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
ConversationImagine 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
Propositional Narrative
Dictated organization Flexible format/organization
Foregrounds sources Embeds sources
Privileges complexity Privileges engagement
Uses graphics to convey Uses them to attract
Assumes readers will read Assumes 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
8/31
/05
11/1
9/05
2/7/
06
4/28
/06
7/17
/06
10/5
/06
12/2
4/06
3/14
/07
6/2/
07
8/21
/07
11/9
/07
1/28
/08
4/17
/08
7/6/
08
9/24
/08
12/1
3/08
3/3/
09
5/22
/09
8/10
/09
123456789
10
All College Students: The Ideal
Development of Student Writing
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Three Different Students
The Reality
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
One Student Throughout College
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
One Student, One Semester, Four Classes
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…
Analyze Summarize Explain Compare
Inform Contrast Narrate Design Propose
Persuade Review 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.”
