PACE Graduate School Open University

Summary Drawing from critical realism and building on previous academic studies and writing theories and practices, the author advances approaches to academic writing that are both human and humane, by situating academic writing within the broader critical realist project of furthering human flourishing and emancipation; of what it means to be human; and of why things matter to people. Addressing what counts as human(e) in academic writing has become pressing, as concerns about machine-generated texts, such as Large Language Models like ChatGPT challenge understandings of truth, knowledge, and justice. Underlying the argument in this chapter is the assumption that writing in the academy is a social practice (specifically, a method of enquiry) that should be oriented towards epistemic virtues including commitment to truth and socially just standards of excellence. For academic writing to fulfil such commitments, the author argues that it needs to be human(e). For it to be human(e), it requires a writer–agent–knower to rationally judge between educative and harmful academic writing theories and practices, in the interests of human flourishing and emancipation. Keywords academic writing being human dharma emancipation explanatory critique flourishing knowledge truth ubuntu

My thoughts on "What Makes Academic Writing Human(e): A Critical Realist Response" in: Bouchard & Zotzmann, eds. #CriticalRealism in #AppliedLinguistics #CambridgeUniversityPress 2026

#AcademicWriting
#WhatMakesWritingAcademic
#WhatMakesAcademicWritingHumane
#GenAI
www.cambridge.org/core/books/a...

Your academic voice is unique. Don't sacrifice clarity for complexity or personality for formality. The best academic writing is distinctly yours.

Writing About Your Researcher Positioning So you know what researcher positioning is and why it matters. Now comes the practical question: how do you actually write about it in your thesis? This is where many doctoral researchers get a bit…

Following on from last week I have a few pointers for writing about your researcher positionality patthomson.net/2025/12/07/w...

Are my academic and non-academic writing styles converging? And would that be good? I spent the first 25 years of my academic career writing scientific papers (and the grant proposals to fund them, of course). I never found that easy – although it got easier through time (and it c…

Scientific writing and writing for the public are very different. As I do both, is that difference eroding for me? And if it is, is that good or bad?

The Shadow Scholars: Academic who travelled to Kenya to meet those ghostwriting university work says practice is ‘completely reshaping our future’. Juliette Rowsell reports #edusky https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/shadow-scholars-inside-essay-mills-serving-western-students

Interested in the history of scientific journals? Or curious why journals became more similar in format over time?

We're starting in about 2 hours 👇

My statement on Ai from the mini-comic as syllabus i made for new class I'm teaching that starts tomorrow! It robs you of your decisions & struggles - and the joy of being surprised. We won’t to be robbed of our learning - this is essential. This & the full mini at post:
bsky.app/profile/nsou...

"“You can only critically assess the output of an AI chatbot if you have the skills to do so, and you don’t develop these skills by using AI. Before you can be critical of an AI summary, you have to learn to understand a text without having it summarized by an AI tool.”

So sorry, Sandra 🖤 {JM}

Photo of Julia Molinari smiling

Photo of several books on academic writing, academic literacies, multimodal, creative, and sociological scholarship on writing as a critical practice and language as power. The books are laid out on a table for display and browsing during our first in-person and hybrid lesson.

Photo of several books on academic writing, academic literacies, multimodal, creative, and sociological scholarship on writing as a critical practice and language as power. The books are laid out on a table for display and browsing during our first in-person and hybrid lesson.

Photo of several books on academic writing, academic literacies, multimodal, creative, and sociological scholarship on writing as a critical practice and language as power. The books are laid out on a table for display and browsing during our first in-person and hybrid lesson.

I've been really enjoying our start to #PACEspace 2025-26.

I'm now really looking forward to how your #DoctoralWriting shapes up ✍️✍️✍️✍️✍️

The Future is in the Now!

{JM}

Welcome 2025 PGR Adventure Begins You are the OU

Welcome to all our postgraduate researchers! You are what makes us a University.

Reading time: discovery, meaning-making and resistance in the accelerated academy by Fadia Dakka The increasing exposure of higher education sectors worldwide to market mechanisms (eg privatisation in and of higher education, platformisation and assetization) generates market-ma…

When @fadiadk.bsky.social presented some of her research on slow reading in higher education, especailly doctoral education at @srhe.bsky.social conference in december last year, it met with furious approval srheblog.com/2025/06/20/r... Intense head-nodding. Lovely to hear more about it.

Is anybody who is involved in #DoctoralEducation able to point me towards a similar report or study on the UK knowledge society, maybe by #UKCGE or similar?

#DoctoralWriting #PhD #GraduateSchool #DoctoralPedagogy

This one is on the European context👇🏼
{JM pace@open.ac.uk}
www.eua.eu/publications...

"for students like me, writing is more than a skill. It’s a form of resistance. It’s how we carve out space in institutions that weren’t built for us. And anyone who helps us do that — respectfully, ethically, collaboratively — is part of that resistance too."

#PACEspace {JM}

Reclaiming My Voice: The Role of Paper Writers in a Student's Resistance to Silence University was supposed to be a place of liberation. But almost immediately, I learned that academic writing came with its own constraints

#PACEspace exists to help with exactly this:

"There’s often a stigma attached to seeking support [...]. There’s nothing more authentic than wanting to do your best work. Asking for help isn’t a failure of ability — it’s a refusal to be isolated"

www.thecanary.co/discovery/fe...

Recordings & slides relating to the 'Future of Doctoral Writing' are under 'Content'.

This page is subject to edits but there's enough there for those interested to get a sense of what was discussed.

Thank you to those who managed to attend {JM}

#PACEspace
#PACExtra
www.open.edu/openlearncre...

Snip tool of 2 of my slides on why archives matter discussed in the context of whose archives and how the AI bots are trained

A pdf of my slides on 'AI and multiliteracies' is now available on the EATAW conference website and can be cited via doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

Thank you to Jennifer Sizer (orcid.org/0000-0002-27...) for alerting me to #Zenodo (which lets you share presentations via #Orcid with a doi)

#PACEspace {JM}

Some countries are making deliberate efforts to match the doctoral curriculum to the prevailing job market. While this is largely a positive move, positioning skills-based training for industry as the key purpose of doctoral education has the potential for the doctorate to be conceptualized primarily as a commodity. The consequences of constructing the doctorate—and by extension knowledge—as a product are numerous: time to completion becomes the focus instead of quality; production is foregrounded over the nurturing of a researcher; and the product is accompanied by a requirement to produce journal articles, which has led to the proliferation of predatory publications. What Is Needed? What is needed for doctoral education in postindependence universities across Africa are spaces to discuss the purposes of the doctorate with a greater reflection on unchallenged assumptions across countries, national policies, and within institutions. Such discussions should not attempt to pin down the doctorate to a narrow, shared purpose—rather they should open spaces for reflection on taken-for-granted and often problematic assumptions. They should allow for far-

V. relevant to our recent discussions:

"Explicit conversations about the nature of the doctorate should enable consideration of how context matters in the conceptualization of doctoral purposes and practices"

'Defining the Doctorate in Africa: Aligning Purpose with Context'
doi.org/10.6017/895b...

Recordings & other resources on the #FutureOfDoctoralWriting sponsored by @ougradsch.bsky.social & #BAAL will be shared ASAP.

> 60 people across at least 10 countries/continents & disciplines attended in-person in #MiltonKeynes & online.

Not easy to organise, but we managed.

#OpenUniversity {JM}

Elsevier journal under fire over ‘AI-generated’ review comments Researcher who waited nearly two years for rejection claims ‘nonsensical’ criticisms of his paper must have been chatbot-generated

www.timeshighereducation.com/news/elsevie...

Slides with aims and content of my talk which will be made available on the EATAW website in due course.

Slides with aims and content of my talk which will be made available on the EATAW website in due course.

Slides with aims and content of my talk which will be made available on the EATAW website in due course.

Winding my way back to the UK by train from Braga (Pt) having made my point: the real politik of #GenAI needs embedding in ALL academic writing pedagogies.

It's not enough to teach what-how. It's imperative to teach why this is happening to develop agentic reflexivity and flourish.
#CriticalRealism

How students should write a thesis in the AI age - Impact of Social Sciences AI tools help students produce polished theses without deep understanding. Thorsten Fröhlich argues rigid assessment formats stifle critical thinking, and calls for a rethink of how research is taught...

blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci... #FutureOfDoctoralWriting

The Future of Doctoral Writing: Critical Dialogues towards a Manifesto Join our online discussions and agenda-setting 1-day hybrid seminar to collectively author a 'Manifesto on the Future of Doctoral Writing'

⏳️Registration closes on Monday June 30th⏳️

We've increased ticket capacity so there's still a chance to join (ideally in person, if you can).

Pre-seminar discussions are already taking place asynchronously online & are heating up🌡

#DoctoralWriting #AcWri {JM}

www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-future...

📢Registration for our event is open until 30 June✅

We warmly welcome in-person attendance on 09 July to ensure discussions are critical & spontaneous♨️
But online places are still available {JM}.
#DoctoralWriting #AcademicLiteracies #tleap #AcWri
#OpenUniversity
www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-future...

They say your contribution should "fill a gap" but is it ok if it mostly just widens existing ones

This is totally what we need right now. So many necessary new emotion words in here.

AI Realism: Reclaiming the Human in AI-enhanced Academic Literacies Julia Molinari ​ Language technologies (LTs) are not new and a life without them means many things to many people: unimaginable, impractical, unavoidable, undesirable, undemocratic, maybe even a welcome relief. LTs include the familiar (dictionaries, machine translators, spellcheckers) and now the unfamiliar, which is rapidly becoming the new normal: LLMs (Large Language Models) powered by GenAI (GenerativeAI) and, apparently, AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) are automating writing in unprecedented ways. I wish to use this talk to press pause, just for a moment, to catch our collective breaths. I would like to halt the dizzying speed at which these technologies are affecting our professional and personal existence by sharing a critical realist perspective (Archer & Maccarini, 2023) on LTs and what it means to be human (Molinari, 2025). This includes reflecting on LTs’ implications for academic literacies broadly understood as multisemiotic modes of communication, which include multilingualism (Lillis & Tuck, 2025). AI Realism entails neither techno-determinism nor techno-enthusiasm nor luddism. Rather, it provides a critical space in which to interrogate why AI has so abruptly irrupted into everyday life and how we might want to respond as educators. For example, it’s no coincidence that ChatGPT was released in the wake of the COVID19 pandemic (Hussain et al., 2024), with significant implications for the development of proctoring and surveillance technologies (McKenna, 2022). It’s also no coincidence that AI is associated with fascist ideologies (McQuillan, 2022). That it remains a black box in terms of how it is trained and by whom also raises concerns for academic writing (Gallagher, 2020). All this presents ideological challenges and opportunities for academic literacies that include, for example, re-visiting what we mean by criticality and agency if these foundational tenets of academi…

I'll be giving this year's keynote at #EATAW25 - alongside Suresh Canagarajah & Federico Navarro - on:

'AI Realism: Reclaiming the Human in AI-enhanced Academic Literacies' (cf abstract) {JM}
🤞
#PACEspace #AcWri #AcademicLiteracies #GenAI #CriticalRealism #OpenUniversity

www.eataw2025.com/keynote

What I love about #PACEspace is the privilege of discussing research writing in progress. Achieving #flow, dealing with #feedback, finding #voice are what we discuss most.

But trusting an Other with your writing is hard. PACE provides a safe & brave space to do this {JM}.

#DoctoralWriting #PhDLife

What your Methods section isn’t If you’re a scientist like me, you read a lot of papers – and a lot of submitted manuscripts, drafts, and other larval stages of papers.* This is extremely helpful when it’s time to write your own …

For scientific writers: Three things your Methods section shouldn't be - but three things Methods sections often end up being. You can avoid these mistakes! scientistseessquirre...

dealing with perfectionism Some academic writers are crippled by the desire to write perfect prose from the very start. Even though they know that the first draft is always rough, they find writing rough difficult. They have…

Taming your perfectionist inner critic patthomson.net/2025/06/03/d...