What is Academic Writing, Anyway?

Knowledge as Conversation Knowledge is a social artifact created (or “built up”) over time through an unending “conversation.” “As human beings, we are the inheritors not of inquiry or accumulated information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries.” Thought originates in “conversation” (not in a vacuum). Thought is conversation internalized, and writing is the re-externalization of thought.

Academic Writing as a Conversation Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so there is no one present who is qualified enough to retrace all of the steps that have gone before this point. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns herself against you. The discussion is interminable. The hour grows late; you must depart. And you do, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.

Different Spheres of Writing Civic/Popular Professional/Vocational Personal/Relational Creative/Literary Academic/Higher Education

Academic vs. Popular PropositionalNarrative Dictated organizationFlexible format/organization Foregrounds sourcesEmbeds sources Privileges complexityPrivileges engagement Uses graphics to conveyUses them to attract Assumes readers will readAssumes reader will choose Specific reading strategies Variety of strategies

Were Students Better Writers in the Past? “Everyone who has had anything to do with the graduating classes has known many men who could not write a letter describing their own commencements without making blunders which would disgrace a boy twelve years old.” --Adam Sherman Hill, English Professor, Harvard, 1878

Does Teaching Writing Help? “ A great outcry has lately been made, on every side, about the inability of University students to write English clearly or correctly…. The schools today are paying more attention to composition than they did twenty or thirty years ago; and yet, the writing of schoolboys has been growing steadily worse. With all this practice in writing and time devoted to English, why do we not obtain better results?” --“The English Question,”Atlantic Monthly, May 1893

Development of Student Writing

The Reality

One Writer, Many Tasks Responding to an array of prompts and assignments Comprehending readings and varied source materials Generating ideas Integrating others’ ideas Organizing ideas in a very particular way Expressing opinions in a very particular way Figuring out what readers know/believe/want Being simultaneously original and conventional Having style or “voice,” or none at all, depending Revising, editing, proofreading

One Writer, Many Prompts, Many Disciplines Write a description of an event from your childhood. Write a comparative analysis of two newspaper articles. Write a 5-pg paper analyzing class in Pride and Prejudice. Write a lab report based on your chemistry experiment. Discuss reasons why the U.S. dropped the bomb. Write a research paper on modern-day slavery. Create a Web site that sells gidgets.

Students are Asked To… AnalyzeSummarizeExplainCompare Inform Contrast Narrate Design Propose PersuadeReview Critique Consider Evaluate Describe Annotate Apply Report Discuss Revise Comment Journal Respond Paraphrase Show Demonstrate Illustrate

Primary & Secondary Discourses “Primary Discourse” is one’s natural, home language. A “secondary discourse” is one that a person learns in order to function in the outside world (with friends, at work, in school, etc.). We all have adopted many secondary discourses, usually without knowing it. Typically, the greater the gap btwn prim. and sec. discourses, the more problems one has in becoming a fluent speaker/writer of the sec. discourse.

Academic Writing as a Secondary Discourse Academic discourse is NO ONE’S home language. It must be explicitly learned. For some people, their home language is—by chance—somewhat like academic discourse, usually making it easier for them to learn it.

Phenomenology of Error Definition: finding error when/where you look for it. (Phenomenology: something happens because you expect it to.) Teacher evaluation of student writing is plagued by this phenomenon. What’s incorrect? Well, it depends (a lot).

Teacher comments are usually... Confusing Not helpful Too much or too little Generic (“rubber-stamped”) Not geared toward revision or improvement, but justification for a letter grade NOT READ, or acted upon, by students

Other Problems Academic writing doesn’t always meaningfully relate writing outside of school. Mastery of academic discourse doesn’t imply mastery of anything else. Academic writing is governed almost exclusively by conventions, so it can seem fixed and normative. The stakes are really high: in order to do well in college, students must be able to negotiate, if not master, academic discourse.

Why We Need Academic Writing “Education, properly speaking, is an initiation into the skill and partnership of this unending human conversation in which we learn to recognize different voices, to distinguish the proper occasions of utterance, and in which we acquire the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to this process. ‘Becoming educated’ is to join larger, more experienced communities of knowledgeable peers through assenting to those communities’ interests and using their language and modes of thought.”