Are textbooks normally academic writing?

Although a little less emotionally and morally charged than the questions you are addressing in your argumentative essays, in our discussion in class yesterday, we had yet another example where a controversy hinged on the definition of a term: whether textbooks are normally academic writing or not depends on what we mean by the term academic writing. At the start of our discussion, most people thought that textbooks were usually academic writing, although there were a couple with the opposite idea who were sure that they were right and the others wrong. Happily, you realised that the problem, the source of the disagreement, lay in the different definitions of the term academic writing, which were then solicited for examination. We saw a couple of common definitions of academic writing which had in common the notion that academic writing means "connected with learning or an educational institution" in some way; however, a more accurate definition is that it is writing which displays certain characteristic styles and purposes, specifically, that it is more precise than non-academic styles and that it is intended to state and support the writer's ideas in a regularly structured form, from which definition it follows that text books are not normally academic writing.

The first definition listed for academic in the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary [OALD] defines it as "connected with education, especially studying in schools and universities" ("academic, adj.", 2011). This definition is clearly what people have in mind when they think that academic writing means "being used in an educational institution" or "a piece of writing designed to teach or educate". Nonetheless, the OALD definition of academic is misleading. First, almost any piece of writing could be, and often is, used at university or school as class material: newspapers, for example, are commonly used resources, and even courses with the word academic in their title, such as AUA's Academic English Program, are very likely to make use of newspaper articles as in integral part of the learning process, but novels, cartoons, comics, personal correspondence, and indeed any other type of written material might be useful and used at an academic institution or for a genuine academic purpose. If the mere fact of being used in a school or university, or used for an academic purpose was enough to make a piece of writing academic writing, then everything would be academic writing, and the term would be meaningless since it would mean exactly the same as the single word writing. For the sake of precision, to actually say something that means one thing and not another, we do not want our terms to be meaningless, so a more precise and meaningful definition of the term academic writing must be sought.

As Quest's comprehension exercise on "The Anthropological View of Religion" and notes on types of definition suggest, two useful strategies for clarifying our understanding of a term that is a noun or noun phrase is to consider its characteristics and functions (Hartmann & Blass, p. 27 & 40). What, then, are the characteristics of academic writing? What purposes, or functions, does it serve? Poome made a promising suggestion in class yesterday when he defined academic writing as "writing that has a particular style". And this sounds right. The most obvious examples of academic writing are journal articles, but also research papers, essays, and of course exam answers. There are definite differences in style between these forms of writing when done for academic purposes and not. If you compare the writing on the BBC News website with the considerably more academic writing of The New York Times or The Economist, some differences in style are easy to see: the paragraphs in the more academic sources are longer, with many paragraphs in the BBC News being a single sentence; the actual sentences are not only longer in The New York Times and The Economist, but they are more complex, using a greater range of grammar, some of which is not usual in ordinary English; this complexity sentence structure is matched by a much larger vocabulary; a further distinction worth noting is that rather than simply reporting facts with little effort to organize or use them to make a larger point, The New York Times and The Economist show a more careful awareness of overall organization, with articles often having a clear introduction, body and conclusion, while BBC News articles are sometimes not much more than a collection of facts with only the simplest organizing principle. In our own classes, we have see other examples, such as the thesis statements that we have been writing this week. These sentences are all long, and use complex grammar to state our ideas. And there are reasons why academic writing has these style characteristics that distinguish it from other, less formal types of writing.

Writer's always have a purpose. We do not write for no reason. Although we might sometimes write because a teacher tells us to, that is not really why academics, or anyone else, writes. William Golding did not write Lord of the Flies because his mother or teacher or someone else told him to; he more likely wrote it because he had had a great idea for a story and wanted to share it with others, perhaps also hoping that his message would be understood and make a difference in the world, or at least to the people who read his novel. And it has. Academics, and those who write in a similar style, such the staff of The New York Times and The Economist also have purposes. A common purpose in most academic writing is to clearly state and support an idea about something. This is why scientists write up their research and propose new theories; they have had a new idea, and they want to make sure it is precisely stated and well supported. Similarly, when you had an idea about the merits of Thailand's Ministry of Public Health's proposals to further control tobacco in Thailand, you wanted to be sure that your readers understood exactly what you wanted to say, and to persuade them that your idea was right. These two purposes, precisely stating our ideas and supporting them, explain many of the distinctive style elements that characterize academic writing. If you want to state your idea so that your readers will understand it correctly and exactly, you need to use vocabulary precisely, and that often means using words that are not commonly used in non-academic English, or using words in ways and with meanings that might not be common. Academic English does not use words because they are uncommon, but because sometimes the uncommon word is exactly the right word for the writer's idea. Similarly, sentences in academic English are often longer, and use things like the passive voice and complex nested conjunctions because the writer's ideas are complex and need a complex sentence to be precisely stated. You could not possibly write the thesis statement for an argumentative essay on a controversial topic, even the topic of this essay, in a short, simple sentence. If you go back to the thesis statement above for this essay, you will see that it has 86 words, that the relative pronoun which occurs  3 times, that the word that is used 5 times to introduce a clause, and that as well as the conjunctions however, and, and or, and that the grammar is also used show the connections between the ideas that make up the thesis that this body paragraph is helping to support. Perhaps I could have written a shorter sentence, but I definitely could not have written a short, simple sentence that would have accurately stated what the thesis statement above does. Academic writing, then, can reasonably well be defined as writing that uses characteristic styles in order to precisely state and effectively support a writers ideas.

When we look at textbooks, they are certainly intended to convey ideas, but the ideas are more often well established facts, information or theories that students are expected to learn. Textbooks do not typically present an idea and then support it. They tell us what Newton's laws of motion say. They tell us how to apply them to physics questions. They tell us when Newton made his discoveries. They do not present new ideas by the authors. They do not challenge us to reconsider currently accepted ideas (with some exceptions). They do not generally lead students into uncertain areas at the edge of what is known. And that's university level textbooks. Textbooks for high school students, or primary school use, are even less likely to do anything to radical. The purpose of textbooks is not to state and then support the writers' ideas; it is to as clearly and as simply as possible present well established facts that students are expected to learn: that 2+2=4, that Columbus discovered the Americas in 1492, and that the Latin word for table is the first declension mensa ~ae. Since these are the purposes of textbooks, it is not surprising that writers are careful to use a simple language as possible, that they often introduce new vocabulary in bold and then add a definition in parentheses, which style features we see throughout the Quest series,along with more obvious signs of a textbook such as questions to check understanding, exercise to test understanding and skill, and questions to check that important details are remembered; none of these are normally found in academic writing because the purposes of academic writing result in a very different style. Although at higher levels, the style of writing in textbooks might approach a more academic writing style, both the purposes and resulting style mean that textbooks are generally not academic writing.

The common notion that textbooks are normally examples of academic writing is an error that occurs because of a faulty understanding of what academic writing is. When this is rightly understood as being a style of writing distinguished from other forms of writing by a style which is sufficiently complex in grammar and vocabulary to precisely state an idea at the sentence level, and to support a writers ideas over an extended essay or other longer piece of writing, it is also understood that textbooks generally do not qualify as academic writing. Quest, for example, is mostly not academic writing, although it is about academic writing, and some of the examples in it are academic writing, especially the readings in Parts 3 and 5 of each chapter, the Academic Reading and Academic Writing parts of the chapters. As is so often the case in academic reading and writing, it is essential to pay very careful attention to the precise meanings of the words and the grammar which we use to present out ideas to the world.

 - My thanks to the members of my AEP RW5 class of term1, 2011, 
whose excellent questions on Tuesday prompted this short essay -

Feel welcome to comment, especially if you disagree.  

This is the first draft, and I've already thought of a couple of revisions to make it stronger. What do you think? Can you make any review suggestions? Do you see any weaknesses I should fix?  

__________

References

academic, adjective (2010) Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, (8th ed.). Oxford University Press. Retrieved February 2, 2011, from http://www.oxfordadvancedlearnersdictionary.com/dictionary/academic

Hartmann, P. & Blass, L. (2007). Quest 3 Reading and Writing (2nd. ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.
__________
Notes - Analysis

The first paragraph is my introduction. For this short essay, the introduction is only one paragraph. As expected, the thesis statement is at the end of the introduction. If you took that one sentence and handed it to someone who was not in class and who has not seen the rest of this essay, they should be able to tell you:

• the topic of the essay = textbooks
• my main idea about that topic = they are not normally academic writing
• the expected structure of the body of the essay =
  1 - a discussion of a definition of the term academic writing which I will argue against
  2 - a discussion of the definition of academic writing that I support
  It is unnecessary, and probably best to avoid, mentioning textbooks in these two parts of the body of my essay (why?). The topic of these body paragraphs is not textbooks; it's the meaning of the term academic writing.
  3 - some analysis which applies the definition supported to relevant facts. This is where the topic of the paragraphs is textbooks. My main idea about them should come out of this analysis. 

I've you've been checking over the past 24 hours, you will have realized that:

• I wrote the thesis statement first. 
• I then wrote a very short introduction to give some background. 
• Next, I wrote the parts of the body of the essay to support my thesis statement in the expected order, which I had already planned before I wrote the thesis statement. 
• I then wrote a conclusion. 
• Finally, I went back and rewrote the introductory sentences leading to my thesis statement. This is not unusual. It's a good idea to write your introduction last. (Why? )