Writing better won't cure your academic woes

[...]a genre of self-help writing manuals has seductively marketed itself over the years to academics in search of the magic tonics that will help them improve their writing and increase productivity when love just doesn't cut it. Academic labor has been systematically devalued; contingent faculty members fill more than 70 percent of all current teaching positions in the United States; the divide between available academic jobs and the number of people graduating with doctorates is the widest it's ever been. Crucially, for Bourdieu, while we have more control over our individual habits, the habitus is "a product of history," shaped by class structures, political economies, cultural customs, and traditions. [...]there's a backward logic to the belief that forming writing groups or experimenting with different writing genres is going to somehow shake the historical foundations of contemporary academe's habitus. There's cause for hope in movements to collectively empower those whose labor is most heavily exploited, whether contingent faculty members' joining the Service Employees International Union or the local bargaining efforts of grad-student unions like the Graduate Employees' Organization at the University of Michigan and Local 33 at Yale.