The Very Hungry Academic Reader

“Now, the caterpillar was no longer small. He was a big, fat, caterpillar.”

This line comes from one of my favorite books of all time: The Very Hungry Caterpillar. It’s not just my favorite because I love to eat food (which I definitely do). It’s not just my favorite because it’s a childhood classic. It’s my favorite because it’s difficulty matches my reading abilities.

I’m not a big fan of big words or big sentences. I like to keep my diction simple, with words like “fat,” “ate,” and “hungry.” However, the world is not sunshine and roses for me. Sometimes I have to dive into harder works, such as academic writing; It’s much harder than The Adventures of Captain Underpants and Diary of a Wimpy Kid in fact!

Reading through Teaching the Conventions of Academic Discourse, I realized it wouldn’t be quite as easy to chew through. I read a few pages and began to digest the material, and I realized it’s not that bad. I’ve never had a taste for academic writing, but I found Teresa Thonney’s tone to be engaging and able to maintain my focus. This is due to straight-forwardness of the paper.

I liked the structure of the piece. It is laid out in an easy-to-follow manner. The six main topics all receive their own section and are clearly labeled with a bolded heading. The end of each section has a short summary to re-cap and solidify her points. Each sub-point has its own smaller heading, which allows for significantly easier readability.

A thought crossed my mind as I was reading this. It went like, “Hey, I could totally only read the headings and just ignore all the paragraphs.”

I did not do this.

However, the structure is so clear that you know exactly what you’re going to be reading before you read through the section. The section itself exists to support the claim that academic writing does in fact use the “six standard ‘moves.’” The sections do offer some explanation, but the meat of them is evidence for her claim that students should learn basic academic writing principals.

Because we are students instead of college professors, the main claim of the paper is rather irrelevant to us. We don’t care that we should be taught because we have no say in what we DO get taught. This makes it extremely easy for us students to read because we only need to understand what the six standard “moves” are, not why we should know them.

Essentially, we could ignore half of this paper.

This smooth reading is because of the convention “Academic Writers State the Value of Their Work and Announce the Plan for Their Papers.” Thonney lays out her claim and quickly announces the plan for the paper, which is clearly laid out through the whole paper. I attempt to use this convention often in my writing, as I feel being clear is the most important part of any paper. No one cares how smart you sound if you’re babbling in a circle with no clear arguments.