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  • Doing Academic Writing in Education: Connecting the Personal and the Professional
  • Marybeth Gasman
Doing Academic Writing in Education: Connecting the Personal and the Professional Janet C. Richards and Sharon K. Miller Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005, 248 pages, $24.50 (softcover)

I find great irony in the fact that our profession, through many of its scholarly journals of writing, encourages a professional discourse that communicates to fewer and fewer. . . . Our profession depends on vigorous discourse between those who explore and extend our discipline and those outside the profession who we may influence and who will instruct us. We need to communicate to those who make academic decisions that control support for research, scholarship, and teaching.

(p. xviii)

As an historian who writes and practices within the social sciences, I, too, have been frustrated for many years by the jargon-filled prose of some of my colleagues. At times, I have absolutely no idea what they are trying to convey to the reader. As such, I was heartened to read the above quotation from writing expert Donald Murray's foreword to Doing Academic Writing in Education. Murray pointed to the main premise of Richards and Miller's new book—we must write with clarity, write for our audiences, and write to be inclusive of others, not exclusive. I found this message to be quite refreshing in an age of sentences cobbled together with verbs that used to be nouns ("dialogue"). We academics have created a language that does us a great disservice, especially within the field of education where we already lack credibility in some public and policy circles. Many of my students have been affected by this trend to the point that they can no longer find their own voices (a topic in the book).

In Doing Academic Writing in Education, Janet C. Richards and Sharon K. Miller delved deeply into the writing process. Their book focuses on understanding oneself as a writer, the actual mechanics of writing (drafting, editing, revision), and most importantly, how an author can meld the personal and professional in the writing process. Their book offers a mix of practical comments, self-revelatory writing exercises, personal confessions, and suggested readings. Aside from the focus on education (and introspection), Richards and Miller have produced a book that is similar in nature to many helpful writing primers. It is slightly more detailed than William K. Zinsser's On Writing Well (2001) and much less rigid in its adherence to tradition than William Strunk, Jr., E. B. White, and Roger Angell's The Elements of Style (2000). The fact that the book focuses on education will be appreciated by readers of the Journal of College Student Development as the authors situate their writing scenarios within many different areas of the field, including teacher education, schools, and universities.

Perhaps most valuable and interesting in the book is the authors' emphasis on voice. Richards and Miller spent ample time discussing the voice of the student, which is often diminished or silenced by the professor. Instead of learning writing as a personal endeavor, students are taught to think of it as detached and objective. Richards and Miller asked their readers (who also happen to be writers) to examine and reflect upon their struggles and successes with writing and to bring these experiences into the process. The authors modeled this behavior by reflecting upon their own writing experiences, both good and bad. In addition, they drew upon the voices of their students and colleagues, [End Page 486] providing multiple perspectives on writing. For example, the authors shared the reflections of Kim Shea, a doctoral student at the University of South Florida:

As a beginning doctoral student, I don't think I've found my writing self yet. I don't even know if there is a particular strategy I pursue for academic writing. When I am required to write in an academic voice, the topic is constantly on my mind as I drive, do housework, and exercise.

(p. 37)

The book is filled with similar personal anecdotes and stories, all of which are aimed at making the reader/writer feel more comfortable with the writing process.

The major weakness of...

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