Academic Writing

The week-long blog post on CSU got reduced to 850 words and ran as an oped (Will CSU’s motto someday be: ‘I am a Phoenix’?) in the Sacramento Bee. I spent a year working with a panel of academics to determine the scientific evidence for what works with regard to increasing access to college. The monograph was published. I just spent a day speaking to policy makers about the findings. What they resonated to were the stories I told them of the high school students who center my life. The urgency of change came not from the careful analyses we had done over the past year, but the description of the lives of the young people with whom I work.

The game – Pathfinder U – that Zoe has described, is about to take off. I am working with many people to make a hope into reality. The hope is to invent something that will actually increase access to college. In order to see that hope actualized I have had to learn new languages. We are working with folks from the School of Cinema; they work, think, and speak differently from me, and if I am to succeed I have to learn their language. We also need money to build the game. I have been trying to write a business plan to make the hope reality. Again, a different language.

I never learned all these different discourses in graduate school. In truth, we did not need to know them. The standard academic language was sufficient. But I am surrounded by smart folks who help me learn how to write in a different register. I am at times exhausted by the variety of languages I have to learn, but I am always excited and challenged. Always.

The future for academics is that we must speak in different registers. To claim one or another language is no longer sufficient. We have to speak and write for multiple audiences and the individual who entirely rejects the old way, or entirely wants to be the lonely academic writing for the scholarly few just won’t work anymore.

It’s exciting. And exhausting. I wouldn’t want to do anything else.

Bill Tierney