On Writtenness ― The Cultural Politics of Academic Writing

The term 'writtenness' is used to describe highlight a socio-academic criterion that is often taken-for-granted. The trope 'well written' is widespread but it is rarely very clearly defined and not adequately described by theory.

This book redresses that neglect by contextualizing writtenness as a focal issue in the contemporary context of international higher education. The quality of academic writing is often the source of both practical and ethical dilemmas in the academy, while at the same time the social value and productive role of the writing in the communication of knowledge are underestimated. The book interrogates the cultural power and value of writtenness, while also revealing its relative misrepresentation within academic culture at large.

The conceptual relevance of writtenness is accentuated in the current geopolitical context of English language dominance, where it is at the hub of both centripetal and centrifugal forces. On the one hand, there is a widespread uniformity in notions of style and accuracy which academic writing is deemed to embody and represent, while on the other, with English as the lingua franca in different academic and geographic contexts globally, and different varieties of English proliferating, writtenness becomes a site of struggle.