Can academic writing be engaging? Takeaways from a writing workshop

Recently, I had the privilege of participating as a mentor in a writing workshop initiative sponsored by the Journal of Urban Studies and Review of Urban Affairs, (June 9-14, 2023, Goa) in which I walked selected applicants through the nitty gritty of academic writing, its features and protocols. While the primary purpose of the workshop was to help young scholars of urban studies augment the quality of their academic articles, the actual experience went far beyond this initial goal.

It generated exciting conversations that brought to the fore the gaps in higher education in India and the pressures faced by young academics from the emerging ecosystem of academic publications and rankings. The workshop was a productive exercise and underscored the pressing need for hands-on and interactive interventions to plug the gaps in the teaching of the Humanities and Social Science programmes.

Publishing and higher education

Over the last two decades, two tendencies have become pronounced in India’s ecosystem of higher education. One is the compulsion to publish, which has become the basis for promotion, for dissertation submissions and recruitment. The other is to participate in the call for the internationalisation of education, which is rhetorically powerful but remains vague at the level of the actual implementation. Both processes involve writing and packaging research ideas, neither of which is undertaken seriously by higher education institutes.

Like the refresher courses of yore that were offered within universities to help faculty at undergraduate institutions improve their reading and skills, writing and research methodology courses are compulsory components of PhD coursework. And much like the refresher courses, which often degenerated into ritualised pathways for promotion, methodology, and writing courses too remain tentative and ad hoc. For the most part, these courses are cobbled together to include a few core readings to familiarise scholars with basic methods of research and do not factor in the importance of teaching how to read or how to write and structure an argument.

It is ironic that this is so when scholars face the constant pressure of having to publish without the tools and means for writing at their disposal, especially after the scrapping of the MPhil programme, which for a while had emerged as a bridge between an inadequate Master’s degree and a doctoral programme. Consequently, young scholars face challenges in framing a research idea, developing a question, hazarding a claim, and thinking of evidence to instantiate the claims and processing it in relation to existing work on the field.

What is the way out?

It is evident that universities with extensive and diverse cohorts cannot address this problem using current strategies. The issue with writing courses runs deeper than the fact that not all students have the same degree of proficiency in English. In fact, the ways in which universities teach doctoral students to evaluate content also encourage formulaic approaches to learning and retention of knowledge and stifle critical thinking.

There are some spaces, admittedly, where the emphasis has been on critical thinking and engagement but these are few and far between. In the circumstances, it appears that small, micro-level workshops designed for small groups with specific activities could work as an immersive exercise in thinking very specifically about research and its underlying rationale. My own experiences in the workshop, where I interacted closely with a number of students as they crafted rough drafts for publication, shared their anxieties and communicated best practices with one another, gave me hope and a lot of joy.

It held out solid prospects for intellectual exchanges, for approaching writing as a craft and a recursive activity, and for collaborative work. It also saw, albeit for a short duration, the coming together of a community of readers and writers who saw their labour as part of a collective effort. The workshop was designed around two principal activities: an open session where the resource persons spoke at length about what constituted the basic elements of a journal article, how it is viewed by editors and referees who use their expertise to validate its contributions within the specific field it is located, about the modalities of mapping ideas and how to deal with rejections and respond to them. These sessions used actual examples to communicate best practices – parsed model articles and demonstrated how writing is a very refined craft accommodating specific conventions and balancing these with new empirical claims and conceptual ideas.

The second session saw smaller groups who worked with one mentor, presented their drafts to the
mentor and other group members and embarked on a review and revision activity. These sessions
continued for four days and ended with a brief presentation by scholars of their revised work, where it had progressed and how it had absorbed the inputs of the workshop. What stood out in the workshop was the attention to detail and to the intensity of academic interactions. This was possible because the groups were small and the activity focused and because the mandate was to think with a community of peers, without fear or competition.

While it may be difficult to scale up efforts like this workshop, the time to devise and offer small and carefully designed initiatives routinely has certainly come. It is possible that such efforts might help set a basis for a critical understanding of academic work, knowledge production, and asymmetries in the ecosystem of higher education and publishing. This, in turn, would give scholars a clearer idea of what they are pursuing and why adhering to protocols is so important in developing sound academic habits It is only then that we can avoid being sucked into the vortex of predatory publications and offer a real critique of the paradigm of mainstream journals located in the global north.

The issue then is not “to write or not to write” but how to write and the key to this is to be taught
how to read, how to identify core arguments and how to recognise the spine of an argument. Given the extraordinary pressure students face, transitioning from MCQ culture to a content-heavy evaluation system, from inadequate access to resources to language facility, it seems that the model of the small workshop holds the key to self-inquiry and genuine transformation. I am grateful for having experienced this first-hand and would urge more public-minded institutions and individuals to come forward and fill the gap.