This paper examines the underlying genres of philosophy focusing especially on their pedagogical forms to emphasize the materiality and historicity of genres, texts and writing. It focuses briefly on the history of the essay and its relation to the journal within the wider history of scientific communication, and comments on the standardized forms of academic writing and the issue of 'bad writing'.

Academic Writing Manual for Religious Studies - İlahiyat Alanı Makale Yazım Kılavuzu.

This paper examines the underlying genres of philosophy focusing especially on their pedagogical forms to emphasize the materiality and historicity of genres, texts and writing. It focuses briefly on the history of the essay and its relation to the journal within the wider history of scientific communication, and comments on the standardized forms of academic writing and the issue of ‘bad writing’.

Academic writing, even in prestigious journals, is frequently ugly and arduous. The writing in academic philosophy is no exception, especially given philosophers’ tendency to overlook prose and to focus exclusively on philosophical content. This paper argues that good prose matters for moral, prudential, and philosophical reasons. After glossing these reasons, the authors offer advice, born of experience, to academic writers who want to achieve clear, effective prose. Their advice includes how to improve sentence structure (e.g. (...) eliminate undue repetition and forms of “to be,” be careful with comma use, evaluate sentences by reading them aloud), global considerations (e.g. use technical notation cautiously, avoid prose in footnotes, read and report opponents’ views with charity), how to practice reiterating the same point in different words (e.g. play language games likes crossword puzzles, read non-academic prose, aim to communicate one’s point succinctly), and the suggestion to take prose seriously in the evaluation of student work. (shrink)

The Academic Writing Guide was prepared in accordance with "The Chicago Manual of Style" citation and reference system for the Cumhuriyet Theology Journal. In terms of spelling principles, the spelling rules in the first volume of the Encyclopedia of Islam of the Religious Foundation of Turkey were utilized. In this guide, the formal features that should be considered while preparing an academic article were tried to be explained with examples.

This book investigates how philosophical texts display a variety of literary forms and explores philosophical writing and the relation of philosophy to literature and reading. Discusses the many different philosophical genres that have developed, among them letters, the treatise, the confession, the meditation, the allegory, the essay, the soliloquy, the symposium, the consolation, the commentary, the disputation, and the dialogue Shows how these forms of philosophy have conditioned and become the basis of academic writing within both the (...) university and higher education more generally Explores questions of philosophical writing and the relation of philosophy to literature and reading. (shrink)

The logic of academic writing is the argumentative strategy on which our papers, our sections, and our paragraphs are based. It is a strategy, as it is a plan that connects different steps and has a specific goal, namely convincing the audience of an original and important idea. And it is argumentative, for two reasons. First, we can defend our idea and we can convince our audience only through arguments, which only in very few disciplines are formal deductions. (...) In most cases, the arguments that we use are based on premises accepted by a community and the conclusions are drawn from principles that in the ancient dialectics were called “maxims,” principles shared by everyone. Second, a paper is a dialogue between the author and his or her readers. An idea can be considered as interesting and worth reading only when it addresses a topic that is perceived as important by the readers and tackles a problem that is open and needs to be solved. Our arguments are acceptable when they start from the premises of our community of readers, avoiding repeating what is obvious for them or taking for granted what is obscure or unknown to them. In this book, we present the argumentative approach to academic writing that we used in classroom. What characterizes it and makes it unique is the perspective that is adopted. We do not start from preexisting ideas that only need to be presented in a way that is suitable to an academic public. We intend to show that writing academically is a consequence of thinking academically, or rather “strategically.” We want to explain how the linguistic and presentational devices are the result of a much deeper plan underlying them, and how mastering the logic of a paper leads to understanding and even developing academic styles. The logic of academic writing is not aimed at teaching how to use language and write texts academically, but at enabling readers to create their own style based on their own argumentative strategies. (shrink)

Most academics write in a dispassionate, third-person voice. That stylistic choice is so expected in academic contexts that when an evocative, first-person voice is used instead, it feels unsettling and out of place to many of us. But why should we react so negatively to such a subversion of expectations? Is it because of the subversion itself, or is it because of an inherent incompatibility between evocative writing and realist analytical traditions? In this paper I’ll show that the (...) freedom of first-person, evocative writing in autoethnography is a strength to be embraced rather than something to be avoided. I’ll further show how offering readers a more complete sensory understanding of experience and meaning isn’t incompatible with realist analytical traditions. I will do this through an exploration of my current research on childhood sexual abuse, which has inspired me to set aside my initial unease with evocative writing and embark on a journey from autoethnographic skeptic to advocate. (shrink)

International students often turn to various sources for help, including writing center tutors, friends, faculty mentors, online sources such as Google translate, and proofreading and editorial services, among others. While receiving help from these sources is both understandable and somewhat expected, what type and level of help is appropriate or ethical is not always clearly defined. The current research study investigates perceptions of faculty and international students at one U.S. university as to what is ethical in academic (...) class='Hi'>writing help for international students in 17 different scenarios. Findings suggest that students, far more than faculty, lacked certainty and agreement on whether certain help they may receive is ethical. The two groups’ views also varied on machine translation and the use of for-pay editors. Faculty, in general, had the least agreement on the use of machine translation and the use of a for-pay editing service for sentence- and discourse-level help and expressed that specific contexts and instructor’s expectations should be taken into consideration. Also, perceptions of students from East Asia showed notable differences. We argue that establishing and communicating clear guidelines concerning writing help should be part of any policy of academic integrity and present an “ethicality index” to help begin conversations as each institution, program, or faculty establishes the boundaries of ethical writing help in a specific context. (shrink)

Algorithms, or rather algorithmic actions, are seen as problematic because they are inscrutable, automatic, and subsumed in the flow of daily practices. Yet, they are also seen to be playing an important role in organizing opportunities, enacting certain categories, and doing what David Lyon calls “social sorting.” Thus, there is a general concern that this increasingly prevalent mode of ordering and organizing should be governed more explicitly. Some have argued for more transparency and openness, others have argued for more democratic (...) or value-centered design of such actors. In this article, we argue that governing practices—of, and through algorithmic actors—are best understood in terms of what Foucault calls governmentality. Governmentality allows us to consider the performative nature of these governing practices. They allow us to show how practice becomes problematized, how calculative practices are enacted as technologies of governance, how such calculative practices produce domains of knowledge and expertise, and finally, how such domains of knowledge become internalized in order to enact self-governing subjects. In other words, it allows us to show the mutually constitutive nature of problems, domains of knowledge, and subjectivities enacted through governing practices. In order to demonstrate this, we present attempts to govern academic writing with a specific focus on the algorithmic action of Turnitin. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to investigate the consequences of the use of text-matching software on teachers’ and students’ conceptions of plagiarism and problems in academic writing. An electronic questionnaire included scale items, structured questions, and open-ended questions. The respondents were 85 teachers and 506 students in a large Finnish university. Methods of analysis included exploratory factor analysis, t-test, and inductive content analysis. Both teachers and students reported increased awareness of plagiarism and improvements in writing habits, (...) as well as concerns and limitations related to the system. The results suggest that teachers are inclined to think of plagiarism as part of a learning process rather an issue of morality, which may have consequences for how they understand the role of text matching. The introduction of text-matching software has supported teachers’ work, but at the same time teachers emphasized their own responsibility in detecting problems in student writing. The survey provides a limited sample of “Case Finland,” where implementation of text-matching software nationwide has been remarkably rapid; it offers a glimpse into one institution’s implementation of a newly introduced policy for mandatory plagiarism detection. (shrink)

Based on applied linguistics, this study looked at the decision support system for emphasizing self-assurance in academic writing. From a generic perspective, academic writing has been considered both a process and a product. It has highlighted the planning composite processes, editing, composing, revising, and assessment, which depend upon the familiarity of someone with confidence in their capability for engagement in these activities. As a product, it has focused on the writing results through the product’s characteristics. (...) These contain specific content areas in acceptable depth and well-structured technical vocabulary. Higher education aims to support students in optimizing their potential for achieving satisfactory outcomes. For example, the assessment of grades involves academic writing, contributing to the degree course classification. Students have differences in many respects, such as expectations, background knowledge, and study and learning approaches. There were varying students’ beliefs about what academic writing is for evaluation. Modern-day motivations and theories highlight the significance of students’ confidence in their studies. The role of high confidence can support students to apply more effort toward setting challenging goals. Students may find it more difficult to succeed in higher education if they lack confidence in their academic writing abilities. A DSS has many applications in diverse areas and can play a significant role in the ranking and prioritization process. The current study has considered the DSS for prioritizing self-assurance in academic writing based on applied linguistics. Various criteria were considered for the evaluation of the research. The Super Decision software was used for the experimental process of the proposed research. The results of the study show the effectiveness of the proposed research. (shrink)

This paper has already been published in Higher Education Research & Development, Volume 38, 2018 - Issue 1: New Perspectives on Reading and Writing Across the Disciplines, p. 185-197. We thank the authors for the permission to republish it here.: Where and when do academics write and what are the feelings associated with it? Is the pressure to write a fulfilling process of joyful exploration, or is it stressful and wracked with self-doubt? Inspired by Henri Lefebvre's - Sciences de (...) l'éducation et de la formation – Nouvel article. (shrink)

Students experience different levels of autonomy based on the mediation of self-regulated learning, but little is known about the effects of different mediation technologies on students' perceived SRL strategies. This mixed explanatory study compared two technology mediation models, Icourse and Icourse+Pigai, with a control group that did not use technology. A quasi-experimental design was used, which involved a pre and post-intervention academic writing test, an SRL questionnaire, and one-to-one semi-structured student interviews. The aim was to investigate 280 Chinese (...) undergraduate English as a foreign language students' academic writing performance, lexical complexity, and perceptions of self-regulated strategies in academic writing. One-way ANCOVA of writing performance, Kruskal-Wallis test of lexical complexity, ANOVA of the SRL questionnaire, and grounded thematic content analysis revealed that, first, both Icourse and Icourse+Pigai provided significant support for the development of SRL strategies vs. the control group, although there was no significant difference between the two groups. Second, Icourse+Pigai-supported SRL was more helpful for improving students' academic writing performance because it enabled increased writing practice and correction feedback. Third, Icourse+Pigai-supported SRL did not significantly improve students' lexical complexity. In conclusion, we argue that both learning management systems and automated writing evaluation platforms may be used to assist students' SRL learning to enhance their writing performance. More effort should be directed toward developing technological tools that increase both lexical accuracy and lexical complexity. We conclude that the technical tools used in this study were positively connected to the use of SRL techniques. However, when creating technologically mediated SRL activities, students' psychological study preferences should be considered. (shrink)

This brief paper considers what to say about someone who responds to Saul Kripke’s writing by saying, “He uses ‘I’. That sounds subjective.” What to say about such an inference?! The main response I offer is that philosophy is partly about challenging, not encouraging, mistaken inferences.

The purpose of this work is to think about the thematics of the inventive formation of teachers crossed by the aesthetic activity of self writing. Therefore, we echo the question made by Maurice Blanchot when we confront the language of research in education linked to the requirement for its discontinuity, so that the written word is plural and involved with the movement of an aesthetic experience: “How to write in such a way that the continuity of the movement of (...) writing might let interruption as meaning, and rupture as form, intervene fundamentally?” Two axes of analysis and intervention were investigated: the notion of self writing of Michel Foucault and the idea of text and outside the text of René Lourau. There are circles that aim to guide the reader in the trajectories of the research on inventive teacher formation and their diaristic fragments. The circles are not separated, but meet each other and resonate with the axes of self writing, of the text and of the outside the text, these being: research with; cartography; research diary and writing restitution. There are inventive resonances, where each diary fragment, more than being a fragment, is the expression of an action that constitutes effective practices open to intensities and differences. However, the work of the diary is reversed by taking it away from the standard, to be able to treat it closer to alterity, to the ethical, aesthetic and political subjectivity processes of inventive teacher formation. (shrink)

This conceptual review seeks to reframe the view of academic integrity as something to be enforced to an academic skill that needs to be developed. The authors highlight how practices within academia create an environment where feelings of inadequacy thrive, leading to behaviours of unintentional academic misconduct. Importantly, this review includes practical suggestions to help educators and higher education institutions support doctoral students’ academic integrity skills. In particular, the authors highlight the importance of explicit academic (...) integrity instruction, support for the development of academic literacy skills, and changes in supervisory practices that encourage student and supervisor reflexivity. Therefore, this review argues that, through the use of these practical strategies, academia can become a space where a culture of academic integrity can flourish. (shrink)

Research skills are important for university graduates, but little is known about undergraduates’ motivation for research. In this study, self-efficacy beliefs and intrinsic motivation for several research activities were measured three times during an undergraduate research project. In order to promote self-efficacy for writing and collaboration, a collaboration script was developed and tested on half of the students. Twelve students were interviewed three times to gather in-depth information about motivational and self-efficacy beliefs. All measures except intrinsic motivation for research (...) increased significantly during the project. Interview results suggest that enactive mastery and positive social interdependence promoted self-efficacy. Feelings of relatedness seemed to promote intrinsic motivation for writing. Lack of autonomy and low perceived relevance may explain why motivation for research remained stable. The script had no impact on self-efficacy beliefs. Relatedness,... (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Volume 16, Issue 1, April 2020, Page 116-121.

A practical guide to both writing and getting published, written by an expert in academic publishing.