by Zaky Jaafar
Academic writing today occupies a strange
tension between form and thought. On one hand, universities and journals
increasingly insist on standardisation—structured abstracts, predictable
sequences, rigid referencing styles, and tightly specified methodological
declarations. On the other hand, the very traditions that built modern
scholarship were rarely standardised. Few of the texts we consider “seminal”
would survive contemporary peer review without major revisions. Kant would be
told to “tighten his argumentation,” Hegel to “clarify his conceptual
framework,” and Augustine to “reduce unnecessary narrative digressions.” Their
works were dense, uneven, at times opaque, yet they endured because their
intellectual ambition exceeded stylistic constraints.
The coherence we now demand was not
inherent in these foundational texts; it was produced by centuries of
commentary. Gadamer (1975) reminds us that meaning unfolds across time, shaped
by readers who reinterpret difficult ideas. Ricoeur (1981) similarly argues
that the task of scholarship is not merely to transmit information but to
reorganise complexity into new frameworks of understanding. Standardisation,
however, reverses this logic: instead of shaping genres around ideas, it
pressures ideas to fit genres.
This pressure has consequences.
Contemporary scholarship increasingly displays signs of what Nicholas,
Watkinson, and Boukacem-Zeghmouri (2017) call “safe scholarship”—research that
takes minimal risks and avoids conceptual experimentation. The rise of audit
cultures and metric-driven evaluation, as Biagioli (2016) notes, channels
academic behaviour toward what is measurable rather than what is meaningful.
Firestein (2012) observes a similar pattern in the sciences, where
curiosity-driven inquiry gives way to output-driven productivity. In humanities
and social sciences, the language of bureaucracy now shapes intellectual
practice: clarity becomes a procedural requirement rather than a philosophical
pursuit.
Standardisation does improve certain
things. It promotes clarity, facilitates peer review, and makes scholarship
easier to index, compare, and replicate. But it also narrows the range of
permissible thought. As Foucault (1977) would argue, forms of writing operate
as forms of discipline: they shape not only expression but imagination itself.
When scholars internalise the expectations of journal templates or
institutional rubrics, they begin to anticipate what will be accepted, funded,
or publishable—and censor lines of thinking that fall outside those boundaries.
The result is a gradual erosion of
creativity. Exploratory, conceptual, or speculative inquiries—the kinds
historically responsible for intellectual breakthroughs—become compressed into
formats designed for empirical research. Hjørland (2005) warns that when
interpretive or philosophical ideas are forced to mimic the structure of
positivist research, they lose their richness. They become deskilled imitations
of a method never meant for them. More worryingly, they risk becoming
unpublishable, not because they lack insight, but because they resist reductive
clarity.
This narrowing of form leads to a narrowing
of thought. When the essay, the treatise, the commentary, and the conceptual
monograph are sidelined in favour of the IMRaD article, the intellectual
ecosystem shrinks. Academic writing becomes predictable. Ideas fragment into
“least publishable units,” as institutions reward output over depth. The
humanities—once home to sprawling, imaginative, philosophically vibrant
writing—risk becoming procedural imitations of scientific reporting.
Yet history shows us a different model.
Hermeneutic traditions, critical theory, and philosophical commentary all
demonstrate that scholarship flourishes when writers are free to explore ideas
without rigid structural constraints. These traditions do not reject clarity;
they reject the notion that clarity must always take the same form.
If academia is to recover its intellectual
vitality, it must reconsider its assumptions about what writing should look
like. Standardisation should not be abolished—it serves important functions—but
it should no longer dominate the terrain. The freedom to experiment with form
must be restored, not as an indulgence but as an epistemic necessity.
Creativity is not ornamental to scholarship; it is foundational. Without it,
knowledge becomes repetitive, procedural, and devoid of transformative
potential.
In the end, the crisis is not simply about
writing style. It is about what kinds of thinking academia is willing to
cultivate. If universities and journals want research that truly
matters—research that shifts paradigms, challenges assumptions, or imagines new
futures—they must once again make room for writing that thinks beyond the
template.
(This article is AI assisted for details and references)
References
Badley, G. (2019). Academic writing as
shaping and sharing knowledge. Studies in Higher Education, 44(7), 1159–1170.
Bazerman, C. (2013). A theory of literate
action: Literate action volume 2. The WAC Clearinghouse.
Biagioli, M. (2016). Game theory: Academic
misconduct, metrics, and the new audit culture. In The misconduct of science
(pp. 15–28). University of Chicago Press.
Firestein, S. (2012). Ignorance: How it
drives science. Oxford University Press.
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish:
The birth of the prison. Vintage Books.
Gadamer, H.-G. (1975). Truth and method.
Continuum.
Hjørland, B. (2005). Empiricism,
rationalism and positivism in library and information science. Journal of
Documentation, 61(1), 130–155.
Macfarlane, B. (2017). Freedom to learn:
The threat to student academic freedom and why it needs to be reclaimed.
Routledge.
Nicholas, D., Watkinson, A., &
Boukacem-Zeghmouri, C. (2017). The precariousness of scholarly creativity.
Learned Publishing, 30(3), 233–239.
Ricoeur, P. (1981). Hermeneutics and the
human sciences (J. B. Thompson, Ed.). Cambridge University Press.
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