writers feel pressured to make them as sophisticated as possible, to impress the judges so to speak. The language level is, um, “high” (or even “obnoxious” and I admit I have certainly written my fair share of discourse-laden-obnoxious academic stuff).
What compounds this though is that the discourse (specialized vocabulary) of any field–biology, criminal justice, business, history, philosophy, etc–is incredibly complex because we humans have spent a few hundred (or in my field’s case a few thousand) years writing about it. Words come to have special meaning. For instance, if you are reading humanities work on artificial intelligence, you might come to the word “affordance.” Something like “The possibilities given by hypertext structures are one of the most useful and defining affordances of digital technology. However, affordances that are strengths in one domain may be weaknesses in another, and hyperlinks very often distract continuous and concentrated longform reading.” You can probably infer the meaning of “affordance” from context, but you probably cannot infer that the term has a fraught history of debate. Do technologies afford us new possibilities for thinking? Or do the determine the ways that we think? That word, affordances, is caught up in a decades long academic debate. It has a history (and some of those three blind reviewers might be on team “determines” and be pretty angry if you use “afford” and thus you have to construct a sentence that acknoweldges the possibility of determination while not foreclosing on the idea of mere affordance). Sentences get long. Words carry specific academic meanings. Words have histories and allies and enemies.
The other reason reading academic writing is hard is that most academics have not taken a class in writing. They don’t practice writing. And they write passive sentences. This semester we are going to work a lot on writing active sentences. I think active sentences make for better reading because they have a specific character doing a specific action. Take the sentence I quoted above:
“The possibilities given by hypertext structures are one of the most useful and defining affordances of digital technology. However, affordances that are strengths in one domain may be weaknesses in another, and hyperlinks very often distract continuous and concentrated longform reading.”
I believe this is a bad sentence because it has no agent doing something. As a reader, I have to work hard to figure out who thinks or does what. BOO!
Here’s how I would revise that sentence to make it more active: Some scholars believe hypertext will be useful. They think that it will help us to see connections between texts and ideas that we wouldn’t have been able to see before we could link texts together. Other scholars acknowledge that might be true; but they are scared that a constant barrage of links will distract readers and diminish their capacity for longform reading.
Granted, I made it longer. And I used a high-falooting semi-colon. But I also believe I made it more intelligible. How? I made sure every clause started with an agent doing something:
- scholars believe
- They think
- us to see
- we wouldn’t have been able to see
- scholars acknowledge
- they are scared
- distract readers
It is way easier to tell who is doing what in my version because my sentence syntax (the way I treat nouns, verbs, and objects) forefronts agents acting. Academic writing is often agent-less.
Finally, a lot of academic writers do not use “I” or “we” in their papers. This makes it WAY more difficult for novices like yourselves to figure out what is going on. There’s a deep, complicated philosophical reason why some bad writing teachers might have told you not to use “I” in your paper but I do not have time to deconstruct Modern (as opposed to Postmodern) epistemology (the perverse fetishization of Objectivity) and the subsequent demonizing of subjectivity it produced. Just use I in your paper like a normal thinking person aware of their own limitation should. [FOOTNOTE: if you use a weak-ass I in the nature of “”I” indicates this is only an opinion and everyone is entitled to an opinion and an opinion can’t be wrong” then I will swoop in and destroy you. There is only opinion and the quality of an opinion is based on the evidence and reason upon which it is built and I don’t have time to finish writing this paragraph take ENG 319 Rhetorical Theory in the spring if you care about the intersections of identity, power, language, and difference. Take ENG 231 Ways of Analyzing Video Games if you care about identity, power, language, difference, and video games].
Why Undergraduate Students in a Research Writing Class are Sometimes REALLY Bad at Reading an Academic Article
Okay, I’ve been writing for about 30 minutes now, and I think I have covered why academic writing presents difficulties. There’s another one, but it is tied to how y’all do (or, um, don’t) read. And it leads into my first big tip for productively engaging academic writing. Let me take a sample article and walk you through. It is so poorly written that I would fail it in this class. For reasons I will make clear to you now and consistently over the next few months.
To help facilitate this read, let me first give you the expected structure of an academic article (note: not every field will use this exact structure; literature, history, and philosophy do NOT do this; nursing, critical justice, education, and any science almost certainly will).
- Abstract
- Introduction
- Literature Review / Background Literature
- Methodology / Methods
- Data / Findings
- Discussion
- Conclusion
Okay, now let me annotate what those sections are supposed to do [Ideal] and what they often end up doing [Real]
- Abstract: this should be a 300-400 word summary of the project. A good abstract will indicate specific major findings. A bad abstract will not.
- Introduction: this should essentially be a slightly longer abstract. The opening paragraphs might make a case for the importance of the research. One paragraph should gloss (quickly summarize) the methods section. One paragraph should detail every major finding. If you read an introduction and it leaves you questioning what their experiment actually found, then you are reading bad writing. Academic writing is not an episode of Scooby-Doo. Do not pull the mask off the findings on page 15. Tell me on page one. I will fucking die on this hill.
- Literature Review: This is an essential part of the peer-review process. It demonstrates to reviewers your awareness of the field. How? By making you summarize and link all previous relevant research in the field of discussion. It is like saying “see, I’ve read all the things I am supposed to have read to write about this topic.” STUDENTS: you are generally bad at reading academic research because you spend a lot of time reading *this* section. Which makes a ton of sense–you are all new to basically every field and if you are interested in a field then you should spend time here learning its foundations. AND–please don’t take this personally–research shows that you just don’t spend a lot of time reading for homework and so are likely to burn out after about 15 minutes of reading (which, um, isn’t enough) but if you are only going to spend 15 minutes reading an academic article then for the love of the gods do not spend those 15 minutes reading the lit review
- Methods: this should explain three things:
- How the researchers collected the people / objects they were going to study. As readers we should be interrogating these methods for bias [sample size, etc]
- How the researchers analyzed the people / objects they collected. Ways of analysis differ *really* widely between different fields. From ways of reading to some serious mathematical stuff that I do not understand at all
- How the researchers made sure their analysis was reliable and valid
- Findings: Some disciplines connect findings and discussion into one section. Others do it separately. Findings sections can involve some impenetrable math. Or tables that will not make sense to a non-expert.
- Discussion: HERE IS THE MONEY. This is where the researchers clarify findings and discuss their significance. Ideally, they will have summarized discussion findings in the introduction. But about 75% of the time here is the stuff we are looking for.
- Conclusion: usually phatic nonsense about how this one study is a start in a direction but ultimately more research will be needed to blah blah blah.
Okay, let’s look at a better article.
For Next Session
Guess what? Y’all are going to read an academic article. I did not have time to read all of these, but I have scanned them and believe they should be 1) interesting and 2) accessible.
- Creativity: Haase and Hanel.
- Racial Bias and Education: Warr-et-al.
- Pedagogic Potential (Education): Sandu-et-al.
- Regulation: Rao AND Lebouhk (two short pieces)
- Economic Impact: Noy and Zhang.
I want you to read an academic article and then write about 500 words about it (2 1/2 pages double-spaced). Half of that writing should try to summarize the article. Try to briefly summarize the methods and focus on the findings. But then get to the important stuff: ask yourself, “what does this article want [folks] to know?” and “with that knowledge, what does it want [folks] to do differently?” What does it want readers to do? What does it want other people to do? That’s the summary.
Then, do some thinking. We’ve read a bunch of Mollick. You have read other public pieces on AI. You’ve been using AI. Think. Connect. Contrast. Question. Write. Do you have questions about their methods? Do you agree with their finding? What questions do you have? Do they mention something else that you should read? There’s no one right way to think. And I don’t want to try and predict or limit the vectors you might pursue. So I simply ask for a word count (which you are welcome to blow past) as some sign of engagement. Gut responses and then reflection.
As always, you are free to use AI to help you with any element of this assignment. Just tell me how you are doing that. This can be integrated into your writing, or can be a sentence at the beginning to alert me to what’s going on.
