I’ve been watching my students struggle with something that shouldn’t be difficult, and it’s starting to irritate me. Not them—they’re doing their best with an impossible task. What irritates me is how we’ve managed to turn one of the most natural human activities—having a conversation—into an exercise in intellectual contortion that would impress a medieval theologian.
Take one student, who spent our last meeting apologizing for their research interests. They’d discovered something genuinely fascinating about how Syrian refugees navigate bureaucratic systems, something that could reshape how we think about agency and institutional power. But instead of telling me about their insights, they spent twenty minutes explaining why their work wasn’t as important as what other scholars had done, why their methods weren’t as sophisticated as so-and-so’s, why their theoretical framework was “just building on” established thinkers. By the time they finished diminishing their contribution, I’d forgotten why I’d been excited about their project in the first place.
This pathological humility isn’t serving anyone. We’ve somehow convinced graduate students that scholarly conversation requires a kind of intellectual genuflection—bow before established authorities, apologize for your existence, then maybe, if you’re very good and very careful, add one tiny brick to the cathedral of knowledge. The metaphor breaks down immediately. Cathedrals aren’t built through conversation; they’re monuments to institutional power. Real conversations happen in kitchens, on park benches, in places where people feel comfortable enough to think out loud.
The problem starts with how we teach literature reviews. We treat them like diplomatic exercises where the goal is to acknowledge everyone important without offending anyone powerful. Students learn to write sentences like “While Smith’s groundbreaking work has contributed significantly to our understanding, and Jones’s influential framework has provided valuable insights, this study seeks to modestly extend the conversation by examining…” By the time you get to the actual point, everyone’s asleep. Including the writer.
What if we tried something different? What if we taught students to write like they actually think? Sarah Ahmed does this beautifully—they’ll start a paragraph with something like “I am struck by how…” or “This makes me wonder…” They’re not apologizing for having thoughts; they’re inviting us to think with them. That’s what conversation actually looks like. Someone notices something, gets curious, shares what they’re seeing, and invites others to look more closely.
The “gaps” obsession particularly annoys me—and I’ve written about this here before. We’ve trained students to scan scholarship like archaeologists looking for empty sites to excavate. “No one has studied X” becomes the magical incantation that justifies existence. But the most interesting research rarely emerges from obvious gaps. It comes from noticing that something everyone thinks they understand actually doesn’t make sense. Toni Morrison didn’t write “Beloved” because no one had written about slavery. They wrote it because the stories being told weren’t true to the complexity of the experience.
I’ve started asking students different questions. Instead of “What’s missing from the literature?” I ask “What’s bothering you about how people talk about this topic?” Instead of “What’s your contribution?” I ask “What do you notice that others seem to miss?” The shift is subtle but significant. It moves from deficit thinking to curiosity, from gaps to puzzles, from contribution to perspective.
The voice problem is trickier. Academic writing demands this weird register where you sound authoritative without seeming arrogant, innovative without being disrespectful, passionate without being unprofessional. It’s like being asked to perform enthusiasm at a funeral. Most students solve this by writing in the passive voice and hedging everything: “It might be suggested that there could potentially be some indication that…” This isn’t humility; it’s hiding.
Real intellectual humility looks different. It’s Octavia Butler saying something like “I’m not trying to predict the future; I’m trying to prevent it.” It’s James Baldwin writing something like “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” These writers take full responsibility for their ideas while acknowledging the provisional nature of knowledge. They’re not hedging; they’re being honest about what thinking actually involves.
Some of the so-called digital natives—or so we think of them—in our seminar rooms understand this intuitively. They’re used to building ideas collaboratively, testing thoughts in public, refining arguments through response and revision. They know that knowledge emerges through interaction, not individual genius. Yet we ask them to write as if they’re Victorian scholars working alone in libraries, occasionally citing dead authorities for legitimization.
Maybe the conversation metaphor is wrong entirely. Conversations are temporal, ephemeral, responsive. Academic writing feels more like contributing to an archive—adding your voice to an ongoing record that others will encounter later, asynchronously, in contexts you can’t predict. That’s both more intimidating and more liberating than conversation. You can’t control how others will read your work, but you also don’t need to manage their immediate reactions.
The students who eventually find their scholarly voice seem to share something: they stop trying to sound like scholars and start trying to think clearly about things that matter to them. They realize that academic writing, at its best, is just a particular way of paying attention—systematic, rigorous, accountable to evidence, but still fundamentally human. They learn to trust their curiosity while developing tools to pursue it responsibly.
This might be the real challenge: helping students understand that becoming a scholar doesn’t require abandoning their intellect or personality or experiences or interests. It requires bringing these aspects more fully into engagement with ideas that deserve serious attention. The conversation they’re joining isn’t happening in some rarefied atmosphere where only perfect thoughts are welcome. It’s happening wherever people are trying to understand something important about the world. They belong in that conversation not because they’ve earned the right through proper citations, but because they’re curious, thoughtful humans with something to contribute.
The rest is just learning the craft.

