If Academic Neutral Isn't Dead Yet, It Soon Will Be

We need to consider voice beyond our classrooms and start addressing the Academic Publishing Problem

Starting this semester, we are asking our students to write in what we have termed, “Semi-Formal Style.” It is a bit chattier than formal style and a bit more formal than casual or conversational style. It’s that in-between style that we love to read, but AI can’t really do very well. (At least not yet.)

If you want to know what that voice is, you are reading it now.

One of the things we realized when we started teaching with Generative AI (GenAI) is that the academic-neutral style can’t really be differentiated from an AI voice. We wanted to focus on voice and tone and audience awareness in our courses, so it became important to start to think about what all this means for our students. We started insisting they write in conversational tone for discussion posts and semi-formal tone for papers. We want to make sure that the humanity of their writing is front and center and that our students understand the importance of their role and their unique expression in writing.

We didn’t really consider what it means for ourselves as well.

Not, that is, until recently, when we tried to publish a paper. We were informed by the peer review that we needed to write our paper in a more formal voice. We needed to, according to the reviewer, adopt the “academic neutral” voice that is present in most journals. That’s where we drew the line. We aren’t going to write in academic-neutral style because, whether this publication knows it or not—academic-neutral style is dead. GenAI already killed it.

We can make the choice to ignore the publication because we are community college professors, and we are employed on a contract that requires 80% of our work toward tenure be devoted to teaching excellence. The other 20% can be volunteer work for the department or the college, student clubs and organizations, and professional activities. We aren’t required to publish at all. We are not part of the “publish or perish” world that engulfs most of academia. So, when we write a paper, we write it because we care about sharing what we know—not because we have to do it to keep our jobs or get a promotion. We can be picky about where we publish, what we publish, and how we publish it.

We know this is not true for most of our academic brothers and sisters whose contracts at colleges and universities demand that they publish papers in peer-reviewed journals, which is a pretty hard thing to do year after year after year, we know. That is exactly how journals and academic publishing have been able to bully academics into writing in a certain way for all these years for little or no money (some journals are even cheeky enough to demand academics pay them to publish articles.) The way that academic publishing has made so much money on the backs of hard-working professors and researchers is horrible, but their lack of understanding the world of writing may soon be their undoing.

That famous “academic-neutral” voice our researcher colleagues are forced to use all the time to communicate their findings is supposed to be the formal voice of authority. But here’s the thing: GenAI is REALLY good at that academic, neutral voice. In fact, GenAI can do that with an academic-neutral voice without breaking a byte of sweat, as it feeds you completely fabricated facts. It can academically and neutrally spit out anything you want to hear. GenAI is famously obsequies too. It won’t complain if a shady academic wants it to spit out an AI-generated research paper every year. It will keep their secret. Katherine Palmer writes in an Inside Higher Ed article from March 18, 2025, “during a six-week span last fall, one scientific journal published by Springer Nature retracted more than 200 articles” (Palmer). She isn’t specific about the reason why they were retracted, but the assumption from the context of the article is that they were articles written with GenAI that may have contained false information.

The problem is that the overarching demand to write in an academic-neutral voice makes the work of legitimate, hard-working academics sound exactly the same as those falsified GenAI papers, and it is very difficult to prove they did (or didn’t) use GenAI to substitute for their own writing.

Strangely enough, academic publishers are turning to GenAI to solve the problem of GenAI, but continue on with their dogged use of the formal academic-neutral voice (despite their words to the contrary). Just last week, Wiley released new guidelines for responsible and effective uses of AI, aimed at deploying the technology to make the publishing process more efficient “while preserving the author’s authentic voice and expertise, maintaining reliable, trusted, and accurate content, safeguarding intellectual property and privacy, and meeting ethics and integrity best practices,” according to their press release (Wiley).

Unfortunately, the “authentic voice” they are touting is usually not authentic at all. Academic-neutral voice is many things, but “authentic” is not one of them. We have found in our own teaching that the formal academic-neutral voice is actually the antithesis of authentic. That voice is based on the idea of objectivity and neutrality, and it has been thoroughly scrubbed of all personality and vigor.

You don’t have to take our word for it, though. You can go all the way back to Steven Pinker’s wonderful article in the Chronical of Higher Education from 2014, entitled “Why Academics Stink at Writing,” where he tries to uncover the reasons behind the language of academese. Pinker writes of academics, “Their goal is not so much communication as self-presentation—an overriding defensiveness against any impression that they may be slacker than their peers in hewing to the norms of the guild” (Pinker). Maybe that’s why we object so strongly to rewriting our paper in an academic-neutral voice and why we don’t care to do so. We don’t care about the impression we make or what our peers are thinking because, frankly, most of our peers aren’t publishing, and most of our “peers” in university settings dismiss us as soon as they hear we work at a community college. So, what difference would academic-neutral make for us?

The answer is “no difference.” So we are in the perfect position to demand change. Let’s kill off the academic-neutral voice once and for all. Let’s focus on communication and clarity so we can all sound justifiably and nakedly human.

This all gets back to voice. We aren’t naive. We know there are a miriad number of ways academics can use GenAI to write papers—some more ethical and responsible than others. We also understand that we can’t tell when they have or haven’t used GenAI. However, in our own classes and in our writing, we have decided that, even if a writer is using GenAI in the creation of their paper, they had better never SOUND like they used GenAI in the creation of their paper. The importance of voice, tone, and audience awareness cannot be underestimated. In the new age of AI, no one wants to read a paper that sounds like it was written with GenAI . . . and we definitely don’t want to write one.

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Works Cited

Palmer, Kathryn. “Publishers Embrace AI as Research Integrity Tool.” Inside Higher Ed, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/research/2025/03/18/publishers-adopt-ai-tools-bolster-research-integrity. Accessed 23 Mar. 2025.

Pinker, Steven. “Why Academics Stink at Writing.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 26 Sept. 2014, https://www.chronicle.com/article/why-academics-stink-at-writing/.

Wiley. “Wiley Releases AI Guidelines for Authors.” Wiley Newsroom, 13 Mar. 2025, https://johnwiley2020news.q4web.com/press-releases/press-release-details/2025/Wiley-Releases-AI-Guidelines-for-Authors/default.aspx.