We want to talk about writing in other languages. The majority of journal articles in the journals we’re involved with, and two of the books we’ve edited, have had the majority of chapters written by authors for whom English is an additional language. Julian’s own father was German, who wrote his doctorate in his fourth language (French) and then worked and published in his fifth language, English. Some of the greatest writers in English have been writing in an additional language: Joseph Conrad, who was Polish and born in Ukraine, is an excellent example. So we don’t get all high and mighty when it comes to writers in languages other than their mother tongues.

In a previous podcast, we talked about how ‘academic’ is itself an additional language, so all writers, whatever their home language is, will have to learn to write ‘academic’. AI does a good job of converting text (from any language, including non-academic English) into ‘academic English’, but it is a very bland style. We prefer the character in writing by real people, with the distinctive features of their own culture, including their other languages. As readers, that is, we are interested in the core of the work, and the surface features just give it more character and more authenticity. We have to remember this, when marking student work or reviewing professional academic work. There is honey at the core.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We want to talk about civil disagreement. We don’t always agree, and we need to know how to disagree well, in academic writing. (If we all agreed, there would be no need to write anything more.) Being disagreeable is a skill, perhaps an art, and it is better to have a creative disagreement than to have a feud.

What about starting and ending disagreements? To start a disagreement, we first need to understand, to be receptive to, to appreciate, the view that we will be disagreeing with. That gives us a licence to disagree. Like James Bond has a licence to kill: that sort of licence. And how do we end a disagreement (in a piece of academic writing)? We can either end it with a resolution. That is like the dialectics of the Ancient Greeks, or the 19th century Germans, where every thesis has an antithesis, ending in a synthesis. If that’s possible, that’s fine. But the more common way to end a disagreement is to leave room for it to continue, even if that is a little uncomfortable. That is an example of dialogue or conversation: deciding that we’ve tried to understand and appreciate the other point of view, and saying there’s more to be said. As there usually is, if we keep on thinking.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.