About Arlene McCoy

I teach academic writing. Most of what I know about it I learned from reading several thousand drafts by people who were convinced they were bad at it.

How I got here

I came to writing through psychology rather than through literature. My master's degree is in applied psychology from the University of Southern California, and the questions that interested me there were about how people process information, what makes an explanation land, and why two arguments with identical evidence can persuade very differently.

Those turned out to be writing questions. A paragraph that confuses a reader is usually a paragraph whose author has not decided what it is for. A thesis that feels unarguable is usually a claim that has not been separated from its topic. Once you see academic writing as a set of decisions rather than a set of rules, most of the advice students are given starts to make sense.

What I actually do

My work has three parts. I write educational resources on academic writing, which is what most of this site is. I coach students directly on their own assignments, which is where I learn what the resources are missing. And I develop instructional material, which forces me to be honest about which explanations work when there is nobody there to ask a follow up question.

Since 2020 I have worked with EssayPay as a writer and academic coach. That work covers essay organisation, thesis development, research papers, reflective writing, and capstone projects, mostly for undergraduate and graduate students in the humanities and social sciences.

What I believe about academic writing

Students are told academic writing is formal. That is true and unhelpful. Formality is a surface feature, and chasing it produces the passive, over qualified prose that makes academic writing painful to read and hard to grade.

What academic writing actually requires is that you show your reasoning. Say what you think, say what makes you think it, say how confident you are, and say what would change your mind. Everything else is convention, and conventions can be looked up.

I also believe most students underestimate how much of writing is revision. A first draft is a thinking device. It is supposed to be bad. The work is what you do to it afterwards.

Outside this site

I write occasionally for general audiences on education, student life, and the transition from study into work. Those pieces are collected under publications.