Academic WRiting

For an interesting overview of how much academic writing works, check out Joseph Williams' book Style, Lesson 10, "Motivating Coherence," in which Wilson analyzes the template of:

Shared Context -- Problem -- Solution

He addresses two kinds of problems:

1. Practical
2. Conceptual (this is the kind we typically work with in academic contexts, he says, and the kind of problem students sometimes struggle with)

He writes:

All of this is hard to grasp if you're new to teh academic world. We all understand practical problems because they make us pay a palpable cost. But those new to academic research don't know what gaps in understanding make good conceptual problems, because they don't yet know what others in their field don't know, but want to. (That's a practical problem that only time and experience solve.) (p. 191)

It occurs to me that this chapter might be an interesting or useful one to ask students in a WAW course to read, so they have some big-picture or meta-knowledge about how the academic articles I am going to ask them to read work.