Introduction
Welcome! Wherever you’re at in your writing journey—whether you have no experience with scholarly writing or you’re feeling pretty confident about your skills—this textbook is for you.
The skills you’ll learn in this open online resource will empower you to meaningfully contribute to scholarly conversations in your disciplines, as well as support you in considering how these skills might be used to effectively communicate your knowledge with people outside the university.
Before we begin our journey together, there’s a few things I want to acknowledge. First, I want to assure you that academic English is nobody’s first language. You might be arriving here already speaking a handful of languages, but feeling uncertain and insecure about your ability to carry out nuanced and engaged scholarly writing in English. Or, English might be your first language, but you’re not sure what’s required of you in terms of tone and level of formality in this new genre.
Learning how to write in a scholarly context is a process. But the good news is that we get better at writing by writing.
I also want to acknowledge that scholarly writing as a genre situated within academic institutions is inherently colonial and exclusionary. Historically, Indigenous Traditional Knowledge has been actively fenced out of the conversation. It is our responsibility, as students and as scholars, to educate ourselves about the histories and contemporary realities of First Peoples, and to actively contribute to the important work of reconciliation and decolonization.
This textbook was created at the University of British Columbia, on the traditional and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) people. As an uninvited settler on Indigenous territory, this land acknowledgement does not absolve me of my responsibility to work towards right relations every day.
Media Attributions
- Spring of Hope © Amber Vittoria is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA (Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike) license
Something that is academic in nature.
Tone refers to the writer's voice in a written work. It is what the reader or hearer might perceive as the writer's attitude, bias, or personality. Many academic writers mistake a scholarly tone for dull, boring language or a mixture of jargon and multisyllabic, "intelligent-sounding" words. Academic writing, however, does not need to be complicated nor lacking in style (see APA 7, Section 4.7); instead, it can be both engaging and clear. (Walden University Writing Centre)
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission report “defines reconciliation as an ongoing process of establishing and maintaining respectful relationships. A critical part of this process involves repairing damaged trust by making apologies, providing individual and collective reparations, and following through with concrete actions that demonstrate real societal change” (Honouring the Truth, 2015, p. 16).
Decolonization may be defined as the active resistance against colonial powers, and a shifting of power towards political, economic, educational, cultural, psychic independence and power that originate from a colonized nation’s own indigenous culture. This process occurs politically and also applies to personal and societal psychic, cultural, political, agricultural, and educational deconstruction of colonial oppression.
Per Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang: “Decolonization doesn’t have a synonym”; it is not a substitute for ‘human rights’ or ‘social justice’, though undoubtedly, they are connected in various ways. Decolonization demands an Indigenous framework and a centering of Indigenous land, Indigenous sovereignty, and Indigenous ways of thinking.
SOURCE:
1. The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), “Glossary.”
2. Eric Ritskes, “What Is Decolonization and Why Does It Matter?”
