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Writing, The Art of Making Readers Care: Why Most Academic Writing Fails to Create Real Problems

A confession: I’ve been teaching academic writing for years, but only recently realized I’d been focusing on the wrong problem entirely. In countless workshops, I’ve helped students craft elegant prose, structure clear arguments, and perfect their academic style. Yet their writing, while technically proficient, often left readers cold. It took me too long to understand why.

The issue crystallized during a recent seminar. A brilliant student had written a technically flawless paper on memorialization practices in Berlin. Perfect citations. Impeccable methodology. Comprehensive literature review. And utterly forgettable. When I asked her who needed this research and why, she looked blank. “It fills a gap in the literature,” she said, reciting the standard academic justification we’ve all used.

But here’s the thing: gaps don’t matter unless something falls through them. In academic writing, we’ve become masters of identifying what’s missing, but we’ve forgotten to ask why anyone should care about filling these holes. We mistake absence for importance, forgetting that in an infinite field of knowledge, there are infinite gaps. The mere existence of unexplored territory doesn’t make it worth exploring.

Real academic problems – the kind that make readers sit up and pay attention – aren’t about gaps. They’re about instability. About tension between what we think we know and what we observe. About contradictions in our current understanding that have real consequences for how we think or act in the world. When a piece of writing identifies such an instability and shows readers why it matters to them, it creates an intellectual itch that demands scratching.

Consider two ways to frame research on, say, urban memorials. Version one: “While scholars have extensively studied Holocaust memorials, there is a gap in the literature regarding memorials to other genocides.” Version two: “Our current theories about how cities process historical guilt through memorialization cannot explain the puzzling selective visibility of different genocides in Berlin’s memorial landscape.” The first tells us what’s missing. The second shows us why our current understanding is inadequate – and implies that this inadequacy matters.

The difference isn’t just semantic. It’s about intellectual stakes. A gap is passive – it just sits there, waiting to be filled. An instability is active – it creates tension in how we think about something, suggests our current frameworks might be wrong, hints at costs of leaving things unresolved. Gaps invite completion; instabilities demand resolution.

This distinction transforms how we write. Instead of starting with background information (the classic academic move), we begin by showing readers why their current understanding is unstable. Rather than establishing our credentials through literature reviews, we demonstrate value by revealing the costs of unresolved tensions in existing knowledge. The goal isn’t to prove we know something, but to show why knowing something new matters.

I see this shift happen in students’ writing when they finally grasp it. Their introductions stop trying to educate readers about basic concepts and start showing why established concepts don’t fully work. Their literature reviews stop being catalogs of previous work and become stories of unresolved tensions. Their research questions stop being about what we don’t know and start being about what we need to know.

Most profoundly, their relationship with readers changes. Instead of performing knowledge for evaluation, they’re offering solutions to intellectual problems that matter. Their writing becomes less about filling gaps and more about resolving tensions that have real stakes for their readers.

This is more than a writing technique – it’s a different way of thinking about academic work itself. It suggests that our value as scholars lies not in what we know, but in how we help others understand better. It reminds us that academic writing isn’t about displaying knowledge – it’s about advancing understanding in ways that matter to specific communities of readers.

The challenge, of course, is that this approach requires us to really know our readers – their concerns, their assumptions, their needs. We can’t create meaningful problems in a vacuum. We have to understand what keeps our readers up at night, what challenges their current thinking, what would help them understand better.

Perhaps this is the deeper problem we need to solve in academic writing: not how to fill gaps in knowledge, but how to create intellectual problems that matter to real readers. Everything else – the style, the structure, the methodology – serves this fundamental purpose: helping readers see why they need what we’ve discovered.


OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Victoria Mummelthei (29. November 2024). Writing, The Art of Making Readers Care: Why Most Academic Writing Fails to Create Real Problems. Keine Disziplin – No Discipline. Abgerufen am 26. März 2025 von https://doi.org/10.58079/13jse


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