Part 1 – Developing personal academic writing style
| Stránky: | Moodle ZČU |
| Kurz: | UJP/AEP5 Akademická angličtina 5 - šablona |
| Kniha: | Part 1 – Developing personal academic writing style |
| Vytiskl(a): | Nepřihlášený host |
| Datum: | pondělí, 9. listopadu 2026, 22.41 |
1. Style: is it something you are born with?
Before you read on, think about the following question:
Are we born with our unique writing style and typically cannot change it throughout our lives or is our writing style something that could be possibly learned and acquired?
Judith Butler, Preface to
Gender Trouble, 1999:
„Both critics and friends of Gender Trouble have drawn attention to the difficulty of its style. It is no doubt strange, and maddening to some, to find a book that is not easily consumed to be „popular“ according to academic standards. I think that style is a complicated terrain and not one that we unilaterally choose or control with the purposes we consciously intend. .[..] Certainly, one can practice styles, but the styles that become available to you are not entirely a matter of choice. Moreover, neither grammar nor style are politically neutral. Learning the rules that govern intelligible speech is an inculcation into normalized language, where the price of not conforming is the loss of intelligibility itself.“
Exercise 1: Having read the quotation, please write down 3 assumptions, conclusions or inferences you can make about writing styles and grammar.
1.1. What can you infer?
You are right. We can infer that
1) our writing is always evolving in accordance with our thoughts.
2) complicated language might be difficult to read and comprehend.
3) our writing helps us think. We may create new ideas while writing.
4) there are certain rules we need to obey to be understood.
These conclusions lead us to a motivation with which we should write: we are writing to express and explain our ideas, our understanding of the world in order to perceive the concepts better and be able to add up our own ideas to these concepts.
Our texts should be created for ourselves so that we can move on to thinking about the matter we discuss on a new, perhaps higher, level. We are creating new knowledge for ourselves while we write and our writing encourages us to deepen our perception of our topic.
Again, we are NOT writing to impress our academic community. We are NOT making our texts sound deliberately difficult and obscure. We are NOT writing to get published somewhere. We are writing to think about a concept thoroughly to enhance our own understanding.
With this outlook on academic writing it may be easier to study the aspects of grammar and style.