Tools and Implicit Skills in Academic Writing

Try to imagine yourself standing in a kitchen, kneading a ball of dough on the bench. While you’re carrying out this task you see a child ride a bike past the house. Now think about how you would explain to someone else how to carry out these skills?

When attempting to improve their academic writing, students often look for a toolkit of explicit rules to follow. A writing toolkit may include elements such as correct grammar, clear syntax, well-formatted citations, and correct use of terms. Beyond these basic elements, it is essential to consider the relevance of each piece of information you include in a piece of writing.

Following on from this, be ruthless with the content that you remove. In the words of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it – wholeheartedly – and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings’ (Wright, 2012). However, despite all of these rules, it is difficult to overstate the importance of tacit knowledge.

Tacit knowledge allows us to make judgements that cannot, or need not, be broken down into explicit steps (Davies, 2015). It is the intuitive skilfulness or ‘knack’ that we feel when using well-developed skills. As you progress through your academic career you should feel the explicit ‘rules’ of academic writing, as well as your own distinctive writing style, transforming into tacit knowledge (Elton, 2010).

To ensure that this process occurs, you must be patient and engaged. Research has long found that the key to developing writing proficiency is to spend time reading quality texts, as well as practicing your own writing (Krashen, 1982). This can be likened to the procedural memory (or muscle memory) that develops as we learn to use a physical tool (Roy & Park, 2016).

We learn the rules and conventions of academic writing, just as we would follow explicit instructions when using a carving chisel for the first time. But the fluent gliding motion with which experts use this tool is something that develops with practice. And in the case of academic writing, lots of reading!