Recently in ASTU 100 we’ve been focusing on a new topic which is all about academic culture and scholarly writing. Just to be honest, this probably wont be my favourite topic as it’s just a basic (kind of boring) introduction for us first year students to be able to understand this new culture we’re now in, academic culture. However, I am grateful our professor, Dr. Lugar has made the content much more interesting than just simply reading off of a textbook. I’ve realized this new culture of academic writing has almost an entirely new language, of course it’s all English, but just uses different meanings or interpretations for words I used to use differently.

One chapter in our textbook, “Academic Writing an Introduction”, that surprisingly caught my attention was chapter 6 which is all about orchestrating voices in writing. I find it pretty fascinating that writers have put so much thought into simply quoting other works, the fact that they connect the different people they’re quoting in their own writing is really interesting to me. This act of creating a relationship between other writers was definitely never something I really thought about, you assume what you’re writing wouldn’t require for you to also show relationships of other peoples writing as well, but the concept makes so much sense! For example, what’s talked about in section 6C in chapter 6 “The challenges of Non-Scholarly voices” (p.120), it makes so much sense to connect the two works cited because you can’t give the same credit to people who are writing in non-scholarly voices. This is simply because it makes it harder to know if that source is as reliable as a scholarly, peer reviewed one.

Another section that caught my attention was 6D which is about “Orchestrating Academic Textbooks and Popular writing” (p123). This section was almost like reading a textbook inception, I was reading a textbook, which was analyzing and defining textbooks, which are used to define, confusing right? This section really helped me see the bigger picture of the purpose of this topic in class, it was defining things for me that before were assumed to already be understood. For example, I was being given a definition of a textbook which is not usual as you assume students know what a textbook is. All these explanations are helping us to understand WHY we’re being told to write these essays or read these textbooks and WHAT their true purposes are. This helped put everything in perspective for me and almost makes me more confident for the future as I don’t seem so lost in this new “strange” world I’m in now going from high school to university level academics.

Sources:

Giltrow, Janet, Richard Gooding, Daniel Burgoyne, and Marlene Sawatsky. Academic Writing: An Introduction. 3rd ed. Toronto: Broadview, 2014. Print.