Thanks for your support; open for questions

This blog and website are approximately one month old. After my first advertising campaign, I received hundreds of likes on the Facebook page. I am very grateful for and encouraged by that response.

I believe this confirms the essential premise of the service I am offering. A lot of people seem very unhappy with what little writing instruction they receive from school and university.

Why? I think the answer is different depending on the level of school. I don’t have any recent knowledge of high school, but I pretty much live in the Tertiary sector.

Most students only experience universities as schools and therefore believe that universities focus on teaching. This is incorrect. Real universities are primarily research institutions. I am not making absolute statements, and some universities do provide good teaching. However, it is unusual, especially given that most academics have no real incentive to care about that. When it comes to academic career rewards, only research and obtaining funding for research count. Teaching is bottom of the list. Therefore senior academics often delegate teaching duties to junior staff, who have their own crushing load of research commitments as well. For many individuals, departments, and institutions, teaching is definitely an afterthought, doubly so at undergraduate level.

Yet the work of a university writing teacher is different. Few are researchers. They seldom investigate anything or produce new knowledge. They should be able to devote their entire working effort to teaching, and we should expect that to be high quality. Paradoxically, we get the opposite.

Where a university teacher is not an active researcher, they will usually be a pseudo-intellectual lecturer. This can be a job title or a personality type. Universities overwhelmingly foster and produce this type, whom many students experience as pompous windbags. Pseudo-intellectuals use big words and name-drop real intellectuals to make themselves sound clever. They may be quite well read, but this is not the same as intelligent.

As a science writer, I am extremely fortunate to have regular discussions with researchers from a huge variety of fields. Some are good at explaining ideas clearly, some not so good. Those who can do it are exceptionally skilled at separating the crucially important bits from the less important. This takes advanced critical skills.

Critical does not necessarily mean the act of criticising, although it can be that. Critical actually means the ability to discriminate the good from less-good. It is a rare skill, and absolutely fundamental to all intellectual work. Whether in teaching or research, I find that critical people always nail the central issue. If they don’t already know the answer, they can identify exactly what information they need to obtain.

Where intellectuals create clarity, pseudo-intellectuals obscure it or distract from it. They usually have either weak critical skills or none at all. Since they can’t focus, they transfer their own confusion to others. This is partly why they are bad teachers. They overload students with irrelevant facts rather than pinpointing what is needed. A second reason is that their lack of critical ability means they believe everything they read.

Nobody should ever do this, especially not concerning education. Much of this subject’s published literature doesn’t rise to the standard expected of serious research. It’s mostly opinion. Worse, it’s mostly wrong too, or at least highly questionable. So the pseudo-intellectual university writing teacher did not develop their own techniques, rehashes old methods (or those inappropriate for a certain situation) without being able to discern their ineffectiveness, and lacks the creative capacity to develop anything better. They do what they do mainly for ego-gratification, and so are very resistant to criticism themselves.

This is why students so rarely receive satisfactory results from university and other Tertiary institutions. It’s a systemic problem. The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that what I am offering here is a better way.

In addition to a personalised teaching service, I will also answer writing-related questions on this blog. This is partly to express my thanks for the support I have received. Many such questions may come from students of other subjects. Regardless of your background, if you have a question about writing, please send it to me and I’ll do my best to answer for everyone’s benefit.