By Lisa Clughen & Christine Hardy (Eds.)

Emerald (2012)

Review by Keith Jebb

The book could be seen as a bit of a mess, but if I don't mean that as a compliment, I do mean that it reflects the situation it is intended to grapple with: the state of student writing in Higher Education in the UK. There is a general acceptance by the authors in this book, that there is at least a mismatch between academics' expectations of students' writing abilities and skills, and what students bring to the table. Clughen and Hardy's essay 'Writing at University' (pp24-54) acknowledges this with evidence of attitudes on both sides of the divide. One of their conclusions is that HE institutions should:

provide and ensure the delivery of preparatory courses on academic writing for those FE students who are most likely to benefit and are expecting to progress to HE, having entered the UCAS system (p.54).

This is fine if the issue was merely academic English, but issues encountered by academics, in particular in the post-1992 sector, cover a number of the competencies expected of level 4 students in the national curriculum (reprinted in Hardy and Helen Boulton's essay 'Writing at School' (p.9)). It's not just the old chestnut of grammar, it's the basic ability to articulate an argument, as opposed to relaying information, where so much of the fault lies. And it is not for Universities to sort this out. It could be argued (but there is no time for it here) that the information-delivery bias of the national curriculum in practice amounts to a disenfranchisement of large sectors of the population.

That said, there is a lot useful material in this book. At the heart of it is Patrick O'Connor and Melanie Petch's 'Merleau-Ponty, Writing Groups and the Possibilities of Space' (pp. 75-97), which uses Merleau-Ponty's concept of the 'embodied writer' to analyse how students relate to their writing. To get students (and academics) to see writing as an active rather than a passive activity—think of the classic notion of 'writing-up'; the very last thing one does after the real work of research—they advocate writing groups, where writing is embedded and embodied in a social and dialogic context. If there's one overall thesis in this book—which takes a number of divergent but for the most part complementary approaches—it's this emphasis on writing groups and the mutual support and platform for discussion that they provide.

In particular, Clughen and Matt Connell's 'Using Dialogic Lecture Analysis to Clarify Disciplinary Requirements for Writing' makes the case for the social space of writing and presents a number of strategies and techniques for developing it. This is something that is fairly obvious in the creative writing sector, and is one of the functions of the writing workshop (there are others), but it is good that there is only one brief reference in passing to creative writing in the whole book. There are wider concerns here.

Which is an apt point to return to the mess. There are dozens of little errors in this book, from mistakes in punctuation, to uncoordinated sentences to missing words. Nothing that a decent proofreader wouldn't weed out, but characteristic of the current time-pressured and REF-pressured state of UK academia. Yet so much of this book is about giving students (undergraduate and postgraduate) time to write, not 'write up' or just get things down. It is a book that should not become just another disposable outcome of the academic machine, when so much of what it says provides cogent, often implicit, criticism of the machine itself.