Reflections on Quality in Academic Writing

As scholars, we engage with quality as writers, readers, and reviewers of academic texts whether we expressly articulate what we mean by quality or not. In this essay, I will discuss aspects of quality in academic writing as both a process and product. First, we invariably employ some notion of what constitutes quality when we evaluate academic writing in peer review and assessment processes and when we make use of others’ writing in our own writing processes. Second, while quality criteria are important and can be useful, we should use them with caution because they might divert our attention from discussing the quality of a piece of work to focusing on the criteria themselves. Third, it is so important that what counts as quality in academic writing is subject to a rich and nuanced debate like any other aspect of academic work. Thus, we need to talk (much more) about quality in academic writing in order to improve our understanding of how we can aspire to produce quality in our own work and writing, as well as how we assess the quality of academic writing in a given text.