It’s 2014, and after a much needed break we are back and work and back on the blog. I want to start off this year with a short think-piece about something I have been wondering about for a while. Unthinking the way we think about writing, or aspects of how we teach students to write in academia. This post will be part one.

By unthinking what I am trying to get at is questioning our assumptions about what makes academic writing generally good, or worthy of praise or recognition – some of the ways in which we write and think in academia are so for good reasons and don’t necessarily warrant changes; but not all of them are so helpful and may even be making it harder for students to succeed. Perhaps, then, the start of a new academic year (for us in the Southern hemisphere at least) is a…