MA Week 20 - Academic Writing

Academic Writing  -  4th March 2016 

 

 

Some theory and some practical tips surrounding academic writing in this useful session. 

Karen talked about academic writing as an integral part of research by practice, referring to it as a "thinking tool" and a "reflective tool". There is a tendency amongst students of visual art to see writing as an add-on, and as I've mentioned I often find it a stress as I juggle and struggle to get visual work finished. However, Karen did say you have to get it into its place, and by doing shorter and more focused blog posts, I think I'm starting to get the hang of that. That said, once I get into something that really interests me, I can spend hours reading - even skimming - and thinking and writing a reflection. I suppose this is the use of writing as the "tools" that Karen referred to. It seems logical that a reflection on a piece of visual work would go hand-in-hand with creating that work. This is fine, as long as I acknowledge the time that needs to be allocated to it. 

Academic writing needs to reference knowledge, discourses, practices etc other than your own, but it must acknowledge that I am the author, with my own viewpoint, which hopefully will be well-argued and backed up by references. You need to consider what you will write and how you will write it before you start out. Fair comment. To this end, Karen suggested thinking of a title for a piece of longer work then unpicking that to identify different themes. Each theme can then have its own "research folder" of whatever kind and this can help reduce the confusion, although we agreed you "have to have the confusion before the clarity" and this applies to both visual and written work.  

Karen also provided some "grids" for building up bibliographies. One could be in each of the above research folders, along with a list of quotes. A literature review is also useful - a few sentences about each book you’ve identified and how it will be helpful. A book can be reviewed for this by reading the back cover and contents and having a skim through. For my own part, I did try using grids before but put the quotes in them, not just book details, so they got unwieldy more or less immediately. I went back to writing by hand.  I am pretty strict with myself about writing down book references and page numbers when making notes and I think this works OK for me on the scale I'm currently working.  

Any written piece needs to have boundaries. Reading that you’ve done that goes wider than this can be summed up in a few sentences so the reader can understand the writer has a breadth of knowledge. Also think about the reader. What information do they need in order to understand the context? A further consideration is whether to write in the first person or third person. I don't fully understand this debate ( it wasn't possible to go into it in detail) so I think I will need to ask or find out more about it later on. 

Karen also provided some further info about quoting, paraphrasing, referencing etc. This will be of use. It was really good to get some concrete practical support material to help with writing, although I don’t feel that I’ve had too many problems with it to date, other than the time factor.