Hello [friend],
May I test an idea with you?
Today I led a seminar for post-graduate students in a course called
"To write scientific articles". We had a linguist here who talked about
style and other aspects of writing academic texts. In the afternoon we
had a vivid discussion on masculine and feminine styles when presenting
research results. Are there such differences? One of the female students
took up the quite common way of women to present themselves and their research:
"I have made a little study here", i.e. a tendency to play down the importance
of the work one has done. I started reflecting on why, and came to think
about Carol Gilligan and her critique of Lawrence Kohlberg's approach.
Now it comes:
When defining the criteria for Good Academic Writing, one usually talks
about such things as Precision, Conciseness, Organization, Impersonal style,
and Comprehensibility. What if there are two sets of criteria, dealing
with different dimensions, and corresponding to the traditional male and
female orientation? The criteria above would correspond to the typical
masculine emphasis on task fulfillment. The feminine orientation would
have to do with relationships. When a woman plays down the importance of
her work, she is trying to establish a specific kind of relationship to
her audience or readership. She wants to relate to them as equals, where
everyone's opinion is of interest. She wants to avoid posing as an expert
lecturing to an unknowing audience. What would criteria for Good Academic
Writing be if we look at the *relationship* between scholar and readership?
We discussed this at the seminar, and came up with the following:
- Tuning-in (i.e. adapting the style to the wave-length of the readers)
- Conscious self-presentation (i.e being present as an individual/subject
in the text, to write in a personal style, not hiding behind an impersonal/abstract
style)
- Authenticity (i.e. being true to one's own values, competence, identity)
- Animation (i.e. to give life to the substance; to use a vivid and
image-rich language that makes the text enjoyable, and that conveys the
substance in a way that is easy to grasp and remember)
These two sets of criteria are not mutually exclusive, just different. Hopefully one can usually integrate both sets in the same text.
Does this make sense?
Thomas