Dancing at the Edge: Writing for the Academic Marketplace

Drawing on our experience of working in Sweden and seeking to help colleagues enter the prestigious culture of Anglophone academic text production, this article explores the landscape of academic writing and publishing. We first provide an account of the birth of academic writing and the gradual emergence of its present forms. We then explore academic writing as it is practised in the first decade of the 2000s; and finally, we consider the future of journal publishing and what it might mean for academic authors. We consciously introduce monetary or commercial imagery to underline the impact of exchange or market relationships in the world of academic publishing, arguing that texts need to be reworked until they become responsive to the branding and marketing requirements of specific academic journals.