Active Voices: The Language of College and Composition [1st ed.] 1680366777, 9781680366778

Table of contents :
Engaging the Language of the Academy
1 What the Academy Is
2 What Knowledge in the Academy Is
3 What Thinking like an Academic Means
Active Voices: Utilizing Campus Resources
4 What Being a Student Means
Active Voices: Understanding Different Methods of Learning
5 What Reading in College Means
6 What Writing with Authority Means
7 What an Academic Discourse Community Is
Active Voices: Sprout Up
8 What Becoming an Academic Means
9 What Knowledge Transfer Is
Active Voices: Transfer Across Student Experiences
10 What Language to Write in
Active Voices: Heritage, Identity, and Scholarship
Engaging the Language of Writing
11 What Google Translate Is in the Academy
12 What Academic Freedom Is
13 What the Rhetorical Situation Is (Part 1)
14 What the Rhetorical Situation Is (Part 2)
Active Voices: Students Provoke National Action
15 What Counts as Text
Active Voices: Historical Monuments as Texts
16 What Argument Means
17 What Counts as Evidence
Active Voices: Alta Gracia Apparel Company
18 What a Claim Is
19 What Counterargument, Rebuttal, and Concession Are
Active Voices: Freedom of Speech on Campus
20 What Ethos, Logos, Pathos, and Kairos Are
Active Voices: #HUStands
21 What a Logical Fallacy Is
22 What Toulmin’s Model Is
23 What Rogerian Argument Is
Engaging Writing as a Process
24 What Writing as a Process Means
25 What Prewriting, Drafting, and Revising Are
26 What Peer Review Is
Active Voices: Activism Across Generations
27 What a Two-Part Title Is
28 What a Thesis Is
29 What Summary, Paraphrase, and Quotation Are
30 What Analyze, Report, and Respond Mean
31 What Synthesizing Means
Active Voices: Cougar Pantry
32 What Metatext Is
Active Voices: Students Never Stop Learning
33 What Presentation and Design Are
Active Voices: I’m Lovin’ Diversity
Engaging Research in the Academy
34 What Information Literacy Is
Active Voices: Student-led Governance
35 What Conducting Research Means
Active Voices: Research Pays It Forward
36 What Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Research Is
Active Voices: Conducting and Repurposing Research
37 What Academic Databases Are
38 What Note-Taking for Writing Means
39 What Citing Sources Means
40 What Plagiarism Is
41 What Bullshit Is
42 What Wikipedia and YouTube Are in the Academy
Engaging Writing in the Disciplines
43 What Writing in the Humanities Is
44 What Writing in the Sciences Is
Active Voices: Fossil Free Stanford
45 What Writing in the Social Sciences Is
Active Voices: Campus Pride
46 What Writing in Business, Health Sciences, and Other Applied Fields Is
Active Voices: Campus Sustainability
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

ctive

Voices

Jeffrey Klausman

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ISBN: 978-1-68036-677-8 Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents Preface for the Instructor: Agency, Social Justice, and Active Voices . . . . . . vii Introduction for the Student New to College: Access and Agency . . . . . . . xi

Engaging the Language of the Academy 1 2 3

What the Academy Is . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 What Knowledge in the Academy Is . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 What Thinking like an Academic Means . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Active Voices: Utilizing Campus Resources — 16

4

What Being a Student Means . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Active Voices: Understanding Different Methods of Learning — 23

5 6 7

What Reading in College Means . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 What Writing with Authority Means . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 What an Academic Discourse Community Is . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Active Voices: Sprout Up — 38

8

What Becoming an Academic Means. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 Active Voices: Heritage, Identity, and Scholarship — 44

9

What Knowledge Transfer Is . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Active Voices: Transfer Across Student Experiences — 51

10 What Language to Write in . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

Engaging the Language of Writing 11 What Google Translate Is in the Academy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 12 What Academic Freedom Is . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 Active Voices: Freedom of Speech on Campus — 70

13 What the Rhetorical Situation Is (Part 1). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 14 What the Rhetorical Situation Is (Part 2). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 Active Voices: Students Provoke National Action — 85

15 What Counts as Text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 Active Voices: Historical Monuments as Texts — 92

16 What Argument Means . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 17 What Counts as Evidence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 Active Voices: Cougar Pantry — 105

18 What a Claim Is . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 19 What Counterargument, Rebuttal, and Concession Are . . . . . . . . . . 113 20 What Ethos, Logos, Pathos, and Kairos Are . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 Active Voices: #HUStands — 126

21 What a Logical Fallacy Is. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127

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22 What Toulmin’s Model Is . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 23 What Rogerian Argument Is . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141

Engaging Writing as a Process 24 What Writing as a Process Means . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 25 What Prewriting, Drafting, and Revising Are . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 26 What Peer Review Is . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161 Active Voices: Activism Across Generations — 166

27 28 29 30

What a Two-Part Title Is. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What a Thesis Is . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What Summary, Paraphrase, and Quotation Are . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What Analyze, Report, and Respond Mean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

169 175 181 187

Active Voices: Alta Gracia Apparel Company — 193

31 What Synthesizing Means . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195 Active Voices: Students Never Stop Learning — 201

32 What Metatext Is . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203 33 What Presentation and Design Are . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209 Active Voices: I’m Lovin’ Diversity — 215

Engaging Research in the Academy 34 What Information Literacy Is . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217 Active Voices: Student-led Governance — 223

35 What Conducting Research Means. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225 Active Voices: Research Pays It Forward — 230

36 What Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Research Is . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231 Active Voices: Conducting and Repurposing Research — 236

37 38 39 40 41 42

What Academic Databases Are . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What Note-Taking for Writing Means . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What Citing Sources Means . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What Plagiarism Is . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What Bullshit Is . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What Wikipedia and YouTube Are in the Academy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

237 243 249 255 261 267

Engaging Writing in the Disciplines 43 What Writing in the Humanities Is . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273 44 What Writing in the Sciences Is . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279 Active Voices: Fossil Free Stanford — 284

45 What Writing in the Social Sciences Is . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285 Active Voices: Campus Pride — 290

46 What Writing in Business, Health Sciences, and Other Applied Fields Is . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291 Active Voices: Campus Sustainability — 296

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301 iv

Acknowledgments I’ve been greatly fortunate to have spent the past 20-plus years among the dedicated colleagues in the English department at Whatcom Community College, participating in a long conversation that has found expression in this book. I’d like to make special mention of my friends Signee Lynch, Amanda Henkel, and Jessica Steele who have taught me much about composition, teaching, and curriculum design. And I can’t say enough about the unacknowledged co-author of Active Voices, Sherri Winans, writing center director, intellectual partner, and my loving spouse. I’d also like to acknowledge the support of my college’s administration—the presidents, vice-presidents, and deans who have supported innovation and experimentation and have done their best to back up their support with budget lines and reassign time, without which, nothing much can happen. Chief among them are Richard Fulton, my former vicepresident who created a budget line for the WPA position I’ve worked in for a dozen years, which has allowed me a chance to conduct research and study in the field. And I’d like to thank my friends and colleagues of the CCCC, TYCA, and WPA-L who have created an intellectual climate I’ve been able to grow in since I first discovered there was such a thing as composition and rhetoric. But perhaps most importantly, I’ve had the privilege to work with amazing students. I’ve worked with some as young as 14 (and brilliant) and with returning adults giving college another chance. I’ve worked with dual-enrolled students who were finding what they couldn’t in their high schools, and with veterans, attending college after serving their country. I’ve worked with students from privilege and with students who were homeless. I’ve worked with students returning with master’s degrees and retraining for a second career and with students who had been home-schooled all their lives stepping for the first time into a classroom. I’ve worked with students from more than 50 different countries, some finishing master’s degrees and some finishing high school, and who’ve brought with them dozens of languages and given me insights into their

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cultures. From all of them, I have learned what it takes to make it—or not—in college. I dedicate this book to them, especially. Finally, I’d like to acknowledge all the good people at Fountainhead Press, especially Christina Bruer for first listening to my pitch over an Asian bistro lunch, who has worked tirelessly to shape the initial idea into this finished product. And thanks to Amy Salisbury-Werhane who has done even more than the hard work of bringing this text into print but whose brilliance and sharp eye has shaped the intellectual scope of this book as well.

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Preface for the Instructor: Agency, Social Justice, and Active Voices Active Voices is written for today’s students, presenting a set of concepts that allows them to gain agency in college writing and beyond. And Active Voices is written for today’s instructors, who are knowledgeable and innovative. People act within institutions where they know the rules, that is, understand that others have certain expectations of how things are done, or that certain patterns of speech and behavior have certain meanings, and that individuals will react with sanction or in other, less predictable ways if the implicitly formulated or formal rules are violated. – Iris Marion Young Welcome to Active Voices, a textbook unlike any other in that it does not seek to explicitly teach students to write but rather to offer the background and contextual knowledge they need to make the most of your instruction. By explaining important concepts briefly and through accessible examples, Active Voices ensures that the writing instruction you offer has the best chance of succeeding so that students may be agents in their own lives, whether that’s in writing their own path through college or in becoming a more informed and critically minded citizen. Agency, I believe, in a highly impersonal and rigid educational system, must be an important goal of any social justice efforts.

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Active Voices is written for today’s student According to recent research, 36 percent of students at public four-year colleges identify as black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American or Pacific Islander while 44 percent of students at public two-year colleges do. Moreover, the number of students for whom English is not their first language continues to rise as does the number of first-generation college students (National Center for Education Statistics). If you’ve been around a while, no doubt you’ve seen this growth in the numbers of what many refer to as systemically non-dominant students. For many students, dominant and non-dominant, attending college can be highly intimidating with its byzantine administrative structures, its often bewildering and disparate expectations, and its specialized discourse systems. Those students formerly considered non-traditional are at a special disadvantage. Without knowing how the game is played, however, all students are at risk of becoming passive players in a system whose rules they only vaguely perceive. The result is disengagement and lower success rates. Active Voices is meant to help students navigate the language, structure, and values of higher education.

Active Voices is written to provide access to the context for good college writing What I’ve found over the years is that much of the teaching that needs to happen is based on an understanding of context. For example, when we talk about academic writing, what do we mean by “academic”? When we ask students to read something, what do we mean by “read”? The same goes for conducting research, developing a claim, or analyzing evidence. Many students simply haven’t had access to those terms. That access is what Active Voices provides, through explanations of the core ideas, terms, and concepts that form the context in which students new to the academy find themselves writing and in which you are teaching. It does not seek to replicate the teaching process nor provide a step-by-step approach to a writing process, nor even less to provide a “boxed” formula for writing. Instead, Active Voices provides the ground on which good academic writing and good instruction of academic writing can happen so that students can gain agency in shaping their own lives and education.

Active Voices is organized to activate knowledge transfer Research on knowledge transfer, from the seminal work of Perkins and Salomon, to the 1999 book How People Learn, and more recently Yancey, viii

Preface

Robertson, and Taczak’s Writing across Contexts, has helped shape Active Voices. Each chapter starts with the most important concept condensed to a single sentence. This approach is designed to open a conceptual door for students to the ideas explained in the chapter. Every chapter includes “Access Points,” questions that encourage students to reflect on and activate their prior knowledge as a means of facilitating knowledge transfer. At the end of the chapter is a short summary that reinforces the main ideas in slightly more detail and which may foster forward-looking transfer as well as serve as a memory aid. Each chapter includes “Action Points,” activities designed to help students apply the concepts so that they may broaden and deepen their knowledge. The activities range from tasks that can be accomplished quickly in class, either through conversation or use of a smart phone, to tasks that ask students to explore their world a little more carefully, either literally or virtually, to tasks that ask students to explore ideas through research. Some activities are designed to be done alone and others in groups. All of the tasks can be modified easily and many can lead to more comprehensive writing. Because each chapter is short, students can read the selections in ten to fifteen minutes. This is important, I believe, given the dominant cognitive mode of students raised in the digital age.

Active Voices is written for today’s writing instructor As no doubt you are painfully aware, the vast majority of writing instructors at colleges and universities teach off the tenure track. At the same time, most contingent faculty have years and years of experience. A study I conducted several years ago, “Not Just a Matter of Fairness: Adjunct Faculty and Writing Programs in Two-Year Colleges,” found that adjunct faculty at two-year colleges have an average of five years of full-time equivalent experience and many have ten or more. Of course, the same can be said of contingent faculty at four-year colleges and universities. If you are one of these instructors, you probably feel undervalued, certainly underpaid, and probably “contingent” in the full meaning of that word. At the same time, you probably feel confident in your classrooms, teach good classes, connect with your students, get excellent reviews, and feel proud of what you do. And given your experience, you probably don’t rely on a textbook much. If you’re one of the minority, a tenured or tenure-track faculty member teaching writing, you probably have years and years of experience as well, and probably find yourself relying less and less on textbooks to support your teaching. If you’re like me, the idea of having students buy a

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textbook of 800 pages or more when you assign only a very small portion seems not only impractical but unethical. Moreover, you probably find that no textbook supports your philosophy and pedagogy fully. What I found myself wanting the past several years is a text that could lay a foundation on which I could build my own course rather than a text that I had to shape my course to fit. It’s my hope that Active Voices supports the work you do as a teacher of writing, whether undergirding long experience and developed teaching materials or helping shape a new and innovative classroom. Ultimately, it’s my hope that Active Voices, in however small measure, can support the social justice efforts you, your colleagues, and your program offer your diverse range of students. As the epigraph for this preface suggests, our students need to know rules, even the implicitly formulated ones, if they are to thrive in our institutions. Active Voices is written for today’s students, many of whom are systemically non-dominant. It makes apparent a set of core concepts that are too often invisible to students but which, when made clear and understood, allow a student to gain agency in college and beyond. Active Voices is written for today’s instructors as well, instructors who are knowledgeable and innovative.

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Introduction for the Student New to College: Access and Agency Knowing how college works and what things mean gives you power. In the mid-1980s, David Bartholomae, an English professor at the University of Pittsburgh, was tasked with reading essays written by incoming students to his university. These new college students were required to write an essay on some banal subject such as “What does creativity mean for you?” Depending on how well they did on those essays, they would be placed in either first-year writing or a pre-college, basic writing class.

ACCESS POINT How did you end up in this class? Did you have to take a test? Write an essay? Were you “placed” here? By whom and how? Most importantly, why? Did you have a choice? How do you feel about that? If you did have a choice, how might you feel differently about being in this class if you hadn’t?

Very quickly, Bartholomae (pronounced “Barth-ALL-o-may”) recognized that the situation was unfair. Why? Students were never informed of how their writing would be judged. They were never told who their audience was. And they were never told how they were supposed to make their argument. This is critically important because without knowing the standards by which a piece of writing is to be measured—what it’s supposed to accomplish—a writer cannot make strategic decisions about how to

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shape their message. Can you imagine being judged on your performance but not being told what things you were being judged on or how? The consequence of this was that students had to “invent” a university in their minds and then write to it. So Bartholomae published his article “Inventing the University” in the Journal of Basic Writing. Since in-coming students—especially those who ended up in pre-college writing classes— had little exposure to academic writing, they had to draw upon what knowledge they had. And for these students, nearly all their knowledge about writing came from their middle- and high-school instruction and nearly everything they knew about sounding authoritative came from their personal lives, what they had gathered from school, home, and popular culture. Unfortunately, this prior knowledge did not serve them well in this new situation. They ended up “inventing” a university in their minds that was very different from the actual university their reader-judges inhabited. It’s not hard to imagine that students from less affluent families, students of color, and students for whom English is not their first language, would likely do worse in such a writing situation. Although issues of race and class, as well as the ways language can shape identities, are never far from the surface of Bartholomae’s analysis, he chose to focus on the ways students responded to the situation and how instructors could and should change their practices. College writing instruction to this day is heavily influenced by Bartholomae’s insights.

ACCESS POINT Emotions can tell us a lot about what we believe about who we are what is possible for us. When you read this section about race and class and academic background, how does it make you feel? Angry? Skeptical? Dismissive? Why? What in your own background has the potential to arouse such feelings? How might these feelings suggest something about what you think is possible for you? The term used to describe this is positionality.

positionality one’s position in relation to a community, organization, or other social or political group

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Active Voices helps demystify the college experience What this book is designed to do is give you the basis by which you can demystify the college experience so that you can take control of your life as a student and, ultimately, a citizen. Instead of just drawing upon old knowledge in the hope that it can provide you with guidance for this new situation, you can use what you learn here to analyze the situation you find yourself in and develop new knowledge that is better suited. You won’t have to “invent” a university out of what you know from your

Introduction

past experiences but can piece together a more accurate picture so that you can actively read, write, and communicate in the college world more effectively. Of course, you never entirely abandon what you know, but you can reshape it to use in the new situation. That is what the students in Bartholomae’s study did not have: a way of assessing and reshaping their past knowledge. It’s my hope that this book will provide access to the terms, concepts, and practices that make up “the academy,” the intellectual work of colleges and universities. It’s my hope that you will read through the short chapters with peers and instructors, have open and challenging conversations about the ideas you find here, and come out feeling better prepared for all your studies, your writing classes especially. As a first-generation college student myself, one who was wholly unprepared for the experience, I know I would have benefitted greatly from such discussions. Maybe I wouldn’t have quit college—twice—before finally figuring out how to do it.

Active Voices helps you develop agency As you read the chapters that are assigned to you and which interest you, try to go beyond passive reading and look up from the text every now and then, and assess the value of what you’ve read. You might say to yourself, “Okay, so what this guy is saying is . . .” and complete the sentence. Then gauge your response: What makes sense? What challenges your previously held ideas? What might you do with that knowledge? Your instructor may ask you to consider the questions in the text boxes labeled Access Points. These are designed to tap into your prior knowledge—what you already know but probably haven’t thought of—so that you can activate it and use it to shape what you are learning going forward. This process is based on recommendations from knowledge transfer research, which has helped us understand how people learn. Your instructor may assign one or two of the Action Points activities. These ask you to apply the ideas to the world you inhabit so that you can make abstract knowledge more concrete and, therefore, more useful and real. Knowledge is not really knowledge if it belongs to someone else, and it is of little value if it is still in a textbook or in a notebook or on a computer. You must have it in your head so that you can use it, just like you need a tool in your hand. That puts you in charge. You have—to use a favorite word of student-learning research—agency. Agency means power to act on the world, to shape it, rather than being shaped by it. Agency is exactly what those student writers that Bartholomae studied didn’t have and what Active Voices is intended to help you gain.

agency the power to shape one’s experience, worldview, or identity

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Students entering college bring with them their own ideas of what college means. But few are aware of this. Consequently, they are disempowered, being judged and governed by rules that they are only dimly aware of or don’t even know exist. This book is designed to provide the concepts you need to build your own understanding of the academy. By so doing, you gain agency, the capacity to shape your own life as a college student and to read, write, and think in ways that shape the world.

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1 What the Academy Is The academy is the intellectual work that people in colleges and universities do. In college, you’re expected to write “academic papers” and to conduct yourself like “an academic.” But what does academic mean exactly? To answer that question, you have to know what academy means and what it refers to, because knowing that can help you understand how to conduct yourself as an academic and how to write academic papers. So, what is the academy? Where did it come from and what does it do?

ACCESS POINT When you hear the word academy, what does it make you think of? What images come to mind? Where do you think these ideas and images have come from? Popular culture? Family beliefs? Personal experience? Finally, how do these ideas and images relate to what you believe you are doing in college right now, if they do at all?

The first academy The first Academy—with the capital “A”—was founded by Plato in ancient Greece just outside of Athens. The site included a grove of olive trees considered sacred as they were dedicated to the goddess Athena. Eventually, the site was enclosed within a wall. Here, young men were trained to become well-rounded citizens. The well-being of the state depended, then as it does now, on the quality of its citizenry, and the Academy did a good job training them, lasting 400 years (until 86 CE). However, Plato’s academy admitted only free young men—not slaves, not the poor, and with very rare exceptions, not women. Thus, it was highly exclusive. The principles of Plato’s Academy, and later the Lyceum, founded by Plato’s student, Aristotle, shaped medieval and ultimately modern universities. Figure 1.1 is a photo of Christ Church, part of the University of

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Oxford, in England. Note the wall-like buildings encircling a central quad with a fountain at the center. To this day, most colleges and universities have gates, quads, and fountains, suggesting some of the exclusivity and sacredness of the original Academy. But over the last century and a half, efforts have been made to make the academy more open. In the United States, the establishment of land-grant colleges in the late nineteenth century made agricultural and industrial studies more widespread, and in 1890, the second Morrill Act helped establish colleges for students of color. After the Second World War, the GI Bill opened the academy to millions of returning service men and women, Figure 1.1 Oxford University, Oxford, England most of whom would not have attended college otherwise. And later, in the 1960s and 70s, community colleges, such as Salt Lake Community College, rapidly expanded in an effort to democratize higher education, making college both affordable and geographically accessible to millions more people. The relative success of these efforts is a matter of debate. The expansion of the community college system, for instance, has not significantly increased the number of college graduates coming from the lower socioeconomic classes. Still, efforts have been made and continue to be made to open higher education to more and more people.

The academy today

academy all the thinking and writing, all the publishing and presenting, and all the teaching and studying that goes on at colleges and universities

2

You probably recognize that I’m using the academy almost interchangeably with colleges and universities. But they’re not quite the same. The academy doesn’t refer to the buildings or campuses of colleges and universities. Both the GI Bill and the rise of community colleges did more than simply build more campuses. They fundamentally changed the number and economic class of students that were admitted to colleges. Nor does academy refer to the business of higher education—all the testing and textbooks and administrative functions and sports teams. The term academy is more specific. The academy refers to all the thinking and writing, all the publishing and presenting, and all the teaching and studying that goes on at colleges and universities. It is the intellectual work of colleges and universities that constitutes the academy all around the globe, across national borders and across time. This means that a professor of economics in

Chapter 1 • What the Academy Is

Sydney, Australia, is part of the same academy as a graduate student in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and as an undergraduate researcher at a community college in Santa Rosa, California. And it means that a physicist or mathematician today is part of the same academy as was Sir Isaac Newton at the University of Cambridge in the seventeenth century. What binds them together is a shared pursuit and a shared set of values that underlies that pursuit.

The goal of the academy The academy’s goal is a grand one. The academy seeks nothing less than to understand and explain all the natural world and all the humandeveloped cultural world. In short, the academy seeks to know all human experience. Physicists, for example, are trying to understand and explain all the physical phenomena that make up our universe, from sub-atomic particles to black holes. Psychologists are trying to understand and explain all aspects of the human psyche, from its formation to function to development. Academics in film studies are trying to understand and explain everything about films, from how they are made to how they reflect and influence human cultures. What binds all these pursuits is the underlying belief that all things can be known and understood through reason and the gathering and analysis of reliable evidence, and that knowing how the world works will make for a better life for all. If there’s an article of faith at the heart of the academy, that’s it. The term academy derives from the original academies of the ancient Greeks and refers to the intellectual work that people in colleges and universities do. The goal of the academy is to understand and explain all human and natural experience using reason and the gathering and analysis of reliable evidence.

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ACTION POINTS All colleges and universities, even open admissions colleges, are exclusive to some degree, meaning they don’t allow everyone to enroll. Talk with a group of classmates. How does your college admit students? What do you think are the positive and the negative effects of these policies and for whom? If you’re not sure about a practice or policy, study your college’s website. Search the Internet for images of the academy. Try these search terms: college walls, college grounds, college quads, college campuses, college libraries. How relevant are these images to your views of the academy and to your own college? With a small team, conduct a search for the latest news about legislative efforts to redefine the role of higher education and, thus, the academy. Based on what you find, how have recent political events challenged the traditional view of “the academy”? With a classmate or two, take a short walk around your own college’s campus, taking notes of whatever features of the ancient academy that you can find. Are there fountains, quads, gates, or walls? What about the architecture and layout of the buildings? Are there echoes of the gothic or ancient eras? Is there ivy and brick? What is the intended effect of all this? Do these make you feel welcome or unwelcome? Who might be affected differently? Why?

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2 What Knowledge in the Academy Is Where you are in the academy dictates how much you are expected to know and how you are expected to demonstrate it. As a student in college, you are not expected to know more than your professors. And yet it is assumed that you know more than most middle school students and even the average high school student. But how much more? How much knowledge are you expected to have as you work through your college courses and how are you expected to demonstrate that knowledge?

ACCESS POINT When you were in high school, what was the most common way you showed your teachers you knew something? A test? An essay? A project? Which of these had the highest stakes? What does this say about what kind of knowledge was most valued?

These are vital questions for you as a college writer since how you answer them can determine the scope of a writing project and set you up for success or failure. So, what are you expected to know and how do you demonstrate it? To answer those questions, it’s important to understand how the academy is laid out and what your position is in it.

Types of degrees The academy is structured a bit like a pyramid, with the highest degrees at the top and the lowest degrees at the bottom (Figure 2.1). Where

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Doctorate Master’s

you are dictates what you are supposed to know and how you’re supposed to show you know it. If you can show you know certain things and can do that in the appropriate way, then you will be awarded a degree.

Let’s start from the top. At the top is the doctorate degree, most commonly the PhD, which stands for doctor of philosophy. But there are other doctorates Associate’s as well, such as the EdD, the doctor of education; the MD, the medical doctorate; the JD, which stands for juris doctorate for those graduating from law school; Figure 2.1 Pyramid structure of degrees and other less common doctorates such as PsyD for doctorate of psychology. Regardless of the type of degree, a person earning a doctorate is expected to be able to add new and unique knowledge to the academic world, often demonstrated by the completion of a dissertation, which presents significant, original research. Most doctorates take between four and seven years of study beyond an undergraduate degree to complete. Generally, the first several years are dedicated to coursework and the final few years to research and the writing of the dissertation. Note that the MD and JD are professional degrees and require coursework and exams rather than a dissertation, and the MD requires an extended internship. Bachelor’s

Below the doctorate is the master’s degree, generally a Master of Arts (MA) or Master of Science (MS) or a professional master’s degree, such as the master of business administration (MBA), the master of education (MEd), and the master of fine arts (MFA). A person with a master’s is supposed to have expert knowledge of the broad discipline with some deeper knowledge of one area. The broad knowledge is generally demonstrated through comprehensive exams (called “comps”) that follow coursework, and the deeper knowledge is generally demonstrated through the writing of a thesis, which is usually shorter and less comprehensive than the dissertation. A master’s degree generally takes two years of study beyond an undergraduate degree.

ACCESS POINT What kind of degree or certificate are you currently pursuing? What will you be required to do to earn that degree or certificate? Why did you choose this degree goal?

Below the master’s degree is the baccalaureate, or bachelor’s degree, generally the bachelor of arts (BA) and the bachelor of science (BS), but there are also more specialized bachelor’s degrees, such as the bachelor of applied science (BAS) and the bachelor of fine arts (BFA). The 6

Chapter 2 • What Knowledge in the Academy Is

difference between the BA and BS is the emphasis of coursework, with the BA generally requiring a foreign language and more coursework in the humanities, and the BS requiring more math and sciences. A person with a bachelor’s degree is supposed to have thorough knowledge of the broad discipline. This knowledge is generally demonstrated through the successful completion of course work at the upper-division level, concentrated in the major, sometimes including a capstone course. Some bachelor’s degrees, such as in engineering, are professional degrees. Earning one of them may grant entry into the profession. A bachelor’s degree is designed to be completed in four years, though taking up to six years is common. Below the bachelor’s degree is the associate’s degree, such as the associate’s in arts and sciences (AAS) or associate’s in applied sciences (also AAS). A person with an associate’s degree is expected to demonstrate the thinking and habits of the academy and to have an introductory-level knowledge of the major areas of academic study, such as the arts and humanities, the sciences, the social sciences, and math. In the case of the applied associate’s degree, the student is expected to have a working knowledge of a professional field. The associate’s degree is designed to be completed in two years and is generally not awarded at colleges and universities, though the first two years there are roughly the equivalent. These are often called general education, or Gen-Ed, requirements. The knowledge is demonstrated through coursework alone. The academy also confers professional degrees and certificates, such as an associate’s in Nursing, which prepares a person to take a licensing exam, in this case the National Council Licensure Exam (NCLEX), to become a registered nurse (RN). Other certificates may be conferred alone or in conjunction with degrees at the associate’s, bachelor’s, or master’s level. Most are designed to be completed in one or two years.

What counts as knowledge What counts as knowledge in the academy depends on two factors. First, all knowledge must be based on reliable evidence and reasonable explanations. This is implicit in being in the academy at all, so in this sense, all knowledge is of the same kind. Second, what counts as knowledge is relative to your position in the academy (Figure 2.2).

Doctorate Original research adding to the field’s body of knowledge; book-length dissertation Master’s In-depth secondary research, 50–100 page thesis Bachelor’s Longer, focused research paper, 10–20 sources Associate’s Short research paper, 5–7 sources

Figure 2.2 Knowledge relative to position

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If you are a first-year student, you have not yet had the time and training to develop deep knowledge of the field, and so you are credited with the knowledge appropriate for your level and only have to show you know your subjects at a relatively introductory level. A broad and relatively short research paper on some aspect of study is acceptable in an introductory course. In Introduction to Psychology, for example, you might be asked to write a review of literature on ADHD treatments and draw upon four to ten sources. However, by the time you are completing your bachelor’s degree, you must demonstrate a deeper and broader understanding of the field for it to count. You are asked to conduct more in-depth secondary research on a narrower topic and draw upon a greater number of sources. In an upper-division abnormal psychology course, for example, you might conduct a critical review of the research on the effects of exercise on ADHD, reading a significant number of peer-reviewed journal articles and writing up your findings in a ten- to twenty-page paper. If you go on for a master’s degree, you will have to show even greater depth of knowledge and more expertise in a single area, plus be familiar with the research methods of that field. If you were to write your thesis on ADHD, you would draw upon dozens of sources to provide an overview of the field and then develop a claim about one small aspect of treatment. Your thesis might be up to a hundred pages. For the doctorate, you would be expected to add the findings of your own original, primary research— studies you’ve conducted in the field, for example—to the academy’s body of knowledge. You would do this in a book-length dissertation. The different degrees awarded in the academy reflect the kind and quantity of knowledge the person is expected to hold. What counts as knowledge in the academy depends on where you are in your academic journey. The further you move toward more advanced degrees, the greater the breadth, depth, and originality of knowledge you are expected to demonstrate.

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ACTION POINTS Talk with a few classmates about the degree or certificate they are working toward. How did they make this decision and why? Did anyone have special influence on their decision making? If your classmates are willing to share, ask about their family’s educational background. What are the differences in academic plans among your classmates? With a partner, conduct a web search on how many people in your country hold what types of degrees. What percentage of the population of adults hold a bachelor’s degree? How many hold the master’s and doctorate degrees? Can you find data specific to highest degree of race, socio-economic background, gender, and other group markers? Compare your results. Conduct some research on doctoral dissertations and master’s theses in an area you are interested in going into. In Google, search “Doctoral dissertations in ______” and your area of interest. Many universities publish abstracts of recent dissertations. Look through a few of the titles, skim the abstracts, and examine the details, such as length and number of advisors. What can you conclude about doctoral dissertations that is relevant to ideas presented in this chapter, such as depth of knowledge or degree of specialization? Find one or two people who hold bachelor’s degrees and ask them about their experience. How did the first two years of their college study compare with their last two years? To put this another way, how did their study in their major differ from their general education classes? Report back to your group.

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3 What Thinking like an Academic Means Thinking in college means questioning what can be known and to what degree of certainty and asking what the significance of the knowledge might be. Have you ever noticed how professors run a class discussion? Usually they will ask a question, listen to a student’s response, sometimes rephrase and expand upon the response, and then ask another question. You’ve probably been in these situations so often that you’ve scarcely even thought about it. But how do professors know to ask the questions they ask, how to rephrase a statement, and how to elicit the next idea or question from a class? Is there some common code, some common way of thinking that defines thinking in college?

ACCESS POINT Can you recall a particularly lively class discussion, one that made you eager to join? What was the subject? What was being discussed? How many people were involved? What it made it so good?

In the course of my academic career, I have studied in five different disciplines: business administration, psychology, English and American literature, philosophy, and rhetoric. The ability to analyze a problem and ask key questions, which I developed in my earliest years studying management theory and comparative psychology, transferred almost seamlessly to my later studies in literature and then into philosophy and 11

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rhetoric. I recognized a common code, a way of thinking across disciplines, that seeks the complexities inherent in issues worth examining. This questioning does not settle for simple answers or binary approaches; rather, it focuses on suspending judgment and objective analysis.

Avoiding judgments As has been and will be suggested many times in this book, the purpose of the academy is to make sense of the world, explaining what it is and how it works. The first thing you want to do to think well in college is to step back from making a judgment about something in favor of analyzing and exploring its many parts. Judgments are usually in the form of a binary (which means being of two parts), such as right or wrong, good or bad, should or shouldn’t. When you start with a judgment, you limit what you are able to see. For example, if you judge the effects of digital technology on literacy as “bad,” then you immediately cast all evidence into only one of two categories: evidence that supports the judgment of bad and evidence that doesn’t. The actual effects of digital technology on how people read and write and think, however, are likely much more complex and suggest consequences that are neither good nor bad but simply different. The judgment can blind you to that complexity. So, if you find yourself making such a judgment, just set that judgment aside and ask a different set of questions.

Questioning like an academic The most fundamental set of questions involves observation and corroboration. These include “What is there? How do I know it is there? What else is there? What’s not there and why not?” These questions suggest a self-awareness, which is key, since college thinking recognizes that the person asking the questions has a particular purpose in knowing. That purpose is a kind of bias and being sure you know what you’re looking at is the first step in limiting that bias. Another key mode of thinking involves questioning certainty. “How certain can I be of my claims? How valid is the evidence?” Academics are aware that almost no evidence is beyond question and almost no evidence is wholly complete, so they include counter-argument and rebuttal and qualify their claims. They might include qualifying statements such as “Although there are stark exceptions, in most cases . . .” Or they might include a statistical qualification, such as “with a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percent . . .” College thinking requires you to imagine an audience that is skeptical and to account for that skepticism. 12

Chapter 3 • What Thinking like an Academic Means

ACCESS POINT If you’re knowledgeable about a subject, you likely talk with others who are also knowledgeable. For example, football fans might agree that a defensive scheme is common in certain situations but disagree vehemently about its use in any particular situation. When you’re with others who are knowledgeable about a subject you care about, what kinds of things do you discuss and how? What do you agree about and what do you disagree about? What does that tell you about thinking and knowing?

Thinking in college also asks questions about meaning. “What does this term mean exactly? Why is it significant? To whom? In what ways? In what ways is it not significant? What else might it mean?” All of these questions address the larger claims made in an academic argument. In general, you should rarely be satisfied with a single, definitive claim of significance. Complex issues require complex claims to adequately account for all the parts, all the uncertainties, and all the possibilities. This brings up an important point. In college, you are rewarded for recognizing and presenting complexity. The American writer H.L. Mencken is often credited with saying, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” I’m fond of reminding students as they approach research projects, “All the easy questions have been answered. Only the tough ones remain.” So instead of looking for the answer to some problem, you’re better off showing why easy answers and easy explanations are inadequate. Embrace complexity and uncertainty, and show why that complexity and uncertainty are better representations of reality than simplicity and certainty. Show your audience that things are difficult to understand and even more difficult to know for certain, and you’ll be on your way to thinking like an academic. The term that describes this is problematize. It means to take what appears to be a simple answer or simple theory and show how its simplicity masks complexity, how a “simple answer” has problems and isn’t enough.

problematize to show your audience that your topics of discussion are difficult to understand and even more difficult to know for certain

Thinking like an academic and intellectual development Thinking in college may not be as simple as trying on a new set of clothes, however. It may be part of a larger process in the way college students develop intellectually. In 1970, William G. Perry, a Harvard psychologist, published his findings from a 15-year study of the intellectual development of undergraduates. While his work has been extended and modified in 13

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the years following, it remains a prominent model to discuss the growth of college-age learners. Perry’s scheme presents nine stages of growth, which can be grouped into four levels. Understanding these four levels can help you make sense of the kind of thinking that academics do. 1.

Dualism: knowledge is received, there’s a right and wrong answer to be learned, and an authority knows it.

2.

Multiplicity: there are multiple right solutions to a problem or no solution at all, and opinions matter.

3.

Relativism: knowledge is contextual (meaning it is known by someone in a particular setting) and can be questioned by source and evidence.

4.

Commitment: knowledge is integrated with personal experience via reflection and is ongoing and incomplete.

From this, you can see that thinking in college may only describe the latter two stages, relativism and commitment, which come out of the former two stages, dualism and multiplicity. As a student of college age, no doubt your dualistic thinking has already been challenged or you have left it behind. Regardless, you may recognize that the kinds of questions your professors ask in class discussions are intended to move the thinking away from dualism and multiplicity and toward relativism and commitment. A way of thinking is likely shared across academic disciplines, which can be understood as asking and answering particular kinds of questions. These questions lead thinking away from simple answers and right solutions toward recognizing and accounting for complexity and uncertainty. This kind of thinking may culminate in ways of knowing that can be described as relativism and commitment, which integrate contextualized knowledge with personal experience as an ongoing and forever incomplete process.

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ACTION POINTS With two or three classmates, discuss how the ideas in this chapter differ from how thinking may have been encouraged in high-school classes or other secondary-education contexts. For example, students responding to a writing prompt for an SAT test were once asked, famously, to argue that the US Civil War was either primarily about race or primarily about economics—but not both. Students were forced to ignore the complex relations among race, labor, and the political and economic systems that were built on them. Have you and your classmates experienced similar kinds of pressure to engage in binary thinking? Why? Do an online search of some of the concepts from this chapter. Look at several sites for each. What similarities do you find among these concepts in general and how do they relate to your experiences so far in college classes? Locate an article from an academic discipline you are interested in. Read the abstract and locate the main claims. How are the claims qualified? What conditions are accounted for and what exceptions are made to limit the claim? What language do the authors use to do this? Conduct a study of a whole-class discussion of a class you or a colleague are currently taking. Take notes on the questions the professor asks and the responses the students offer. How many times does the professor question the reasoning of the students? Based on your notes, describe the values of the kind of thinking the discussion promoted. How might this kind of thinking shape your next writing project?

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Realizing she could be affected by the announcement of the DACA repeal, Maria took action by utilizing on-campus resources toward determining her academic and personal future.

Utilizing Campus Resources Maria, an undocumented student who came with her parents from Oaxaca, Mexico, is a 29-year-old student with an American-born daughter; her husband is also undocumented. She has worked at her college’s Writing Center for more than a year, carries a 3.8 GPA, and is bilingual. When the United States Attorney General announced in 2017 that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, DACA, would be repealed, she felt frightened and intimidated. She no longer felt comfortable on campus and contemplated dropping out of school. But a talk with the writing center director helped her see her situation as an academic would. She asked what the development might mean: what it was, what it wasn’t, and how it could be interpreted. Then she contacted the Cultural Center on her campus and with others explored what other colleges and universities were doing. With her peers, she helped organize an event to raise awareness of the issue among students. She knew she would have to speak and so she conducted research, developed her talk, got feedback from her fellow peer-tutors in the writing center, and practiced. When the day came, she delivered her speech, using both English and Spanish, as she felt this was the most effective. The event was covered by the local newspaper and was well received by the college administration. During her work, she learned of free legal help and through this organization, both she and her husband gained citizenship. Just as importantly, Maria took an active role in determining her future. 16

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4 What Being a Student Means Being a student in college means orienting yourself toward a subject of study and adopting the habits of mind and practices of a scholar. When a teacher teaches, she is teaching, but what is a student doing? We don’t have a verb for that, but we should, perhaps “studenting,” because research on student success has found that engagement, as expressed in certain habits of mind and certain practices, are essential (National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and the Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE). Likewise, unsuccessful students tend not to engage in these habits. To write well in the academy, it is important to have a solid base as a good student in the academy, that is, to adopt the habits of a scholar. But what are those habits? And why the term “scholar”?

ACCESS POINT When someone says, “She’s a good student,” what comes to mind immediately? How much of your answer describes the person’s intelligence and how much describes the person’s actions and habits?

A student studies a subject Scholar is the root of the word scholarship, and scholarship is what academics produce and what academics do. As a student, that’s what you want to produce and do, as well. Since the academy comprises numerous disciplines, from anthropology to zoology, a student in one of these disciplines is supposed to be a student of that subject. If you ask high school students, “What are you a student of?” they’ll either be

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confused and answer, “I’m not a student of anything,” or they’ll answer with the name of their school or teacher, as in “I’m a student at Garfield High,” or “I’m in Mr. Jenkins’ class.” But if you ask graduate students at a university the same question, they’ll answer with their discipline, sub-discipline or even specialty, depending on who they are talking to. To a person outside the academy, they might say, “I’m studying English.” To a graduate student in a different discipline, they might say, “I’m studying rhetoric in the English department.” To a fellow PhD candidate in English, they might say, “I’m studying eighteenth-century feminist rhetoric in the British popular press.” In all three cases, they present themselves as a student of a subject. The key point is that now that you have moved into the academy, so must you shift your orientation away from being a student of a particular person or place to being a student of a particular subject. Though you may be at the beginning of your studies, you likely already have a long-term goal in mind, however vague, anything from getting a transfer two-year degree to completing a PhD in religious studies. Orient yourself toward that goal, and you become a student of that subject, which is the first move toward becoming a scholar.

ACCESS POINT When you hear the word “scholar,” what comes to mind? Where do your ideas come from? Do you consider yourself a scholar? Why or why not? How much of your answer do you think refers to issues of identity and how much refers to issues of lifestyle?

A student studies actively with a purpose

habits of mind eight qualities of students that are essential to success in college writing: curiosity, openness, engagement, creativity, persistence, responsibility, flexibility, and metacognition

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What this move demonstrates is a shift from being passive, defined by your role relative to someone or something more powerful, whether a teacher or institution, to being active, defined as your pursuit of knowledge in a subject or discipline. As a scholar, you are in charge of your own study and your own success, and you are responsible for learning the subject. This means that professors are only there to guide you and encourage you. It’s your job, as a scholar, to study the field. But what does that entail, exactly? First, it suggests a set of habits of mind that are summarized in “The Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing.” According to the Council of Writing Program Administrators, the habits of mind are eight qualities essential to success in college writing.

Chapter 4 • What Being a Student Means

i Curiosity: the desire to know more about the world. i Openness: the willingness to consider new ways of being and thinking in the world. i Engagement: a sense of investment and involvement in learning. i Creativity: the ability to use novel approaches for generating, investigating, and representing ideas. i Persistence: the ability to sustain interest in and attention to short- and long-term projects. i Responsibility: the ability to take ownership of one’s actions and understand the consequences of those actions for oneself and others. i Flexibility: the ability to adapt to situations, expectations, or demands. i Metacognition: the ability to reflect on one’s own thinking as well as on the individual and cultural processes used to structure knowledge. Consistently striving to achieve the eight habits of mind can be challenging when you’re juggling three to five classes, maybe a part-time or full-time job, and perhaps family responsibilities. But if you remember that a scholar takes an active role in investigating a subject and does not merely fulfill the professor’s requirements, you’ll see that your field is broad and that one bit of knowledge isn’t an end point but rather leads to more questions. Moreover, students who have a particular academic goal and use that goal as a means of approaching and connecting classes generally do better than those who don’t. Imagine one student who wants to go to medical school. He has to take numerous general education courses, which don’t necessarily seem to connect with his field of study. However, this student has adopted the position of the scholar and has decided to seek the answer to the question, “What can I find in this class that will make me a better doctor?” With this question in mind, he approaches his art history class with an open and curious mind, actively exploring the field not only to understand the richness of the history of art but also to connect it to his chosen field of medicine. It turns out art history has a lot to teach him about gender roles and authority, care-taking, and paternalism. He uses the opportunity to write a research paper to focus on nineteenth-century romantic images of battlefield nurses. All of this helps him rethink his attitudes, 19

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as a man, toward patients and patient care. The result is that he is more engaged in art history while he is furthering his studies in medicine. By approaching what appears to be irrelevant or even boring activities or classes as opportunities to find something that will help you toward your larger goal, you’ll be adopting the habits of mind of a scholar and putting yourself in the position of an active and purposeful student.

A student engages in effective practices Most students enter college with a set of practices that were developed more or less organically. Whatever worked in the past and got them through stuck. But these practices may not translate to the greater demands and greater freedoms of college. For one thing, most professors will not provide the daily structure high-school or middle-school teachers do. For another, standards tend to be higher and prior practices and intellectual habits may not be sufficient to accomplish these higher goals. Being a student means adopting the practices that ensure success. This is a two-part process. First, you will need to study how to study so that you can consciously develop solid practices. Second, you will need to adopt the practices you’ve studied and apply them to the subjects you’re studying. There are many study skills you need to develop, from note-taking, such as the popular Cornell method, to annotating a reading in a textbook, and it will be up to you to study the essentials. But a base practice I’ll mention here. Being a good student means knowing how to get things done, that is, good students practice good time management. To do that, they tend to use a calendar, usually digital, on their phones and computers, and they use the calendar not only as a place to record the due dates of projects and dates of tests, which is crucial, but also as a scheduling matrix. They record all their commitments, such as work and family, as well as all recreational activities, such as going to the gym or out with friends. Most importantly, they plot out their studying. They schedule time to study for each class, and they use principles of backward design. This means they start with the goal and plot backward through the steps and stages that they have to go through to reach that goal. For example, to study for a large, multiple choice test, good students would likely plot out how much reading they would have to do, over how many days, along with the time dedicated to reviewing notes. As 20

Chapter 4 • What Being a Student Means

they do that, they post these landmarks on their calendar. They do this for each of the major projects or tests they have. In this way, they use technology to manage their time so that their studying is most effective. Being a student in the academy is fundamental to writing well in college. To be a student means to orient yourself toward studying a subject and carrying that larger goal with you into all your classes and coursework. It means adopting the habits of mind of a scholar, including curiosity, openness, and persistence. Finally, it means studying the art of studying itself, including time management, and applying what you learn to your practice.

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ACTION POINTS With a few classmates, discuss your current study practices. Do you keep a schedule, use backward design to manage your time, practice a formal note-taking or annotating method? None of these? Share your best ideas and agree, as a group, to each try out one or two practices over the next week. With a peer or two, check out a few YouTube videos from the College Info Geek series on study habits and techniques. With your partners, choose two or three to watch. Take notes as you do. Then discuss what applies to you, what strategies and habits you might adopt, and how you will do that. With a peer or two, compare several calendar and scheduling apps, such as Evernote, Doodle, or some other more web-based option like Google Calendar. Then, if you wish, look at available apps for gamifying your study, such as Habitica. Which might be best for you and why? Finally, schedule a final writing project for this class or the final exam of another onto a scheduling device (calendar, etc., or using a paper planner) and then, using backward design, plot out the stages you’ll need to go through to be successful in that final project or exam. Schedule an informal talk with professors or instructors and ask them about their experiences being a student, both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student. How did their approach to their classes and their studies change as they moved from lower-division to upper-division courses and then into graduate school? What advice might they have on being a student in the terms suggested in this chapter?

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Understanding Different Methods of Learning Austin is 17 years old and completing his highschool diploma while taking classes full-time at a community college. Austin, diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, found it difficult to fit in socially at his high school. In spite of his efforts, he made few Austin discovered a particular note-taking method that worked best friends and often found for him to manage his learning style for lecture-based courses. that others treated him poorly. At the community college, by contrast, he felt none of the pressures to conform socially that he had felt in high school and found that fellow students and especially faculty and staff were welcoming. Everyone treated him with respect and he felt that his input was welcome. However, he still struggled in traditional classes, especially larger classes that required a lot of note-taking during lectures or were based on class discussion. Austin had no difficulty reading and taking notes from his textbooks, but he found that when professors lectured or when the class discussed an issue, the rapid verbal exchanges confused him and made him anxious. He talked with a counselor at the disability support office and got some good strategies. Following the counselor’s recommendations, he instituted a two-column note-taking method, with one column for notes and one for his questions. Using this method, he was able to identify what areas he missed so that he could follow up with the professor during office hours. Also, professors were asked to provide any lecture notes and slides in advance so that Austin could study them. Even more helpful, a fellow student was assigned to provide copies of her notes from class, which she was happy to do. This freed Austin from worrying about taking precise notes and allowed him to concentrate on the overall tenor of the class. 23

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5 What Reading in College Means Reading in college means filling gaps in your knowledge on the way to mastering a subject. Reading with a purpose While being a student means adopting the habits of mind and the practices of a scholar, one practice dominates activities in college: reading. Reading in college means reading with a purpose: to use what you read to further your knowledge. This is most important. As the student of a subject, you use reading to teach yourself that subject.

ACCESS POINT Have you ever been part of a heated discussion about something you read? Maybe in high school your class argued about 1984 or To Kill a Mockingbird. Why was the exchange heated? How did you or your classmates use the text in the discussion? How did it feel to be in that kind of discussion? Finally, would you want to recreate that feeling more often?

Your professors also read to teach themselves their subjects. It may seem odd to think that people with PhDs are still studying their subjects, but that’s what professors do each time they read a journal article, book, or even online discussion. They are reading to keep up on advances in their field and to further their own knowledge. They might ask, “Where is the field going? What does this article or book offer that is new in the field? How might I use this to further my own research?” This suggests that academics read fast, and most do. Unless the purpose is to experience the quality of the prose, say of a novel or poem, college

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readers read for meaning and ideas, paying attention only to those that fill their needs. They might scour a text just for what’s useful. They then use the ideas in their own thinking, in building a more complete mental map of their subject’s world. What they don’t need, they set aside, with the understanding that it might be useful later.

Identifying the purpose As a college reader, you do the same. It may be more difficult for you as a beginning student of a subject to determine what is needed and what is not. Your mental map of the subject may be fairly limited. But there are things you can do to overcome that. Most importantly, you can shift your purpose from reading pages to filling gaps in your knowledge. Becoming a college student means shifting your identity from being a student of a school to being a student of a subject. For example, when you were in high school, people may have asked you what school you went to. In college, they may ask you what you are studying. From this, it follows that your purpose in reading shifts as well. Your professor may ask you to read the introduction and first chapter of your textbook, for example, but what she really means is for you to read those pages and gather the knowledge you need from them. To do that, you set your purpose to studying the subject. You might ask, “What are the origins of modern sociology? What are its primary aims? What are its primary methods?” And you take notes on your answers to those questions. But how do you develop these questions?

Specifying the purpose through prereading prereading looking at features of a text such as the table of contents, chapter previews, headings, and key terms to formulate a set of questions that you think represent the key ideas of the reading

Prereading means looking at features of a text such as the table of contents, chapter previews, headings, and key terms. These allow college readers to formulate a set of questions which they think represent the key ideas of the reading. Sometimes professors will give a set of questions to guide the reading. Even then, college readers review those questions critically and add to or revise them to make them their own. They nearly always write these questions down on paper or in an electronic document dedicated to reading notes. College readers set a goal for their reading. Generally, the goal is to answer the questions they’ve posed but only as a means to discussing, explaining, or otherwise using the important ideas. They then read to meet these goals. In this way, they fill the gaps in their knowledge and build up a more comprehensive map of the field. Numerous sources, online and otherwise, can show you the basics of how to do this. They can show you how to mark up a text, how to take notes in the margins, and how to take notes on paper or a document.

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My favorite is a table with two columns, one column for key quotations or summaries of key ideas and one for making connections among those ideas or commenting on them. Regardless of your method, it’s essential to keep reading notes for each class in a separate notebook or in a dedicated folder on your computer or online, such as in Google Drive.

ACCESS POINT What have you been taught in the past about reading well? What tips or suggestions have been offered? How many did you actually put into effect? What is your usual way of approaching a reading assignment? Overall, how effective do you feel your method is?

Fulfilling the purpose by reading for conversancy So, college readers read with the purpose of filling the gaps in their knowledge. But how do they know when the gaps are filled? For instance, many graduate students enroll in seminars. In a seminar, a student generally attends once a week with perhaps ten to twelve other graduate students. Usually, there is no lecture, just a discussion of the week’s reading, which may be as much as an entire book. The professors usually do not explain passages or key ideas. Instead, the students are expected to read and understand the ideas themselves as well as the significance of the ideas. In short, they are expected to be conversant with a reading. Conversancy in reading means you will have the ability to recall and then discuss, explain, or use the significant ideas. It also means you can quickly locate whatever passages you may need to support your discussion.

conversancy in reading, the ability to recall and then discuss, explain, or use ideas significant to the reading

As a college reader, you should aim to do the same. You should prepare to use the reading for discussion or application. You can then test yourself. Can you talk about what you’ve read without going back and looking at the text? If not, then you haven’t read it well enough. Can you find the key passages you need quickly? If not, then you’ve not marked the text carefully enough. This is key: the techniques of prereading and note-taking are not an end in themselves but a means to an end. They are designed to help you become conversant with a reading as part of mastering a subject. This is what it means to read in college. Reading dominates college study activities. In college, reading means to fill in gaps in your knowledge as a means of developing a more complete map of a field. Prereading identifies the gaps that need to be filled and helps you formulate the gaps as questions to be answered. A good notetaking method fills the gaps and encourages conversancy, which means the ability to recall and then discuss, explain, or use the significant ideas.

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ACTION POINTS Read and mark up a page or two of an article and share your strategies with a couple of peers. Use the techniques you’ve gleaned from your studies on active reading. Most importantly, test yourself: Are you conversant with the ideas? To what extent? How is this experience different from your usual reading practices? With a partner, locate and skim three websites that offer suggestions for prereading. What ideas overlap? Which seem especially useful? Then, together, develop a shared set of principles for prereading and agree to fulfill them for the next reading assignment. Schedule a check-in time to compare your experiences. The College Info Geek videos offer a number of useful tips on college reading, even one on helping you decide whether you need to read something at all. Take a look at a few of the videos with a critical eye. Then, check out a few other sites that offer ideas about college or critical reading. From what you now understand, write up your own one-page theory of college reading: what is it, what is it for, and how does it work? Analyze a page of text that has been annotated and discuss the kinds of markings used and their purpose. In what ways do the markings suggest reading with the purpose of using the ideas? In what ways do the markings suggest an aim toward conversancy? What connections among ideas do the markings suggest?

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6 What Writing with Authority Means Writing with authority in the academy means not judging or teaching but joining a conversation by questioning and seeking to understand. Common forms of authority In an article titled “Reading and Writing Without Authority,” Ann Penrose and Cheryl Geisler present their analysis of two writers, Roger, who is completing his doctorate in philosophy, and Janet, who is a first-year student at the university. Each is given the same task: conduct research and write an argument on the meaning of “paternalism,” which is when a person restricts the freedom of another in their supposed best interest, thus taking on a fatherly or paternal role. Given Roger’s and Janet’s training and experience, each approaches the task differently.

ACCESS POINT Think about a teacher you’ve had who inspired you. What was inspiring? Was it the factual knowledge they had or was it the way they asked questions about the subject? Were they able to make the subject come alive? How? So did their power come from what they knew or how they approached their subject?

Roger joins the conversation among the various authors debating the meaning and value of paternalism, weighing one author’s ideas against another’s, questioning the claims of certain authors, and offering his own analyses of the ideas as he goes. If he finds a controversy, he pays special attention to it. Janet, by contrast, treats the task as one of finding the right answer to the question “What is paternalism?” She then looks

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for ideas that align with what she thinks is the right answer. If there’s conflict, an area of dispute or uncertainty, she ignores it. Although she comes up with what she believes is a “right” answer, from an academic perspective, Roger writes with much greater authority. In the introduction, we looked at David Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University,” in which he showed that students who are new to academic writing and who face a writing task generally do not understand what’s expected of them and so revert to what they know. Instead of writing as Roger does by joining the conversation, questioning claims, and offering ideas with qualifications, they wrote more as Janet does, looking for the one right answer and then explaining it. Bartholomae noticed that novice writers adopted the voice of one of two common authority figures in their lives, the parent making a judgment or the teacher giving a lesson. These writers would present some point and then explain why it was good or bad, right or wrong, as a parent might. Or they would adopt the role of the teacher giving a lesson, explaining how something should be done or how something worked. Both are understandable since most people have spent much of their lives being talked to by parents and teachers, but neither is appropriate as the voice of an authority in the academy. So, what does “writing with authority” mean in the academy and why does it matter?

Writing with authority in the academy authority in academic writing, thinking and writing the way academics do, neither judging nor teaching

As you can probably surmise from the discussion above, writing with authority moves beyond gaining knowledge of subject matter to include the way that you analyze the evidence, develop ideas, and make and qualify claims. That is, you gain authority by thinking and writing the way academics do.

ACCESS POINT Think of a writing project you have completed in school that involved research. What kind of research did you do? What were you searching for? How did you know when you found what you were looking for?

Roger, as described in the Penrose and Geisler study, had authority when he wrote about paternalism not because he knew more about the subject than Janet did but because his writing enacted the modes of thinking appropriate to the situation. He recognized that the meaning of paternalism was a matter of debate and his job as an academic writer 30

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was to present and join that debate, as academics do. Janet, by contrast, approached the question of the meaning of paternalism not as a debate but as a matter of finding a single, right answer.

Writing with authority grants the privilege to speak If you write with the authority appropriate to the situation, then you will be granted the right to say what you wish to say. That is, if you show that you are a member of the community of scholars, even a novice in that community, by demonstrating that you have adopted the ways of knowing, questioning, and communicating that the community shares, you will be listened to. However, if you adopt an inappropriate kind of authority, such as the parent or teacher or the naïve researcher who thinks they have the right answer, that is, those who aren’t part of the community of scholars, then you will likely not be listened to. Instead, you may have what you say discounted. It won’t necessarily be because what you say is wrong, as counter to fact, but that the way you approach knowledge is not the way the community demands. And in case you think this is merely an unfounded bias, remember that for academics, knowledge is always expanding, always contingent upon the next discovery or insight, and thus uncertainty is not something to be afraid of but something to embrace. Some things can be known, the atomic weight of barium, for example, but what significance chemistry has in the structure and makeup of the larger world is still developing. So that’s why it matters. If you don’t speak, write, or think in the way that is expected of the academy, searching for meaning in an unfolding and uncertain universe, you likely won’t be heard. Writing with authority in the academy is different from writing with the authority of a parent or teacher. In the academy, writing with authority means adopting the modes of inquiry that define the academy community, which include a shared sense of inquiry and knowledge building. If you adopt the appropriate modes of authority, you will be listened to; however, if you do not, what you say will likely be discounted or ignored.

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ACTION POINTS In discussion with a few classmates, contrast what you had thought writing with authority in college might mean. In particular, consider Janet’s approach to writing about paternalism and compare and contrast it to your experiences writing research papers in the past. How much were you questioning authority and how much were you searching for answers? Locate online the “Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing,” a statement jointly published by several professional writing organizations, and read the executive summary, and reflect on the Habits of Mind further, considering how you think they can be reinforced by students’ goals and expectations. With a classmate or two, use your college’s library databases (ProQuest, for example, or Academic Search Premier) to find two journal articles in a field you’re interested in. Read the introductions to see what kind of research questions each sets up and how, that is, in relation to other research. Second, read the conclusions to see what kind of claims the authors offer, how they qualify those claims, and how they relate them to other research. Talk to a peer with a declared major different from yours. Ask him about how he came to decide on that major and how he feels he’s assimilating into the field. Reflect together on your different experiences, considering how your different majors might influence those experiences.

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7 What an Academic Discourse Community Is An academic discourse community is a group of people with shared knowledge of an academic field’s history and areas of study as well as the kinds of questions it asks, how it answers them, and how it advances. Knowing a field is joining a community By the time a person finishes her bachelor’s degree, she is supposed to know her subject very well. That means she knows the main terms and concepts of her field and can place them into a historical and a taxonomic frame. A taxonomy is a scheme of classification, a kind of mental map. That map represents the main branches or areas of the field and the main ideas of those branches or areas relative to one another in the here and now. In a sense, the person with a bachelor’s degree knows what a group of people in her field might be studying in an area “over there” and how that differs from, but is related to, what another group is studying “over here.”

ACCESS POINT Consider your intended major field of study. How many subfields can you name? What is the history of the field? When did it start and who are the major figures? By contrast, what do you think you’ll know when you finish your degree? In what concrete ways do you think you’ll demonstrate that knowledge?

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She also knows the specific history of the field so that she can explain which ideas came before others, who developed them, and how one idea influenced and developed into the next. In short, she has in her mind a relatively coherent narrative of the history of the discipline, one which includes major advances and discoveries as well as major figures. For example, someone who knows the field of biology has a coherent understanding of how modern biology developed, from the earliest efforts, perhaps in ancient Greece, through the Renaissance and into the modern, scientific era. She can describe the contributions of Aristotle and explain how some were valuable while others were not. She can talk about the impact of Carl Linnaeus, Charles Darwin and other major figures in the field and how their ideas moved the study of biology toward where it is today. At the same time, she can explain how microbiology “over there” is different from macrobiology “over here” while still sharing the same underlying principles, practices, and interests, that is, what makes them both biology. We might say that a person who knows her field in this way has both diachronic knowledge, “across time,” and synchronic knowledge, “across space.” Every person who considers herself a biologist and is considered by others “to be” a biologist shares this knowledge. That is how she is identified as a biologist in the first place, by both herself and others. Her thinking, speaking, and writing are grounded in a knowledge of biology, all the fields and subfields as well as the broad narrative sweep of the field’s history, shared with others who consider themselves, and are considered by others to be, biologists. She’s a member of that community.

ACCESS POINT Nearly everyone identifies themselves as a member of at least one community. How about you? Do you identify as a basketball player, video-gamer, snowboarder, or jazz musician? If so, what specialized knowledge do you have that a non-member probably does not? How did you gain that knowledge and when did you consider yourself knowledgeable enough to think of yourself as a member of that community? What were you able to do?

The same can be said of members of other communities. A young man who takes his identity as a snowboarder likely knows something about the history of the sport, how it began as a cross between surfing and skiing in the 1960s, and how it developed rapidly through different phases in the 1980s and 90s and became an Olympic sport in 1998. And he likely knows the different kinds and styles of snowboarding, from downhill to freestyle, 34

Chapter 7 • What an Academic Discourse Community Is

and can name some major figures, both historical and contemporary, associated with each. Moreover, he probably knows the specialized terms of the sport and can use them to talk with other snowboarders. If he can’t, he probably won’t be considered a full member of the community, though he may be accepted as a novice willing to learn. In both cases, the biologist and the snowboarder, people with sufficient knowledge to talk about all aspects of their field can be said to be part of a discourse community.

A community is defined by a shared language Discourse refers to written or spoken communication, which, in the context of the academy, extends to communication grounded in the structure of knowledge that governs how we think, speak, and write about a particular subject. It is the glue that holds together discrete bits of knowledge. To extend the biology example, it is the knowledge of what followed from Crick and Watson’s discovery of the helical structure of DNA. These consequences followed logically and thus the knowledge takes the form of a narrative, which is a linguistic structure.

discourse written or spoken communication grounded in the structure of knowledge that governs how members of a discourse community think, speak, and write

Just about every group you can think of, from snowboarders and biologists to football coaches and astrologists, has a specialized body of knowledge that allows them to identify one another. All are members of a discourse community.

Academic disciplines as discourse communities However, as we’ve discussed it, biology is different from the other communities mentioned. Biology is an academic field. As such, it is an academic discourse community. In addition to the knowledge of the history and areas of the field, a biologist is also grounded in the general principles and practices of the academy: making reasonable claims based on the analysis of verifiable evidence. Note that the astrologist mentioned above may be a member of a discourse community but not an academic discourse community, since astrology does not adhere to the academic standard of analyzing verifiable evidence: there is no scientific evidence to link the position of planets at the moment of a person’s birth to his or her personality or behavior; correlation, without any plausible scientific explanation, cannot support claims of causation. Similarly, snowboarders are members of a discourse community, but knowledge in the field is not advanced using the methods of the academy.

academic discourse community a group of people with shared knowledge of an academic field’s history and areas of study as well as the kinds of questions it asks, how it answers them, and how it advances

Why is this distinction important? An academic discourse community is what you are entering and what you are learning to write and speak 35

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in every time you take an introductory class, from Psychology 101 to Introduction to American Literature. And as you move into your major, you are moving further and further into that academic discourse community. If you understand that your job as a student is to learn about the history of the field and the major aspects of the landscape, you can recognize gaps in your knowledge and work to fill them. You can ask your instructors and professors to help, asking them to make clear the connections you cannot yet see clearly. Most importantly, you can use your writing as a powerful means of filling those gaps and for demonstrating your membership in the academic discourse community. That is the number one reason people write in college. Knowing a field means joining a community of people who know that field, its history and its branches, as well as its principles for making meaning and communicating. These communities are marked by discourse, specialized ways of speaking and writing. Every academic discipline is a discourse community and studying a field is entering and joining that academic discourse community, which is accomplished and demonstrated through speaking and writing.

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ACTION POINTS Gather two or more introductory textbooks, from classmates, your bookstore, or library, and study them. How much history and how much nomenclature of the field is represented? Do you think that if you read the entire textbook you would be a member of the “academic discourse community” the book’s authors are part of? Why or why not? Analyze an online encyclopedia entry, such as from Encyclopedia Britannica or Wikipedia, for a field you are thinking about majoring in. Read as much of the entry as you wish. How much of this community’s knowledge are you familiar with? How do the ideas of this chapter relate to your findings? Locate a journal article in a discipline you are interested in, using one of your college library’s academic databases. Read the introduction. How many specialized terms are you unfamiliar with? How many of these are defined? How many of the terms are not defined? In your view, is this unavoidable, necessary, or simply a matter of practice? Take a trip to your campus bookstore and conduct some research on the required reading for a 400-level course in your prospective major, if your college offers upper-division courses, or for any honor’s program course. What does the reading list suggest about the degree of specialization in the academic discourse community the course is situated in?

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University of California, Santa Barbara, students founded Sprout Up, a nonprofit with the goal of providing free environmental education to children in California public schools.

Sprout Up The nonprofit organization Sprout Up: Environmental Education for the Next Generation was started by students at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2009 with the goal of bringing free environmental education opportunities to kids in California’s cashstrapped schools. Starting with activities in a single second-grade classroom, Sprout Up now has chapters at nine universities and serves thousands of children every year from California to New York. Drawing upon support from contributors who provide as little as $3.00 a month, Sprout Up is able to make a difference in not only the children’s lives but in the lives of hundreds of volunteer college students who are trained to work with children in some of the country’s neediest schools. Like many nonprofits begun by college students, Sprout Up is based upon the principle that systemic change—that is, change to the very structure of the systems that govern the way we do things, such as those of education, government, and business—must begin at the bottom. By joining a discourse community around environmental protection, these students took action to resolve a deficiency in early childhood education and foster the spread of those changes nationally.

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8 What Becoming an Academic Means Writing in the academy may change your identity and distance you from your home culture. Here’s the question: Can you can “get an education,” adopt the habits of mind of a scholar, write and speak in an academic discourse, and not change who you are? Is a college education something you can put on and take off like a jacket? Or does a college education change you in a more fundamental way?

ACCESS POINT Have you studied abroad for an extended period or known or heard of someone who has? Why do you think studying abroad is of value? What does a person learn? Does that experience change a person? In what ways? If not, why not?

Academics and family values Many years ago, I was teaching an introductory writing class, the first in our college’s sequence, and on the first day, I noticed someone sitting at the very back of the room, near the door. She was perhaps in her thirties, which was not unusual since my college has many returning adults. Still, I could tell from her body language that she was uncomfortable. She had edged the desk closer to the wall, away from other students, and as I went through the syllabus and my usual introduction, she seemed to shrink in her seat, hunching her shoulders as if to protect herself. Certain she was going to bolt out the door the first chance she got, I made my way toward her and spoke quietly to

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her in a friendly tone. I don’t remember what I said, but she seemed to relax at the connection. After class, I made a point of talking with her. It turned out that she had just completed her GED after quitting high school almost two decades before. This was her first college-level class. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to study yet, only that she wanted to study something. As I got to know her, I learned that she had been a highly successful commercial real estate agent, having earned a six-figure income the previous year, an income she was giving up by returning to school. Clearly, she had known success. I also learned that she was the first person in her family to choose to attend college which, she told me, was a kind of betrayal of her family’s values, especially those of her father. Betrayal seemed such a stark word that I asked her about it. Working hard and making it on one’s own, without the benefit of a college education, was a core value of her family’s beliefs, a matter of pride, and she had been highly successful at living up to that standard. But she wanted more. She wanted to know more about the world, its history and how it works. She wanted to see what her mind could do, and college, she thought, was the best way to do that. Her family didn’t understand. As the semester progressed, she felt more comfortable in my class and her other classes, and she eventually joined the college’s honors program. She thrived during her time completing her two-year degree and then transferred to a university, completed her bachelor’s degree, and then went on for a master’s and eventually a doctorate. I can only imagine how difficult it must have been for her whenever she went home and was around her family. Perhaps she was able to hide her interests and passions, the new person she must have felt she was becoming, or perhaps her family was more welcoming of her choice. While her story is unusual, it is also indicative of the kind of challenges many people face.

Academic discourse and identity The writer Richard Rodriguez, a child of immigrant parents, attended Stanford on a scholarship. In his memoir, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, he writes about the value of a mainstream education and yet always with a note of melancholy at the loss of cultural identity. The further he went in his education, the greater the distance became between himself and his parents.

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ACCESS POINT How comfortable are you walking onto a college campus? Some small college campuses and some urban campuses may not offer much challenge at all, but some large or exclusive colleges may seem off-putting to some. Why do you think that is? What kinds of values do such colleges suggest?

The feminist writer and educator, bell hooks, the daughter of a custodian and a homemaker, was educated in the segregated schools of the American South before graduating from Stanford, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. In Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, she writes about the challenges of being black and a woman in a white, patriarchal educational system. And make no mistake: mainstream higher education has its origins in the world of wealthy, privileged white men. Academic discourse we looked at earlier has been critiqued as the language of oppression. This means that built into its very structure may be a value system that privileges white, upper-class men. Audre Lord, a black, feminist, lesbian poet and educator, delivered a famous talk, later published as an essay titled “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” In it, she criticizes people who think that the structure of the academy, which she identifies as white, patriarchal, and homophobic, has in it the means to undermine its own oppressive structure. Instead, she calls upon those who have been traditionally marginalized to define for themselves their own differences, to decide for themselves how they will speak. These three writers have all addressed the challenge that education presents to identity. To an equal or lesser extent, perhaps everyone who enters the academy and stays faces a similar challenge. Certainly, some international students, after studying abroad for years, find it difficult if not impossible ever to be fully accepted in their home culture again, especially if their home culture has very strong and traditional gender and class roles. The same can be said of people from less affluent cultures, like the woman whose story I told.

Academics and personal identity The question we began with is whether you can adopt the values of the academic culture and not change who you are. Can you speak, think, 41

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and write as an academic during the day and abandon those values at night? Or do the habits become more engrained and change the very way you think and see the world? My sense is that once you know something, once you sense its power, you can’t not know it. And there’s real power in the ability to analyze a problem, to question evidence, to hypothesize and test claims, to question assumptions, and to challenge the definition of words. And I don’t believe that once you know how to do this that you can ever not know how to do this. I am not saying that these habits of critical thinking are unique to the academy. But I am saying that the academy’s insistence on them may be new to many students and foreign to some cultures. In fact, some people may find this code of thinking threatening. If you are from a culture that does not necessarily value academics, or the habits of mind that mark academics, becoming a student in the academy may alter the very person you are. Attending college means adopting the habits of mind and practices of a scholar, which may challenge the values of your family or home culture as well as alter your personal identity. While the language of the academy has been critiqued as patriarchal and oppressive, it remains unclear whether a person may adopt it and still challenge that oppression or whether adopting the language implies complicity.

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ACTION POINTS In a small group, talk a bit about your family backgrounds, your home cultures, and how amenable they are to academic culture. If you were always expected to go to college, how were those expectations made known? How do your personal experiences relate to the ideas presented in this chapter? With a partner or two, do a quick search for definitions and explanations of “culture shock” and “reverse culture shock,” sometimes called “re-entry adjustment.” While both phenomena deal with the effects of immersion in a new cultural setting, they may be helpful in understanding the experiences briefly discussed in this chapter. How might these concepts be applied to the situation you find yourself in now? Using your college’s library or your library’s databases, do a little background reading, especially regarding their educational experiences and views, on one or more of the people mentioned here—Richard Rodriguez, bell hooks, Audre Lord. Add to that list Gloria Anzaldua and Adrienne Rich. What do they have in common? What differences? Most importantly, what do their experiences say to you? With a partner or two, talk to one or more of your peers or instructors about their journeys into the academy. Do they feel they gave up anything in terms of home culture? Did they become different people?

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Aylen’s Native American heritage helped develop her identity as a scholar.

Heritage, Identity, and Scholarship Aylen is a first-generation student of Native American heritage. She attended a large, urban high school and then enrolled at a community college, very unsure of herself and her future. While she had done well in school and had good friends, none of her immediate family had ever attended college. Her mother was supportive and encouraged her to go, but Aylen was worried about paying for tuition and, especially, wasting time and money if she didn’t know what she was doing. Aylen took a wide variety of classes her first two semesters, earning average grades. While officially she was a psychology major, she didn’t really see herself as a psychologist or counselor. Then she took a women’s studies class in which she was introduced to the work of a major scholar on Native American women’s issues. So much of what she read resonated with her that she felt she had found a home. Her professor put her in touch with the Native American scholar, a professor at a large university in the Midwest. To her surprise, the scholar responded warmly to her inquiry. Now Aylen is planning on majoring in Women’s Studies and focusing on Native women in white society. She sees herself now as a Native woman and as an academic. She plans to finish her bachelor’s degree and then apply for admission to graduate school where she hopes to study with the scholar at the Midwestern university whose work has so inspired her. 44

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9 What Knowledge Transfer Is Writers approach a new situation by transferring what they know from a prior or parallel situation; knowing what they are transferring and why can be crucial to success. In the landmark book How People Learn, originally published in 1999, the authors describe in detail all the aspects necessary to increase the likelihood that students will successfully transfer learning from previous situations to new ones. The key is developing a conscious awareness of what previous knowledge and experience is being transferred and why.

ACCESS POINT Think about the writing you’ve already done in college. Maybe you had to write an admissions essay? A placement essay? A research paper? A lab report? How did you know how to do that? What experiences did you draw upon and how? What did you have to do differently?

To illustrate the idea of successful learning transfer, imagine a student who learned in a debate club to anticipate counter-arguments and to develop responses. As part of her training, she developed a method that included a three-column table, with her points in the first column, the counter-arguments in the second column, and her responses in the third. When she is confronted by an assignment in her political science class that requires her to analyze the political debate over federal support of charter schools, she sees an opportunity to create a three-column table. She puts the points of the advocates of federal support of charter schools in the first column, the counter-arguments of the opponents in the second, and her responses in the third column. She successfully completes

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the political science assignment partly because she has successfully transferred what she had learned in a prior situation. On the other hand, imagine a first-year student in an introductory psychology class faced with a similarly new writing task. The assignment asks her to develop a sense of what psychologists know and don’t know about a particular subject and where the areas of conflict are and why. To do this, she must gather several peer-reviewed articles, read them, and report on what she’s learned. If she is like most students, she does what she has always done. Maybe she looks at the assignment, gets anxious, and then puts it off until the night before it’s due. Then she grits her teeth and sets to work. Since she’s always written in the five-paragraph form and done well, she adopts it automatically. She finds three articles online, reads them as well as she can, and takes a few notes. She writes out an introduction that talks about the issue in general, writes three body paragraphs, one each summarizing and commenting on each article she’s read, and then writes a conclusion paragraph that sums up what she said about the three articles. She does all this in one sitting. Satisfied she has done her best, she turns in her paper the next day hoping for a good grade. But when she gets her paper back, she is surprised she has received a much lower grade than she had expected. She is confused and upset and wants to know what went wrong. One way to explain why her writing fell short would be to analyze her writing in light of the requirements for this particular assignment. But to help the writer beyond this situation, a better approach would be to look at the way she approached this new writing task. In other words, what did she do in this new situation that she adopted from what she had done in prior situations that perhaps did not work? Another way to ask this is what knowledge did she transfer, mostly unconsciously, and how?

Vertical and horizontal knowledge transfer Starting in the late 1990s, two researchers worked together to conduct and publish research on knowledge transfer, which ultimately transformed the way we understand how people learn to do things. David N. Perkins at Harvard and Gavriel Salomon at the University of Haifa in Israel wrote several articles that laid out the theories of knowledge transfer in ways that have been very fruitful for researchers ever since. Their theories are complex, but a couple of the basic concepts can be very helpful. In brief, there are two directions that knowledge transfers from one situation to another: vertically and horizontally. 46

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ACCESS POINT Much has been made about the ease with which people of the digital age pick up and learn new games, platforms, and apps. If you play video games, how do you learn a new one? How much skill and knowledge do you transfer from other, similar games? If you’re on social media, how do you learn to use a new platform? What is transferred, how, and from where? Can you think of specific examples?

Vertical knowledge transfer refers to transferring prior knowledge to vertical a current situation, such as from an introductory chemistry class to a knowledge transfer more advanced organic chemistry class, or from an AP English class to transferring prior a college literature class. Sometimes this vertical transfer is successful, knowledge to a but sometimes it is not, as seen in the examples above. We also saw this current situation in an earlier chapter, when the student named Janet mistakenly transferred what was successful in high school to the college writing situation. In high school, she found that gathering facts to prove her point was rewarded; however, in college, critically evaluating evidence to develop and qualify claims and to explore areas of uncertainty is rewarded. Similarly, our psychology student above transferred her practices from high school to the new situation. Because she had always written in a five-paragraph form, she automatically adopted it. This is probably why she chose to find only three articles and why each body paragraph was dedicated to a single article. In this case, our student transferred her knowledge about genre, the 5-paragraph essay, to the new situation, which required more than that genre could accommodate. In college writing, the approach and structure of a paper is shaped by its intended purpose, rather than a preconceived format. Horizontal knowledge transfer occurs when a person transfers from one situation she is currently in to another situation she is currently in. Sometimes, horizontal transfer can be successful. For example, perhaps a student has a job at the college bookstore and, in that role, she has to cash out her register each night to make sure that the items she rang up equal the cash and credit card receipts she collected. At the same time, she is taking an introductory accounting class. When she is introduced to the concept of debits and credits, she draws upon her knowledge at work to help her make sense of the accounting concept.

horizontal horizontal knowledge transfer transferring knowledge from one current situation to another current situation

However, horizontal transfer can sometimes be unsuccessful. Imagine a student working in his father’s real estate business, where an email to a fellow employee calls for a relatively casual voice. He might appropriately 47

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write, “Hey, how’s it going?” in a work email. However, when he transfers this writing voice to an email to his professor asking for an extension on his research paper, he has probably mistaken the level of formality required by his professor, who sees the casual writing style as a lack of seriousness. He may be surprised that the professor turns down his request. This is an example of unsuccessful horizontal transfer.

Transfer of disposition or emotion metacognition awareness and understanding of your own way of thinking

While much research has been done on how people transfer what they know from one situation to another, recent research by Dana Lynn Driscoll and Roger Powell focuses on the transfer of “emotional disposition,” which refers to how people manage their emotions across different contexts. What Driscoll and Powell found was that students had a wide range of emotions about writing. How they managed those emotions—rationally, emotionally, or using metacognition—influenced how knowledge transfer worked or didn’t work. In other words, emotions shaped by prior experiences can help or hinder learning to write in a new environment, depending on how those emotions are managed. What Driscoll and Powell suggest is that a person’s past experience with teachers and with writing assignments has created a disposition toward writing, from relatively positive to relatively negative. How they manage those emotions when they are confronted with a new situation can deeply influence how well or poorly they transfer what they’ve learned elsewhere to this new situation. Knowing this and developing a conscious awareness of emotions can be a great help in developing strategies to respond well to new situations.

Transfer of knowledge about writing For college writers, this research shows that knowing what you are transferring into a new writing situation and why you are doing so is crucial. In other words, you must have a clear sense of what you are bringing to a new situation and whether it is appropriate, and not fall back on prior knowledge without thinking about it. In a sense, what you’re developing is a more abstract understanding of the writing situation. Perkins and Salomon describe this process as having three stages. 1. Writers detect the context where transfer can occur. 2. Writers elect to make the connections needed. 3. Writers connect what was learned in prior context to the new context. 48

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Two essential questions drive this kind of thinking once the opportunity for transfer is detected: What have I done in the past that is similar? How much of that can I use here and how? To do this well, you will likely want to work with others to develop a fuller view of the expectations. You might talk with classmates about their understanding of the assignment and schedule time to talk with your professor. You might visit your writing center as you plan your writing project. Finally, you might share your thinking with friends and family. Throughout, you will be willing to listen and learn in order to assess what you already know and be prepared to revise it. And you will monitor your emotions, being aware when fear or anxiety impede your progress. Writers transfer knowledge about writing to new situations from prior or current parallel situations. Such knowledge transfer can be successful or unsuccessful. Taking the time to identify what kind of knowledge is appropriate and useful to transfer and being aware of emotional blocks can be crucial to success.

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ACTION POINTS With a couple of peers, talk about a writing assignment you’ve been given recently, whether in your English class or another class. How did you feel about it? How did those feelings impact what you did? Where in your past writing experiences have you had similar feelings and why? Most importantly, do you think you need to make any changes to how you approach a writing task? What might you do? With a partner or two, do some quick research on near transfer of learning and far transfer of learning. How do these terms help you understand the connection or disconnection between high school and college as you’re experiencing it and between college and the workplace as you either understand it or imagine it? Locate and download the Driscoll and Powell article (titled “States, Traits, and Dispositions: The Impact on Writing Development and Writing Transfer Across College Courses and Beyond” published online in Composition Forum in 2016). With a partner, read and discuss the key points. What are the most important concepts for you as a college student? How might these concepts help you write better across your courses and academic careers? Write up a brief one-page summary of what you discussed. Talk to a professional about how his educational experiences did or did not prepare him for his eventual field. What did he learn as he studied that transferred to his position? What struggles did he have adapting to his role, and how did his prior knowledge transfer successfully or not so successfully?

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Derek used what he learned during his time serving in the US Army and transferred it into his new role as a college student.

Transfer Across Student Experiences Derek is a veteran of the United States Army, having served eight active-duty years. For much of that time, he was unit supply specialist, in charge of receiving and storing supplies for his unit, among many other duties. The job required attention to detail and great organizational and communication skills. While he achieved success in the Army, Derek had not been a particularly strong student in high school. He had been unmotivated by his classes and had little interest in the social activities offered. In the Army, however, he’d found the drive to bring out his strengths, and so after he completed his service, he was eager to try college, something no one in his family had ever done and which he had never thought was in his future. He applied for admission to the university near his hometown, and through a special program, was admitted provisionally, starting with summer classes. Derek found that the skills he had developed in the Army, especially scheduling his time, paying attention to detail, and being very precise in his communication, served him very well in his classes. He was able to transfer what he had learned in the Army to life at the university. After a full year, Derek now has a very high grade-point average and has been admitted to the university’s highly acclaimed engineering program.

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10 What Language to Write in In college, you have the right and the responsibility to use your own best language in whatever form that takes. In 1972, the National Council of Teachers of English, the NCTE, adopted a highly controversial resolution. It begins like this: We affirm the students’ right to their own patterns and varieties of language—the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they find their own identity and style. This became known as the Students’ Right to Their Own Language, the SRTOL, and it was huge. Why? Because saying that different kinds of English are valid also means that there is no single correct version of English. This is what follows: The claim that any one dialect is unacceptable amounts to an attempt of one social group to exert its dominance over another. This means that a teacher who tries to force someone to give up their language, say African American Vernacular English, or AAVE, in favor of a so-called Standard American English is committing an unethical act. The NCTE, which represents English teachers from pre-school to graduate school, condemns such acts.

ACCESS POINT Have you witnessed someone being singled out for the way she or he spoke or wrote? What happened? What was being focused on and why? What did you do? While some incidents may be relatively harmless, others are more harmful. Where do you think the harm comes from?

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Writing in your own language So, does the Students’ Right to Their Own Language mean that as students enter college, they get to write in their own language, even if it’s different from Standard American English? Yes, it means exactly that. It means if you’re Chinese and learned English in China, you have the right to speak and write what some sociolinguists call China English. It means that if you have grown up in an environment where both Spanish and English are spoken, you have the right to speak and write with the inflections—the patterns and style—of your home language. This means it’s the responsibility of professors, who might speak a different kind of English, to meet you halfway, to make a good-faith effort to understand you in the language you choose to use. This also means you have a responsibility to make a good-faith effort to be understood. As you can see, there’s a tension here. On one side is your own language, which expresses your identity as a member of a group. On the other is the need to be understood by others, who are often more powerful than you and who may speak a different language. How do you manage that tension?

Use your own best language Write in your own language but write in your own best language. By this, I mean the language that is yours but which says exactly what you want it to say in exactly the way you want to say it. Here’s a simple test you can use.

ACCESS POINT What have you been taught about “proper” English? When and how? How did that teaching affect you personally and emotionally? What effect do you think that teaching may have had on others?

After you’ve written something, after you’ve done your very best to make sense of what you want to say in the words you want to say it in, read what you’ve written aloud. You can read it aloud to a parent or a friend or even to a mirror. But you have to read it aloud, in a voice you can hear clearly, and you have to listen to your reading. Do you feel comfortable with what you are saying? Are you comfortable with what is coming out of your mouth? Are the words saying what you want them to say? Does the writing sound like you and not like you’re trying to sound like someone else? Can you read your writing without hesitation and without stumbling? 54

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If you aren’t comfortable with what you’ve written, revise it until you are. Revise until you can read your writing fluently and until you can feel confident that these words are really your words and they are saying what you really want to say. Then, if anyone wants to question you, you know where you stand.

Seek feedback on your language choices However, you might fear that what makes sense to you may not necessarily make sense to someone else, especially a professor. How do you account for that? Feedback from another can really help. It constitutes a second part of the test. After you’re confident you’re making sense to yourself and in your own best language, that you’re being true to your own identity and your own meaning, you can check your meaning with a classmate or a tutor in the writing center. Do they understand what you’re saying? If not, you can decide whether that’s because of a cultural or linguistic difference or from some problem with the language you’ve chosen. You can then choose to revise the sentences and paragraphs or leave them. In either case, you have the power to decide.

Mix languages and dialects Since the right to decide which language to use is yours and cannot be code meshing imposed by another, you have the right to mix languages and dialects. in writing, mixing The term used for this by the scholar Vershawn Ashanti Young is code languages, dialects, and vernaculars meshing. Code meshing means blending together different kinds languages and dialects, such as your home language with Standard Written English, in a way that makes most sense to you, the writer. It stands in contrast to code switching, as the term has been used in writing studies. Code switching proponents advocate that students learn to move back and forth from their home language to Standard Written English. At best, code switching can be a way of maintaining identity within the home culture while accommodating the forces that demand Standard Written English. Doing so successfully allows a kind of power, yet limited.

code switching in writing, moving between Standard Written English and one’s home language, dialect, or vernacular

The problem with code switching, as Young and others argue, is that it leaves in place the view that Standard Written English is, and therefore should be, the language of power. However, Standard Written English has been part of a long history of oppression of non-white, non-upper-class people. Code meshing is a way to resist that history and, it is hoped, change the way the world works. 55

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As a college writer, you have the right to speak and write in your own language. Professors have the responsibility to respect your home dialect and language. The right to your own language comes with the responsibility to write in your own best language, that which says exactly what you want to say in exactly the words you want to use. To accomplish that, it’s a good idea to read your writing aloud and get feedback from a classmate, friend, or tutor. Ultimately, you have the right to blend all the different languages and dialects you feel are necessary to be a powerful and effective writer.

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ACTION POINTS Conduct a poll of your classmates. How many native languages are spoken? How many second and third languages? If they are comfortable doing so, students whose first language is not English may share their understanding of language differences and the pressure they may feel to conform to a single Standard Written English. Ask your professor about his or her beliefs about language use and correctness. How did he or she reach those views and why? Find online the NCTE’s “Students’ Right to Their Own Language.” Read a bit about its history and reception. Share your understanding with a few classmates: Why do you think this issue remains so controversial? With two or three others, use your college library or search on the Internet to locate an article, book, or video by Vershawn Ashanti Young. Read or watch enough to get a sense of the argument. What do you think about the idea of code meshing? Does it apply to social class differences as well as race and ethnicity differences? Talk to your classmates in other courses. What are their positions on Standard American English (SAE)? What is the basis of these positions?

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11 What Google Translate Is in the Academy Google Translate can help non-native English speakers compose more fluent and complex texts in English, creating a more equitable translingual space, while offering a tool to improve understanding of difficult readings. In 2011, a Korean student of mine, Sun, produced an essay on how the education system in his native Korea was changing. I had read his writing all semester and was surprised at how much more complex and fluent many of the sentences were in this essay than in his previous work. Sun had come through our English Language program and while his English language skills were at a high level, he was clearly not a native speaker, and yet many of the sentences read as if he were.

ACCESS POINT If English is not your first language, you probably use different kinds of technology to aid you in your studies. What technology do you use? How and when do you use them? Are there times when you feel you shouldn’t use technology? Why?

Curious, I asked him how he had produced the essay. He explained that he had written his essay in Korean and then used Google Translate to help produce the English text. He demonstrated for me. First, he wrote out a sentence in Korean that was comparable to a sentence in his essay, and then read the sentence into the Google Translate app on his iPhone. He then showed me the English sentence the app produced. The sentence wasn’t perfect, but it was close.

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I then wrote a similarly complex sentence in English and asked Sun if he understood it. “A little,” he said. I then read the sentence into the Google Translate app on his phone and showed him the Korean translation. “Ah. Now I understand,” he said. I had no doubt that the essay Sun had written was his original work since structurally it read like an essay written by a native Korean speaker educated in the Korean system. So I had no problem accepting his use of technology. The purpose of the essay assignment was not to learn to write complex English sentences but rather to learn to write a persuasive argument, according to American academic standards, presented in an English-language text. I was impressed by Sun’s use of the technology to help him accomplish the task.

Google Translate can help create a translingual space Most professors who teach writing are moving away from a strict demand for Standard Written English (see the chapter on what language to write in). Many are embracing the ideas of multiple Englishes, world English, code meshing, or what Bruce Horner, a scholar of English-language use across cultures, calls a “translingual space” where writers shuttle back and forth among multiple languages. For them, Google Translate may not be a problem at all but a tool that can help writers learn to navigate and help create a translingual space. However, many professors still maintain that students should learn to write in English first, which means composing directly in the English language without writing in their native language and then translating, whether with or without the aid of computer technology.

ACCESS POINT In your view, is there a difference between using an online program to translate a single word and using a program to translate an entire sentence? What about a paragraph or an entire essay? What’s your reasoning?

While their goal may be to help students learn to use English better, the demand to write in English first may be counterproductive. At least one study, by Hiroe Kobayashi and Carol Rinnert, found that when students compose in their native languages and then translate their writing into English, they receive better grades. In a more recent study, Jonathan Benda found that many students reported a greater sense of ease developing ideas and considering counterarguments in their native language than they did when trying to compose in English. It’s 60

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likely that they felt hindered by the constant search for the right word, expression, and sentence structure in English.

Assess the purpose and context for Google Translate But to use Google Translate effectively, students have to learn to optimize what the program can offer. Benda found that students writing in Chinese learned that they had to write relatively straightforward sentences for Google Translate to work well. They then could revise the English sentences for meaning and clarity. However, when they wrote in idiomatic or colloquial Chinese, Google Translate produced very odd or nonsensical English sentences, which the writer had to rewrite completely, negating the value the translation program. In some situations, however, using Google Translate might subvert the purpose. In a class focused on the acquisition of English language skills and competencies, a reliance upon Google Translate may not be useful as it may limit the very efforts needed to learn the language. But even here, innovative instructors may use Google Translate to enhance their instruction. When adopting any tool or strategy, as a college writer you first want to ask what your purpose is. Is it to learn to compose an argument in the form of an English-language text? If so, then using Google Translate may be a good strategy. Is your purpose to learn to write in English as a means of enhancing your language skills? If so, then Google Translate may not be a good option if used merely to translate your writing, although it may be useful if it is used to enhance your knowledge of language features.

Google Translate may help readers engage with the subject As you move through your college career, you will encounter more and more complex texts. Google Translate can aid in your understanding of these texts while not eliminating the need to read and understand writing in English. For example, in an economics class, you may be assigned to read some of the work of Adam Smith, the eighteenth-century political philosopher. His writing style is typical of the time, with complex sentences built layer upon layer, with long series of metaphors, and with verbs far separated from their subjects. This can make reading difficult. In this kind of situation, you might want to use Google Translate, or another translation program, to translate sentences or paragraphs into 61

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your native language. You can then check the translation against the original to enhance your understanding. The same is true for many peerreviewed articles and other texts written by professionals and experts in their fields. Their writing can often be dense, with long sentences and specialized vocabulary. Google Translate can offer a window into their writing and provide a useful step toward greater understanding, which in turn may lead to greater engagement with the ideas and the subject of study in general. If English is not your first language, Google Translate can enhance your ability to compose fluent and complex compositions in English and can augment your understanding of complex readings. When considering any technology, you must assess your purpose and the context that you are reading and writing in, and then adopt the best strategies and tools for the situation.

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ACTION POINTS Poll your classmates about their views on using Google Translate as a tool for composing in English. If those students for whom English is not their first language are willing, ask for volunteers to discuss their experiences and views. What conclusions can you reach regarding writing, writing in the academy, and the relation between language and rhetoric in this context? If English is not your first language, write a few sentences or short paragraphs in your native language to answer this admittedly difficult question: “What has been the primary cause of change in your home country’s education system in the past twenty years and why?” When you’ve finished, consider how you might have answered that question if you were required to write in English first. Would you have written an equally complex response in the same amount of time? Finally, use Google Translate to translate your sentence into English. What changes do you have to make to the English sentences to make them say what you want to say? Find Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations online. Find a paragraph that seems especially complex. Try to read it in the original. Then copy and paste it into Google Translate, either on your phone or computer, and translate it into your native language. How much does the translation help? Where is the translation not so helpful? Alternatively, find and translate the opening paragraph to the US Declaration of Independence. If English is your native language, look at Smith’s Wealth of Nations and use Google Translate to translate a dense paragraph into a second language you are reasonably familiar with. Reading that translation, how well could you understand the nuances of Smith’s argument? Talk with a professor in a non-English course you are taking about her or his views on the use of translation programs by students whose first language is not English. What is her or his reasoning? Has she or he always held this view? If not, how and why has it changed?

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12 What Academic Freedom Is Academic freedom ensures that academics are free to pursue all knowledge within the principles of academic inquiry without interference or censor. Imagine you’re playing basketball. You’ve got the ball and there a number of things you are free to do. You can dribble and run down the court (provided you’ve not already dribbled and stopped). You can pass the ball to another player. You can shoot the ball into the hoop. You can even hold onto the ball and do nothing for a certain amount of time. All of these are specifically allowed in the rules of basketball. But what if you were to pick up the ball and run with it, without dribbling? You’d be called for traveling. That’s against the rules. You’re not free to do that.

ACCESS POINT Freedom is probably the most contested issue of any. What does freedom mean to you, as a citizen and as a student? What are you or should you be free to do? What are you or should you be free from?

The rules in basketball represent both positive and negative freedom. Positive freedom tells you what you are free to do, such as pass or dribble. Negative freedom tells you what you are free from, such as the player you’re guarding pushing you out of the way and running down the court. In basketball, as is in most other endeavors, the rules both limit behavior and allow the endeavor to function in the first place. That is, basketball without rules would not be basketball at all.

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Active Voices academic freedom the rules that govern what members of the academy can and cannot do as academics

It’s the same in academics. There are rules that govern what you can do as an academic and there are rules that govern what you can’t do. These rules, collectively, define academic freedom. Academic freedom applies to all members of the academy who are pursuing knowledge through research and who are propagating and developing knowledge through teaching and studying. Academic freedom has been, and continues to be, strongly contested and protected.

Challenges to academic freedom Historically, academic inquiry has been subjected to outside influence about as long as academies have been around. Socrates is probably the most famous early pursuer of knowledge censored by the state. His questions were inconvenient to those in power and he was condemned to death in 399 BCE for “corrupting the youth” of Athens. Centuries later, Galileo Galilei was put under house arrest by the Roman Catholic Inquisition from 1633 until his death in 1642 for promoting the Copernican theory of the heliocentric solar system (Figure 12.1). In the twentieth century, totalitarian states, such as the Soviet Union in the late 1930s, sought to bring academic inquiry under the control of purported governFigure 12.1 The Trial of Galileo in Rome, 1633 mental and social needs, branding certain intellectuals as immoral or bourgeois, going so far as to send thousands to prison camps. Michael Polanyi, a famous twentieth-century Hungarian and later British chemist, economist, and philosopher, who fled Hitler’s Germany, was instrumental in promoting academic freedom, arguing that science flourishes only when scientists are free to pursue knowledge, wherever it may lead, in open debate. In the United States, what is now the American Association of University Professors, the AAUP, first articulated a statement on academic freedom in 1915, which was revised in 1940, and stands to this day with interpretations added in 1969. These principles, which are accessible online, are the foundation of how academic freedom is understood today. However, academic freedom is far from secure and continues to be tested and contested. In 2016, after a failed coup attempt in Turkey, thousands of professors and college deans were forced to resign under spurious claims of collaboration. In the United States, various bills are sent through state legislatures each year demanding that academics declare their religious 66

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or political affiliation or that they teach creationism or intelligent design. And routinely, issues of free speech bump up against academic freedom, which highlights the contested border between the two. For example, when Charles Murray, the controversial author of The Bell Curve, a book which many find blatantly racist, was shouted down and denied the right to speak at Middlebury College in Vermont in early 2017, many claimed that academic freedom, in addition to freedom of speech, was under threat. Similarly, when Monica Pompeo, an undergraduate at the University of New Mexico, brought a lawsuit against the college claiming her rights to free speech were violated by a film professor, the university argued that insisting upon critical reasoning, a fundamental of academic inquiry, was not an unreasonable limitation on free speech, and the courts agreed.

Principles of academic freedom Academic freedom holds that the production of knowledge depends upon the freedom to pursue knowledge wherever that pursuit takes a person, free of censorship, interference, or repercussions. This means that while functioning as an academic, that is, following the rules of the academy, a professor or student may explore, in the classroom or in research, inconvenient, uncomfortable, or controversial subjects that are relevant to the pursuit of knowledge in their field. However, this does not mean that a professor or student is free to raise any issue. The issue has to be relevant to the subject. The AAUP suggests that a professor or student avoid controversial subjects that are not related to the subject—in other words, freedom as an academic is confined by the role as a scholar of that subject. An academic, therefore, is free to pursue questions in their field that may challenge religious or popular cultural beliefs, that may seem frivolous or useless to political entities, or that seem counter-intuitive to the majority of people. The only requirement is that those pursuits must be defensible as reasonable within their field of study and must be pursued following the principles of academic inquiry. This constraint does not extend beyond the classroom or research, however, as a person’s role as an academic shifts to that of a private citizen outside the academy. When in public, a professor or student may speak as a private citizen with academic credentials but not for the academy nor the institution she may be associated with. In short, she has the same rights to freedom of expression as anyone else, but she must make clear that she is not speaking on behalf of her institution or any larger aspect of the academy unless given the right to do so. 67

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Students and academic freedom As a student, academic freedom means that so long as you are pursuing knowledge germane to the subject at hand, such as economics, political science, or biology, and in the manner of an academic, you are free to raise difficult questions, pursue controversial lines of inquiry, and challenge traditional ways of knowing. In fact, you are encouraged to do so, so long as they work within the principles of academic scholarship. What happens if pursuit of knowledge in the academy challenges one of your core beliefs, such as a religious belief?

ACCESS POINT Have you ever felt in a class that you couldn’t say what you thought? What do you think was at the heart of the issue? How did you resolve the situation?

This can be challenging since for many people their religious beliefs form the basis of their identity. And yet, when they pass through the gates of the academy and take on the role of an academic, they are asked to suspend that identity, at least temporarily, and abide by the academy’s set of rules. The same probably holds in reverse. An academic, entering a church, synagogue, mosque, or temple may suspend her academic principles, for example, the need for scientifically valid evidence, to adopt his non-secular role. How academic freedom plays out in particular locations, such as at religious-affiliated colleges and universities, where limitations on academic freedom are generally clearly articulated, differs from place to place, though the principles are the same. Academic freedom is not absolute freedom but guarantees the pursuit of knowledge within the principles of academic inquiry free from outside interference or pressure. Academic freedom protects academics from censure, intimidation, or other repercussions while pursuing knowledge in their fields, however inconvenient, controversial, or unpopular. Academics, when acting as private citizens, enjoy the same freedoms as others, such as the freedom of speech on any issue. Students have the same academic freedoms and responsibilities as any other member of the academy. Academic freedom has been and continues to be contested throughout the world. Yet it is necessary to the free production of knowledge.

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ACTION POINTS Conduct a poll of classmates: How many have felt constrained by what they could do, say, or study in school? Based on your understanding of the concepts laid out in this chapter, were any of the situations an encroachment upon the academic freedom of students? If so, what remedy might have been appropriate? If not, what was the nature of the constraint and why was it acceptable in an academic setting, if you believe it was? Do an online search using the key terms “news articles academic freedom.” What’s going on right now? You might also look at the two examples mentioned here, that of Monica Pompeo and Charles Murray. With a partner or two, discuss the issues and how they do and how they don’t relate to academic freedom. Use your library database to search for recent academic articles on academic freedom, especially in the current political climate. Choose one, download it, and read it with a partner. How do the ideas relate to the ideas in this chapter? How do both influence your own sense of academic freedom? Engage in a classroom discussion that includes your professor. Has he ever felt constrained by what he could and couldn’t say? How did he manage the situation? What are his guidelines?

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Freedom of Speech on Campus In February of 2017, Milo Yiannopoulos was invited to speak at the University of California, Berkeley. Yiannopoulos, a British political commentator and social activist, had been a senior editor at Breitbart News, a staunchly conservative website often accused of UC Berkeley has been the site of many national conversations spreading fake news for politi- about freedom of speech on college campuses. cal purposes. Yiannopoulos is a critic of many of the social movements that UC Berkeley students are famously proponents of, such as feminism, LGBTQ+ rights, and social justice. Many students at Berkeley protested his appearance, and the protest turned violent. This was far from the only such protest that students across the country staged against conservative and highly controversial speakers. From California to Vermont, Alabama to Oregon, protests have either forced the cancellation of appearances or forced them to be rescheduled or relocated. The protesters argue that freedom of speech on a college campus does not extend to hate speech, that is, speech that is intended to “insult, offend, or intimidate a person because of some trait (as race, religion, sexual orientation, national origin, or disability).” 1 They say that hate speech violates the very principles a university stands for: the use of reason to understand and better the world. Those in support of the speakers argue that freedom of speech must extend not only to speech that may be offensive to some or many but even to speech that violates the principles of respect and tolerance that the university promotes. By closing down one side of an argument, the reasoning goes, the open inquiry that a university depends upon is threatened. Perhaps the real question is whether the principles of academic discourse, the basing of claims on the careful analysis of reliable and verifiable evidence, extends to all speech on campus or whether it can be limited to the activities of the academy, such as class discussions, research, and publications. If the campus is part of the academy, then inviting a speaker onto campus necessarily requires the speaker to adopt the standards of academic discourse. If the physical campus is only incidental to the work of the academy, then perhaps speakers need not be required to adopt the principles of academic discourse but may speak according to different, even potentially offensive, principles. 1 Merriam-Webster, s.v. “hate speech (n.),” accessed August 15, 2018. https://www.merriam-webster. com/dictionary/hate%20speech.

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13 What the Rhetorical Situation Is (Part 1) The rhetorical situation describes the factors that shape the effectiveness of a communication, including the audience, purpose, and writer’s stance. How many ways do you communicate in writing in a single day? If you’re like most college students, you post status updates on Facebook, tweet, use Instagram or Snapchat, or some other social media. You probably also send text messages to parents and friends, and write emails to employers or teachers. And you write in school, perhaps in an online platform such as Blackboard or Canvas where you post responses to discussion questions, comment on the work of others, and complete more formal assignments. Throughout the course of the day, you write in many different situations. And in each of these, you shape what you say and how you say it for a particular audience and a particular purpose. These factors and several others make up what we call the rhetorical situation.

ACCESS POINT Have you ever written a text message that was received in a way very different from how you had intended? Why do you think that was? Did you misread the situation in some way? What did you misread? What did you learn from that?

The rhetorical situation Aristotle defines rhetoric as “the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.” Here we can see two things.

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Active Voices rhetoric effective or persuasive speaking or writing that often employs rhetorical devices or appeals

First, rhetoric refers to persuasion. Aristotle believed that what is true and just should naturally sway an audience more easily than what is untrue and unjust. Yet he recognized that truth and justice did not always win the day. What sometimes swayed listeners was the effectiveness of the communication, the ability of the speaker to persuade the audience that what he was presenting was true and just, even if it wasn’t. In the tradition of Aristotle, rhetoric refers to the art of persuasion, how a message is shaped and delivered. Second, we can notice from his definition that the persuasiveness of a message differs depending on the situation. When he says “in any given case,” we can recognize that there’s a call to the speaker to assess each case, each situation, and respond appropriately. In other words, we must shape our message to fit the situation. In fact, that’s what the bulk of his major work on the subject, The Art of Rhetoric, is dedicated to, determining how best to shape a message to achieve different purposes for different audiences.

rhetorical situation the term used to describe the factors that shape the effectiveness of a communication, including the audience, purpose, and writer’s stance

Today, we commonly use the term rhetorical situation to describe the factors that influence a communication. Being able to assess these factors and respond appropriately can greatly increase your chances to be an effective writer in college. Here, we’ll look at the three foundational factors: audience, purpose, and writer’s stance.

Analyzing the audience When writing in a new situation, one of the first questions you want to ask is “Who am I writing to?” Most of the time in college writing, your audience is your professor, and so she is your primary audience. You may also be writing to and for classmates, and so they may be considered a secondary audience. At other times, an assignment may ask you to imagine writing to some other audience, such as an editor of a newspaper or the human resources director of a company. These can be considered your primary audience for the purpose of the assignment, though for final revising and editing, the grading criteria your professor develops may shift your focus to your professor as audience. However, it’s not enough to simply name the audience. You have to develop a fuller understanding of the audience by asking such questions as “What are the audience’s expectations? What is their level of expertise on this subject? What are their needs and biases?”

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ACCESS POINT In general, how would you describe your relations with your professors as compared to past teachers, say in high school? Does that affect the way you write for them? Should it?

You’ll find in college writing that many of the audience expectations are laid out in the assignment description itself. Read it carefully for direct statements about what the professor is expecting and for clues on how that might be best presented. Are there dos and don’ts regarding style and formatting? Is a particular citation system called for? Are there hints or direct statements about recommended subjects or subjects to stay away from? More than an individual, your professor is part of a discipline that values certain ways of knowing. An economist, for example, would often rely on public data, such as census figures or labor statistics, but a literature professor would often rely more on the analysis of a primary text, such as a poem or novel. And different disciplines have different expectations for form and style, which your professor in her role as a disciplinary expert naturally adopts. However, your professor is not necessarily an expert in other disciplines. Consequently, if you use a theory or body of knowledge from another field, you almost certainly will have to explain that theory or body of knowledge. So, in analyzing audience, it’s not enough to simply name the person you are writing to. You must draw a fuller picture of the person in the role they are adopting as your reader. What are their expectations, their needs, and their level of expertise? If you can answer these questions, you’ll be more likely to be successful in adapting your writing to the situation.

Analyzing the purpose Just as important as asking who you are writing to is asking why you are writing. What is your purpose? What are you trying to accomplish? Common purposes in college writing include to report, analyze, argue, reflect, assess, and critique. Each of these has specific definitions that can guide your writing, suggesting different ways to analyze, organize, and present material. You likely will be able to find the purpose in the writing assignment itself. Pay careful attention to words that indicate purpose and avoid assuming

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you understand what they mean. You might look up the definitions, refer to writing texts, and consult others to round out your understanding. And be aware that many assignments have several purposes that combine to form a larger, primary purpose. For example, in a humanities class you may be asked to attend an artistic performance, such as a play, and critique it. While your primary purpose is to critique, you also have several secondary purposes. Critiques usually require you to present pertinent information about the play, such as the author and date of composition, summarize briefly the play’s storyline, describe different aspects of the production, and then evaluate the quality and effectiveness of those aspects. Your primary purpose is to critique, but your secondary purposes are to present, summarize, describe, and evaluate. Your written critique would likely have four parts each fulfilling its purpose. Being able to analyze and articulate what your primary and secondary purposes are is key to knowing what and how to write successfully.

Analyzing writer’s stance Another fundamental question you want to ask is what your position is as the writer. What is your relationship to the audience? What is your level of expertise of the subject? What is your personal engagement with the subject? How does your history, culture, and unique experiences shape what you know about the subject and why you care? These kinds of questions help you identify and analyze your writer’s stance relative to the audience and subject. As an undergraduate in college, you’re probably fairly new to the various fields you’re studying. Your professor certainly is not. It would be inappropriate to adopt the stance of a teacher teaching him a subject, as discussed in the chapter on what writing with authority means. Even less would you stand in judgment of the subject, for example, suggesting that a play is good or bad, right or wrong. Instead, your purpose will be to demonstrate what you have learned and what you’ve come to understand about the subject. So, you adopt the stance of a novice moving toward expertise. Similarly, you have a position relative to the field of study. As a first- or second-year student, you are most likely on the periphery of the discipline and looking in. You won’t adopt the stance of an expert in the field capable of contradicting other experts’ conclusions. You may be expected to analyze the conclusions and question how they were reached, but you can’t simply agree or disagree with an expert as you are not an equal. 74

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Finally, your stance may be affected by the context that you are writing in, which we’ll discuss in the next chapter. As a student, of course, the context of college writing calls for a respectful and fairly formal attitude to whatever subject you are writing about. But this does not mean that you are not a person in the world, with your own agenda, biases, and experiences. For example, perhaps you have experience that directly impacts your understanding of an issue. Immigration law in the United States may mean something more to you if your family has come to the country as refugees or immigrants. You don’t have to pretend not to know that or that you are not passionate about it. The question is how to adopt a stance that shows that passion in a way that is effective in the context of college writing and for the audience and discipline. So, asking what your stance is and analyzing it relative to the audience and to the subject helps determine how to write effectively.

The rhetorical situation describes the factors that influence the way you approach a writing task. The three fundamental aspects of the rhetorical situation are these: 1. Audience: Who are you writing to and what are their characteristics? 2. Purpose: Why are you writing? What are the primary and secondary purposes? 3. Stance: What is your position relative to the audience, subject, and context?

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ACTION POINTS With a partner, analyze a writing assignment you’ve been given in this or another class. Identify and describe the audience. Now identify and describe the primary and secondary purposes. Are these clear in the assignment or do you have to do some work to figure that out? With a few classmates, look at a recent post you made to a social media site and compare it to a text message you are willing to share. How did you shape your post to appeal to your audience? How did you shape your text message based on your relationship with the recipient? How are the purposes similar or different? Locate a TED Talk you are interested in and, with a partner, watch a few minutes of it. Then pause the video and try to describe the stance of the speaker. What is the speaker’s relationship with the audience? Are there primary and secondary audiences? What is the speaker’s position to the subject? Finally, what are the speaker’s primary and secondary purposes? With a partner, take a quick stroll through the halls of a campus building. Look at the posters and announcements that are on display. Choose one to analyze. Who is the audience? What position, relative to the implied audience (you) and the subject, is the writer assuming? How much expertise of the writer on the subject is implied and how much expertise is assumed for you, the audience?

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14 What the Rhetorical Situation Is (Part 2) The rhetorical situation describes the factors that shape the effectiveness of a communication and include the genre, context, medium, and exigence. If you use social media, like Facebook or Twitter, you know that many posts deal with political and cultural issues. Maybe you’ve had the experience of posting something about a hot-button issue and then instantly regretting it because of the ways your friends or followers reacted. What did you do? Were you able to delete the post? Did you engage in further debate? Why did you feel compelled to post in the first place?

ACCESS POINT Do you have a favorite YouTuber you follow? What are that person’s videos usually like? Is there a pattern to them? Can you describe the features that make that YouTuber’s posts unique?

Social media interaction helps illustrate how writing is shaped by more than the writer. Writers are sometimes compelled to write and are influenced by outside forces, and observing writing and response in this realm exemplifies yet another aspect of the rhetorical situation. In the last chapter, we looked at audience, purpose, and writer’s stance. In this chapter, we’ll look at surrounding factors which play important roles in shaping your writing: genre, context, medium, and exigence.

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Analyzing genre After you have analyzed and understood your audience, purpose, and writer’s stance, you want to ask yourself what form, or what genre, would be most effective. The term genre refers to a common communicative response to a common situation. For example, a memo might be more appropriate than an email in some business situations because memos are usually more formal and lasting. In a biology or chemistry course, a lab report is very common because it suits the purposes of that situation. In some social sciences, a field report is a common genre for the kind of research social scientists do. So, you want to ask yourself whether there is a genre that is expected or effective. Then, identify what that genre’s features are. In college writing, choosing the correct genre may only be a matter of following the assignment. The professor may simply assign the genre. At other times, you may have to work to determine the best genre. You might analyze the writing assignment for clues or talk with your professor or your writing center tutors for help. Across disciplines, there are a number of genres to learn. For example, consider the lab report. A lab report is a genre with very specific features, including clear sections, such as experimental method, results, observations, and conclusions, each with its own purpose and content. Similarly, in a business class, you might be asked to write a proposal. A proposal is also a genre with specific features, including clear sections, such as a statement of problem, proposed methods or solutions, and expected results, each having a specific purpose and content. In other classes you might be asked to write in a genre that is less well defined, such as a research paper. While a research paper is less well-defined, it still comes with expectations. It is expected to have an introduction that establishes the broader context of an issue and narrows to a particular question or thesis. It’s expected to have a body section that presents information synthesized from multiple sources and addresses the question or develops the thesis. And it’s expected to have a conclusion, which may offer a summary and then reflect on the significance of the findings or a call to action. analysis in writing, breaking down a complex concept into smaller topics to enhance understanding and advance knowledge of the concept

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Likewise, in a humanities class, you might be asked to write an analytical essay. While an analytical essay is even less well-defined than a research paper, it still has common features. It is expected to have a summary or description of the object of analysis. It is expected to present patterns of textual features in the work, such as repetition or contrast. It’s expected to offer an interpretation of the importance of those patterns, often through

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the lens of a theoretical approach: using and citing researched, peerreviewed, and published scholarly works to support a writer’s findings. Finally, it’s expected that the interpretation will lead to some claim about the significance of the findings. So, identifying and analyzing the expected or effective genre can help you understand both how you are expected to present your work and what you can and should write.

Analyzing context Writers and audiences don’t exist in isolation, so you’ll also want to ask what the context of the writing is. What are the political, social, linguistic, and cultural factors that bear upon the communication? What’s going on around you that shapes the situation? In some college writing, the context is limited to the academic world in which you are writing. For example, writing a lab report probably will not be influenced by political or social issues. However, the context of the academy influences the writing as it shapes both the professor’s and the student’s roles. The expected formality, in language and form, is a contextual constraint. A contextual constraint is what we call the limits or interdependencies of the decisions writers make depending on their writing situations. Writers writing in a history course, in contrast to writers writing lab reports, absolutely would need to consider political or social issues. Likewise, history writers will often adopt a temporal pattern of organization, as this would be appropriate for the context of discussing historical events, whereas lab report writers might adopt a more linear pattern of organization that addresses the scientific method.

contextual constraint in writing, the limits or interdependencies of the decisions writers can make when considering the writing situation

Moreover, academic cultures differ across cultures. If you are a student from another country, you have probably learned to adapt to the expectations you have found here, such as less formal or more formal relations to your professors. This can be expressed in word choice as well as essay structure. In other college writing, however, the context of a writing task can play a vital role. For example, imagine you are taking an art history class and you have decided to study nineteenth-century portraiture. In the portrait you choose to focus on, a woman is dressed in formal attire, seated in a garden; the entire scene is idyllic and romantic. Recognizing the expected role of a woman of a particular socio-economic class in nineteenth-century Europe as part of the cultural context would be very valuable to your analysis of the painting. You’d probably have to refer to other texts to know it, but you would not want to read that painting 79

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naïvely, as if the attitudes and expectations then did not matter. Likewise, recognizing that the attitudes of our contemporary culture differ from that of the original viewers probably should play a role in your writing as well. Similarly, broad social and political factors of today may impact your writing. For example, since gay marriage has been legalized in many countries around the globe, analyzing the political suppression of gay rights in a still discriminatory culture today should take into account what is happening and has already happened elsewhere. So, asking yourself about the context of your writing, what’s going on around you politically, socially, culturally, and linguistically, can help you understand what you need to write and how.

Analyzing medium Writers choose genres to write in, but they also often have the choice of how to present their work. Medium refers to what carries your message. For example, if you are writing a research report and turn it in on paper, paper is the medium. However, if you turn in that research report electronically, then the software program, such as Microsoft Word or Google Docs, is the medium.

ACCESS POINT If you use social media, which platform do you like best? What does that platform allow you to do that others don’t? What features make it your favorite?

affordances the term used to describe what capacities a medium offers

So, what medium will convey your communication most effectively? What opportunities does that medium offer you? What limitation does that medium have? This is important because you can do things in one medium that you can’t in another. For example, an electronic research paper can include embedded videos, sound files, GIFs, and color charts and graphs. These are difficult or impossible to include on paper. The term we use to describe what capacities a medium offers is affordances. As you can probably see, a medium is not neutral. Given its affordances, a medium can shape a message drastically. Let’s say you’re giving a presentation to a class and you have a choice of electronic media to support the oral part of your presentation. Two obvious options are PowerPoint and Prezi, an online presentation program. Each allows you to do different things. Prezi, for example, allows you to zoom in on a word or text and then zoom in even further, perhaps to an image or a video (Figure 14.1). This gives the feeling of depth of thought or vertical or spatial thinking.

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Figure 14.1 An example of a Prezi presentation.

PowerPoint, on the other hand, can’t do this. Instead, it offers a more linear presentation of the material. PowerPoint is organized slide by slide and point by point (Figure 14.2 on the next page). You may still embed videos and images, but they will be presented on their own slides. This suggests more horizontal or linear thinking, which is an affordance of PowerPoint. So, considering medium, especially in light of the affordances each offers, can shape your meaning and your message and add to the effectiveness.

Analyzing exigence Writers write because they are compelled to write, so you’ll want to ask why you are writing now. What is the urgency or pressing need of the communication? What are the factors that are compelling you to write at this moment? The term we use to describe this is exigence.

exigence in writing, the urgency to write in response to compelling topical factors

Think about the situation described at the opening of this chapter, of your posting to Facebook or Twitter and instantly regretting it. What would have happened had you waited a day? How would the situation have changed? Perhaps you wouldn’t have felt so compelled to write, and you would have decided not to say anything. The moment passed, the exigence had changed. 81

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Figure 14.2 An example of a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation under development.

In college, especially early in your career, the exigence may seem artificial. You must turn in a paper by the due date the professor assigns. But in a broader sense, you can think about the moment you’re writing in in one of two ways. You can situate your writing relative to the latest developments of a field of study. For example, if you’re an education major, you might ask, “What are the latest views on ADHD and how do they apply to issues of classroom technology?” As someone training to be in the classroom, you need to answer these questions, which are situated in the current moment of the field’s development. Or you can situate your writing in a broader social, political, cultural, or technological moment. For example, in a sociology class, you may be interested in why many black churches have begun to stream their services. You do so in the context of those churches’ historical role of centralizing social action as they did during the Civil Rights movement. You feel compelled to write at this critical intersection of cultural and technological advancements given contemporary political issues. So, asking yourself why you are compelled to write and assessing the factors that are compelling you can help shape what you write and why.

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The rhetorical situation describes the factors that influence the way you approach a writing task. In addition to three fundamental aspects of the rhetorical situation—audience purpose, and stance—are these: i Genre: What is the expected or most effective form for this writing situation? i Context: What is going on politically, socially, culturally, and linguistically? i Medium: What is the best medium and what are the affordances of that medium? i Exigence: What is compelling me to write now and how can I situate my writing to this moment?

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ACTION POINTS With a few classmates, locate and review a writing assignment one of you has been given in this or another class and which allows a certain amount of freedom. How could you shape a response that taps into a personal exigence, such as the intersection of your need with the development of the field, or the intersection of a personal interest and a cultural development? Do a quick search for “academic genres.” What do you find? Note that you may find what is commonly called “modes,” such as description, analysis, persuasion, argument, etc. Based on your understanding of genre as described here, why do you think the idea of modes is inadequate to explain genre? Go to the homepage of one or two sites that offer news, such as MSN or Yahoo! Look at the affordances such a digital medium offers. Contrast this with an image of the front page of The New York Times from a century ago and from last year. Make a list of how many different things the website can do that a printed newspaper cannot. How does the medium of an online news page affect the kind and quality of the news presented? What kind of writing do you think professors do in their everyday lives? You might think about different types of emails, reports, or proposals that they write. What can you make of the need to be rhetorically flexible as a professional?

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Students have catalyzed national conversations about firearm ownership in the US by designing well-timed, coordinated walkouts.

Students Provoke National Action On March 14, 2018, students across the country joined in a concerted effort to provoke Congress to take action against gun violence in schools. For 17 minutes beginning at 10:00 a.m., across all time zones, students walked out of their classes and joined thousands of others to make their voices heard. Marking both the time of day and the length of time that the gunman killed and wounded students and teachers at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on February 14, 2018, students coordinated their efforts to maximize the effect. Why this course of action? Why was this the most effective message to send? We can answer these questions by looking at the walkout rhetorically. As a genre, walkouts share characteristic features. For example, they tend to be coordinated, large scaled, and non-violent. The students chose a walkout as their genre and adopted and adapted the characteristic features. The walkout also occurred in a context. It was carefully coordinated to speak back to political and social events. And the walkout had a clear purpose: to goad legislators to take action against gun violence. Perhaps most importantly, we can consider exigence. The students felt compelled to act at this moment in time, seizing the power of the widespread outcry against school violence in hopes of moving the political conversation. They knew that a delay of even a few days could lessen the effects. By assessing the situation rhetorically, students at high schools, middle schools, and colleges joined together to make their voices active and heard. 85

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15 What Counts as Text Since the digital revolution, a text now is often multimodal, meaning it combines alphabetic, numeric, graphical, visual, and/or audio media. ACCESS POINT This is the cover of The New Orleans Bee on April 7, 1917. Notice how much written text there is. Notice the use of space. How would you feel about reading this today?

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Texts today use multiple modes It has been said that humans have passed through three great revolutions: the agrarian, the scientific-industrial, and the digital. Like the first two revolutions, the digital has touched nearly every aspect of modern life. What the digital revolution has meant to communication is most obviously speed and ubiquity: We want everything, from news to music to data, everywhere, at all times, for free, and fast. And what we want is very often multimodal. multimodal in communication, the use of multiple modes to make meaning, alone or in combination

multimodal literacy the ability to read and to compose in multiple modes

In communication, multimodal means the use of multiple modes to make meaning, alone or in combination. Those modes include alphanumeric text (letters and numbers), visual text (images, videos), and aural text (sound recordings). We might also add design elements, like white space, color, and fonts to that mix. For writers in the digital age, traditional literacy, which can be defined as the ability to read and write alphabetic text at a certain proficiency, may have been supplanted by the need for multimodal literacy, which can be defined as the ability to read and to compose in multiple modes. We might say that a literate person in the twenty-first century has the capacity to read a multimodal text critically and to compose a multimodal text effectively. Many texts have always been multimodal. Medieval illuminated manuscripts contained beautiful hand-drawn images and elaborate lettering, often in gold-leaf. Newspapers used engravings and then photographs since the mid-nineteenth century. But what has changed today is the quantity and quality of modalities used in nearly all texts and the fact that we all now have the capacity to compose multimodal texts relatively easily.

Multimodal texts weave together media The word text comes from the Latin verb texere, which means to weave. So, the word text means woven, as found in the word textile. A multimodal text, then, is woven from multiple modes.

ACCESS POINT Find the front page of your local newspaper or a national entity like The New York Times from this year. What are the main differences in newspaper layout a century has made? What does that say about reader expectations?

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In the second chapter on rhetorical situations, we saw how different media have different affordances. For example, if you were to write a research report and turn it in to your professor on paper, you would be able to include alphanumeric text but also images, including charts and graphs, and possibly in color if you have access to a color printer. But that’s about all. But imagine if you were to submit that same report digitally. The electronic medium has many more affordances. You could embed a YouTube video or a podcast. You could include color images and be sure the colors remained vivid. You could add a GIF file. You could include hyperlinks that would put your paper into conversation with many other voices. You could record a voice-over narrative to explain charts, graphs, and images. These media are all parts of your text, and they have the potential to increase its rhetorical effectiveness.

Multimodal literacy means composing power Because nearly everyone composes digitally now, they have the capacity to think beyond alphanumeric texts. They may still be limited by the technology they are using, but the affordances are far greater than ever before. The ease with which composers now can create a graph or chart, import an image, or make a movie means that composers who do not know how to do these things or who are not willing to learn are at a disadvantage. So, multimodal literacy means rhetorical power. What counts as text is only limited by the technology you have available and the time and effort you wish to expend learning how to manipulate textual elements and technological affordances.

Making multimodal choices Given the great opportunities digital technology offers, making rhetorical choices can be overwhelming. However, most programs and techniques can be learned relatively quickly through how-to videos, wiki pages, and help menus. Exploring a bit, with an open mind, can take you a long way.

ACCESS POINT Go to the website of a national newspaper or magazine, such as The Los Angeles Times or The Atlantic. Notice how several stories with their images occupy various spaces and change intermittently. How many different media are included? How about written text? Note that the short texts are hyperlinked to full stories “inside” the digital version. How can this be seen as meeting reader expectations?

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Here are a few of the questions you’ll likely want to ask: i What is the platform that will carry the communication? i What are the affordances of that platform? i What are the genre expectations for the communication? How strict are those expectations? i What choices do I have to present evidence? i What will be the most effective presentation for my audience? By asking these questions and responding to them effectively, you’ll be on your way to being multimodally literate. The digital revolution has ushered in a new kind of literacy, digital literacy. With that is the expectation of readers for multimodal texts and the opportunity for writers to produce those multimodal texts. Composing multimodally is a power that writers today enjoy.

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ACTION POINTS In a group of three or four, conduct a poll among your classmates on a mundane issue such as “How many people believe eating a good breakfast is important versus how many actually eat a good breakfast?” You might add a brief interview or two. Now, think about how you would present that information if you were limited to linguistic text only—writing or speech. Contrast that with how you might present that same information if your platform was digital and you were allowed to use any media you wished. What might you come up with? Be as creative and imaginative as you can. With a partner, take a look at your college’s website. In a sense, that website is making an argument at the same time as it is providing a portal to information. How many different kinds of media are included? Do the images add to the rhetorical effect? For whom? Are videos included and, if so, are they effective? As a group, explore and then contrast a simple word-processing program such as Microsoft Word or Google Docs with a free infographic-making website such as Canva, Venngage, or Piktochart. How might you use alphabetic text, numeric text (numbers, graphs, charts), images, videos, and audio recordings in each? What are the possibilities? What are the limits? With a few peers, step outside your classroom and look around. How many different types of text can you see? What do these “say”? How about the architectural styles of the buildings? What messages do they send? Looking closely and thinking about the concept of text presented in this chapter, are you surprised at how many messages you are exposed to every day? Why or why not?

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Because so many American universities were founded or in their heyday while slavery was still legal, students across the country challenge related monuments on campuses, using them as texts to analyze their presence.

Historical Monuments as Texts American economics, politics, and culture have been woven into the fabric of universities and colleges throughout our history. But only recently have colleges have been forced to look at their own involvement in perhaps the most wrenching part of American history: slavery. Georgetown University, for example, owned and sold slaves. Harvard received large endowments from men who capitalized on the exploitation of slave labor. Many colleges and universities have obvious ties to slavery. Buildings are named after slave owners and memorials and statues commemorating Confederate soldiers can be found on campuses. Some argue that the statues and building names are part of history and should not be erased, while those who oppose them, sometimes violently, argue that they are not merely markers of the past but remain potent symbols with meaning today. That is, they argue that the statues are textual: they have symbolic meaning and are read and understood by each new generation. To understand this, it’s valuable to think of the university or college campus as having meaning as a whole. The idea of the academy extends to the grounds of campuses themselves, from the quads and fountains to the gates and walls. Something of the sacred and exclusionary remains in the very architecture and layout of a college. The placement of a Confederate monument in this setting cannot, then, be neutral. To remove such monuments, the protesters argue, is not to erase the past but to write a different kind of future. 92

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16 What Argument Means An argument consists of evidence and the assessment of evidence which gives rise to a reasonable claim. In a high school English or middle school language arts class, you might have been given an assignment like this: Which character in The Great Gatsby changed the most over time and why do you think so? You probably thought about it, then chose a character you thought had changed, and then scoured the book looking for three examples of that character’s behavior that you could line up to support your position. Once you found those three examples, you wrote up your paper.

ACCESS POINT When were you taught in school about argument? Did you have to write an “argument” essay? Did you have to present an argument in a speech or debate? What were the features of those arguments and how did you put them together?

You started by stating your belief that, for example, the main character, Nick Carraway, changed the most of all the characters in the book, and then previewed the three examples you were going to use. Next, you related your examples in order, one per paragraph, and then you restated your claim in the conclusion. The grade you earned depended on how well the examples proved your point and how tightly your writing fit the form. In this chapter, we’ll discuss what argument in college writing means along with its elements and features.

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College argument focuses on meaning In a college literature class, by contrast, you might be asked to consider a character’s development and not prove that the character changes more than others, a kind of either/or statement, but rather to analyze and assess the meaning of that change relative to some larger issue. Here’s a prompt you might find in a college literature class: How has Nick Carraway’s character changed upon return to the Midwest at the end of The Great Gatsby and what does this transformation suggest about the larger significance of the novel, especially in contrast to other characters and what the novel suggests about the shifting values of post-war America’s newly wealthy class? To respond to such a question, you’d not be trying to prove that Nick changed most but rather to gather information that sheds light about the change, analyze and assess it, and make some claim about the meaning of that evidence, relative to other characters’ values and the values in America in the aftermath of World War I. The quality of the argument rests on how well you’ve presented and interpreted the evidence to suggest meaning, not whether you’ve lined up three pieces of evidence to prove one thing over another.

Elements of argument dynamically related argument in college writing, evidence; the assessment, evaluation, and interpretation of that evidence; and a claim about the meaning or significance of that evidence

From the example above, we can see that argument has three fundamental pieces: 1. Evidence 2. Assessment, evaluation, and interpretation of that evidence 3. A claim about the meaning or significance of that evidence If any of those pieces are missing or incomplete, the argument will feel less persuasive. We’ll talk more in later chapters about other aspects of argument, including evidence and claims, counterargument and rebuttal, and thesis. For now, what’s important to understand is the different parts of argument and how they are related dynamically. This means that none of them necessarily comes first, such as a thesis which other things must revolve around, and it means that a change to any one element affects all the others. At the heart of argument is a claim. Any time you think about what something might mean or how something might work, you already have some tentative claim in mind. Perhaps your thinking is still in the form of

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a question, but that question suggests a tentative answer or answers and guides what evidence to look for.

ACCESS POINT Think about a time you had a heated discussion about an issue with a friend. Maybe you’re a sports fan and were arguing about a team’s chances of winning the championship or whether a trade for a player was a good idea. Maybe you were discussing which college to attend or which cell phone to buy. Maybe you were arguing about the quality of a movie or the casting choices. Talk about how often you looked for evidence to back up what you were saying and whether the evidence ever changed your mind. In short, how much of that personal discussion was structured like an academic argument?

In the sciences, that question might take the form of a hypothesis, a tentative answer that your research will test. But it’s only tentative. That means as you work, if you find evidence that doesn’t support your hypothesis, you will probably have to reassess both the hypothesis and the evidence you already have gathered in order to make a reasonable claim. That is, you’ll have to rethink how the evidence and claim are related. What this suggests is that the glue that holds the pieces together is the mental work you do regarding the evidence and claim. We might say, then, that argument in college writing is a function and presentation of the habits of mind of a scholar, as discussed in earlier chapters.

Argument as understanding Perhaps first and foremost, academic arguments are generally not a judgment. They are not about winning or losing or proving a point. They are not about right or wrong, true or false, or should or shouldn’t. Notice that these judgments are in the form of binaries. That is, they have two parts. Generally, scholars are wary of binaries because they move away from exploring, interrogating, and understanding, and because they tend to hide complexities. We already looked at what thinking in college means and considered the term problematize. Judgments tend to do the opposite. Rather than seeking out and exploring complexities, judgments pronounce simplicity and invite a simple either/or assessment of evidence. For example, either Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby changed most of all characters or another character did. By contrast, academic arguments are mainly about proposing, based on evidence, the meaning or significance of something. For example, in anthropology, you might argue that certain features in various oral 95

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histories suggest a particular trait in a past culture. In political science, you might argue that the evidence of the low voter turnout among Gen-Xers suggests that the use of social media by certain groups was ineffective. In neither case are you trying to prove right or wrong, or should or shouldn’t, but rather you are trying to locate and explain the meaning of some phenomenon. You seek understanding and to argue for the reasonableness of that understanding.

Argument as discussion While an academic argument is probably different and more rigorous than the kind of argument you’ve done in school thus far, it’s not that different from some discussions you’ve likely had in your personal life. In fact, any time you and your family or friends are trying to decide on something, you are engaged in argument. Think of a time you and your friends were trying to decide whether a movie was worth seeing or not. You weighed the evidence, the kind of movie it was, the actors, and the reviews you’d heard about, whether from friends or professional reviewers. You weighed that evidence, negotiated the relative importance of the different pieces of evidence, and then reached some kind of conclusion. In this case, the discussion contained two of the fundamental elements of academic argument, evidence and assessment of that evidence. The claim, though, moved to a binary, “The movie is or isn’t worth seeing.” In college writing, your claim would seek to explain some meaning derived from an assessment of the evidence, such as, “Critical reviews suggest the movie adds little new to the genre but remixes established motifs in a refreshing way.” Here, the meaning of evidence is used to explain how the movie fits with the development of the genre which gives rise to an assessment of its overall value. Similarly, maybe you and friends at school and perhaps with teachers have had to consider a difficult question like, “Was what a person did really bullying?” Here, you had to assess the evidence and the reliability of the evidence. In addition, you had to consider the definition of the term bullying so that you could effectively interpret the evidence. And even though you may have stated your conclusion in the term of a binary, such as “She bullied someone,” the claim probably was more nuanced, at least in your mind. It might have been formulated like this: “The evidence suggests that what she did constitutes bullying based on the definition available, though it’s difficult to assess her intent.” In a sense, you were matching the evidence to a definition and making a claim about the 96

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fitness of that evidence; that is, you were seeking to understand and express an understanding of the relevant evidence. Argument is like a carefully considered discussion. And it probably goes without saying that an angry or heated discussion, really more of a series of attacks, is not an argument as we’re discussing it here. In fact, unlike a shouting match, academic arguments tend not to be adversarial at all, with a winner and loser, but collaborative, even if that collaboration can be competitive. We’ll look at that in a later chapter on Rogerian argument. An argument in college has three fundamental parts: evidence, assessment of that evidence, and a claim about the meaning of that evidence. Inherent in this is your role. You actively arrange and assess the fit among those three parts so that the claim is about the meaning and fitness of the evidence.

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ACTION POINTS Work with several classmates to look at the different syllabi of the courses you are in. Look at the descriptions of the class subject. How much of those descriptions discuss a search for meaning and understanding? What words or phrases do that work? By contrast, how many present the material as knowledge simply to acquire? What can you conclude about the goals of the course relative to the ideas of this chapter? With a partner, look online to find in a major newspaper a commentary on a speech given by a political figure, such as the most recent presidential State of the Union address. How is the commentary an argument about the meaning of the speech? What evidence is used? How is the evidence interpreted? What is the final claim? Look through an academic journal using your college’s library database, in a field you are interested in. Read the abstracts from two articles. What issues are the authors seeking to explain or understand? What questions are they asking? What evidence is considered? What claims are the authors making as a conclusion? Share your findings with two or three of your classmates. In a group, discuss what you think makes a solid argument across disciplines using what you find searching through your library database. How do your assessments differ? What is the significance of your findings as a college writer?

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17 What Counts as Evidence What counts as evidence differs by discipline, but all evidence is tied to a claim, formed through a disciplinary practice, and must be reliable, valid, and sufficient. Imagine a rock sitting on a table. Just any old rock. Look at it for a moment. Now, what does that rock mean? Mean? A rock doesn’t mean anything, you might say. It’s just a rock sitting there. But let a geologist pick it up, and suddenly the rock takes on meaning. He might analyze its composition and formation and estimate its age, and then use that rock as evidence to make a claim about the history of the area where the rock was originally found. The rock is now a piece of evidence because it is tied to a claim, interpreted through a disciplinary lens.

ACCESS POINT Have you ever been falsely accused of something? What evidence was used to support the accusation? Undoubtedly, there was something wrong with the evidence or the claim. Which was it? What does this tell you about evidence and claims?

Now imagine a lawyer picks up that same rock. Perhaps it was found inside a store beneath a shattered window. The rock now is evidence of a violent action. Coupled with other evidence, perhaps video from an exterior security camera showing a man with the rock in his hand, the lawyer can claim that the defendant is guilty of destroying property. Now the rock is a piece of evidence tied to a different claim, seen through a different disciplinary lens. From this, we can see that evidence and claim are two halves of a whole and each can shape the other. The term we use to describe this kind of

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Active Voices dialectical in academic argument, the tension between evidence and claim and the opposing forces that mutually shape each

relationship is dialectical, a word with several meanings but here indicating the tension between two forces that mutually shape one another. When you change the claim, you change the meaning of the evidence, and when you change the evidence, or how you interpret it, you change the shape of the claim.

Evidence responds to and shapes a claim Before you even begin a process of trying to figure something out or conducting research, you’ve probably got some sense of what you hope to find. That might be stated as a formal hypothesis or it might be just a hunch. In either case, the intent of your inquiry already casts objects and events into the role of potential evidence. It turns a rock into something with meaning. As some objects and events take on meaning relative to your claim, you begin to formulate that claim a bit more thoroughly. Perhaps the evidence supports the hypothesis and so you’re able to assert your claim with some level of confidence. Or perhaps the evidence doesn’t answer the question in the way you thought, and so you have to change your claim accordingly. When you do, you immediately open up the possibility of finding new evidence and that affects how you view the evidence you already have. Some of your evidence has to be thrown out and some has to be reinterpreted.

Types of evidence for college writing evidence in college writing, material that is reliable, valid, and sufficient, which supports a claim

Almost anything can be used as evidence, but in college, certain kinds of evidence are preferred and accepted. We might even think of evidence as part of the genre of writing in different disciplines. In the sciences, the evidence that’s most relied upon is facts gathered through experimentation or direct observation, whether you have gathered the evidence yourself or are reporting the evidence from a reliable source. In the social sciences, the evidence that’s most relied upon is also facts but usually reported as statistics; however, other “softer” evidence, including oral histories, interviews, and observations, is also considered good evidence in the social sciences. In the humanities, the evidence most relied upon is primary textual analysis, such as the analysis of a novel, painting or piece of music. Part of learning the discourse of a discipline is learning the types and quality of evidence that is expected in that discipline.

Testing the quality of evidence Not all evidence is equally good, however. In college writing, evidence has to be both reliable and valid. When evidence is reliable, it means it 100

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can be seen or measured by different people, at different times, and at different places. For example, let’s say a group of students takes a math test and we find that girls’ test scores are lower than boys’ scores. Is this result reliable enough to use as evidence? Maybe. We would have to see the scores of similar groups of girls and boys on the same test a second, third and fourth time. If the results are consistent, and if all other factors are accounted for, then the results could be said to be reliable: Girls do more poorly on this math test than boys do. However, does that mean the evidence is good? We can’t say that yet. We also have to see if the results are valid. Results are valid if they actually measure the thing they are supposed to be measuring. How can we know that the test scores, which show that girls performed consistently worse on this math test, actually say something about math and not just the test itself or the testing situation? Does the test actually measure math abilities? Or does it measure mainly test-taking ability? Or maybe the results reflect the pressure that comes with being a girl tested in math, what is called stereotype threat? These questions relate to the validity of evidence. Scientists and social scientists spend a lot time testing the validity of evidence. The want to know if the evidence they have gathered actually says something about the world they are investigating. When you read peer-reviewed articles in the sciences and social sciences, you’ll nearly always see some discussion of validity.

Reliability and validity in everyday evidence Many factors can influence the validity of evidence, including cultural, historical, or linguistic contexts. So even in relatively common situations, validity has to be questioned. Imagine an international student writes an email to a professor and begins with a short discussion of the weather. What is this evidence of? In her home culture, beginning an email in this way is evidence of politeness. In America, it may be evidence only that the student is unaware that Americans prefer directness, especially in emails. However, to the professor, it might be interpreted as evidence of uncertainty or a willful misdirection. This is a cultural factor that shapes the meaning of the evidence. Now, think of the use of blackface, white actors blackening their faces to portray African Americans on stage and in films. Blackface is usually considered evidence of a deep-seated racism. But when a white actor donned black makeup to play the lead character in Othello in Shakespeare’s time, it’s unlikely that can be seen as evidence of the kind of racism widespread later. Generally, the racist stereotypes of the 101

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nineteenth and twentieth centuries weren’t available to Shakespeare or his audience in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Blackface as evidence of racist attitudes of Shakespeare’s audiences may not be valid because of the historical context. Perhaps the greatest question in constitutional law is whether we can ever know the original, intended meaning of the Unites States Constitution. If we believe we can know the meaning of a word or sentence regardless of when it was written and when we are reading it, then the job of the Supreme Court is to discover the meaning of the Constitution as it was originally intended and apply it consistently. Anything else is unreliable. If, on the other hand, we believe that the meaning of a word or sentence is always a product of its time as seen through the lens of our own culture, then the job of the court is to interpret the meaning of the Constitution as it can best be understood today and apply that understanding consistently. Anything else is invalid. This is an example of linguistic factors shaping the meaning of evidence.

Sufficient evidence In addition to being reliable and valid, for evidence to count it also has to be sufficient. That means that there has to be enough of it to support the claim. A common way to prove a hunch is to find an example. Often, an anecdote is used. “One time, when I was sixteen. . . .” But we have to ask, can an anecdote count as evidence? It might be reliable in that you could find others to vouch that the story has not changed. And it might be valid in that most reasonable people would agree that the story points to the thing it is about. But even if it is reliable and valid, is it sufficient? That is, is there enough in one story to support a claim? In college writing, it’s very difficult if not impossible to support a claim with one piece of evidence. What this means is that regardless of how compelling an anecdote or an example is, it is generally not sufficient to support a claim about anything other than itself. What this means is that it is not generalizable. In the social sciences especially, a lot of work is done to be sure that sample sizes are sufficient to be generalizable to the general population. You’ll see careful analyses to prove that the evidence is, in fact, sufficient.

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In college writing, evidence is always tied to a claim seen through a disciplinary lens. The kind of evidence accepted differs depending on the discipline: i Sciences: facts gathered through experimentation and observation, either through primary or secondary research i Social sciences: facts, usually reported as statistics (gathered through primary or secondary research), as well as oral histories, interviews, and observations i Humanities: patterns of meaning gathered through primary textual analysis All evidence must be reliable, meaning it does not change over time or place; valid, meaning that it actually gives information about the thing it is meant to; and sufficient, meaning there is enough of it to support the claim.

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ACTION POINTS Ask a few classmates whether they have ever started a paper with an anecdote. If they have, what was the paper about and what was the intended effect? How should anecdotes not be used? Find an article online in The New York Times science section that has hyperlinks embedded in the text. Read the article and as you do, follow the hyperlinks. What do they lead to? How do they support, as evidence, the main claim of the article? Is the evidence reliable, valid, and sufficient? How can you tell? Locate peer-reviewed articles in three different disciplines: biology, sociology, and literature. Skim the articles and look at the evidence. How is it shown to be reliable, valid, and sufficient in each? What might this tell you about writing in different college settings? Look through an introductory textbook, such as for a psychology or biology class, that you or a classmate has handy or that you find in your college’s bookstore. Read a few paragraphs. What claims are being made? What evidence is provided? Is the reliability, validity, and sufficiency of that evidence demonstrated? Do you think you can do the same thing in your papers? Why or why not?

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Used with permission from CSUSM Procurement Operations

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The Cougar Pantry at California State University, San Marcos, offers resources to food insecure students. A group of business students realized that knowledge of the Pantry was limited and set out to change that.

Cougar Pantry The US Department of Agriculture estimates that 41 million Americans are food insecure, defined as not having consistent access to enough, affordable, and nutritious food. And of course, college students are not immune. A recent national study found that 25 percent of two-year college students and 20 percent of four-year college students suffer “very low food security,” meaning they changed their eating patterns or went without eating within a thirty-day period. And more than half of first-generation students suffer some degree of food insecurity. Colleges and universities across the country have taken steps to combat the problem. Most have started food pantries where students can get food when needed. California State University at San Marcos opened “The Cougar Pantry,” which soon was serving up to 150 students per week. However, awareness among students was very low, which meant that many students who needed the service were unaware of it. Five students

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working on their Senior Experience project at San Marcos—Renzo Elias, Vivian Garcia, Angela Huang, Nuri Melo, and Rosa Soto—set out to change that. The team surveyed students and faculty and found that fewer than a quarter knew where the pantry was located, and only about half knew that it existed. They went to work to raise awareness by writing informational handouts, attaching them to granola bars, and distributing them to students on campus. They then made informational presentations at faculty meetings on food insecurity and the Cougar Pantry. Finally, they designed flyers and displayed them on bulletin boards and created a digital message to be broadcast on screens around campus. “It was inspiring to watch a group of students who perhaps didn’t have a connection with the pantry but quickly became passionate about the project and what they were doing,” said Annie Macias, Executive Director, Associated Students, Inc., which operates the Cougar Pantry. Their efforts paid off with an immediate increase in pantry use. One student, Serra Lanzezio, who had taken an unpaid internship while completing her degree and thus had to cut down on her paid work hours, said, “The pantry came at a good time.” The Senior Experience project students identified an explicit need in the campus community, gathered evidence through direct observation and surveys, and generated a multimodal series of solutions to achieve their goal of increased awareness and use of the pantry.

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18 What a Claim Is A claim is always tied to evidence and describes the meaning of that evidence; claims must be carefully qualified. In the last chapter, we talked about a rock serving as evidence. For a geologist, it could support a claim about some geological formation. For a lawyer, the rock could serve as evidence of a person’s guilt. In both cases, the claim and the evidence are tied together. But what is the nature of the claim in academic writing?

A claim is tied to evidence First, it’s important to recognize that a claim is not an opinion. A claim is tied to evidence by careful reasoning within a disciplinary lens. Geology uses evidence in particular ways and makes claims about geological issues. The law uses evidence in particular ways and makes legal claims. Opinions, however, tend to be much more loosely connected to evidence if connected at all. They have no place in college writing. In fact, in most writing textbooks, the word “opinion” does not even appear.

claim in college writing, a qualified statement or assertion that describes the meaning of the evidence tied to it

ACCESS POINT Often in high-school writing, students are asked to express their opinion on a topic and back it up. If you’ve had that experience, how did you formulate your opinion? Did that come before or after you looked for evidence? How did your opinion shape the writing you did? Did you change your opinion as you wrote? Why or why not?

That might be difficult to accept for writers coming out of high school or returning to college after time away. In high school, writers are often told to state their opinion and then back it up with examples. In public

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life, it’s a common belief that everyone has the right to their own opinion and that all opinions matter. In college writing, however, what is called for is careful reasoning that ties evidence to claims.

A claim reflects the disciplinary lens As we said, a claim is tied to evidence through reason within disciplinary conventions. Usually, this means analyzing evidence through questions relevant to the field of study and in a manner the discipline accepts. For example, a political scientist would look at on the Occupy Wall Street movement one way while a sociologist would look at the same march in another. However, they would ask many of the same type of questions. What does this evidence mean? Is it valid? Is it reliable? To what degree of certainty? Where did this evidence come from? Is the source credible? What other evidence is available and what does it say? They would come up with different meanings of the evidence, of course, because they are seeing through a different lens. The sociologist would understand something about the use of social media to form social groups. The political scientist would learn something about the power of these social forces to shape governmental policy. Through asking and answering these questions and others, a claim would arise in the form of a statement about the meaning and significance of the evidence. But that’s as far as the claim goes. A reasonable claim does not reach beyond the evidence.

A claim reflects scope of evidence Let’s say in a communications class you’re looking at the way digital technology is changing the way people interact. You find several research articles about social media and the effects of its use on interpersonal relations. After reading the research, you’re ready to make a claim. Let’s say that several of the peer-reviewed articles you read suggest that social media has impacted interpersonal relationships by making them more volatile. When friends interact both personally and virtually, their friendships can be more fraught with trouble. Based on your reading, can you make a claim like this? The use of social media impacts interpersonal relationships of friends by making their overall relationships more volatile. Yes, you can make that claim and you can back it up with the evidence your sources provide. But the fit will be easily questioned. Why? Because you’re talking about the world in which people interact, but your evidence 108

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is research articles, which themselves are talking about the world. You’d do better to tie your claim to the evidence you have and not to what the evidence points to. Such a claim might look like this: The research I reviewed on social media suggests that heavy use may impact interpersonal relationships of friends by making their overall relationships more volatile. In this example, you are making a claim about the research on social media and its effects on interpersonal relationships of friends. In the first example, you are making a claim about the actual, interpersonal relationships of friends as played out in the world they live in. The articles you read are the reports of primary researchers studying the world. Those researchers get to make claims about the world. Your claim should be tied to your evidence, which is the secondary research. The second example better reflects the scope of your evidence.

ACCESS POINT Have you ever repeated a story you thought was true but then it turned out not to be? Why did you believe that story in the first place? What evidence did you have that the story was true?

Claims may include qualifications and concession In the second example claim, in addition to being tied more carefully to the evidence, the claim is carefully qualified. The second example previously reads “The research I reviewed,” which suggests the sufficiency of the evidence. It’s possible or even probable that there’s research that you did not review which may give different findings. Moreover, the claim says “suggests that” and “may impact,” which indicates probability rather than certainty. These hedge words are not just for politeness but accurately tie the claim to the quality of the evidence. We rarely know anything for certain beyond basic facts. Since claims are statements about the evidence, they are not facts but reasonable interpretations. Claims, therefore, are written to show that qualification. What if you conduct your own experiment or observation? Can you know for certain what that evidence says about the world? Let’s say you’ve decided to conduct your own research on the impact social media has on your friends’ interpersonal relationships. You’ve gathered data through a survey. Now what kinds of claims can you make?

qualification in college writing, accompaniments to claims that suggest interpretation and sufficiency of evidentiary backing

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First, you’ll have to include some statement about the reliability, validity, and sufficiency of the evidence and the research you’ve done (see the chapter on evidence). Something like this might work: While I only received ten responses to my survey and had to exclude responses to two of the questions because they were vague . . . Here, you’re acknowledging issues of reliability and validity due to the sample size and problems with the survey. Next, you’ll have to say something about the meaning of the evidence you’ve gathered. As above, you won’t be making a direct statement about the world but about the results of your research. It might look like this: . . . my research results suggest that the heavy use of social media has little impact on the quality of interpersonal relations among users. If we combine the two, we get a reasonable and credible claim that fits the scope and limitations of your primary research. While I only received ten responses to my survey and had to exclude responses to two of the questions because they were vague, my research results suggest that the heavy use of social media has little impact on the quality of interpersonal relations among users. In a sense, you’ve built a chain of reasoning from the world, to the evidence, to your claim. Whether you risk having that claim say something directly about the world depends on how confident you are that the evidence is valid and sufficient, in other words, that it actually describes the world.

Minor claims add up to a main evolving claim Most written arguments that you’ll encounter in college have more than one claim. They’ll have multiple claims that work together to develop one larger claim. In his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King Jr. makes a number of claims: that he is not an outsider, that his actions are timely, that there are just and unjust laws, to name a few. For each of these claims, he presents evidence, mainly by pointing to examples and precedent. These claims are cumulative and lead to his main claim that he has a moral duty and a responsibility to lead the non-violent protests in Birmingham. In college writing, as in King’s “Letter,” most claims are explicitly stated. They may even be tagged with a phrase to set them off as a claim. In an 110

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essay on writing titled “Closing My Eyes As I Speak,” Peter Elbow writes, “My claim is . . .” and then lays out his main point. However, a bit later he states, “I’d like to offer an even more complicated claim, which is . . .” and lays out his main point but now complicated by new ideas he has developed. In addition to being tagged as claims, the claims in Elbow’s essay are evolving. That is, as Elbow considers new evidence, he modifies his claim, making it more complicated to account for more evidence. In many fields, such as history, philosophy, and the humanities, evolving claims are common. They suggest self-reflection and a willingness to entertain new ideas as new evidence arises. In other fields, claims evolve as well as the writers work, but often only the final, complex claim is explicitly stated in the finished text.

Claims develop and express theses When the minor claims in an argument are cumulative, as they are in King’s “Letter,” they act as stages between the direct evidence presented and the larger claim. When the minor claims are evolving, as they are in Elbow’s essay, we can see the thesis developing in each claim until it reaches a final, definitive claim. We can say, then, that in all cases the final claim, which accounts for all of the evidence and all the minor claims presented in the argument, is the same as the thesis statement when it is explicitly stated. If it is not stated but only implied, it is still the thesis; it is simply not a thesis statement. Even though the thesis statement often appears at the beginning of a written document, it is actually the end product of a long thought process. The writer, in revision, may place the thesis statement at the beginning of the text for the ease of the reader and to satisfy genre and disciplinary conventions, but don’t be fooled. A thesis statement, the final claim, comes only at the end of a long thought process and may only arise as the writer writes her way through the evidence. In college writing, a claim is tied to evidence and arises through careful reasoning within disciplinary conventions. A claim does not reach beyond the evidence but limits itself to that evidence and the quality of that evidence. Claims may be cumulative or evolving in an argument, and the final, definitive claim, when stated explicitly, is equivalent to the thesis statement, which may appear at the beginning of a piece of writing for the convenience of the reader or to meet genre and disciplinary expectations.

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ACTION POINTS In a small group, look at a range of textbooks from introductory courses, such as biology, sociology, or psychology. Read a few paragraphs from any chapter. In contrast to the previous chapter’s activity, look specifically at the claims instead of the evidence. How are the claims presented? Are they presented more or less as facts? In your group, assess how they differ across your different disciplines. Read about the definition of fake news, what it is, what claims are made, and for what purpose. Then find a couple of examples of fake news stories (you can find a list of confirmed fake news websites on Wikipedia as of this writing). Considering the explanation of claims in this chapter, how are the claims in fake news constructed, especially in terms of claims and evidence as you understand them? Locate two journal articles, each from a different field. Read the abstract, introduction, and possibly the conclusion to identify the main claim. How is that claim presented relative to the evidence and relative to certainty? What can you make of this in relation to your own development as a college writer? With two or three partners, study class lectures in different disciplines. Seek to determine how much of the lecture focuses on the evidence and how much it focuses on the subject the evidence points to. Take notes and see if you can develop a claim based on the evidence you’ve gathered about the focus of lectures in different disciplines especially in terms of claims, evidence, and interpretation of the evidence.

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19 What Counterargument, Rebuttal, and Concession Are Counterarguments refute a writer’s claims or evidence, rebuttals reject part or all of those counterarguments, and concessions accept part or all of them while accommodating them into the main argument; all enhance the writer’s credibility. One of the hot-button issues on campuses recently is freedom of speech. Certain controversial speakers, such as Ann Coulter, a conservative pundit, have been scheduled to speak on college campuses only to have their invitations rescinded and later reinstated, due to protests and counter-protests. Some argue passionately that what they consider unreasonable or even hate speech should not be allowed on college campuses, which they say stand for reasoned debate. Others argue that limiting the freedom of speech for some, however potentially offensive the message, threatens the freedom of all.

ACCESS POINT If you’re on social media, think of a time you read a post that bothered you and immediately made you want to respond. What did you do? Did you respond? If not, why not? If so, how? What was the effect? Was your response well received? Overall, what does this say about social media as a means of carrying on a reasoned discussion?

Rarely are these arguments carried out in reasonable, measured terms. Neither side seems to be able to listen to the other. However, the ability to listen to opposing points of view and to take them seriously as a means of

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deepening your own understanding and enhancing your position is a defining trait of college writing. One way to express this ability to listen can be shown through your use of counterargument, rebuttal, and concession.

Counterargument presents opposing views In the example about freedom of speech, imagine that a claim you put forward is that hate speech has no place on a college campus because colleges are about respecting all views in a search for truth, and that hate speech, by its very nature, disrespects and rejects certain people and their views. What might someone who disagrees with you say? You can imagine someone saying, yes, colleges are about respecting all views in search for truth, but having a speaker who expounds what some would call hate speech on the college campus is not the same as having hate speech in the college classroom, where the academic work goes on. counterargument in college writing, statements that refute a writer’s claims or evidence

Here, the counterargument would be about conflating a college campus with the work of the academy. Students on the campus, the argument would go, are in a public place and are in their roles as private citizens, not necessarily students in the academy. In writing an argument, you want to be able to present multiple views as fairly and fully as possible, especially those that disagree with yours, such as in the example above. Doing so shows that you are a trustworthy writer, capable of considering opposing views, and assessing their worth and value. This is the power of counterargument. Counterarguments should be built into any planning and developing process. As you work to develop ideas and gather and assess evidence, keep one eye open to possible counterarguments. How might others see this evidence? What else might be said about it? What are the weaknesses to these claims? Moreover, it’s a good idea to actively seek counterargument as part of your research. Rather than stopping when you find evidence that satisfies your hunch or hypothesis, keep digging. Look for evidence that counters your claims and present that as fully as possible. Your argument will be stronger, and you will be a more credible writer.

Rebuttals reject part or all of counterarguments Good college writers don’t stop at presenting counterarguments, however. They consider the validity of the counterarguments and often reject or modify part or all of them. Based on evidence or reasoning, they show 114

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why part or all of a counterargument is not valid or reasonable. That is, rebuttal in college writing, a they offer a rebuttal. rejection of part or all

What kinds of rebuttals might be proposed to the counterargument in of a counterargument the freedom of speech example? To the counterargument that college campuses are public places and that students, while on the campus and outside the classroom, are private citizens, you can imagine rebutting this by stating that college campuses are not like other public places, such as a city park. You could argue that while colleges are at once dedicated to open, critical debate and thus should welcome all speech, they must balance this with their commitment to ensuring that people of all backgrounds feel welcome and safe on the campus. To allow that feeling of safety to be threatened by hate speech would deny the right of an education to certain populations. Unlike a city park, which can be avoided by people if necessary, a college campus is the very place an education can be attained. Similar to counterargument, rebuttal requires that you keep an eye open to countering the counterargument. To do this, you can talk with other people to get their views and you can further your research. A practical approach that yields good results is to take notes in a document or on paper with three columns, one for your points, one for counterarguments, and one for rebuttals or, as discussed in the next section, concessions.

Concessions accept part or all of counterarguments At times, writers must recognize that part or all of a counterargument is valid and reasonable. In that case, they make a concession and reconsider their evidence and modify their claims. A concession is a statement that accepts part or all of a counterargument It need not undermine the writer’s position but may actually enhance it. When a writer accommodates the counterargument, they bring it into their argument through revision of the claim they are putting forward.

concession in college writing, a statement that accepts part or all of a counterargument

In our freedom of speech example, we could concede a counterargument that freedom of speech is of higher value to the academy than the values of reasoned debate and dialogue. That is, reasoned debate depends on free speech and so free speech must be protected above all. In conceding this point, the writer could then modify her original claim that hate speech be banned from college campuses to include her rebuttal. Her 115

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claim now is that hate speech should be banned from those parts of college campuses that students cannot easily avoid, thus protecting students’ right to an education unimpeded by potentially offensive or threatening language. Since your credibility as a college writer depends on being reasonable, treating counterarguments fairly and fully should give rise to concessions naturally. Parts or all of some counterarguments will simply make sense, in which case you can accept them and modify your claims.

Counterargument, rebuttal, and concession recognize complexity Many issues are complex, and good college writers not only embrace complexity but actively seek it out. One of the best ways to do this is to problematize what appear to be simple issues. By actively seeking counterarguments and offering rebuttals, and by conceding part of or all of counterarguments and accommodating them through revising your claims, you demonstrate the capacity to entertain complexity and to accommodate multiple views, which are highly valued in college writing. College writers actively seek opposing views to their claims or evidence, which are presented as counterarguments. Rebuttals offer evidence or reasoning to reject part or all of the counterarguments. Concessions accept part or all of the counterarguments, which requires that the writer modify the claim. All of these moves recognize the complexity of an issue and strengthen the credibility of the writer.

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ACTION POINTS Conduct a quick poll among classmates. How many have participated in a debate club or in any kind of formal debate activity? Through discussion, determine the general principles that governed the use of counterargument, rebuttal, and concession in a debate-style situation. How do those principles relate to college writing, based on your experience thus far? With a partner or two, read about what has been dubbed the “bubble effect” (or sometimes “filter bubble” or “echo chamber”) in social media. What is it? How does it operate? What do the critics say about it? Most importantly, how are counterargument, rebuttal, and concession curtailed or eliminated in the bubble effect? Why do you think that matters for a society that uses social media to form at least part if not most of its views on important issues? With a partner or two, use your college’s library to locate a recent issue of Opposing Viewpoints in Context. Read the opposing views on a current issue and try to identify where the authors present counterargument and offer rebuttal. How do they do so? Are there any concessions made? Finally, how are these pro/con arguments different from what you might be expected to write in college courses? Your college library likely has recent newspapers, both local and national, as well as national news magazines. Find the letters section in a newspaper or magazine and read a few. How many of them present mainly counterargument? Is that their purpose, in your view, to counter claims made in the newspaper or magazine stories? If editors offered responses, were these responses mainly rebuttal or concession or some combination?

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20 What Ethos, Logos, Pathos, and Kairos Are Ethos, logos, pathos, and kairos are four aspects of an argument first identified by the ancient Greeks and refer to the credibility of the speaker, the logic of an argument, the emotional effect of a message on the audience, and the opportune moment for the message.

Photo by Francis Miller/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

In 1960, Senator John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard Nixon faced off in the first televised presidential debate in history. Kennedy, in a dark tailored suit, gave off an aura of youth and vitality with his broad smile and suntan. Nixon, on the other hand, just out of the hospital where he’d lost weight recovering from a knee injury, looked pale and drawn in an ill-fitting gray suit that blurred into the gray backdrop of the set (Figure 20.1).

Figure 20.1 Kennedy-Nixon debate, 1960

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Most people who listened to the debate on the radio thought Nixon had done well. But for those who watched the debate on television, it was no contest. In the words of Senator Bob Dole, the 1996 Republican Presidential candidate who had listened to the debate on the radio and later saw a taped version, it was clear that on television Kennedy “wiped Nixon out.” What made Kennedy so persuasive on television but less so on radio? It wasn’t the soundness of his argument nor the governmental programs he promoted. It was his visual appeal as a speaker that won him the debate. He looked stronger, healthier, and more fit for the job. A good way to make sense of Kennedy’s effectiveness and the effectiveness of an argument in general is to use the three classical appeals, ethos, pathos, and logos, first defined by Aristotle in his Art of Rhetoric, plus the concept of kairos. Rhetorical appeals allow you to divide an argument into parts and to assess the effects and effectiveness of each of those parts or strategies.

Identifying the credibility of the speaker ethos in classical rhetoric, the appeal referring to the credibility of a speaker or writer

How a speaker or writer appears to the audience or reader matters. Does the speaker seem experienced, informed, impassioned, or trustworthy on this subject? This credibility, or fitness of the speaker, is referred to as ethos. Ethos can be established in two main ways. First, ethos can be established from information outside the main text. For example, a major speech is usually preceded by an introduction of the speaker that lists the speaker’s credentials, such as education, experience, and accomplishments. Similarly, in a newspaper or magazine article, the author’s credentials are listed, usually as a note at the end of the article. And on the back cover of most books, the author’s background and experience are often described in a paragraph or two. These credentials form part of the author’s ethos in that they support the claim that she knows what she is talking about and thus is fit to speak or write on the subject.

ACCESS POINT Why do you think actors like Samuel L. Jackson appear in so many commercials for products like credit cards or prescription drugs? What is it about their presence that is designed to influence the audience? Do you think they’re effective?

Second, and most importantly, ethos can be established in the main text itself. It is established by the language the speaker uses at the word, sentence, and paragraph level. Does the speaker’s language sound 120

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appropriate for the subject? Does she sound educated and rational, impassioned and articulate, or folksy and wise? The appropriateness changes depending on the situation. Also, is the experience and credibility of the speaker directly presented, such as through examples recounting relevant events? Do the qualities of the evidence the speaker chooses fit the nature of the argument, the subject, and the purpose? If so, the ethos of the speaker or writer is strengthened. If not, it is weakened. In college writing, your ethos depends on two factors. First, do you sound the way you are expected to? This means you demonstrate the ability to use language effectively, whether that’s academic discourse within the discipline or some purposeful alternative (see the chapter on what language to write in). This includes expectations about how to present secondary sources, such as how to quote, paraphrase, summarize, and cite. Second, do you sound like you know what you’re talking about? Are you aware of the main lines of thought on a particular subject? In short, does it sound like you’ve done your homework?

Assessing the appeal to reason How evidence is presented and to what effect are, of course, also crucially important. Are the examples, facts, and statistics good ones for this subject and for this audience? Are they interpreted effectively? The quality of reasoning in an argument is referred to as logos. Logos also can be established in two ways.

logos in classical rhetoric, the appeal to a speaker or writer’s quality of reasoning

First, logos can be established by what things mean. For example, in “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King Jr. redefines the term “outsider.” King writes in response to criticism by white church leaders who he claims had been influenced by “outsiders.” He argues in his letter that outsiders are those who don’t have a vested interest in the community, which he then uses to show how he is not an outsider through referencing his ties to the community and what compelled him to act. By defining the word in the way he wishes, he can then marshal evidence to show that his actions are justified. Many arguments revolve around the meaning of words or phrases, especially in the application of law. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 forbids discrimination in education on the basis of sex in any federallyfunded program. However, what constitutes being “denied the benefits of” an education? What exactly does denied mean? Many lawsuits hinge on the meaning of that word. Second, logos can be established by how things are proven. Facts, statistics, examples, anecdotes, and precedents can all be aligned to support

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a claim, depending on the situation. In a scientific article, generally only empirical evidence is acceptable, but in “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” King, writing for a popular audience, piles up example after example of mistreatment of black Americans to argue that the time is right for action and that action is justified.

Assessing the appeal to emotion pathos In classical rhetoric, the appeal referring to a speaker or writer’s emotional effect on an audience

How the audience or reader responds emotionally to an argument is also important. What’s the emotional effect of the speaker or writer’s tone? What’s the emotional impact of the images, anecdotes, or examples? Does the audience or reader feel inspired, saddened, angered? The emotional effect of the argument is referred to as pathos. Pathos also can be established in two ways. First, pathos can be established in the speaker’s tone and delivery. How a person delivers a speech can be just as important as what that speaker says. King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered in Washington on August 28, 1963, was effective at least partly because of his delivery, marked by his soaring and dramatic voice, echoing the rhythm of a sermon. Likewise, the tone and rhythm of a writer’s words, phrases, and sentences impact how the audience responds. The fiery language of political blogs, for example, is meant to affect the reader in a particular way, while academic prose, with its often cool and neutral language, is meant not to stir the emotions of the reader, which is another way of addressing emotion. Second, pathos can be established through the emotional impact of the evidence presented. In the sciences, only empirical evidence is readily accepted, which is supposedly free from emotion. Especially in political and popular venues, examples, narratives, and anecdotes can be used to affect the emotions of the audience. The use of pathos alone can be questionable since it is seen, rightly or wrongly, as not grounded in empirical evidence nor careful reasoning. It’s wise to remember that pathos can and should be used strategically and not in place of ethos or logos. Consider pairing pathos, as previously noted, with another appeal to enhance the argument you’re making. In King’s “Letter,” for example, he recounts the story of his daughter who first encounters racial discrimination and describes how, as a result, “the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky.” Most readers are strongly affected by this image of a child’s psyche being harmed by social practices. Consequently, readers are sympathetic to King’s argument.

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Assessing the opportune moment Just as important as what and how something is said or written is when. What is the right time to send a message? What factors influence that moment? The Greeks used the term kairos to refer to the opportune moment for the delivery of a speech. The term originated in two different venues. In archery, kairos referred to the moment when the arrow may be fired with sufficient force to penetrate a target. In weaving, kairos refers to the moment when a shuttle may be passed through the threads on a loom.

kairos in classical rhetoric, the appeal referring to a speaker or writer’s ability to identify the most effective time to act

In both archery and weaving, the actor waits for just the right moment to act. In the case of the “I Have a Dream” speech, King seized the perfect moment for the greatest effect, capitalizing on the nation’s rising awareness of the injustice done to a portion of its citizens and the burgeoning Civil Rights movement, which had been gaining greater and greater television coverage. King and his followers sensed the power of the moment and seized it at the most opportune time and location, at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. In college writing, you may not have the luxury of deciding when to write. You may not get to choose the opportune moment. But the concept of kairos can help you in two ways. First, you can understand the effect of a message by how well it seized the opportune moment. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin appeared in 1862, at a time when the anti-slavery movement was rising and seemed to so capture the abolitionists’ sentiments that it is said to have precipitated the Civil War. Second, you may shape your own message based on the current issues. If you are conducting research on the use of stem cells, for example, you may find that the peak of the controversy has long passed. However, as you enter the conversation now, you can position your research relative to the next phases of the scientific research, what is and isn’t allowed and why, what is promised and what is feared, to argue your particular point. That is, you can seize the opportune moment now as it presents itself. Analyzing kairos can help you determine what that is.

Using ethos, logos, pathos, and kairos The three classical appeals and kairos offer a way to analyze existing arguments. In a composition class, for instance, you might analyze the effectiveness of a personal essay. You can analyze anecdotes as the writer uses them as evidence to support the claims she makes. Thus, you’re looking at logos. But you can also look at the emotional impact of those anecdotes on the audience. Thus, you’re looking at pathos. You might 123

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assess how the writer proclaims she gathered the anecdotes, perhaps traveling the country and speaking to workers in factories. Thus, you’re looking at ethos. Finally, you might look at the moment of publication and ask how the essay responds to the times. Thus, you are looking at kairos. Understanding how the writer produced the overall effect she did can allow you to more effectively respond. The classical appeals and kairos also allow you to understand how to present yourself as a college writer. By assessing the situation, you can make decisions about logos, what kinds of evidence you wish to present and how. As a college writer, you are equally concerned with ethos, establishing your credibility in the academic setting. Do you sound reasonable, informed, and engaged? Do you know the language of the academy? Do you know the common genres and when to use them? You might consider pathos and the effect of certain words or phrases on your audience or the use of anecdotes to establish a context. Finally, you might shape your research to address an issue of importance at the time. In so doing, you take control over the effects of your writing. Ethos, logos, pathos, and kairos can help you identify different aspects of an argument and understand how and why that argument is effective. They can also help you develop your own effective argument. Ethos refers to the speaker’s or writer’s credibility and fitness to speak or write on a subject. Logos refers to the logic of an argument, the reasoning and evidence. Pathos refers to the emotional effect of the message on the audience. And kairos refers to the opportune moment for a message to be most effective. These can help you analyze the arguments of others and understand your own effectiveness as a college writer.

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ACTION POINTS With a few classmates, discuss the instructors of the classes you are taking right now. For an instructor to be effective, she or he must garner the trust of the students. How do good instructors do that, in your view? Explain your argument using ethos, pathos, logos, and kairos. Locate online a famous advertisement and analyze it using ethos, logos, pathos, and kairos as the lenses. You might try the iconic “Big Brother” Apple television commercial from 1984 or the commercial Nike ran during the 2008 Olympics that featured Langston Hughes’ poem “A Dream Deferred.” Try to identify the ethos, logos, pathos, and kairos of the message. How is the overall argument constructed? Feel free to look at any advertisement or advertising campaign you’ve currently noticed. How do they work? The historian Henry Steele Commager said soon after the first Kennedy-Nixon debate that the televised format was “designed to corrupt the public judgment and, eventually, the whole political process.” With a partner or two, watch a portion or all of the first Kennedy-Nixon televised debate and then compare it to a more recent presidential debate, such as Trump-Clinton from 2016. Compare your assessments of the ethos, logos, pathos, and kairos of the four candidates. To what degree does your viewing of the debates support Commager’s assertion? Locate a flyer or poster on campus that advocates some kind of action, whether that is attending a lecture, studying abroad, joining the military, or talking with an advisor. On what is the poster’s appeal resting mainly? Analyze your poster or flyer and share your analysis.

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ACTIVE #HUStands On August 29, 2018, the Howard University office of the president announced the launch of HU Stands, “a sexual assault awareness campaign geared toward raising awareness, provoking advocacy, and taking action against sexual assault and other forms of interpersonal violence.” The campaign is in collaboration with the Title IX Office, the Interpersonal Violence Prevention Program Office, the Office of the President, and several student organizations.

OICES #HUStands

The HU Stands program at Howard University is a response to change demanded by students. In collaboration with several university offices, the HU Stands program offers support and resources related to the elimination of sexual violence on campus.

In 1972, Title IX of the Education Amendments Act became law. It reads in part, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” This means that colleges and universities must ensure fair access to education for women and people of all genders. In 2016, six Howard women filed a federal lawsuit asserting that the university violated Title IX because it had not maintained their fair access to education as a result of sexual assaults that had occurred on campus. Because no arrests were made for more than a year, students gathered at the university to protest the inaction of the Washington, DC police and university police and administration. These students at Howard, and at many other colleges and universities across the country, are demanding that reports of sexual assault are taken seriously and acted upon quickly. Indeed, the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN) reports that 11.2 percent of all university students experience sexual assault. The HU Stands program and Title IX Office recognize the work to be done to ensure that the Howard campus is free from sexual violence, releasing an interim revised Title IX policy to better protect complainants and respondents during Title IX investigations. The HU Stands website offers resources, trainings, and a pledge for students, faculty, staff, alumni, and friends of Howard to take to commit to ending sexual assault and other forms of interpersonal violence. Because of the kairotic actions of Howard students, the university responded by creating a model program that would better serve the needs of the Howard community and protect its students. 126

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21 What a Logical Fallacy Is A logical fallacy is an error in formal reasoning, but many logical fallacies appear often in political and popular arguments; less experienced writers are prone to several types of logical fallacies. In January 2017, the recently inaugurated President Donald Trump gave an interview to ABC’s David Muir, who challenged President Trump’s claim that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote because millions of illegal ballots were cast for her. Muir, noting that this would constitute the largest electoral fraud in American history, repeatedly asked for evidence. President Trump, unable to provide any, grew increasingly frustrated and closed his argument by saying, “You know what’s important, millions of people agree with me.” And he was right. Even though there was no evidence to support his claim, let alone reliable and sufficient evidence, it didn’t matter. In this moment, President Trump was not trying to form a logical argument. Instead, in his style of political rhetoric, messages are evaluated not by evidence or facts but by whether or not his supporters like what he says. The truth, in this context, becomes irrelevant. This is why many rhetoricians and political analysts say that President Trump embodies what is called post-truth rhetoric. However, college writers cannot base their arguments on an appeal to popular agreement, what is called an ad populum fallacy. In the academy, we seek truth, based on the “underlying belief that all things can be known and understood through reason and the gathering and analysis of reliable evidence,” as we saw in chapter one. Good college writing depends on sound reasoning and the gathering and analysis of evidence.

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ACCESS POINT All advertisements make an argument—even several arguments. Here is a massive Apple ad on the side of a corporate building in Las Vegas, NV, in January 2019. Marketed to those attending the Consumer Electronics Show, it encourages attendees to read about Apple’s privacy features. What’s the argument here? Why do you think Apple’s marketing department chose such a format for this ad? Now, think about the ads you’ve seen that have been effective for you. How do they work? What are their arguments?

Faulty arguments are all around us By academic standards, poor arguments are common in our culture. It’s common to hear a politician or celebrity respond to criticism by attacking or questioning the person who critiqued them, perhaps by pointing to the person’s weight or gender or political affiliations, rather than the facts or evidence. This kind of faulty reasoning or attack is called ad hominem or “to the person” and it’s very common in popular culture. It’s also very common to appeal to the audience’s emotions when evidence isn’t available, sufficient, or useful. Advertisers use music, images, and spokespersons to create an emotional appeal to viewers to sell their products. For example, the efficacy of a new drug may or may not be

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proven by clinical data, but clinical data will not sell the drug to people watching television. But images of people living happy, full, and apparently healthy lives will. We live in a culture teeming with such arguments, from politics to advertising to sports to social media. These arguments use images, questionable evidence, emotional language, personal attacks, and other means to persuade the audience to believe the claim. It’s understandable, then, that writers new to the academy may adopt some of these tactics unknowingly to make their own arguments. However, when they do, they are committing what is called a logical fallacy.

Four logical fallacies to watch out for A fallacy is a false belief, and so a logical fallacy is a false belief in the soundness of a logical argument. By soundness, we mean that the parts fit together to an acceptable degree of certainty. When a logical fallacy is employed, the parts of the argument don’t fit. Something’s missing or something’s used in an unreasonable way. There are many kinds of logical fallacies, some more common in certain situations than others. There are four fallacies that less experienced writers tend to use. Hasty generalization fallacy A person who commits a hasty generalization makes a claim about hasty something with insufficient evidence. Most commonly for college generalization writers, this happens when a writer critiques a claim and concludes making a claim based on insufficient that the idea is “true” because it describes her own experience. For evidence example, Nicholas Carr, in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” claims that the Internet is rewiring our brains so that we are unable to concentrate deeply. An inexperienced writer might read that and agree, saying that Carr’s claim is true because he finds that he has difficulty concentrating deeply when he’s studying for an exam. In essence, he has argued that all people are being affected by the Internet in this same way because he has anecdotal evidence about one case, his own. It’s probably obvious that one piece of evidence cannot support a generalization about a large population. To avoid hasty generalization, therefore, be sure you have sufficient evidence or that you do not make a claim that reaches beyond the scope of the evidence.

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either/or fallacy the binary presentation of an argument when more than two possibilities exist

non-sequitur fallacy presenting a claim as true based on another claim, even though the second claim does not follow from the first

slippery slope fallacy claiming that one small step will lead to a series of catastrophic effects

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Either/or fallacy A person who commits an either/or fallacy presents an argument as if it has only two possibilities when, in fact, others exist. Most commonly for college writers, this happens when a writer seeks to argue a point of policy, practice, or meaning. For example, in analyzing the effects of cell phones in public schools, especially as distractions in class, a writer might be tempted to argue that phones should be banned entirely to enhance student success. The argument is structured as either we ban cell phones in public schools or we risk lowering student success. However, there are other options. Perhaps cell phones can be used for educational purposes in class, using them to conduct research and participate in surveys. Or perhaps cell phones can be used as a reward after an intense period of study. These middle-ground options are missed, either accidentally or intentionally, with the either/or fallacy. Whenever you see a claim resting upon a statement with an either/or construction, you can check to be sure that other viable options aren’t being ruled out. Non-sequitur fallacy Non-sequitur is Latin for “it does not follow.” A person who commits a non-sequitur fallacy presents a claim as true based on another claim even though the second does not follow from the first; that is, there isn’t a clear reasonable explanation to connect the first claim to the second. For example, one claim offered to counter scientific claims of global warming induced by burning fossil fuels is that the earth’s climate has fluctuated similarly many times in the past; therefore, today’s climate change is no different. But this second claim doesn’t follow from the first. It doesn’t follow that just because something happened in the past that it is happening again now for the same reasons. In fact, the claim that the earth’s climate is changing due to the burning of fossil fuels makes no claims about the existence or causes of past climate changes. So, to avoid a non-sequitur, make sure that claims follow logically from supporting claims or evidence. Slippery slope fallacy A person who makes a slippery slope fallacy posits that one small step will lead to a series of catastrophic effects. This may or may not be true, but without evidence to support that claim, the claim is fallacious. It could well be that taking a small step will not lead to a fall down a steep slope but rather onto firmer ground. For example, common arguments made in the United States against gun control measures tend toward a slippery slope, for example, positing that banning semi-automatic weapons is the first step toward banning all guns. That’s possible, but it’s just as possible that it’s not. It could be that banning semi-automatic weapons has the

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desired effect on stemming gun violence and, therefore, decreases the pressure to pass even further gun-control measures. The point is that without evidence supporting the claim that one step will inevitably lead to a sequence of others, the claim is unfounded. To avoid a slippery slope argument, be sure to have evidence to support any claims of the consequences of an action. Logical fallacies are errors in formal reasoning that are common in popular culture, especially in political rhetoric and popular media. In college writing, logical fallacies should be avoided. Four common types of logical fallacies for less experienced writers are hasty generalization, which means reaching a conclusion on too little evidence; either/or fallacy, which means positing only two options when there are more; non-sequitur, which means making a claim that does not follow from what came before; and slippery slope, which means claiming a catastrophic consequence will follow a single step.

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ACTION POINTS Hasty generalization was discussed first in this chapter among the logical fallacies found most commonly in student writing. Quickly review that section and then share with a couple of classmates both your understanding of the concept and your experience with it. That is, have you ever made claims in your writing that now appear to have been hasty generalizations? Explain the situation and how you might now go about remedying it. If you can, contextualize your discussion with reference to the chapters on argument, evidence, and claims. In a group of two or three, google images of “logical fallacies and advertising.” Scroll through the images and find several that represent different kinds of logical fallacies. The most common include appeal to false authority, nonsequitur, and false analogy. Share your results. Why do you think such advertising is effective? With a partner or two, do some research on the power of the either/or fallacy, sometimes called the false dilemma fallacy, in political rhetoric. For example, you might look at recent State of the Union addresses—from President Trump or President Obama—and see what critics have made of them. Why do you think a false dilemma is so appealing in political speeches? With a partner, interview a writing center peer tutor about logical fallacies. Which do they most commonly see in their work and how do they help writers work through or around them? Don’t expect the tutors to be fluent in the logical fallacies that you are familiar with—there are many, many different types of logical fallacies—so go prepared to explain the various fallacies you’ve read about here.

22 What Toulmin’s Model Is Toulmin’s model is a tool to analyze or build arguments; it consists of ground, claim, and warrant, and of backing, rebuttal, and qualifier. Stephen Toulmin was a British philosopher who earned his PhD at Cambridge. In 1958, he wrote his most influential book, Uses of Argument, in which he described what became known as The Toulmin Model of Argumentation. Toulmin originally used his model to analyze legal arguments as a means of exposing what he saw as problems with formal reasoning. He argued that logic and reason, rather than a timeless science, were deeply woven into human affairs and thus could not be reduced or even accounted for through strict logic. He wrote, “A sound argument, a well-grounded or firmly-backed claim, is one which will stand up to criticism” rather than formal rules of logic. Later, his model was shown to be highly effective in analyzing more popular and everyday arguments, such as advertisements and business communications. For college writers, Toulmin’s model can be very useful both to analyze arguments that others make and to analyze and build one’s own arguments.

Claim, ground, and warrant as essential parts of any argument The Toulmin model posits three essential parts of any argument, mean- Toulmin model ing that if any of them is missing, the argument will seem incomplete developed by Stephen Toulmin, and likely unpersuasive: claim, ground, and warrant. The claim is a statement about what is being argued. The claim can be a statement of truth or belief or a call to action. It is always based on

three essential and interrelated parts of an argument: claim, ground, and warrant

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evidence and is always present in an argument. It answers the question, “What are you arguing?” As an example, in an environmental science class, you might want to make this claim: The federal government should encourage the use of hybrid vehicles through tax breaks. The ground is the evidence that such a claim would be based on. Such things as empirical findings, facts, anecdotes, and examples can serve as the ground of an argument, depending on the audience and situation. The ground is nearly always present in an argument. If not, it is closely implied and understood by the audience. It answers the question, “What have you got to go on?” One possible ground for our example could be this: Hybrid vehicles reduce emissions by approximately 30 percent and thus can help in the fight against global warming. The warrant ties the ground to the claim and shows that the ground is directly relevant to the claim. Often, warrants are so obvious as to be assumed. However, in other cases, the warrant has to be laid out. It answers the question, “Why does the evidence matter?” How are the grounds relevant to the claim in our example? That is, what is the warrant? You might say this: The federal government is interested in fighting global warming through the use of the tax code. Visually, our example argument might look like this:

GROUND

CLAIM

Hybrid vehicles reduce emissions by approximately 30 percent and thus can help in the fight against global warming.

The federal government should encourage the use of hybrid vehicles through tax breaks.

WARRANT The federal government is interested in fighting global warming through the use of the tax code.

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Backing, rebuttal, and qualifier as common parts of argument In many arguments, such as academic and legal settings, three other aspects of argument are common or even essential. These account for the complexity of situations and the limits of claims. The backing is a statement that supports the warrant. These don’t directly address the grounds or the claims but provide evidence that bolsters the power of the warrant. It answers the question, “How do you know the warrant is valid?” For our example of the hybrid cars and federal policy, we could add the following backing: The federal tax code has been revised four times in the past four years to promote the fight against climate change. The rebuttal is a statement that acknowledges the limits of a claim or instances when the claim may not be valid or true. It answers the question, “What might be wrong with this argument?” What rebuttal might there be for our example? Pollution from vehicles is only one small part of the causes of global warming. The qualifier is a word, phrase, or sentence that limits the claim or recognizes the strength of an argument. It answers the question, “How sure are you of this claim?” What qualifier could we offer? Tax breaks for hybrid vehicles alone will not stop climate change. Based on this, we might offer a revised and qualified claim: The federal government should encourage the use of hybrid vehicles through tax breaks as one part of a larger comprehensive approach to fighting climate change.

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Visually, the extended argument would look like this: QUALIFIER Tax breaks for hybrid vehicles alone will not stop climate change.

GROUND

REVISED CLAIM

Hybrid vehicles reduce emissions by approximately 30 percent and thus can help in the fight against global warming.

The federal government should encourage the use of hybrid vehicles through tax breaks as one part of a larger comprehensive approach to fighting climate change.

WARRANT The federal government is interested in fighting global warming through the use of the tax code.

REBUTTAL Pollution from vehicles is only one small part of the causes of global warming.

BACKING The federal code has been revised four times in the past four years to promote the fight against climate change.

Using Toulmin’s model to analyze arguments Toulmin’s model is a useful tool to analyze arguments you are reading or studying. For example, let’s say that you are in a history class and come across a claim like this: Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation out of political necessity to prevent the Union from collapsing rather than from any deeply held belief in the equality of African Americans. You read further and find the grounds that are offered in support of this claim. You read Lincoln’s own conflicting statements about equality from his 1858 campaign for the US Senate. At one point, Lincoln says that we should “stand up, declaring that all men are created equal.” And yet just two months later, he says this: I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the

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white and black races . . . while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white man. You have a sense that there’s something difficult about this argument, that the pieces are held together somewhat precariously. But how? Using Toulmin’s model, you can recognize that the grounds are solid. Lincoln’s own words are presented. And you can see that the claim matches the grounds well. But how is the claim tied to the ground? You notice that the warrant doesn’t seem to be present. Instead, it’s only implied. What is the warrant? To tie the grounds to the claim, the writer assumes that the reader will accept that conflicting statements made in 1858 express a lack of deeply held belief that persisted through January 1, 1863. The warrant might be expressed then as “a person’s deeply held beliefs tend not to change.” If you accept that warrant, then the claim is easier to accept. If you do not, you can challenge the warrant by searching for evidence that refutes the warrant either on general grounds, what is true for most people, or specific grounds, what is true for Lincoln. In either case, you have a better grasp of the structure of the argument and are better prepared to speak to it. Toulmin’s model provides a useful tool for analyzing the arguments of others and thereby provides you a way into the conversation by allowing you to know what parts of an argument are most open to discussion.

Using Toulmin’s model to build your own arguments Toulmin’s model is also a useful tool to build your own arguments. As heuristic such, it is a kind of heuristic, or a strategy to spur your thinking and fill an approach to learning or discovery; out your ideas. For example, let’s say in an accounting class, you are asked to evaluate the effect of an important piece of legislation, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which expanded regulations of public companies, boards, and accounting firms. After conducting your reading, you wish to argue that the act had an overall positive effect. Using Toulmin’s model, you can plot out the different aspects of the argument you wish to make.

a means or strategy to spur thinking

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In the opening section, you might present the context of the act’s enactment, a brief summary of the act, and close with your claim. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 has had on overall positive effect on business due to increased investor confidence. You will then line up the grounds for your claim from the notes you’ve taken in your reading. Some of the evidence you wish to provide might look like these statements. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act has effected more open reporting of financial statements. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act has required that corporate leaders take ownership of key financial statements. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act has eliminated certain conflicts of interest. You may or may not wish to explicitly state your warrant. If you feel it is necessary, you could show how the grounds you’ve offered lead to the claim. You might say: These consequences of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act created the conditions for investor confidence that were absent prior to 2002. You might also choose to find evidence as backing for the warrant, perhaps expert testimony from then Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Alan Greenspan, that explicitly backs that warrant. You would also want to present possible rebuttals. For example, you might state explicitly that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was expensive and may have put US corporations at a competitive disadvantage in the world marketplace. You would then offer a qualifier, that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was not without costs. Your revised claim then might be: The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, though costly and potentially harming US corporate competitiveness, has had on overall positive effect on business due to the increased investor confidence. By providing a template of the parts of an effective argument, Toulmin’s model provides a useful tool for building your own arguments to be sure that you have anticipated rebuttals, considered warrants and backings, and offered qualifiers, thus allowing you to develop a more complete and persuasive argument, one which will “stand up to criticism,” in Toulmin’s words.

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The Toulmin Model of Argumentation consists of three essential parts. The claim answers the question, “What are you arguing?” The ground answers the question, “What have you got to go on?” The warrant ties the ground to the claim and answers the question, “Why does the evidence matter?” Three other parts of argument are common. The backing answers the question, “How do you know the warrant is valid?” The rebuttal answers the question, “What might be wrong with this argument?” The qualifier answers the question, “How sure are you of this claim?” Toulmin’s model is useful in analyzing the arguments of others and in building your own arguments.

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ACTION POINTS With a partner, analyze a paper you have written in this or another class. Use Toulmin’s model to analyze and map the different parts of the argument, starting with the claim, ground, and warrant. Then add the backing, rebuttal, and qualifier. You might draw a graphic representation like the ones presented in this chapter. Don’t worry if not all parts are present. When you’re finished, consider whether your argument would be strengthened by explicitly including more aspects of the argument as you’ve identified them. If so, which parts and how? If not, why not? With a few classmates, select a TED Talk that intrigues you. Sketch out a map of the parts of Toulmin’s model similar to the one in this chapter and then watch the video. As you watch, try to fill in the map, paying attention to what the speaker says explicitly and what is only implied. When you’re satisfied you’ve filled in the map as well as you can, share with your partners and discuss your findings. Note that you don’t have to be in total agreement. Abstracts for journal articles serve as mini-arguments in many cases. With a partner, locate an article from a journal in a field you or your partner are interested in and carefully read the abstract. Use Toulmin’s model to identify the claim and grounds. If you can, identify or define the warrant, as well as any of the other aspects of argument, especially the qualifier. If necessary, skim the main body of the article to fill out your understanding. Infographics are common modes of presenting arguments in easily digestible form. Locate an infographic on your campus and analyze it using Toulmin’s model. Since infographics often only present the bare bones of an argument, don’t be surprised if not all parts are present. On the other hand, you might be surprised to see how much of a fully developed argument is presented. If you can, take a photo of the infographic and share your results with classmates, either verbally or in writing.

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23 What Rogerian Argument Is Rogerian argument enacts rhetorical listening to find common ground and move beyond confrontation. Is there a right way to make an argument in academic writing? Is there a wrong way? Probably an immediate answer would be, “If it works, it’s right.” That’s not necessarily a wrong answer but it doesn’t really help us know what to do. So how do you build an effective argument in academic writing? The concepts of ethos, logos, pathos, and kairos apply to the types of appeals a writer makes as part of the argument and the opportune moment for that argument, but they don’t necessarily offer any help on what to include or why or how to arrange what goes in. Toulmin’s model is a bit more helpful in that it can serve as a kind of heuristic to spur your thinking. But Toulmin’s model likewise may be somewhat static, not offering much help in deciding how to arrange what you wish to include or why.

ACCESS POINT Think about a time you’ve been in an argument recently, even a mild one. What happened? When you tried to talk, did the other person listen? If not, how did the other person respond? In the end, did you feel that you were being heard fairly? How was the issue finally resolved? Were you satisfied? What do you wish would have happened?

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However, if we recall that the academy is about building knowledge collaboratively, we may start to have a way in. Writing takes place in a social situation as well as a rhetorical one, so creating an argument fully engaged with others in that social setting would seem a reasonable approach.

Rogerian argument as a generative act Carl Rogers was an American psychologist of the mid-twentieth century who founded the humanistic, or person-centered, approach in psychology. Rogers’s work has been widely influential in many areas, including business and education. A key aspect of that work is the approach to interpersonal communication. A basic principle of Rogerian argument is that each party in a contested issue must restate the position of the other party to the satisfaction of the other. In practice, this means one person speaks his position. After the first person has spoken, the other person must summarize what the first person said to the satisfaction of that first person. This is difficult because usually we are so quick to make our point that we don’t take time to listen generously. So, listening and restating to the other side’s satisfaction often takes many attempts. However, the result is real understanding of the other side rather than partial understanding or hasty dismissal. Additionally, the speaker who is listened to in this way experiences the satisfaction of being heard, a humanizing experience. We might liken this to rhetorical listening, which Krista Ratcliffe, in Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness, says aims to cross according to Ratcliffe, divides, such as those of race, class, and gender. According to Ratcliffe, “a stance of openness rhetorical listening is a generative act in that it generates the knowledge that a person may choose to assume in base of the listener. rhetorical listening

relation to any person, text, or culture”

Remember that in academic writing, writers stand side by side with the reader looking at the evidence. This relation, implicit in the academic endeavor, gives rise to a common writer’s stance. The writer and reader have a shared commitment to understanding and explaining the world as suggested by the evidence gathered. The resulting argument, then, should be collaborative, not adversarial.

Rogerian argument consists of listening, assessing, and evaluating This writer’s stance and the Rogerian practice of rhetorical listening work to suggest a structure, as Richard Young, Alton L. Becker, and Kenneth Pike first explained in their 1970 book Rhetoric: Discovery and Change. 142

Chapter 23 • What Rogerian Argument Is

The structure consists of three main sections, each with its own purpose (Figure 23.1). PARTS OF A ROGERIAN-STYLE ARGUMENT Presentation of the issue Fair presentation of multiple views Assessing contexts for validity Identifying common ground Proposing and explaining a compromise position Demonstrating the value of the position Figure 23.1 The structure of Rogerian Argument as first explained by Young, Becker, and Pike in Rhetoric: Discovery and Change.

The first section of a Rogerian argument generally includes the fair assessment of the various positions relative to the argument. This is the equivalent to restating the position of the other side to their satisfaction. In this section, a writer answers the questions, “What are the various positions on this issue? What do all the sides have to say?” In academics, this is done best when the positions are presented by gathering evidence from multiple sources and weaving the evidence together into a coherent whole. This helps the reader and writer make sense of the various positions and understand the underlying logic in each of them. In a short paper, this might take half the space and consist of three to five paragraphs, including the introduction, which generally lays out the issue, context, and exigence.

Rogerian argument also known as Rogerian reasoning or Rogerian communication, a style of argumentation that seeks to establish common ground

In the second section, the writer steps back and assesses the various positions, seeking to establish areas of agreement while acknowledging the differences. The aim is to establish common ground or shared objectives that can be used to forge a compromise, which will enact the shared endeavor. This section answers the questions, “What are the value of the positions, relative to one another? How do the positions overlap? What are the real differences? What is the common ground?” In academics, the writer generally cites claims from the various positions and shows how they overlap or agree at some level, implying if not stating directly that the areas of agreement may be more important than the differences. In a short paper, this might take another page or two and consist of another two to five paragraphs. 143

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In the third section, the writer critically evaluates the positions, measuring the evidence against the areas of agreement, and finally weighing the significance of the disagreements, as a means of offering a compromise position. This section answers the questions, “Which of the positions has the best claim relative to the common ground? How might the weaker positions be reconciled via the common ground? What compromise position might be acceptable to all sides?” In academics, this compromise position acknowledges the areas of difference but emphasizes a way forward, usually by modifying one of the positions to make it more acceptable by other sides. In a short paper, this might take a page or more and several paragraphs.

Rogerian argument values compromise over confrontation In our Western culture, argument is everywhere and much of it is adversarial or confrontational, especially when the issues are political or social. Proponents of Rogerian argument suggest that we need a way into argument that is not adversarial or confrontational if we are to move beyond stalemated positions. Rogerian argument, with its broad yet established structure, and with its commitment to understanding based on rhetorical listening, is an ideal way to formulate a response to a complex issue that humanizes the holders of diverse points of view and finds compromise, whenever possible, potentially offering a way forward. Rogerian argument is based on rhetorical listening and suggests three sections: the fair presentation of all positions on an issue, the assessment of those positions in search of common ground, and the reconciliation of differences through a compromise position. Rogerian argument can provide a means of going beyond an adversarial or confrontational stance and can move a seemingly stalemated argument forward.

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ACTION POINTS With a classmate or two, find a contemporary social issue to discuss, such as gun control or free speech on campuses. First, agree that this is just an exercise and that you’ll participate in goodwill. Next, have one person present her/ his view or part of it. As a listener, your job is to listen well, take notes if necessary, and then restate the other person’s position as fully and fairly as you can. Ask if you understood correctly, and allow the speaker to restate until he/she agrees with your restatement. Switch roles. When all sides have had the chance to speak and be heard, talk about the experience. As a listener, how difficult was it to hear and report back accurately? As a speaker, how did it feel to be heard fully and fairly? Locate and skim through several websites that give advice on developing a thesis in a Rogerian argument. What ideas overlap? Which seem to be outliers but useful and which seem less useful? Drawing upon what you’ve developed, what personal theory might you suggest about developing a thesis in Rogerian argument? Use your library to access Opposing Viewpoints in Context, an online resource of views on contemporary issues. Form a team of four, and look through the issues and choose one. Read up on both sides and see if you can use Rogerian argument structure to develop a reasonable compromise position that might be acceptable to all sides. Reflect on a conversation you recently had. Do you think you were listening to one another? Did one of you seem more eager to speak than to listen? How might the conversation have been different if the principles of Rogerian listening were employed?

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24 What Writing as a Process Means Understanding and studying your own writing process allows you to develop a more flexible approach that can serve you in many different writing situations. For more than a century in the United States, students learned to write by analyzing model essays and then trying to write one of their own. The instructor would comment on their efforts, mainly focusing on various literary and stylistic traits, as well as grammar and mechanics. This theme-a-week approach, as it was sometimes called, was based on the fact that writing is a product, that it exists on the page, and can be studied. But it was enabled by the unexamined belief that studying models was the way to learn to write.

ACCESS POINT Most writers in middle and high school have been taught about pre-writing, drafting, revising, and editing. What were you taught? What activities went along with those lessons? Now that you are in college, do you continue to do those things in the same way? Which, if any, and why?

Studying writing as a process Then in the 1970s, influenced by social science research methodology, scholars in composition shifted from focusing on writing as a product, a thing that can be seen on the page, to focusing on writing as a process, as something that people do. The goal became not to teach good writing but to train good writers. Researchers such as Donald Murray,

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Sondra Perl, and Janet Flower and John B. Hayes, as well as many others, began to study what writers actually do. They used a variety of methods, including writing protocols, which involve having writers think aloud as they compose, and then analyzing the transcripts to get a sense of the processes writers follow in composing a finished text. The hope was that teaching less experienced writers the processes of experienced writers would be a more effective approach than having students study models of professional essays. This approach has become so dominant that few writing instructors, from pre-school to graduate school, would ever consider teaching writing without basing it in process.

Problems with teaching writing as a process In their work in the 1970s and since, what researchers found is that the processes experienced writers go through in composing are incredibly complex and messy. To generalize that there is “a process” at all is nearly impossible. All that researchers can say is that all writers go through some sort of process and that the processes of experienced writers tend to include several stages. These stages can be described as an invention stage, a planning and organizing stage, a drafting stage, and a revising and editing stage, which we’ll talk about later in this chapter.

writing process traditionally, a sequence of stages that writers move through as they compose; generally includes discovery, planning, invention, drafting, revising, and editing

Two problems arose from this shift toward process. First, as the teaching of these general stages made its way into textbooks and classrooms, the messiness and indeterminacy of various writers’ processes were lost. The result has been that teaching the writing process has sometimes become as lock-step and as fixed as the earlier writing-as-a-product instruction may have been. You may have seen posters on classroom walls depicting the writing process. Generally, these show four or five stages, all lined up in a neat, sequential row (Figure 24.1).

Prewriting

Drafting

Revising

Editing

Publishing

Brainstorm and organize ideas

Write rough draft

Make changes to improve writing

Proofread

Present final copy

Figure 24.1 A typical depiction of the writing process

The danger is that these depictions suggest to inexperienced writers that they should move from stage to stage in a neat, sequential process. However, this is not how writers always work, which suggests the second problem that researchers found. Experienced writers move fluidly back 148

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and forth among stages. For example, while a writer is drafting, she may have one part of her mind attuned to new ideas, which is part of the invention stage, and one part of her mind attuned to the structure of what she’s working on, which is a part of planning. She might even stop her drafting and move back to the invention stage, jot down some new ideas, and change her plan accordingly. She might even have to go do some research to fill in the new idea. At the same time, she might edit a recursiveness sentence for clarity. Only then does she leap back to drafting. in writing, when a This is called recursiveness. To recur means to reappear or happen writer moves back and forth between again, so recursiveness in the writing process describes what happens stages of the writing when a writer goes back to an earlier stage, does some work there, and process, sometimes moves ahead, sometimes skipping a stage or two, sometimes not (see moving ahead, sometimes skipping a Figure 24.2). Writers’ processes are not nearly so neat nor straightforward stage, or sometimes as the depictions of the writing process would have it. moving backward

writing initial drafts of text focusing mainly on the development, organization, and elabortion of ideas organizing and focusing ideas: mind mapping, clustering, listing, outline

drafting letting work sit, coming back to it at a later point

planning

reflection

prewriting generating ideas, understanding the ideas of others, collecting information: note-taking, freewriting, brainstorming, looping additional research

peer/tutor review

or idea generation

feedback from others

editing and proofreading focusing attention on the surface-level features of the text

revision further developing and clarifying ideas, the structure of the text

Figure 24.2 A depiction of writing as a recursive process

Developing your own flexible writing process Most students at the beginning of their college careers have not developed a flexible, useful approach to writing as a process. This may be because they have not faced writing projects that require extensive and

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discovery a stage of the writing process in which the writer creates and develops initial ideas and develops a sense of exigence

planning develops structural features and analyzes purpose and what genre or features fit the task

careful planning. Or it could be because process has been taught as something artificial, something that can be reduced to four to six distinct stages and put on a poster. The stages of writing, then, are simply things to do for a teacher. As a result, most students I’ve worked with in their first years of college do very little planning. Instead, they jump straight into drafting. Many students have told me they know well the horrible feeling that comes from staring at a blank computer screen and having to produce an entire paper by the next morning. These students have lacked a process they can rely upon to produce their best work. No single process works for all people in all situations. Yet we can say that a writer goes through stages, which can be modified to fit the situation. These stages include:

invention

i Some kind of discovery stage in which the writer creates and develops initial ideas and develops a sense of exigence

a stage of the writing process in which the writer develops material

i Some kind of planning stage in which the writer identifies and develops structural features and analyzes purpose and what genre or features fit the task

drafting a stage of the writing process in which the writer composes material into sentences and paragraphs as well as other textual elements

revision A stage of the writing process in which the writer assesses the draft in terms of structure and meaning and makes changes, which may include a return to previous stages

editing a stage of the writing process in which the writer assesses the text for precision and correctness, which can include proofreading

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i Some kind of invention stage in which the writer develops material, often through research (this stage often coincides with and informs the planning stage) i Some kind of drafting stage in which the writer composes the material into sentences and paragraphs as well as other textual elements i Some kind of revision stage in which the writer assesses the draft in terms of structure and meaning, sometimes through peer review, and makes changes, which may include a return to planning or invention and then further drafting i Some kind of editing stage in which the writer assesses the text for precision and correctness, which can include proofreading What we can’t say is that every writer goes through every stage in the same way at the same time. Some stages are barely touched upon while others are labored over. The demands of the writing situation and the writer’s own habits determine the particular process. Knowing how to adjust the process by which you get writing done in different situations is key. You want to be able to think about and plan your writing process so that you can adapt it to accomplish different purposes. A good first step is always to consider your rhetorical situation. Questions to ask include “Who is my audience? What is my purpose? What are the genre expectations?” Then, as you begin to understand the demands and opportunities

Chapter 24 • What Writing as a Process Means

of the writing situation, you can decide how much research you’ll need to do and what kind. You’ll be able to determine genre expectations and plan accordingly, perhaps developing an outline or sketch of the whole. Then, as you draft and after, you can assess whether your writing is on target and make revisions, either major or minor. So, too, should you consider how the writing process transfers between and across disciplines. Recall from the chapter on writing transfer that successful writers seize opportunities to transfer prior and current writing situations to another current situation. As an example of analyzing your writing situation and discipline to determine process, consider the following situations. How would you approach these as a writer with a flexible process in consideration of the disciplinary need? You might want to use backward design, that is, starting with the goal and then plotting backward the stages and activities needed to reach that goal. What process would you go through to be successful in each situation? i You have an exam in history with four short essays to write, about a paragraph each, based on your reading of the textbook and your notes from class lectures. i You have an observation report to write for an education class, one which outlines several theories of child development, presents the situation you’ve observed, and assesses that situation through the lens of one of the theories. i You have a research-based essay to write for psychology, one which synthesizes information from peer-reviewed and popular sources and makes an argument in favor of a particular view on an issue. i You have some poems to write for a creative writing class, each working with and exhibiting a different poetic feature. Doubtless in all these situations, you’d have a process, more or less elaborate and more or less explicit. However, the more conscious you are of your process for each situation, the more likely it is you will be successful in your writing. Teaching writing as a process replaced teaching writing as a product in the 1970s. While research described the processes of experienced writers as complex and varied, the writing process became codified and taught in a lock-step fashion. By contrast, the processes of experienced writers are recursive. It’s important for college writers to develop a flexible process that responds to particular rhetorical situations, and which includes the stages of discovery, planning, invention, drafting, revising, and editing.

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ACTION POINTS Interview a peer about a major project he completed, using the six stages outlined above as a basis. What was the writing process he actually went through? What was the hard part? What was easy? What does he wish he might have done differently? What can he learn from reflecting on his process with this project? What might he take forward to the next writing situation? Write up a summary of the interview and give it to your partner to check for accuracy. Change roles. Finally, talk about personal strategies and goals for developing a stronger writing process. With a partner or two, go online and look at six to ten images of the writing process. How many depict the process as a more or less fixed sequence? How many suggest recursiveness? How many suggest that a process might adapt to different situations? Anything surprising in the images? What might this say about the way you and your partner have been taught or what you believe about writing as a process compared to what you know now? Read a bit about writing process on several sites like the Purdue OWL and The Comparative Media Studies at MIT. What is especially helpful about the instruction offered there and what not so much? How do the descriptions of writing process differ from your practices? When you’re done, write out in 500–1,000 words your own “theory of the writing process,” which describes what you actually do as well as what you believe you should do in future situations. After you complete your next writing project, reflect on and revise your theory. With a partner, go to your writing center and your library to see what resources they have that support writing as a process. Generally, you’ll find flyers and brochures tailored to the students who most use those facilities. Then, talk with a writing center tutor about problems she most sees regarding writing process. What advice about process would she give to students who struggle with writing?

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25 What Prewriting, Drafting, and Revising Are Prewriting includes invention and planning; drafting weaves material together while remaining open to possibilities; and revising re-sees and improves the text, often through feedback from peers. You have probably heard the famous saying, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” It was spoken by Louis Pasteur, the French microbiologist, chemist, and inventor of pasteurization. In 1851, he wrote in a letter that he had already planned his next full year of study, including long nights of work, which he was afraid would displease his wife. As growing college writers, it’s valuable to consider what Pasteur was telling his audience of faculty and students at Lille University, where he delivered his speech in 1854. All the accomplishments he had achieved, he was saying, the sudden insights and lucky breaks, were made possible because he had prepared the way for them. The successes only happened because he had laid the groundwork through careful and persistent planning. Similarly, experienced writers tend to spend a lot of time preparing their material before writing a sentence. Professionals, such as engineers, dedicate a major portion of their total writing time to planning, researching, and organizing, especially on formal documents. The actual drafting, by contrast, tends to go relatively quickly. Less experienced writers, on the other hand, tend to do the exact opposite. Most first-year students spend very little time planning, researching, and organizing. Most spend nearly all of their time on an initial draft, which is then only revised at the sentence level.

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ACCESS POINT When you are faced with a major writing project, in this class or another, what kind of outlining or planning do you generally do, if any? Do you enjoy that process? Why or why not?

Prewriting includes invention and planning prewriting the process of invention and planning that precedes the drafting process

invention the creation of material that will serve as the content of the composition, which can inform the structure of the writing

A significant part of the process that successful college writers develop is all the work that goes into producing something before drafting. These activities can be loosely categorized as prewriting. Prewriting can be broken into two stages, invention and planning. We can think of invention as the creation of material that will serve as the content of the composition and can inform the structure of the writing. In fact, content and structure work dialectically, meaning that one changes the shape of the other. As you develop a structure, you imagine or gather material to fill it. As you develop material, you further develop a structure to hold it, meaning you develop a plan. Using subject as cue: asking questions Experienced writers tend to be curious. Given a subject, they might be cued to ask questions of it. If the question in an environmental science class is why solar panels are not more widespread in the American Southwest, they might be spurred to ask questions about cost, efficiency, government incentives, aesthetics, utility infrastructures, etc. Most importantly, experienced writers write these questions down, forming a list which serves as an initial plan, a kind of heuristic or strategy, spurring them to find answers, through research and reasoning, which may lead to other questions, which further develops the plan. Using genre as cue: responding to what’s required Experienced writers also ask about the required, expected, or possible genres that they may write in. For the solar panels in the Southwest project, the genre of research paper is fairly loosely defined. Still, reading the assignment, the writer recognizes certain expectations, for example, an introduction that frames the issue and leads to a key question, a body that considers all aspects relevant to that question, and a conclusion that reconsiders the framing context and reflects on significance. These can spur questions: What is the most pressing contextual factor for this issue? What are the questions and issues most relevant to this subject? How does my research inform the context? What does this all mean about the future of this issue? The genre spurs thinking that informs the plan.

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Using context as cue: bringing in what’s out there Experienced writers also look around their world to get a sense of what factors influence the subject. For the solar panel example, an experienced writer might look at the current and local political climate, whether it is tending toward or away from ecological concerns, and how. This might suggest a set of questions that can help inform the timeliness of the writing and give it a direction. It could well be that the material generated to answer these questions forms the introduction and conclusion of a research paper, for example, or it may go elsewhere, spurring changes to the plan. Gathering materials: informal, primary, and secondary research Experienced writers generally produce material prior to drafting in one of three ways. First, they might jot down notes about what they know already that answers the questions they’ve developed. This can include anecdotes and examples, but might lead to research. Second, they conduct secondary research, meaning they study secondary sources, such as journal articles, newspaper columns, videos, and other resources. Sometimes college writers conduct primary research through observation or experimentation in a lab class, for example, or through analysis of primary sources, such as a dramatic performance or a social artifact, like a flyer or website.

ACCESS POINT We can say that writing begins the moment a writing assignment or opportunity is encountered. The response may be anything from excitement to an alarm bell going off. How do you initially respond to a writing assignment? How does that shape your practice?

Using medium as cue: considering affordances Experienced writers are also aware of how the medium can offer opportunities. The affordances of a medium, that is, what a particular medium allows or doesn’t allow, can be exploited. For example, perhaps the research project on solar panels can be completed with a mixture of written text, images, and video. What material can be presented effectively in images and video that can’t in written text? Or perhaps the research project must be completed on paper, in which case videos could not be presented. What affordances does paper offer? Images, graphs, or charts? Can color be used?

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Using an outline to plan Experienced writers tend to have an outline more or less developed. Not all outlines are linear, with Roman numerals. Some writers outline more spatially, with sections of writing represented as blocks on a page (Figure 25.1). Regardless of the form, an outline allows the experienced writer to arrange and rearrange the material for effectiveness. The outline also allows the writer to include the material gathered and arrange and rearrange the material within the sections. As material is gathered, the outline is revised. As the outline is revised, new material may need to be gathered and incorporated. Statuses different from posts

High user interaction

Facebook

280 characters

Blog-like Pinterest Less user interaction

Social Media

Twitter More impersonal

Instagram

Image-based

Selfies

Figure 25.1 An example of a non-linear outline on social media

Filling in the plan Experienced writers know what they are going to write about and why for each section of the text. This means they have notes and ideas arranged in each section (see Figure 25.2 on the following page). However, they also know they have room to make changes as they draft. Experienced writers tend not to move to drafting until their internal sense tells them that their planning is sufficient to warrant a good chance for success while still allowing room for discovery. They need a sense of freedom to discover new ideas and new connections. We might invoke the Goldilocks principle here. The plan a writer develops must be neither too strict, which would bar discovery, nor too loose, which would hinder the ease of drafting.

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Essay Outline: Thinking and Knowing in the Age of the Internet I.

Context: My son, who’s 8, is fascinated by weapons, and he said recently that “the A-bomb was the best invention ever because it ended World War II.” I have no idea where he got that, but immediately we went online and found images and video of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was able “to know” about the effects of atomic bombs immediately and in a way that would have been impossible without the Internet. What does this do to his thinking and knowing in the world and how does this relate to the warnings of Carr and the hopes of Cookson?

II.

I was bothered by this because of the glorification of a horrendous act of violence—though that would be enough—but the overall experience gave me some hope because it suggests that his mental world may not be as slow to develop as mine was. And I have the ubiquity of the Internet to thank for that.

III. At the same time, I’m aware of what the critics fear: a. “The internet culture facilitates a kind of solipsistic, permanent adolescence that is profoundly anti-intellectual” (Cookson 10). i. “As we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence” (Carr). b. “My fear is that instead of knowing nothing except the face of our own ignorance, we will know everything except the fact of our own ignorance” (Cookson 8). i. Brin, one of the founders of Google, said in 2004 “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off” (qtd. In Carr). c. “The net is becoming a universal medium” (Carr). i. Media “supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought” (Carr citing McLuhan). IV. Yet, I also recognize the potential for transformation of learning and, by extension, our own sense of self: a. Cookson details what he calls the “21st-century mind” that education must foster: critical reflection, empirical reasoning, collective intelligence, and metacognition (10-12). b. Learning can be “organized” and made “real”: “Students and adults would connect in a global, purposeful conversation that would make the world a better place” (Cookson 14). 157

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V.

But what does my example show? a. Seems that “better off” may be true in the short term. b. I don’t see much “critical reflection” or maybe we didn’t make it explicit. c. I do see “organizes learning” (Cookson 13) available via Google and YouTube, though not to the degree that Cookson imagines—far from but not random. d. I don’t see a “flattening” of intelligence—granted, he’s 8—but instead a deepening of understanding: His “idea” of the A-bomb was completely flat in the first place so deepening took place. e. This makes me think that “students” is not a simple entity but a large term that blurs the variety of students—age and development, of course, but also perhaps gender and learning style, class, etc. (Now we’re into some tough questions.)

VI. So, what does all this suggest?

Figure 25.2 An example of a writing plan in the form of an outline

Drafting turns a plan into prose Once a plan feels right, once it feels complete, and once the writer feels ready to discover how the ideas work together, the experienced writer begins drafting. The writer moves back and forth from the outline to the draft, pulling the skeleton of the ideas into a fuller body of prose, essentially weaving together the notes, whether quotations, anecdotes, or merely words and phrases that suggest ideas, into complete sentences. Working from the outline, the experienced writer nearly always knows where she is going and thus avoids getting bogged down. At the same time, the experienced writer is open to possibilities. Often, when writing through an idea, a new idea occurs. And very often, that new idea is better than the ideas developed in prewriting. Then, the experienced writer can pursue her idea in drafting, adding new paragraphs or even sections spontaneously, or she can pause and return to the plan and make adjustments, even conducting additional research as necessary. Many experienced writers do not begin their writing with the first sentence of the introduction. Many begin at the first main body section and draft to the end of the body section. They then either ride the wave of thinking that they are on to move into the conclusion section, or they go back to the beginning and, knowing where their writing is going, draft an introduction. 158

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Revising sees the text anew In the chapter on the writing process, we discussed how revision works in tandem with other elements of writing. Revising literally means reseeing. After and even during drafting, experienced writers have the ability to step back and see the writing as a whole. What parts fit? What parts don’t? What parts seem underdeveloped? Which parts need to be made more concise? Just as they do during prewriting, experienced writers use genre, audience, and purpose as cues for revision. They check their draft against genre expectations to be sure they are meeting the requirements. They anticipate their audience’s reception of the writing. And they ask about whether the draft fulfills the primary and secondary purposes they identified in the pre-writing. Then, they revise their writing at the section, paragraph, and sentence level to their satisfaction. This means that they may have to return to the planning stage to develop new material to fill out a necessary section they had not anticipated. It means they may need to add entirely new paragraphs or rearrange and rewrite others. It means they add sentences to clarify the material they have or to smooth out transitions where material has been cut. Finally, experienced writers always seek feedback. No one writes alone. Every piece of published writing you’ve ever read has been reviewed by at least one editor. The words you are reading right now have been assessed by more than three professionals and have gone through a strict editing process. Experienced college writers don’t shun feedback but seek it out. They get readers in their college’s writing center to review their work. They ask their classmates to read drafts and offer feedback. And they take advantage of their professors’ office hours to hash out ideas during the pre-writing stage and to get the professors’ views on partial or complete drafts. Most experienced writers spend a great deal of time in the prewriting stage, inventing material and developing a plan. The prewriting is only sufficient when the writer feels the plan will support successful drafting. Drafting means weaving the notes together into sentences and paragraphs while staying open to the possibility of new ideas, which may require more planning and inventing. Finally, revision is reseeing the whole work and making changes to make it stronger and more effective, which may lead the writer through the pre-writing and drafting stages again. Throughout the process, experienced college writers seek out and use feedback from peers and their professors.

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ACTION POINTS Based on what you gathered from this chapter, have a conversation about your current writing practices. What kinds of prewriting do you do and to what extent? What might you improve upon? Do the same for drafting and revising. As a group, see if you can reach some consensus about areas of the writing process most in need of your attention. Take a look online at images for “outlines for writing,” “bubble diagrams for writing” and “brainstorming for writing.” Choose one or two images of each that spark your interest and share your choices with a couple of classmates. What do these images suggest about pre-writing strategies? How might you use them to spur your own process of invention? Locate and study a variety of websites that deal with the difference between revision and editing. Read up on revision strategies. Be sure you look at what is called reverse outlining. Then, in writing, develop a theory of revision that may guide you in your next writing project. With a partner, develop a set of questions and then interview an experienced writer, perhaps a professor or a graduate student, on their pre-writing, drafting, and revising processes and how they have changed their practices over their career. Together, develop a theory of pre-writing, drafting, and revising that offers a tentative view of common practices and provides a road map for you going forward.

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26 What Peer Review Is Peer review functions throughout the academy, from undergraduate to professional researcher, and ensures the best possible scholarship and writing at every level. Writing in college means writing in and to a community. One never writes alone; writing is always a social act. This means that writers write in the company of others. Even when a high-school freshman goes into her room, closes the door, and writes in her journal, she takes with her the long history of journal writing and all the expectations that brings. In academic writing, at all levels, the power of this social group to make forms and to make meaning with those forms can be leveraged, that is, used for one’s own advantage. Writing together rather than alone can enhance the quality of the work we produce. This is done through a process called peer review, and it is practiced in various forms by all scholars, from those just entering the academy to those who are literally changing the world with their work.

ACCESS POINT Can you remember in past English classes, whether college or high school, reading another student’s work? What was the purpose of that? What was your goal and how did you do it? How valuable was the experience and in what ways? If given a choice, would you have done that work voluntarily?

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Peer review ensures quality professional scholarship peer review the process of sharing works with other scholars for the purposes of feedback and encouragement of best practices

For professional scholars, such as many of your professors, peer review operates in several ways. The most apparent is through the review of scholarship. Most if not all academic journals use a blind peer-review process. This process both ensures that only the best scholarship and research is published and encourages excellent scholarship. Let’s say a group of researchers are studying the neurobiological aspects of depression in Parkinson’s disease. They work together, conduct their research, and write up their results. They send their paper to an appropriate academic journal, such as International Geriatrics or The Journal of Psychology, two journals that publish such research. The editor of the journal receives the manuscript, removes the writers’ names and all other identifying information, and sends the paper to several experts in the field, from two to six readers. These experts know the subject very well and have most likely published research in the area themselves. Thus, they are the peers, or equals, of the writers whose work they are reviewing. They read the manuscript and make a decision: accept the paper for publication, recommend revision and resubmission, or reject the paper. Here’s the key point: the peer reviewers’ job is to make the research that appears in the journal the very best it can be. As such, they review the manuscript very carefully, looking for flaws in reasoning, in research design, in the analysis of the results, and the conclusions drawn from those results. Peer reviewers catch any errors or questionable judgments and send the paper back for revision, or reject it outright. It’s a tough process. Most academic journals publish less than 10 percent of the manuscripts sent to them. This means that 90 percent of the papers sent by professional researchers to any journal is rejected. Of course, many of those rejected papers are reworked, resubmitted, or submitted elsewhere and eventually get published. But many do not. So, the peer-review process ensures that the research that appears in the journals is the best it can possibly be. That is why you can trust, more than other sources, peer-reviewed academic journals and why ProQuest and EBSCOhost allow you to filter only for peer-reviewed sources.

Peer review ensures quality graduate training For graduate students in the academy, peer review plays no less an important role. Most graduate students are not yet publishing in academic journals, though as they move toward completing a doctorate, they are often encouraged to do so. For graduate students, peer review works in 162

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two ways: with fellow students, as discussed below, and with faculty mentors.

ACCESS POINT Have you ever had a job, such as working in an office or for a school newspaper, where your writing was reviewed and edited by another? What was that like? What was the purpose? How did it work? Was it valuable? Why or why not?

While faculty mentors are not equivalent to the graduate student in terms of expertise, they function as the peer in that they are striving to help the graduate student rise to their level of scholarship, to join them as peers. Students earning a master’s or doctorate degree have a thesis or dissertation advisor, a faculty member who is an expert in the field they are working in. This advisor works with the graduate student throughout the duration of the project, from initial planning to final publication of the thesis or dissertation. Peer review here uses every medium possible, from face-to-face conversations in a faculty member’s office, to email conversations, to reviewing printed research proposals, to reading and responding to drafts of the manuscript. Peer review at this level ensures that the candidate is rising to the level of scholarship shared by those already at that level. Thus, the quality of scholarship is being ensured and protected and the value of a master’s or doctorate degree is maintained.

Peer review fosters collaborative undergraduate writing For undergraduates, peer review tends to be between student peers; however, the purpose remains the same: to ensure the best possible reasoning and the best possible research given the capacities of the writer and the scope of the project. This is why undergraduates are encouraged to read one another’s papers, to offer insights and advice, and to do so encouragingly, not as a mere exercise but as a means of engaging in a critical function of the academic community. In most cases, acting as a peer means being a collaborator on the project. As a peer reader, you can help the writer meet the demands and exploit the opportunities of the rhetorical situation. For example, if you are assigned a research project on the effects of mental health on undergraduate student success for a first-year experience class, you can check your understanding of the expectations with one or two peers. Do you have the audience right? What about the genre? What about 163

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the different media and what they afford? Then, in the researching and drafting process, you can check with your peers on the quality of your work. Is it the best it can be, given your research and writing capacities? Then, after you’ve developed your idea a bit further, say in a rough draft, you can check with a peer to see how well your arguments hold or to see what avenues of thought you may have not considered and wish to explore. Working with peers throughout the process—from assessing the rhetorical situation of the assignment through revision and editing—mirrors the thesis or dissertation process of graduate students and benefits you both as the writer of the project and as the peer reviewer. Writing is a social act and academic writers leverage that fact to make their research and writing stronger. Peer review of the work of professional scholars ensures that only the best scholarship is published, which in turn pushes scholarship to the highest levels. Thesis and dissertation advisors act as peers for graduate students seeking to join their ranks. And peer review for undergraduates functions in similar ways, ensuring that undergraduate writers are meeting the demands and taking advantage of the opportunities of the rhetorical situation they find themselves in.

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ACTION POINTS If you’ve already conducted a peer-review session in this class or another, look again at the directions and goals. What were you being asked to do and why? How do those directions and goals line up with what is written in this chapter? What do you make now of that peer-review activity? Do you see your responsibility as a peer reviewer differently now? How? Do a quick search for tips for student peer review and skim through various sites. While many of these are aimed at instructors, you can glean a lot about what constitutes success from these. Develop a “top five” list of things to do for your next peer-review session. Did you already employ some of these strategies in your experience? Do a search on ProQuest through your library’s website on a subject you are currently studying, in this or another class. First, search without the “peer-reviewed” box checked. What do you find? Next, check the “peer-reviewed” box and search. How are the results different? When might it not be a good idea to check “peer-reviewed”? Research the peer-review process for academic journals. What is the process like? Contrast this with peer review in your experience and what you’ve conducted in class.

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In 1968, Brown University students staged a walkout to protest the lack of black students being admitted in higher education.

Activism Across Generations Recently, Brown University, led by students in a sophomore-level seminar, has been remembering the student walkouts of 1968 on their fiftieth anniversary. Reviewing the work of their peers, in this sense, offers another chance to reexamine the current realities of the university. How much has actually changed? How much needs to be done? Brown is an Ivy League college, among the most exclusive and prestigious in the world. Comprising Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Dartmouth, the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell, and Brown, they educate leaders of the world: presidents, Supreme Court judges, and business leaders from nearly every nation. Yet until the Black Power Movement of the 1960s, they admitted very few students of color and those they did endured what was called “Jim Crow North,” a cultural and physical segregation. Today, much of that has changed, but only thanks to the strong peer collaboration and activism of black and white students that caught college administrators by surprise, a history of protest detailed in Upending the Ivory Tower: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Ivy League, by Stefan M. Bradley, of Loyola Marymount University. In 1968, women from Pembroke, Brown’s coordinated women’s college until it merged with Brown in 1971, led men from Brown’s Afro-American Society in a walkout, demanding 166

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more black students be admitted to both institutions. Noting that the colleges had increased enrollment of black students by only about 1 percent, in spite of promises for faster change, the students demanded of Brown’s president, Raymond Heffner, that the colleges admit 11 percent in the upcoming freshman class. Heffner refused, saying such a number would amount to a quota. The students walked out at noon on December 5, joined up with black residents of Providence as well as 800 white students. In response to such a show of solidarity, the colleges adopted new admissions goals and dedicated over a million dollars to recruiting and admitting more black students. This scenario played out throughout Ivy League colleges, which until the 1960s, saw themselves as allies of integration and civil rights. But what the students showed was that altruistic attitudes and minor changes were not enough. This led to substantive, not cosmetic, changes to the cultures of those colleges and, by extension, the culture of colleges across the country. We now have more diverse curricula, more diverse faculty, and greater cultural diversity on campuses. There’s work to be done but what students learned in the 1960s, according to Bradley, is that they could organize and speak up for themselves and, just as importantly, that there was nothing particularly sacred—then or now—about Ivy League traditions. Students at Brown continue the work, ensuring that history is neither forgotten nor erased.

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27 What a Two-Part Title Is A two-part title previews a piece of writing for a reader and helps a writer make meaning from drafting through revision.

Nicholas Carr is an American writer who has written several books about the impact of technology on business and culture. Three of his most popular books have these titles. i The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google i The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains i The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us What do you notice about the form of these titles? As you can see, each has two parts, separated by a colon. In academic writing, such two-part titles are extremely common, almost to the point of being a cliché. In the February 2015 issue of College Composition and Communication, a professional journal, three of the four major articles have two-part titles. In the March 30, 2017, online version of The New England Journal of Medicine, three of the four main articles have two-part titles. There’s a reason beyond convention that two-part titles are so common. They have meaning for the reader and help to make meaning for the writer.

ACCESS POINT Think about the writing the titles of some recent books you’ve read that aren’t textbooks. How did the titles of these books help you, as the reader, make meaning?

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Two-part titles suggest the subject and the writer’s take Each part of a two-part title may be a word, a phrase, or even a sentence, in the form of a statement or question. The two parts have a rhetorical relationship, which means that each part of the title shapes the meaning of the other. Generally, one part offers an insight into the main claim of the author or indicates the author’s perspective. At the same time, it may pique the interest of the reader. This part informs the reader of the main point or angle of the author. The other part generally describes the topic and may include an indication of the methodology. This part informs the reader of the subject. The title of Carr’s 2014 book is The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us. Imagine if the book had only one half of the title. The Glass Cage That sounds like the title of a novel. A reader would not know what the book was about or what type of book it was. What about the other half. How Our Computers Are Changing Us By itself, this title is straightforward enough, but it doesn’t offer any insight into what the book is saying about that change. Is the change a good thing? A scary thing? In what ways? The first half of the title offers that information. The Glass Cage suggests that the Internet, by changing us, is putting us inside a virtual glass cage. What are the implications of that? You’ll have to read the book to find out, but I doubt anyone wants to be inside a cage, virtual or otherwise. And since the cage is glass, we may not even know we’re in it. So, the two-part title gives readers enough information to know both what the book is about and something about the author’s take on the subject. Let’s look at an academic title. In The New England Journal of Medicine from March 30, 2017, one of the articles is titled “From Trial to Target Populations: Calibrating Real-World Data.” Here, the second part of the title tells us what the subject is, calibrating real-world data, and the first part tells us something about the main point, how calibrating real-world data can move us from a trial to a target population.

Tentative titles as part of the writing process The value of a two-part title is that it lets the reader know both what the subject of the article or book is, and it gives a hint about the main point the author will make about the subject. For a writer, a two-part title has equally great value but in different ways. Conceiving of and revising a 170

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two-part title allows the writer to focus her thinking through every stage of the writing process, from early hypothetical musings to final polishing. Early in the writing process, a writer probably doesn’t know what she wants to say and even less what her final conclusions or main claim will be. She might have a tentative idea that allows her to begin to plot a way forward, but it’s only tentative. When asked, she might not even be able to say why she’s interested in the subject. She just is. And this is where a title can help her. Let’s say the writer has been reading something in her English class about the effects of the digital revolution on communication, and then she notices that everyone in her house has their devices with them all the time, her brother and sister especially. She begins to suspect that the relationships between parents and kids may have changed since her parents were kids as a result of these devices. So, she has a subject, and it can form half her title. The Effects of the Digital Revolution on Family Dynamics That sounds pretty smart, though her instructor suggests it’s probably way too large to stand on its own. It would take an entire book to cover such a broad subject, something that Nicholas Carr might one day write. Still, it’s a start because it lays out her subject. But what might she want to say about the subject? She doesn’t know, but she does have a sort of question. She wonders if the reliance on electronic devices means kids don’t talk to their parents as much as they used to in the past. Her brother and sister seem to be on their phones all the time, texting, Instagramming, playing games, or watching videos. When her parents want to communicate with them, they text, like everyone else. This makes her wonder whether kids actually prefer to text rather than talk to their parents. Now she has the basis for a tentative two-part title. The Effects of the Digital Revolution on Family Dynamics: Would Kids Rather Text than Talk to Their Parents? Now, that seems kind of interesting and seems to give her a line of inquiry and even a tentative thesis. Her question is whether the accessibility of digital devices and social media has changed the family dynamics such that kids would rather text than talk to their parents. Her research will aim to find out if so, in what ways, and what that might mean. The title is a working title and is designed to do work for her. Moreover, she can revise the title as she works to better fit the project. The important thing is that working on her title now has spurred some thinking and given her 171

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research some direction. She has a clear subject and a question to ask of that subject, and maybe she even has a tentative answer. These form a line of inquiry that can drive her research and the rest of her writing.

Two-part titles change to reflect a new focus As our college writer works on her project, conducting research, taking notes, interrogating evidence, roughing out an outline, and drafting, she looks at her title from time to time. The title can remind her of what her main line of inquiry is, but it can also be revised to reflect her thinking as it evolves. Let’s say that as she is gathering evidence and evaluating it, she finds that her research leads her in a different direction, suggesting that texting with friends is replacing talking with parents. That is, she suspected that teens text their parents instead of talking to them, but her research now is suggesting that texting friends is replacing talking to parents. In short, friends are becoming even more counselors and guides than before, roles traditionally associated with parents. She revises her title to something like this. The Digital Revolution and Family Dynamics: Kids Would Rather Text Their Friends than Talk to Their Parents This new title indicates a revised tentative claim about the subject and it suggests her growing certainty; the second part of the title is no longer a question but an assertion. Now she continues with her research and drafting. Soon, an even greater sense of certainty arises, and she senses she has her main point, that both parents and teens suffer when teens text their friends for guidance in a way that was traditionally the role of parents. So, she revises her title accordingly to something like this. Teens Texting Friends and Parental Roles: How Parents and Teens Both Lose Now the title better presents the more narrowed focus of her research, not the entire digital revolution but only texting and only among teens. And the title better presents her main claim, that both parents and teens suffer as a result. This new title can help her revise her writing to be sure everything leads to and supports her main idea. Two-part titles orient readers by letting them know both the subject of an article or book and the author’s take on the subject. For writers, two-part titles can both spur and refine thinking in the early stages of writing. The two-part title changes to reflect the development of the writer’s thinking and helps clarify the writer’s focus, serving as a focal point for drafting and revising.

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ACTION POINTS If you have access to a paper you’ve written, or can recall one easily, consider the title. Was it in two parts? If so, how well do those two parts work in relation to the ideas proposed in this chapter? If the title was of one part, would a two-part title have worked better? With your partner’s help, try to revise the title now into a more effective two-part title. Now, what changes to the paper might you have made, if any, had you had that two-part title then? Work with a classmate or two. Take a look online, via Amazon or The New York Times, at the titles of a half-dozen non-fiction bestsellers. How many have two-part titles? Do the two parts of the titles match the rhetorical functions described here? Choose one to analyze. What do the two parts do? With a classmate or two, go online and research “how to write a title for an essay.” What suggestions can you find? Which seem helpful and which don’t? Which of the ideas support what is written here and which do not? In a paragraph or two, write out your own tentative theory and approach to writing a title. Put those into practice for a project you are or soon will be working on. Include the title in any peer-review activity associated with the project or get input from a writing center tutor. The next time you are near your bookstore, peruse the titles of the textbooks. How many have two-part titles? Jot down the titles of a few that seem to fit the ideas presented in this chapter. Are there any books with two-part titles that deviate from the principles laid out here? What might those suggest about how to write an effective title?

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28 What a Thesis Is A thesis is an idea in the form of a question or hypothesis that drives writing from uncertainty toward certainty, often culminating in a statement, the thesis statement, of the one main idea. Annie Dillard, an American essayist, begins her book The Writing Life with a metaphor about writing that can be very useful to college writers. When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner’s pick, a woodcarver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year. You make the path boldly and follow it fearfully. You go where the path leads. At the end of the path, you find a box canyon. You hammer out reports, dispatch bulletins. The writing has changed, in your hands, and in a twinkling, from an expression of your notions to an epistemological tool. The new place interests you because it is not clear. You attend. In your humility, you lay down the words carefully, watching all the angles. Perhaps the central term in this beautiful passage is “epistemological.” Epistemology is the study and theory of knowledge, focused mainly on distinguishing between justifiable belief and mere opinion or prejudice. Writing, according to Dillard, is a tool to explore what is not clear about your notions or ideas, moving closer and closer to, but perhaps never quite reaching, knowledge.

epistemology the study and theory of knowledge, focused mainly on distinguishing between justifiable belief and opinion or prejudice

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A thesis starts with a question At the heart of Dillard’s description is the implicit assertion of a purposeful pursuit of understanding, which begins as a mere “notion,” as Dillard suggests, or a full-blown hypothesis. This forward momentum, which moves a writer from possibility toward certainty, can be called the thesis. Many students are often under the impression that they have to come up with a thesis before they can do their research. The purpose of research then becomes a scavenger hunt to search for evidence that “proves” the thesis, rather than an exploration in which evidence is used to test a tentative thesis, possibly for revision, and the tentative thesis is used to question evidence and drive the search for more. In short, writing is no longer an epistemological tool, as Dillard describes it, but a blunt instrument to hammer home a pre-conceived notion. Because the thesis statement in published writing, including finished writing by students, often appears at the beginning of a paper, such as at the end of the first paragraph or the end of an introduction, it’s easy to assume that the thesis must have come first in the writing process. Students then are told to come up with a thesis statement and then find evidence to back it up in order to write the body of the essay, as if the essay were an empty box waiting for content to fill it up.

ACCESS POINT If you were to use a metaphor to describe writing in college, what would it be? A road trip? A wrestling match? Diving for pearls? Where would the thesis fit in this metaphor? What function would it have? What place?

The nature of the writing process tells us that such an approach is difficult and limiting. Writers “lay out a line of words,” as Dillard says, searching for certainty from a position of uncertainty, testing out evidence, trying out claims. Moreover, much of this writing might be happening off the page, in journals researchers keep, in rough drafts that never see the light of day, in notes written on scraps of paper, in ruminations a writer might have while riding the bus to or from campus or work. Later, much more exploring might happen in drafting of more formal writing, yet even here, writers are always “watching all the angles,” as Dillard says. hypothesis

A thesis often evolves

a proposed explanation made to drive further gathering of evidence

Writers and researchers generally start with a question, which may or may not suggest a tentative answer, which may be formulated as a hypothesis. This question or this tentative answer then drives the

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interrogation of evidence, testing both the evidence against the tentative thesis and testing the thesis against the evidence. If the evidence is solid and matches the tentative thesis, good. If not, either the evidence has to be questioned or, more likely, the tentative thesis has to be revised. And the writer keeps going in this way, to the next piece of evidence, the next revision of the thesis. In this way the thesis evolves. We sometimes see an evolving thesis statement rise to the surface of a text in a longer piece. This surfacing might be indicated by a statement such as “It would appear, then, that our original hypothesis of X must be modified in order to accommodate this new evidence” or “While earlier I had suggested X1, now I would have to argue X2.” Most of the time, such statements are not explicit in the text, though a writer knows when his views are shifting. The development of the thesis may also rise to the surface of a text in the form of rhetorical questions. Rhetorical questions for writers are questions in a text that drive both the thinking of the writer and, later, the understanding of the reading. Rhetorical questions are metatextual in that they drive the thinking of the text rather than the subject (see the chapter on what metatext is). Meaning, they provide an explicit structuring of thought that can guide thinking. They’re useful in that they can act as guideposts, leading your thinking and developing your thesis as it evolves in directions and ways that it might not otherwise go. Another way an evolving thesis may rise to the surface of a text is in explicit statements. In the discussion of what a claim is (see the chapter on evidence), we looked at how some writers explicitly state their claim and then their revised claim. A statement like, “My claim is . . .” might be followed later by a sentence like this, “My more comprehensive claim is . . .” Such check-ins with the reader serve to keep the reader clear on where the main line of a complicated and developing argument is, and they serve the writer in drafting and revision in the same way, keeping him clear on his main line of reasoning.

A thesis statement culminates reasoning and thinking A thesis begins with a question but culminates at some point in a final answer, however tentative. As the writer feels comfortable with the more or less certainty he has achieved, or as the writer realizes that certainty is not to be had and he must make some sense of that, a single idea arises that seems to respond to the questions he has pursued and the fit of the evidence he has examined. He then writes his idea out in a thesis statement. 177

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The writing out of this thesis statement may be the first time he has come to this conclusion. In fact, following the thesis through the twists and turns of thought, the multiplicity of evidence and the multiple views of that evidence, he didn’t know what the final thesis statement would be until he arrived at it. Only then did he write it down. Then, it became a thesis statement, which stands as his final word on all that he has done. The writer then decides how and where, or even if, to incorporate the thesis statement in his writing. In some Asian cultures, it is considered rude in many writing situations to state the thesis directly, as it suggests that the reader needs help to understand the main idea. In most academic disciplines in the United States, direct thesis statements are encouraged or even required. The genre and the discipline each have their own expectations, and the writer may choose how to incorporate the thesis statement for rhetorical effect. Finally, the thesis statement becomes a kind of tool in the revision process, helping the writer to assess the movement of thought recorded in the draft. The writer revises paragraphs and sentences to clarify the movement of thought toward the culminating thesis statement. This work may appear, in the final product, to be reversed, with the thesis statement coming at the beginning of the written text and the evidence then “backing it up.” But that is not the way that writers, nor a thesis, work. A thesis is a question that drives a writer toward fuller understanding of a subject. It begins as a question, evolves as new evidence or ideas arise, often developing off the page but sometimes rising to the surface of the text, and culminates, often in a thesis statement, which may or may not be explicit and which the writer uses for revision and then places strategically in her writing according to disciplinary, genre, or rhetorical needs.

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ACTION POINTS Share with three other classmates what you have been taught about writing a thesis, everything from when in the process a thesis was to be developed, to how a thesis was or wasn’t to be revised, to how many parts a thesis was supposed to have. In your discussion, do two things: First, try to figure out why that advice or those rules were given. Second, see what of that advice or those rules might be useful if modified. Listen to a feature science article on National Public Radio. How does the journalist guide the story? Does it seem there’s a question driving the pursuit toward some conclusion? What does the journalist do with the evidence, such as expert opinions, statistics, and facts? Is there a final, culminating statement, akin to a thesis statement? Where is it? If it’s not explicit, what is the thesis statement that is implied? Do some research online for “how to write a thesis statement” or “what is a thesis?” What do you find that is helpful? What contradicts and what supports what is written here? How many ideas suggest that a thesis is formulated before the drafting of the paper? Finally, what can you take, and what must you reject, from what you’ve found? Think about the other courses you’re taking that require writing assignments. How many have expectations for explicit thesis statements located in particular places in a paper? How many accept implicit thesis statements? How do they define a thesis? Share your results and draw some conclusions about the relationship between working with a thesis and writing and incorporating a thesis statement.

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29 What Summary, Paraphrase, and Quotation Are Summary, paraphrase, and quotation are the three ways to bring the ideas of others into your own writing. Imagine certain scientists are trying to figure out if ESP (extra-sensory perception) really exists. You’ve stumbled upon an article in The New York Times titled “Journal’s Paper on ESP Expected to Prompt Outrage.” As a math or psychology major, you’re interested by the arguments over the use of statistics to make the claims. Since you have a writing assignment coming up, you decide to look into this. You do all the reading time allows and start to put together your paper. You know that you have to talk about what’s written before you can talk about your own analysis of the situation. How do you do that? How do you bring material from this source and others into your paper? You have only three choices: summary, paraphrase, and quotation.

Summary is a briefer recounting of main ideas A summary is a briefer, objective recounting, in your own words, of all the main ideas of a text or part of that text, such as a paragraph or section of an article, a scene in a movie, or a chapter in a book. In other words, a summary presents the main ideas of a source, and any essential evidence or examples, in original language. Your summary might include a very brief quotation or paraphrase as needed to do this. A good summary does more than simply present or describe the main ideas and key evidence. It captures the reasoning that links those ideas.

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In this sense, it is an analytical summary, since it shows the results of your mind analyzing the structure of the source and presenting your understanding. An analytical summary would include words like “because” and “therefore,” words which show the logical relationship among ideas, rather than words like “also” or “next,” which indicate the temporal relationship, that is, where they exist in time as a reader reads, among the ideas. In general, analytical summaries have greater value than descriptive summaries.

ACCESS POINT Think about the writing you’ve already done in college. Maybe you had to write an admissions essay? A placement essay? A research paper? A lab report? How did you know how to do that? What experiences did you draw upon and how? What did you have to do differently?

literature review a summary, evaluation, or synthesis of published research in a particular subject area

You can also think of a literature review as a type of summary. A literature review is often used in the social sciences and humanities. Each discipline has its own methodology for conducting a literature review, but the best way to begin regardless of your end product is to become familiar with current works in the field so you can decide what to collect and evaluate, assessing the materials for their relevance to your topic. They also help writers narrow their topics and gather evidence. Literature reviews utilize summary and synthesis, which we’ll discuss in a following chapter.

Quotation presents memorable language directly quotation taking the exact words from a text, setting them in quotation marks, and using them in a text

Quotation, as you probably already know, means taking the exact words from a text and putting them inside quotation marks. In general, there are three good reasons to quote something: the powerful, apt, or memorable phrase that would be diluted by paraphrase or summary, the surprising statistic or fact, and the expert’s opinion. These are in order of importance; that is, it’s always a good idea to quote the memorable phrase, but you have to make a choice with the others. For example, in “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King Jr., writes, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” You likely recognize that as memorable not just for what it says but how it says it. In fact, it’s so memorable that it has been reproduced on bumper stickers and engraved in building cornerstones. If you tried to paraphrase it, that is, put it in your own words, you might get the main idea, but you’d lose much of the power. Here, quotation is the best option.

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Similarly, an apt phrase is one which is very precise and which would become vague or even misleading if put in other words. For example, in an environmental science class, you might look at the wintering of honeybees and read, “A winter cluster can be thought of as a ball of bees dissected by sheets of honeycomb.” It would be very difficult to rephrase and retain the precision found in “a ball of bees dissected by sheets of honeycomb.” The precision of that phrase makes it a good candidate to quote. The other two reasons mentioned, the surprising statistic or fact and the expert’s opinion, are more open to your interpretation. Mainly, you want to quote these if the accuracy of your paraphrase may be questioned. Also, an expert’s opinion is just that, an opinion belonging to someone else. Through quotation, you can present that person’s opinion as a piece of evidence needing interpretation. Remember that when you include a quotation, you are giving up the stage and letting someone else speak. This should be done sparingly. Quoting directly is fine from time to time and is appropriate in certain genres. Podcasts, for example, often intersperse multiple voices, where the actual sound of different voices creates a sense of authenticity and, thus, authority for the producer. But in academic writing, you want to use quotations sparingly and strategically.

Paraphrase recasts an idea into original language Essentially, to paraphrase means to recast a statement or phrase into original language of about the same length. This means you would present the idea from a sentence in a sentence of your own or a paragraph in a paragraph of your own. There are three common reasons to paraphrase.

paraphrase to recast a statement or phrase into original language of about the same length

First, claims in an argument, the key ideas, often won’t necessarily be in memorable words or apt phrases, so it doesn’t make sense to quote them. Paraphrasing allows you to maintain a strong writing voice while showing you have mastery over your source material. Second, ideas from very technical fields, such as medicine and theoretical mathematics, are often expressed in highly technical language. You may want to rephrase those ideas into more accessible language for your audience. Thirdly, you might be working with older texts, for example, economic theories from the eighteenth century. Unless you want to capture the flavor of the times through quoting the exact language, you’d rephrase archaic language into your own words. As with a summary, you might include a very brief quotation, even just a word or two, in your paraphrases. Let’s take a look at an example of each of these by looking at a paragraph from The New York Times article mentioned above, “Journal’s Paper on 183

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ESP Expected to Prompt Outrage,” which reports on the response to the work of Dr. Daryl J. Bem. The article explains the point of debate: Some scientists say the report deserves to be published, in the name of open inquiry; others insist that its acceptance only accentuates fundamental flaws in the evaluation and peer review of research in the social sciences. How would you get this into your paper? Is it quotable? Some of the phrases may be but you wouldn’t want to quote the whole thing. Should you summarize it? It seems pretty short already. A good approach would be to combine paraphrase with quotation. Here’s one possibility. According to Carey, scientists are split over whether to publish the paper. Some say it should be published “in the name of open inquiry”; others say it shouldn’t because publishing it would emphasize “fundamental flaws” in how social science research is evaluated and peer reviewed. You’ll notice that I’ve mentioned the author of the source, Carey, and then given the main ideas of the sentence. I’ve quoted the two phrases that get at the core of the argument, “open inquiry” and “fundamental flaws,” because these phrases seem to locate the emotion behind the argument as well, something that might be lost in a paraphrase. The original is 36 words long. The paraphrase, less the tag, “According to Carey,” is 42. Pretty close. A summary is a brief rephrasing of the main points of a longer text in original language, while an analytical summary indicates the reasoning inherent in the piece. A summary often includes brief quotation and paraphrase. A quotation is a presentation of the original language of a text, from a word to a paragraph or more, generally embedded in your own sentence. Apt or memorable phrases are quoted as are surprising statistics or facts and experts’ opinions. A paraphrase is a rephrasing of a text in original language of about the same length and may contain very brief quotation. Non-memorable, technical, or archaic language are usually paraphrased.

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ACTION POINTS Write a short summary of this chapter. Follow your usual practices or the practices suggested here. Your summary should have at least a sentence for each section and important details. Finally, your summary should have a single sentence that gives the one, main idea. Quote very sparingly and include phrases that remind the reader that you’re summarizing. With a few colleagues, take a look at various websites, such as wikiHow, on how to quote, how to paraphrase, and how to summarize. Present anything you’ve found that’s new or questionable there. Then sum up what you’ve learned, from this chapter, your research, and your prior knowledge, about these concepts. What will you try to do differently in your next writing project? Find an article in The New York Times science section online that looks interesting. With a partner, read the article and underline or highlight those phrases that seem likely candidates to be quoted. Find main ideas in sentences that might be paraphrased and underline or highlight them. Finally, mark any paragraphs that contain big ideas that you might condense into a sentence or so of summary. Compare with your partner: What might be quoted and why? Paraphrased? Summarized? Writing in the sciences tends to downplay quotation when compared with writing in other disciplines. Reflect on writings in a discipline you choose, and determine the frequency of quoting practices. What does this tell you about student writing practices in this discipline? Do you think they differ from professional writings?

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30 What Analyze, Report, and Respond Mean Analyze, report, and respond are three critical moves in academic writing: to take apart a text, to describe what you find, and to extend the ideas. A favorite assignment of a professor who teaches introductory psychology starts off with this question: “How do psychologists look at the issue of spanking?” The assignment asks students to read and analyze two or three peer-reviewed articles and several popular but credible websites, report on what they find, and finally offer a response to the lead question. For students new to the academy, that turns out to be a lot to do. Locating and reading pertinent peer-reviewed articles is difficult enough (see the chapter on academic databases), but even more difficult are the main rhetorical moves embedded in the assignment. If student writers are not clear on what analyze, report, and respond mean, they’ll likely be stumped on how to fill the four pages.

ACCESS POINT Nearly all of us have had to write a book report in school at some point. But what did you have to do to complete that report? What were the expectations? In other words, how much was embedded in that word, “report”?

Analysis breaks the whole into constituent parts In the second chapter on responding to rhetorical situations, we defined analysis as “in writing, breaking down a complex concept into smaller topics to enhance understanding and advance knowledge of the concept.” That may not seem terribly helpful, but there’s a clue in it. The goal of your

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work in analysis should be to understand structure. Structure indicates the arrangement and relationship of the parts of a coherent whole. The parts of a television commercial, for example, might include the images used, any text offered, the soundtrack, and any narrative voice-over. The parts of a song include melody, rhythm, lyrics, and arrangement. Your job in analysis is to identify the parts of whatever you’re analyzing and then understand the relationship among those parts. How do they work together? In the commercial, for example, you’d explain how the soundtrack supports the images, how any written text is used to shape the message, how the images are sequenced to tell a story, and how the narrative voice-over works with all the other parts. In the psychology assignment, we’d want to look at the peer-reviewed articles and the popular websites (such as WebMD and that of the American Psychological Association) and analyze them. To do that, we’d want to identify their constituent parts: What are the claims made in each? What is the evidence? Are there anecdotes? Statistics? How are the claims qualified? Are there rebuttals? Are there recommendations included?

ACCESS POINT Gerald Graff, in “Hidden Intellectualism,” says that we grow up analyzing all the time, such as when we argue about which sporting team is better. We break the team down into its parts and compare and contrast, assessing how well the parts fit together. The same thing underlies the talent shows popular now, such as America’s Got Talent or The Voice. What kinds of things do you analyze with your friends? Sports? Movies? Reality television? Video games? What kinds of analyses do you do? What do you pay attention to and how do you measure the whole?

To do this more efficiently, it might make sense to apply to the articles and websites a theoretical lens, such as the terms ethos, logos, pathos, and kairos, or some other method, such as Toulmin’s model. These allow you to more easily identify the parts and to explain their relationships consistently. Further, as part of your analysis, you should pay attention to how the parts fit together. Are the claims carefully qualified to account for studies that are less than conclusive? Are the claims in the popular websites more definitive because the evidence is presented in a general way and so appears more conclusive? Are anecdotes used in the popular sources and if so to what effect? Often, you are charged with coming up with some kind of assessment, your own claim, about the fit between the parts in making the whole. In that case, you’re providing a more critical analysis. 188

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For the psychology assignment, remembering your position as a relative beginner in the academy, it would be difficult to argue that the claims don’t match the evidence in the peer-reviewed articles or that the arguments presented there are weak. However, since you are the appropriate audience for the popular websites, and since you have some background from the peer-reviewed articles you reviewed, you do have the expertise to argue that the fit between the anecdotes and the recommendations, or the evidence and the claims, are or are not effective and to what degree.

Reporting suggests objective presentation Whereas analyzing means breaking a whole into its constituent parts and understanding the relationship among those parts, reporting suggests a more or less objective presentation of your understanding. Since the main goal of the academy is to understand and explain, not necessarily to judge, it’s usually best to write a report without judgment words, such as good or bad, right or wrong, and should or shouldn’t. Instead, you use words that show the logical connections among different parts. Common words used to do this include support, imply, explain, present, demonstrate, counter, question, explore, corroborate, cause, and influence. These all show a dynamic, not static, relationship among the parts. That is, Part A stands in some dynamic relation to Part B, not just statically beside it on the page or in the lab.

report a type of writing that presents objective understanding of a subject through explaining or exploring

Generally, you want to avoid relying solely on time words, such as next, follows, then, and after. Even in describing a process, one step follows another for a reason. The time word only tells us the sequence, not the reasoning. In the lab report, for example, in describing your process, you might say, “Next, we added the soil sample to distilled water.” However, you would do better to indicate the reasoning for the action: “Next, in order to determine the salinity of the soil, we mixed the sample with distilled water.” Here, “in order to” indicates the logical relation between this step and the previous one.

Responding presents the significance of your findings In the psychology assignment, you’re asked at the end to respond to what you’ve found, though the word used might be close, such as assess, reflect, or speculate. Too often, students take that task to mean that they get to say what they think or give their opinion. In a general sense, that’s not entirely wrong, but it’s vitally important to understand that what college writers are being asked to do is extrapolate from their analysis to offer some assessment about the importance or value of their findings.

respond to offer an assessment, reflection, or speculation of the significance of new knowledge

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What they are not being asked to do is take a side, make a judgment, or offer advice or to go beyond what the evidence they’ve presented in their analysis warrants. A good way to start thinking about a response is to ask the question, “So, what?” Notice the comma in that question. This isn’t “so what?” as in “who cares?” Rather, this phrase implies something more. “So, this is what we know. in college writing, assessing the value Now, what’s the significance of it?” We might say that significance between two points of assesses the value between two points of knowledge. knowledge significance

Four common ways to respond that explores the significance of your findings are these: i What you’ve found versus what you used to think i What you’ve found versus what is commonly thought i What you’ve found versus what you might do in the future i What you’ve found versus what could have been found For the psychology assignment, you can look at what you’ve found in your analysis and compare it to what you used to think before you did this assignment. What did you learn that surprised you? What did you learn that didn’t surprise but nonetheless deepened your understanding? What effect will this new knowledge have on you, not just regarding this one issue but other psychology-related issues? Here, you’re responding by exploring the space between yourself now and yourself before. You can also explore the significance between what you’ve found and what you understand as common belief. What did you learn that seems to contradict what most people, in your experience, believe? What did you learn that supports what many people believe but not necessarily in the way they might know? What does this say about the actions and beliefs that are commonly held? This approach might best be accomplished by tying the common beliefs to one or two key holders of those beliefs, such as a family member or friend. Here, you’re responding by exploring the space between the findings and the world as you know it.

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Another way to respond would be to explore the significance between what you’ve found and what you think you might do with the knowledge in the future. How might you approach similar issues you may face, such as limiting screen time for yourself or children? How might you read popular websites differently? How likely will you be to seek out peer-reviewed articles to inform yourself? Here, you’re extending what you learned from this activity into similar activities. This response is similar to the first, in which you compared what you know now to what you knew before, but it flips the focus to contrasting a sense of your future self now with a future self without the knowledge you just gained.

Chapter 30 • What Analyze, Report, and Respond Mean

A more challenging way to respond because it requires greater expertise is to contrast what was found with what could have or should have been found. What is the reliability of the conclusions that psychologists have reached? What is the credibility of the recommendations, given the basis on which they are made? How then should the popular websites be read? Here, you’re responding by exploring the space between the findings and other findings or your developed sense of some ideal. In a sense, you are assessing the overall coherence and credibility of the research. In all of these responses, you are firmly grounding your discussion in the findings of your analysis as you’ve reported them, but you’re moving outward toward their meaning relative to other ideas or other realms of knowledge. Ultimately, to respond means to ask what value, impact, or importance your findings might have on you and the larger world. Analysis breaks the whole into parts and explains the relationship among those parts. A critical analysis assesses the effectiveness of the fit of all those parts, supporting a statement about the effectiveness of the whole. Reporting suggests an objective presentation of your analysis of an event, experience, or phenomenon. Responding offers an assessment of the significance of the new knowledge, often by relating it to what the writer knew before, to what is commonly believed, to what the knowledge may mean to the writer in the future, or to what the new knowledge indicates about the existing field of knowledge. Having a clear understanding of these modes of thought allows a writer to respond effectively to many writing situations.

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ACTION POINTS With a partner or two, take a look at a piece of writing you have completed recently, in this or another class. Read the conclusion section, whether that’s a paragraph or several paragraphs. Using the concept of responding, analyze that conclusion. What does it do with the knowledge you gained or presented in the writing? How well does it do it? Why did you choose to write the conclusion in the way you did? What might you do differently now, if you were to revise the paper? With a partner or two, look in a newspaper or online at a movie review and read it critically. How much of the review can be called reporting, how much analyzing, and how much responding or exploring the significance or importance of the movie? Recognizing that a movie review is a genre, how can you describe, using the concepts of analyze, report, and respond, the expected characteristic features of that genre? Using your library’s online database, locate a research article in your discipline and skim its overall structure. Is reporting dominant in certain places? How about analyzing and responding? How can you tell? In what ways does the author use analysis, reporting, and responding to further her argument? With a group of colleagues, analyze writing assignments in your other courses. How much analyzing, reporting, and responding do the assignments ask you to do? How much is explicit and how much implicit?

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Alta Gracia Apparel Company Alta Gracia is an apparel company located in the Dominican Republic and pays its workers a livable wage, which is defined by the Worker Rights Consortium as the wage necessary to provide a family of four adequate food, shelter, and healthcare. In the Dominican Republic, that means paying workers about three and a half times what the average apparel worker makes in that country. The company was founded by Donnie Hodge and Joe Bozich in response to student demands. At Georgetown University, for example, students joined forces to condemn the sale of university apparel produced in sweatshops around the world. At Harvard, students conducted research and found evidence of gross pay inequity. They found that a baseball cap bearing the university logo retailed for about twenty dollars and yet was produced by workers earning between forty and sixty dollars a month. On average, only eight cents of the price of the cap went to the worker. More and more colleges, from the University of Minnesota to Temple, are responding to student demands and carrying Alta Gracia apparel. Similar movements by students to force their colleges to divest from the fossil fuel, tobacco, and firearm industries are part of a long tradition of students analyzing, reporting on, and responding to the world Temple University is among the many schools that now source their branded merchandise using Alta Gracia. around them. We can understand these movements by applying the concepts of ethos, logos, and pathos. How is the ethos of the college affected if it stands for social justice and equity but profits off the labor of children? What is the evidence that supports claims that disinvestment is not only the humane but the reasonable move? Finally, how might arguments be presented to appeal to the sense of rightness and empathy in each of us? 193

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31 What Synthesizing Means Synthesizing means working with and on source material, often finding and making a claim about relationships among and within various sources. Carl Jung, the twentieth-century psychologist, explained part of his reasoning behind his break with Sigmund Freud. “If there is a ‘psychoanalysis’ there must also be a ‘psychosynthesis.’” Implicit in that statement is the juxtaposition of the terms analysis and synthesis. The first suggests breaking into parts, as we’ve seen. The second implies putting things back together. Often, when professors assign writing, they expect analysis and synthesis, though they don’t always say so. However, much of your credibility as a writer in the academy depends on your ability to synthesize the ideas of others. Essentially, synthesizing means working with and on ideas found in sources in one of three ways: Lining up sources that agree and explaining that agreement, juxtaposing sources that conflict in some way and exploring the nature of that conflict, and working on a single idea to make something more of it.

synthesis working through the ideas of sources as evidence to develop claims

ACCESS POINT If you’ve been trained to write a five-paragraph essay and have been told to bring in sources from research, what was your goal in bringing in that research? Was it mainly to support your claims? What did you do if you found research that didn’t support your ideas or which conflicted with other findings?

Lining up sources that agree An approachable means of synthesizing sources is by adding them up, that is, taking two or more sources that you assess as agreeing and

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showing their agreement. Though straightforward, this is an important move in academic writing because it establishes a known context. And it’s useful for making non-controversial claims valid by providing sufficient evidence. Here’s an example adapted from a research paper written on the history of human cloning. The proposed practice of cloning human embryos presented a very complicated issue. Rick Weiss, in “Two Studies Bolster Stem Cells’ Use in Fighting Disease,” says the debate over cloning organs was “mired in political controversy” because stem cells used in cloning research came from human embryos, a process which destroyed them. Beyond their opposition to the destruction of embryos, opponents worried that if cloning was allowed for stem cell research, the boundaries of what cloning would be allowed for become would be less defined. Leon Kass, chairman of then-President Bush’s bioethics council, said, “Today, cloned blastocysts for research; tomorrow, cloned blastocysts for baby-making” (qtd. in Hall), suggesting that cloning humans was right around the corner. President Bush rescinded federal funding for stem cell research in 2005, claiming that he did not wish to be involved in the destruction of embryos (Weiss). Essentially, this writer has taken complementary claims by experts and lined them up under a fairly obvious claim: “it’s complicated.” Visually, the argument might look like this. EVIDENCE 1 “mired in politics”

EVIDENCE 2 uncertainty about limits of cloning

EVIDENCE 3 Bush rescinded funding

CLAIM Cloning human embryos is a complicated issue.

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Academic readers are generally suspicious of claims made based on one piece of evidence. Even in presenting something non-controversial, such as saying an issue is “complicated,” good college writers present multiple sources that show this, a kind of triangulating. Notice that in this example, three pieces of evidence are provided and woven together.

Juxtaposing sources that conflict A second synthesizing procedure is to set two pieces of evidence beside one other and make sense of any tension, whether that’s a contradiction or correction or complication. In the example below, adapted from a research paper that explored developments in governmental policies on sex education, a claim made by a journalist is juxtaposed with other evidence. The claim arises from making sense of the conflict. Some discussions about federal funding of sex education were not necessarily straightforward. Back in 2002, Nicholas D. Kristof, in The New York Times, wrote that “for all the carnage in President Bush’s budget, one program is being showered with additional cash—almost three times as much as it got in 2001. It’s ‘abstinence only’ sex education.” While it’s true that abstinence-only sex education funding was increased three times during the Bush years, taken out of context, the statement is misleading. According to the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and citing government reports, contraception and other pregnancy prevention programs at the time were funded at $1.73 billion while abstinence only received $144.1 million, roughly a 12:1 ratio. Increasing the abstinence portion by three times did not reverse the balance, though Kristof ’s language, “showered with additional cash,” suggested so. While the merits of abstinence-only sex education were highly contested, to suggest that the Bush administration was reversing federal policy was misleading. In this example, two pieces of evidence are presented that are in conflict with one another, the second offering a stark corrective to the first. The writer, then, stands between the two, presents each, and makes a claim about the meaning of that conflict, that the original

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piece of evidence “was misleading.” Visually, the argument might look like this. EVIDENCE 1 “showered with cash”

VS.

EVIDENCE 2 12:1 ratio

CLAIM Evidence 1 is misleading.

Working on a single source Another way to synthesize a source is to work on a single idea and make something more out of it. Rather than using it as evidence along with other pieces of evidence to say something, you analyze the source itself, contrasting or comparing one piece of evidence from the source with another. This is a common practice in the humanities, where students are often asked to analyze primary documents, such as a film, a painting, or a work of literature. However, it’s also very common when writers work with any kind of popular sources, such as in the social sciences, history, or political science. Here’s an example looking at the research on spanking as presented in a popular source. A recent report on a review of studies conducted over decades on the effects of spanking children offers some interesting results, as reported by Kathleen Doheny. Elizabeth Gershoff, a developmental psychologist at The University of Texas at Austin, who conducted the review, reported that 13 of 17 negative outcomes were linked with spanking, everything from lower cognitive skills to higher aggressiveness. However, four other effects, “immediate defiance, alcohol or substance abuse in childhood, alcohol or substance abuse in adulthood, [and] low self-regulation,” were said to be linked to spanking, though, in Doheny’s words, “the association wasn’t strong enough to be considered statistically significant.” The phrase “wasn’t strong enough to be considered statistically significant” should give us pause. Social scientists, such as Gershoff, use statistical analyses to tell them whether there are any valid connections between the things they are studying. If a connection is not “statistically significant,” it can’t be said to be linked with a sufficient degree of

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confidence. So, while spanking has been linked to many negative outcomes, according to Gershoff, alcohol and substance abuse can’t yet be listed among them, though the presentation in this article suggests otherwise. In this example, the author presents the evidence but then focuses on one aspect of how that evidence is presented, pulls it out for analysis and discussion, and then makes sense of it relative to other aspects of that evidence, showing in this case the possible weakness of the evidence. This analysis of evidence then leads to the claim, that the presentation of the evidence may be misleading. EVIDENCE 1 “linked but not statistically significant”

ANALYSIS OF EVIDENCE 1 Meaning of “not statistically significant”

CLAIM Evidence 1 may be misleading.

Synthesizing sources means working on the ideas of sources as evidence to develop claims, rather than simply pointing to ideas as proof of claims. Synthesizing tends to work in one of three ways. First, writers line up multiple sources that corroborate one another to support a claim. Second, writers juxtapose source material that conflicts and make sense of and assess the significance of the tension. Third, writers work on a single idea from a source, making sense of any problems or pointing out significance as a means of developing their own original idea that goes beyond the piece of evidence.

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ACTION POINTS With a few classmates, talk about a research paper you’ve written recently, and if you have a copy available, use it for analysis. What was your goal in using sources then? Did you have principles you followed? What were they? Has this discussion of synthesizing sources supported, extended, or conflicted with those past practices? How? Do a quick search on “how to synthesize sources,” and skim a variety of websites for tips. Based on information from this chapter and what you’ve found online, write up a paragraph about the most important principles governing synthesizing sources. Share and compare. Locate a peer-reviewed article in the sciences or social sciences, and read the introduction section. How many sources are woven together in each paragraph? Which of the kinds of synthesizing mentioned here are present? Do the authors do something different? What can you say, in general, about the use of source material in introductions of research papers in that field? With two or three classmates, gather information from instructors in different disciplines, such as from different classes you are taking, about the use of credible sources. What does he or she hope students do with those sources? How are sources used in their discipline? You might ask about reporting, analyzing, and critiquing sources, and you might ask to see a sample paper. Share your results. What can you say that the disciplines share in the use of sources?

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Malik discovered that he had a love for Shakespeare when he enrolled in an elective course to complement his CIS training.

Students Never Stop Learning Malik has had a successful business career as a sales manager for a restaurant supply company. He and his wife have two children, one in high school and one in middle school. He earned a bachelor’s degree in business when he was in his 20s and his wife is a pharmacist. When the company he worked for was purchased by a larger firm and the management was restructured, Malik took the opportunity to come back to school for retraining. He looked at his options and found that a computer information systems program at a nearby university was highly regarded. He applied for admission and began college again after more than two decades of work. He found that he enjoyed being a student again and that the CIS program offered a chance to be trained in a rapidly growing field. More importantly, he was excited by the prospect of relying upon skills that his management career had not allowed him to develop. But what surprised Malik was a new passion he discovered. Needing to fill out his schedule, he enrolled in an introductory literature class, the kind of class he’d had no time for nor interest in as an undergraduate the first time. To his surprise, when the class read Macbeth, Malik found he loved Shakespeare. He read literary critics on the various interpretations of the play and found their analysis of how the play has been used over the centuries to reflect and comment upon current political and social events fascinating. He synthesized these sources to write an essay on how his studies of Shakespeare have helped him interpret current social issues that his professor recommended be published in the student literary journal. 201

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32 What Metatext Is Metatext is a layer of text that comments on the main text and can help college writers develop their ideas while guiding readers through an argument.

When a writer makes her thinking visible on the page, the words she uses can be called “metatext.” Metatext can be incredibly valuable in academic writing and may even be an essential quality of academic discourse.

metatext a layer of text that stands above the main text and which comments on the main text

Metatext stands above the main text Writers have long been aware of themselves as writers creating something artificial, and that self-awareness has made it onto the page as far back as Homer’s Odyssey. But such self-awareness really got going when the printing press was invented, which dramatically expanded readership, and then it got an extra boost in postmodern times when an individual’s sense of identity came into question. When that self-awareness gets into the text of fiction, it’s called metafiction. Here’s an example from Laurence Sterne’s eighteenth-century novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman: “In a word, my work is digressive, and it is progressive too—and at the same time . . . .” Here, the author comments on the writing of the story in the middle of the story itself. This layer of commentary stands above the main storyline and serves to create a larger and layered text. Metatext is apparent all around you. When you’re in a conversation and lose your train of thought, you might say, “Where was I?” Then, you’re rising above the current text of your conversation to comment on your position in that conversation before continuing. Similarly, if you’ve ever

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had a friend say, “Tell me if I’m talking too much” or “Does that make sense?” they’re adding a metatext.

ACCESS POINT Think of a television show or a movie in which the actor looks directly at the camera and makes contact with the audience, such as in Netflix’s House of Cards or an earlier show such as Gilligan’s Island. What’s the effect of that move on the audience? Why would such moments be included?

Metatext may offer access to academic discourse Some scholars support the idea that learning the metatext of academic discourse allows students access to that discourse. In other words, they posit that by learning models or templates that show how ideas are structured and represented in language, rather than studying the ideas themselves, students can develop fluency with the structures of academic discourse. The theory is that if students practice the common patterns of academic essays, the content of that thinking will naturally follow. For example, if one of the moves of an academic writer is to accommodate an objection to her argument while still standing her ground, she needs the language to do that. This might look something like “Although I grant that _________ has valid points, I still maintain that ___________ because ____________.” Whether learning about and practicing these moves actually helps a student enter academic discourse has been seriously questioned, as has the validity of the claim that these moves underlie academic discourse. Nonetheless, it’s clear that the structure of thought that underlies academic discourse, when made apparent, can constitute a kind of metatext and that those structures of thought are often not apparent to writers new to the academy. Learning and practicing them may mean easier access to that discourse community. Indeed, the premise of this book is that having access to the concepts that shape the moves of academic discourse, rather than practicing the moves in isolation, provides far greater power to the new writer than merely knowing the moves themselves.

Metatext as rhetorical questions guides thinking In popular culture, the term “rhetorical question” is used pejoratively to refer to a question that has no purpose, makes no sense, or is not worth 204

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the time to consider. But in academic writing, the term can be used to refer to questions that are inherent to the movement of thought and which guide and enhance the thinking. Since rhetorical questions are not the content of the thinking itself but rather stand above the thinking, they are metatextual. Their value is that they can help you further your thinking by developing new ideas, checking the line of reasoning you are on, and finding new lines of inquiry. Many writers find it very useful to write these questions out as they arise. One good strategy that I’ve asked students to apply is to read a first draft of their writing and look for places to apply rhetorical questions. They then can respond to those rhetorical questions, often in new paragraphs, as a means of furthering their thinking. (I often ask them to write these new paragraphs in blue font as a way of showing the development of their thought.) In this way, metatextual elements can act as a heuristic, deepening and expanding their thinking. Here are just a few of the most common rhetorical questions that can guide and enhance your writing. i Why is this so? i How can we know this? i What else might be said about this? i How else might this be seen? i What might critics argue? i How might we respond to critics’ claims? i What can we conclude from this? i How well can we say we know this? i In the end, what can we say for certain? i What significance might this have? Of course, metatext may be included as statements as well, not merely questions, as discussed below. A writer might write, “My reasoning relies upon a huge assumption, however, as is probably apparent.” Here the commentary is about the writer’s reasoning, which spurs a necessary reassessment. However, even here, the statement responds in the form of metatext to a rhetorical question that is implicit: “Am I making an assumption?” Whether you choose to keep these and similar questions or statements in your revised text is up to you, but using them to visibly guide the movement of your thought may make it easier to develop a text in the complex ways the academy values. Reflecting on your thinking and 205

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writing processes in this manner also encourages knowledge transfer, (see the chapter on what knowledge transfer is), and you should actively seek out moments during your writing assignments in all courses to reinforce transfer.

Metatext guides readers For the reader, metatextual phrases can help them follow the writer’s reasoning. Such phrases act as guideposts. At the same time, metatext may help assuage a reader’s objections by showing that the writer is aware of the patterns of their own thinking, the strengths as well as the limitations, which may make the writer seem more credible. Here are just a few examples of the kinds of metatextual phrases that writers often use and which readers respond to positively. i My claim is . . . i My revised claim is . . . i The main evidence supporting this is . . . i However, others may argue differently . . . i While such criticism has merit . . . i Standing back and reflecting upon . . . i However, it’s important not to take things at face value . . . i The value of this is . . . i In the end, we can say that . . . Metatextual elements are commonly found in much of academic writing, but even when it’s not there, the kind of thinking metatextual elements make visible may be an underlying characteristic of academic discourse. Metatext refers to a layer of text that stands above the main text and which comments on the main text. Metatext may constitute the structure of academic discourse and so knowing it may grant access to that discourse community for new writers. Metatext often takes the form of rhetorical questions and sometimes statements in response to those questions. Writers often include metatext in drafts to guide and develop their thinking and may choose to keep the metatext in final drafts. For readers, metatext aids their understanding of the writer’s reasoning and may strengthen the writer’s credibility.

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ACTION POINTS Freewrite for ten minutes on “What I think about college writing so far.” Every time you start to slow down, write out a rhetorical question such as “Why do I think this?” “What might this mean?” “What else might this mean?” or “What might others argue?” Then write to answer those questions. How did the writing go? How different did it feel using rhetorical questions to spur your thinking compared with your normal process of writing out your thoughts? With a colleague, look up the definition of “rhetorical question.” What do you find? How many of the definitions deal solely with style or effect? Can you find any that suggest that rhetorical questions are generative of thought? Historically, there has been a separation between rhetoric and philosophy, to the point where philosophers, such as Plato, argued that rhetoric was inherently immoral since, he claimed, it was not grounded in truth. However, later philosophers and rhetoricians have noted that rhetoric, far from being merely decorative or stylistic, is constitutive of knowledge. The term used to describe this is epistemic rhetoric. With a classmate or two, do some research online to understand the basic premises of epistemic rhetoric, and report on what you find. Based on your knowledge of epistemic rhetoric, research philosophical views of rhetoric and truth. You might also research language and knowledge, whether language is constitutive of knowledge or reflective of knowledge. With your partners, develop your own theory about truth and rhetoric as it pertains to your own sense of yourself as an academic writer.

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33 What Presentation and Design Are Presentation refers to the types of texts writers choose to develop in their compositions, and design refers to how those parts are arranged and displayed; both affect the strength of an argument. “Thin slicing” is a term first used by psychologists Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal to describe how people can make relatively accurate judgments using only a very thin “slice” of information. In a 1993 study, they correlated students’ first impressions of teachers with end-of-semester evaluations. They found a significant correlation, suggesting that students can judge within a few seconds whether a teacher will be effective or not and to what degree. Malcom Gladwell, in his popular 2007 book Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking, presents this and many other aspects of “thin slicing.”

ACCESS POINT Think back to the first day of your English class this semester. When you first saw your instructor, what was your initial impression? What kind of feelings were evoked in you? Why? Have your feelings changed at all? What effect, if any, do you think those feelings had on your assessment of your instructor as a teacher?

Thin slicing pertains to college writers as well. Imagine you’ve worked hard to produce a quality research paper. You’ve planned well, managed your time, found reliable sources, read them critically, taken good notes, woven the material together, drafted and then revised conscientiously. Your final

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paper runs to nearly twenty pages. You print it, staple it, and turn it in to your professor, confident you’ll get the grade your work deserves. Now imagine your professor. She has thirty research papers, all twenty pages long, sitting on the corner of her desk. She has set aside the entire afternoon to get started on them. She reaches for the first one, which happens to be yours, glances at the first page, opens randomly in the middle, and then turns to the references. Immediately, in the blink of an eye, your professor has an impression of you as a writer. How do you wish to appear via this thin “slice” of information your professor has gathered? Knowledgeable of the disciplinary conventions as evident in formatting? A careful and organized thinker as evident in the layout of the page? Or not? That experience exemplifies the power of presentation and design. The way your paper appears has meaning and says something about you as a writer.

Presentation and design are complementary Many textbooks and manuals treat presentation and design together, as part of a single concept. It’s useful to separate the two so that we can see how they work together. presentation how a writer intentionally breaks up the text into certain types and numbers of discrete units

design how a writer lays out a text and what choices the writer makes in the text’s appearance

Presentation has to do with how a writer intentionally breaks up the text into discrete units, how many units there are, and what type. Does the writer use subheadings? Graphs or charts? Are images included and cited properly? Are there text boxes or pull quotes? Are there long paragraphs or short paragraphs? Design has to do with how a writer lays out these different kinds of texts and what choices the writer makes in determining their appearance. What size should the graph be? Where should it be positioned on the page? What colors are used? What about fonts and font sizes? Used together, presentation and design affect the quality and effectiveness of the argument; a good way to understand how is by applying Aristotle’s classical appeals of ethos, logos, and pathos.

Presentation and design affect ethos, logos, and pathos Recall that ethos refers to how credible a writer appears. In this case, the look of the text and layout indicate something about you as a writer. Are you knowledgeable of the disciplinary conventions you are writing in? Do you follow the expected guidelines as laid out in the style you are using, such as APA or MLA? Where you have choices, do you make the most suitable ones for the situation? To do this, you have to be aware of your audience’s 210

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expectations and meet them when you can or, when you choose not to, do so consciously. Logos refers to the logic of an argument. Choosing to present your argument augmented with bar graphs or pie charts could strengthen your persuasiveness. Similarly, a telling quotation in a text box, if effective in the discipline, could add strength to the evidence you are presenting in your main text. While we’ve said that pathos, the emotional appeal of a text, is mistrusted in college writing, it is not absent. Even the appeal to a cool, detached reason, as Standard Written English is sometimes said to promote (and perhaps oppressively), falls under pathos. The choices you make in presentation and design affects the reader’s emotional response. For example, a text broken into many discrete units, with graphs and charts and images, short paragraphs and subheadings, would evoke very different feelings than would a text presented as a solid block of words without paragraph breaks.

Presentation choices shape your argument As a college writer, you have presentation choices to make. Some of those choices are dictated by the style you are following. Every style will tell you what kind of header and page-numbering system to follow. And some, such as APA, will encourage subheadings and so choosing not to use them has an effect, since your reader is familiar with the expectations. Even within subheadings, you have choices to make. The Chicago Manual of Style, for example, recommends subheadings for longer papers and has style guidelines for five levels. How many levels of subheadings do you want and what is the effect? text box

You also have the choice to include graphs and charts, either of your own a presentation tool making or reproduced and cited from another source. You can choose in the form of a box of text set apart from to include images, again your own or borrowed and cited. Two lesser-used options are text boxes and pull-quotes. A text box is, as the name suggests, a box of text set apart from the main text. These can frame additional text that augments the main line of reasoning. Text boxes can be used for apt or lengthy quotations, secondary voices, or even commentary or parallel text, such as text in a different language. Pull quotes are reproductions of key sentences in your main text set apart for emphasis; these are common in many academic journals and nearly all mainstream press, such as articles in The Atlantic magazine.

the main text often used to frame text that augments the main line of reasoning

pull quotes a presentation tool in the form of reproductions of key sentences in a main text set apart for emphasis

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Design choices shape the effectiveness of your argument As a college writer, you also have design choices to make. The style you follow will likely dictate some choices, such as headers and title location, as well as indentation and spacing. But many design decisions will be left to you and the choices you make can affect the quality of your argument. layout how elements of a text, including images, graphs, text features, white space, and presentation choices are organized

The first thing a reader sees in looking at a text is the layout. How are things positioned on the page? Where are graphs, charts, and images placed and of what size? To think about layout, you might use page grids, which divide a page into symmetrical blocks appropriate to the purpose and medium. For college writers, a page might be imagined as broken into six blocks of two columns and three rows. A graph, chart, image, or text box would be placed within one of those blocks. For other media, like PowerPoint, you’d use a different page grid. Closely linked to layout is the use of white space, which refers to the blank portions surrounding any textual element. White space affects the balance of elements on a page. Word-processing programs come with default margins and automatic paragraph spacing, but you have the option to change those if you choose. Again, with other types of media and genres such as infographics, you have the chance to experiment with white space and assess the different effects.

ACCESS POINT In what parts of your life do you consider presentation and design principles? Think about your bedroom, car, or cell phone’s home page. What choices have you made? What effect are you going for? What do you think these choices might say about you to another person?

Most style guidelines have recommendations for fonts. Both APA and Chicago, for example, suggest Times New Roman. Both also recommend 12-point font. But as a college writer, you have the right to make your own decisions, recognizing that your reader has needs and expectations. SERIF: Times New Roman Garamond SANS-SERIF: Helvetica Calibri

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You’ll want to consider whether to use serif or sans-serif. Serif, like Times New Roman, has extended lines at the tops and bases of most letters. Sans-serif, such as Calibri, does not. In general, serif is preferable for print media and sans-serif for electronic media. Note that some style guides do make recommendations about which fonts to use. If ever in doubt, ask your instructor.

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Another decision that you may make is for a different font size for different parts of your text. Style guidelines again may dictate, but you may have options, in which case, you should experiment and explore the effect. Finally, you may have the option to use color, if your medium affords it. You may choose to use different color fonts to offset different parts of text. Many word processing programs, such as Microsoft Word, offer style settings that automatically format font and color of headings, titles, and subtitles. Similarly, you may use color in the design of graphs, charts, and images. As with all design elements, color can strengthen the argument or take away from it. Too many colors can create confusion, but one or two colors can help indicate the function of a text, such as indicating a heading or subheading. Presentation and design can have an immediate impact on your ethos as a writer and so good writers attend to them. Presentation refers to how a writer breaks up the text into discrete units and what types of texts are used. Design refers to how a writer lays out these different kinds of text and how they are made to appear. They affect the quality of an argument and so good writers assess the effectiveness of presentation and design; a good way to do that is by applying the concepts of ethos, logos, and pathos.

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ACTION POINTS Work with a partner to look at the presentation and design of this textbook. Which of the principles presented in this chapter seem most at play here? What are the effects of the choices made in the presentation and design of each chapter? Of the cover? With a couple of colleagues, look online for tips on PowerPoint presentations. Look at a few of the websites or videos and take a few notes. How many of the tips refer to design principles? How many refer to presentation? Which tips do you believe are the most valuable? Most importantly, which tips might inform decisions you make regarding other media, such as research papers? Work with a paper you’ve recently completed or are working on. Use the styles feature of whatever word-processing program you’re using, such as Microsoft Word or Google Docs. Try out the title, subtitle, and heading options. Experiment with changing the defaults. Under what circumstances might you use these? If you need a primer, check out a short YouTube video. Share your findings with a partner. Take a stroll down the hall of any campus building. Along the way, you’ll find flyers and posters. Choose a couple to examine. Which display effective design principles, in your view, and why? Which seem less effective and why? What can you glean from your informal analysis about the effect of design and presentation on meaning? If you have the means, take a picture of each flyer and come back to class prepared to discuss your findings.

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Jevh Maravilla, a student at the University of Houston, and recent grad Christian Toledo were eating at their local McDonald’s restaurant when they noticed a distinct lack of Asian representation in the marketing posters on the walls. They decided to do something about it. The students staged a photoshoot of themselves complete with burgers and fries. About $80 and some photo editing later, they had printed out a poster stylized with McDonald’s branding. With Jevh in a thrift store Christian (left) and Jevh created this fake McDonald’s ad McDonald’s uniform shirt, Christian to draw attention to the lack of Asian representation in and he hung it in the restaurant advertising. with the help of a couple friends. Despite them chronicling it on YouTube, the poster remained there, unnoticed by management, for more than two months! On September 2, 2018, Jevh posted a picture to Twitter of Christian and him sitting in front of their poster in the restaurant, contending the prank was a success. The photo quickly went viral, garnering the attention of several international news outlets, talk show hosts, and the McDonald’s corporation. During their appearance on the Ellen Degeneres show, Christian and Jevh were each presented with checks for $25,000 from McDonald’s. Mariselle Quijano, the owner of the particular McDonald’s that housed the poster, said, “We applaud these students’ creativity,” and their efforts toward improving diversity were well-noticed. In addition to their national TV interviews, Jevh and Christian have had the opportunity to speak on social issues and diversity and were featured by the University of Houston president on a spotlight on diversity in marketing. McDonald’s has even invited them to participate in a national commercial for a new breakfast item. These students used presentation and design skills across multiple modalities to raise their voices against an absence they perceived in corporate marketing, challenging barriers to representation across all ethnicities. 215

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I’m Lovin’ Diversity

34 What Information Literacy Is Information literacy is the ability to identify what information is needed, find that information in various media and spaces, and assess its credibility. We are currently living in what is sometimes called the Information Age. Prior to this was the Industrial Age. The name change may seem subtle, but the implications are monumental. In the Industrial Age, industry created the most wealth and subsequent power. Huge industrial corporations dominated the economic and geopolitical landscape. The development of societies, including large industry-focused cities like Pittsburgh and Chicago, followed the development of industry.

ACCESS POINT At the height of the Renaissance in 1597, Francis Bacon wrote, “Knowledge itself is power.” What do you think he meant by that? Why would that be significant to the age he lived in? Is it still true today? How might that be seen in your own life, personally and academically?

In the Information Age, what counts most to create wealth and power is information. Today, the development of societies, including modern industry, follows the development of information: who has it, who distributes it, who owns it, and who makes it. Yes, information is made. Information is not a natural resource, and it is never neutral. It is produced by someone and for some purpose. Knowing something, as Francis Bacon said four centuries ago, is a form of power. In the twentieth century, the French philosopher Michel

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Foucault (pronounced me-SHELL foo-CO) argued convincingly that power and knowledge are inextricably linked. Having knowledge is power, as Bacon said, but Foucault showed that having power means being able to influence and control what information is produced and distributed: knowledge is power; power is knowledge.

Joining the conversation In the Information Age, having the ability to identify, access, and evaluate information may be the most important skills an educated person has. In other words, it may be assumed that an educated person today, first and foremost, is information literate. information literacy the ability to identify what information is needed, find that information in various media and spaces, and assess its credibility

Information literacy is a problem-solving skill, but as the opening suggests, it’s more than that. For academic writers, it is a natural part of joining the academic enterprise. To join a conversation, you access what others are saying. To do that, you must access information across sites, from academic databases to live lectures, as well as across modalities, from podcasts to peer-reviewed articles. Generally, that means you need to be able to do three things well.

Identifying when you need information and in what form First, you have to identify when you need information and what type. In general, the more grounded you are in an ongoing conversation, the better. So how do you know when you need information? A good question to ask as you’re working on an idea is, “Do I know this?” and then follow that up with, “Do I really know this?” If the answer is anything less than “absolutely,” then you probably need information. contextual knowledge entering a conversation with some understanding of a subject

A good place to start is with contextual knowledge. You may have some understanding of the subject, but undoubtedly there are issues you’re unaware of. General subject indexes, such as those available at the Internet Public Library, can provide background reading on a wide range of subjects which may highlight gaps in your knowledge that you’ll need additional information to fill. Similarly, encyclopedias and online resources are readily available, although you’ll have to assess the credibility. A second issue to consider is what forms information may come in. These range from YouTube videos to print journals to digital books to online annotated bibliographies. A reference librarian can be very helpful in expanding your awareness of the possibilities, but you can also ask your instructor and classmates.

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A good question to ask yourself is “What’s available?” and then follow that up with “What else is available?” Combined with the questions posed above, these will reveal to you the gaps in your knowledge and the potential sources to fill those gaps.

ACCESS POINT How often do you Google something? What kinds of things do you Google? When you find answers or information you want, how do you assess its credibility, if you do? What does this tell you about your sense of entitlement to instant information that is accurate? How does this relate to you as an academic writer?

Accessing the information you need In addition to knowing what information you need and in what forms, you have to know where the information is and how to find it. The next question is “How do I find the information?” That question, again, is answered rhetorically. It depends on your situation. If you’re in the first years of your undergraduate education, the demands on the quality, quantity, and depth of the knowledge you present are not as high as they are if you were finishing your master’s or doctorate degree. No one is expecting you to be fully immersed in the latest research in macrobiotics, activity theory, or quantum mechanics. However, you are expected to be able to access nearly all the information available on whatever subject you are researching, if only to recognize that it is there. In other words, knowing what’s out there and how to find it is a key part of your credibility. Later, we’ll look at the different demands put on a researcher when conducting primary and secondary research, and we’ll look at the academic databases. What’s important to know here is that information literacy describes a person’s ability to use multiple strategies for accessing information. Rather than simply going to Google, someone who demonstrates information literacy knows what academic databases, Google Scholar, and other search strategies offer. Two questions can guide your thinking at this stage. i What are the different means of accessing information? i What are the best strategies for using those tools? A beginning strategy is to understand that URLs can have bearing when searching and evaluating sources. For instance, .edu and .gov sites are usually sponsored by educational institutions and government agencies 219

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and often offer informational, fact-driven content. Content sponsored by organizations that may be selling something or trying to influence public opinion often include .org in the URL. The most prolific URL, .com, offers current information from news sources, but also information heavily sponsored by business and marketing, which can indicate bias. The credibility of news sources varies from publication to publication and are not as credible as academic journals. Limiting your search terms with URLs or beginning your searches in Google Scholar can save time when beginning your research. A good practice to adopt for larger projects is keeping a research log. In it, you record what types of information you need, how you’ve gone about searching for it, and the results. The results include the names of the sources you have found, where and how you found them, and their usefulness. Ultimately, this research log serves as a means of enhancing your researching abilities, a fundamental aspect of information literacy.

Assessing credibility credibility the quality of a communication’s objective and subjective components being reliable or believable

Once you’ve accessed the information, you have to assess the credibility of the source you find. The journalist A. J. Liebling, in a 1960 New Yorker article, wrote, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” But when the Information Age came into being, it was hailed as a revolution in democratizing knowledge. No longer was knowledge under the strict control of publishers and editors, those with the money and power to produce print-based texts. Instead, anyone with access to the Internet could write, publish, and disseminate whatever he or she chose. While the advancement of knowledge has certainly increased, it has come with a drawback not wholly foreseen. False information can be spread and propagated more quickly and with more apparent if false credibility than ever before. Fake news sites can present themselves as credible sources, inventing witnesses and evidence and passing them off as real. Self-named universities, with no credentials whatsoever, can offer online lectures and blogs for purportedly educational purposes though without the check on accountability that accrediting agencies have over real colleges and universities. The result is self-appointed experts can say whatever they wish, on any subject they wish, and have a much broader and more credulous audience than ever before. So, assessing the credibility of a source is a crucial aspect of information literacy, more crucial now than at any time in history.

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There are any number of websites dedicated to teaching you how to assess the credibility of sources. In essence, the techniques they teach derive from three basic questions, which can guide your analysis. i Who is speaking and what is their authority? i What claims are they making and how? i Does the evidence exist and is it reliable, valid, and sufficient? The first question suggests that you want to know the credibility of the producer of the information. Who’s saying it and why? Is this person an acknowledged expert in the field? What is her education and experience? If it’s an organization, is it a professional organization respected in the field? What are her interests? What are her biases? The second question suggests that you want to look at the relationship between the evidence and the claims the speaker is making. What evidence is presented or suggested? Is the evidence sufficient to make this claim? Is the evidence appropriate to the claim? Is there enough of it? Dividing the claim from the evidence gives a good sense of the potential credibility of a source. The third question suggests that you want to check on the evidence itself. Can you really find the evidence? If there’s research, can you access it? What’s the quality of that evidence? Is the evidence as conclusive as suggested? You’ll likely find that the more removed from peer-reviewed research the source is, the more general the claims are and the less credible the evidence is. Information literacy is especially important now in the Information Age. It is both a means of gaining knowledge and a means of wielding power. Three aspects of information literacy are identifying when information is needed and of what type, knowing how to find and access the information appropriate to the task, and knowing how to assess the credibility of the information found.

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ACTION POINTS How have you learned to be critical of information gathered from online sources? Have you ever been formally instructed? If so, what do you recall of that instruction? If not, how have you developed information literacy as discussed here? Do you think information literacy is more important for the current generation of college students than in the past? Why or why not? Talk with a few classmates. Explore a few colleges’ websites dedicated to information literacy, starting with your own college library’s. If tutorials are offered, peruse those. What do these sites offer beyond what has been presented here? With a partner, do a quick Google search for a question about a controversial topic you may be interested in, such as district gerrymandering or reforming higher education. Scroll down the list of hits until you find a source you don’t recognize. Go to that source’s web page and evaluate the information critically. What evidence is presented? Is it sufficient? How credible is that evidence? Can you find it? Who is funding this website? What are their interests and biases? Share what you learn with other groups. Librarians are experts in information literacy. With a few others, go to your college’s library and see what resources they offer. Notice how many are internal to the library and how many are shared across institutions, such as databases or interlibrary loan programs. Make a list and come back to class ready to report on what you’ve found.

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Students have organized in support of shared governance, which keeps students at the table when conversations take place that could affect their educational experiences.

Student-led Governance Shared governance is a fundamental principle of the academy. Shared governance ensures that decisions that affect students, including curriculum, program offerings, tenure for faculty, and hiring of administrators, is shared among administrators, faculty, and students. Working together, representatives of these three groups form committees that facilitate most major decision making. In this way, students have a voice in deciding everything from who the president of their college is, which of their professors receive tenure and promotion, and whether funding is cut or augmented for different programs. Lately, shared governance has been under threat. As state funding for public colleges has decreased as part of a shift in economic policies that have tended toward the privatization of formerly public goods, a more corporate model has been adopted. Faculty, through such organizations as the American Association of University Professors and through unions at the local, state, and national levels, have fought back, seeking to keep a seat at the table in governing the college. Students have also organized. Student leadership at colleges and universities remains vibrant but one organization, the National Campus Leadership Council (NCLC), has sought to expand the power of student voices. Co-founded in 2012 by Andy McCracken, a former American University student from Colorado, the NCLC brings together students 223

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for leadership and advocacy training from across the country nationally and regionally. And locally, it also spearheads initiatives important to all students, helping to stop campus sexual assaults, expand student engagement in sustainability efforts, and keep federal student loan interests down. As the value and purpose of higher education is being debated in this country, the NCLC and student leaders work hard to ensure that student voices are at the table where every important decision is made. Information literacy and credibility play key roles in this activism. The NCLC studied the effect on students of working directly with college administrators, including presidents, provosts, and deans. They found that students who used their skills to actively participate in these negotiations felt more empowered and engaged on their campuses.

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35 What Conducting Research Means Conducting research means to search carefully and with an open mind for the evidence and material you need to respond effectively to a rhetorical situation. It’s not always good practice to start your writing by citing the definition or origin of a word. But in the case of research, looking at the origin can be illuminating. According to the Barnhart Concise Dictionary of Etymology, the definition of “research” is: Research n. 1577, careful search; borrowed from Middle French recerche, from Old French recercher seek out, search closely (re- intensive + cercher to seek for). The meaning of a careful hunting for facts is first recorded in English before 1639. ---v. 1593, borrowed from Middle French recercher, from Old French. This definition indicates that research is borrowed from Middle French. As a noun, it indicates a careful search. As a verb, it means to search closely. The qualifiers careful and closely derive from the prefix re. Unlike the re in revise, which indicates doing something again, the re in research acts as an intensifier: to search closely. In college writing, conducting research means to search closely for research evidence, wherever that may be. Whether the research methods are in college writing, especially intensive and formalized, as for writing a thesis or dissertation, to search closely for credible evidence or whether they are fairly loose and informal, as for developing material for an online discussion forum, research involves the gathering, assessing, and evaluating of the evidence that you’ll use to develop your response

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to whatever writing situation you are in. Because through research you join the ongoing conversation of the academy, there is perhaps no more important form of knowledge making that you do.

Research answers questions Most research for college writing serves a specific purpose and knowing that purpose can help shape your research. Most commonly, college writers conduct research to answer questions. These questions are often posed in the form of and in response to a research question, which puts the writer in a position to understand and explain an issue or problem. For example, if you are an education major, you may be curious to know whether and how to incorporate social media into your classes. An effective research question might be, “How has social media been incorporated effectively in secondary education reform thus far and to what effects?” You then might pursue a mix of primary and secondary research to respond to that question, which is discussed in the next chapter. In addition to answering a question, research is commonly used to confirm a hypothesis. A hypothesis is a proposed answer to a question that you wish to test, again mainly through primary and secondary research. For example, you might hypothesize that the reason some malls in America are experiencing a decline in visitors is the resurgence of many small downtown areas. You can test this with secondary research through your library databases but also, perhaps, with primary research by conducting surveys at both a local mall and a revitalized downtown area café. In many disciplines, research is used to explore the significance of an idea or development. For example, in a political science class, you might ask, “What might be the long-term social and political consequences on gay and transgender rights of recent findings in biology that loosely link sexual orientation with genetic makeup?” Your research will then be aimed not primarily at answering the question of the biology findings but at the possible effects on gay and transgender rights in the political field. Throughout your career as a college writer you may conduct research to test the claims of others. In a sociology class, for example, your professor may indicate in a lecture how the Internet effectively ended the domination of radio as the main shaper of musical tastes, resulting in more diffuse sets of identities among teens. Curious, you want to test how that claim holds among you and your friends and so design a survey to distribute on Facebook. You might contrast this with an interview of your parents. You use the results of this primary research as part of a larger project, including seeking significant secondary research, to present your findings on the validity and scope of the claim. 226

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Especially as you move further in your academic career, you may conduct research to confirm or refute prior research. This is especially true for graduate students and professors, since replicability, the capacity of a particular research methodology and findings to be reproduced, is a vital feature of scientific research. For example, learning theorists have argued that seating arrangements in classrooms affect learning for different types of learners and have conducted research to show that. Subsequent researchers have sought to confirm the findings, though their research has mostly yielded complicating and even contradictory results. The next set of researchers will have to try to confirm or refute that research, shaping and refining our knowledge of this issue.

replicability the capacity of a particular research methodology and findings to be reproduced

Research expresses good habits of mind Earlier, we looked at the habits of mind that better the chances for success in college writing. These are described in the “Framework for Success in Post-Secondary Writing” and describe the effective researcher as well. Good researchers display curiosity. They want to know something, to answer a question, to test a claim. While in college, researchers are embedded in a discipline and are expected to conduct research in accordance with that discipline’s practices, they also seek out different kinds of evidence and use different methodologies. A good term to know is triangulating. In social science research, triangulating means crossverifying data with two or more sources. In more general terms, it means to draw upon several verifiable research methods to study a phenomenon. Social scientists, for example, combine archival research with oral histories, or survey responses with personal narrative.

triangulating in college writing, cross-verifying data with two or more sources

Throughout the process, researchers practice openness. They actively seek out differing views and conflicting evidence, while challenging themselves to change their own views if the evidence warrants it. For example, in a business law class, you might conduct research on concealed weapons in the workplace. Your initial view is that such bans violate the US Constitution, but you remain open to differing arguments. Because of that, you eventually see the soundness of the opposing view and while you don’t abandon your position, you modify it to account for the complexity you now see.

ACCESS POINT Do you consider yourself a good, poor, or merely adequate researcher? Why? What experiences have you had that suggest that? What might you do to get better?

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Effective researchers are also engaged. Finding an intersection of personal interest and academic study is key to research supporting good college writing. For example, perhaps you’re interested in sustainability issues. For a cultural anthropology class, you focus your studies on the threat you believe a local farming community is facing from the corporatization of agriculture. You know and care about the people in this small community. In fact, they may be your neighbors. In this way, you leverage your personal interest to illuminate the more academic study of microcultures in a society. Effective researchers are also persistent and remain invested, even during uncertain times. Every researcher at some point runs into difficulties. The evidence is not lining up. The numbers aren’t showing what they were expected to show. No one’s responding to the survey. At such times, it can be difficult to persist. But remaining open to what the evidence shows and by the creative exploration of other avenues, researchers persist. Finally, researchers practice metacognition. They think about and reflect upon their research methods and practices. They look backward to identify past experiences for principles that can transfer to the current situation and they look ahead to how their research practices might transfer to the future. Professionals maintain extensive research logs, journals, or notebooks in which they record not just their findings but also their methods and their reflections upon those methods. In this way, they conduct better research and they also become better researchers. Conducting research means to search carefully for material and evidence to form a response to a rhetorical situation. Researchers commonly answer a question, confirm a hypothesis, explore the significance of an idea, test the claims of others, or seek to confirm or refute prior research. Good researchers exhibit curiosity, openness, engagement, persistence, and metacognition.

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ACTION POINTS Share with a group of your classmates a memorable experience you’ve had conducting research. Explain the project and why it was so memorable. After everyone in your group has talked, discuss how you all might approach research projects in the future in a way that fosters this kind of engagement. YouTube hosts numerous videos on conducing effective research. With a few others, locate and watch a few but do so with the mindset of a researcher. Search closely for evidence and material from the different videos to answer the question, “What makes an effective researcher?” Compile your notes and, with what you’ve learned from this chapter, write out your own theory of effective research in a few paragraphs. After your next project that includes research, assess your practice against your theory and make adjustments to either the theory or your practice or both. Locate three research articles in a science or social science journal that you’re interested in. Look closely at the last few paragraphs. Can you find a statement that calls for further research? What is being called for and why? Can you guess which researchers might be in the best position to respond to that call? What might this suggest for you, as a college writer at this stage of your career? Your reference librarian is a wealth of knowledge about conducting effective research. With a few classmates, go to your library (or contact online, if necessary) and talk with the reference librarian. What are the main issues she sees with students trying to conduct research? Given your proposed major, what does she know about the research requirements?

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Students at Portland State’s College of Urban and Public Affairs proposed to state legislators a tuition-free method for low-income students to attend state schools. It passed unanimously.

Research Pays It Forward In 2015, Oregon’s State Senate and House approved unanimously a plan called “Pay It Forward, Pay It Back,” which allows low-income students to attend state two-year and four-year colleges tuition free. Eligible students would repay the state after graduation by pledging a percentage of their income, up to 4 percent, for up to twenty years. The plan was carefully researched, developed, and proposed to the state government by students of Barbara Dudley, a professor at Portland State’s College of Urban and Public Affairs: Hatfield School of Government. One state legislator said, “This is what it looks like to think outside the box.” As average student debt continues to climb, to more than $25,000 for those graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 2017, and as state and federal policymakers struggle to find solutions, students across the country are raising their voices about the economic realities of attending college, such as in the “Million Student March” in November 2015. And some, such as those at Portland State, are actively seeking solutions, as well as those who began the Project on Student Debt, part of the nonprofit organization Institute for College Access & Success. The students who proposed this program showed how research in college often responds to a current political, economic, and cultural situation. By exhibiting the characteristics of good academic researchers, students can actively engage with the world in impactful ways. 230

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36 What Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Research Is Primary research studies the world directly; secondary research studies the primary research of others; tertiary research studies others’ presentation of secondary research; all are a means of joining the ongoing conversation. Joining a conversation among experts when you are in the early stages of your academic career can be challenging and intimidating. Experts have dedicated their lives to their subject, whether that’s the history of American colonialism or the latest advances in astrophysics. What can you possibly add to the conversation? As a college writer, your job is not necessarily to add to the knowledge of the experts, but it is to join the conversation in whatever academic setting you find yourself in, even if that means simply reporting accurately one small slice of the larger body of knowledge and saying something about it. To do that, you must conduct some kind of research. That research can be classified as primary, secondary, or tertiary research.

ACCESS POINT Think about a major purchase or decision you have made recently. That can be anything from deciding which college to attend, and thus what tuition to pay, to buying a new cell phone. What kinds of research did you do and how much? Did it include reading, talking to people, looking at the object or place itself? How did you know when you had done enough research? What from this might you apply to conducting research for college writing?

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Primary research studies the world directly primary research new research done by the researcher himself or herself that examines data about a given subject directly from the real world

Primary research is any research you do yourself directly on the world you live in. In the sciences, this can include experiments and direct observations, following scientific protocols. In the social sciences, this can include surveys, interviews, field observations, archival research and other forms of research following the protocols of the discipline, including the analysis of the data. In the humanities and in some of the social sciences, such as history and speech communication, this can include analysis of primary documents, such as a novel, the US Constitution, diaries, texts of speeches, logs, transcripts of an interview, as well as tweets and Facebook postings. The value and expectation of primary research differs according to the project and your role in the academy. For doctoral students in most fields, primary research is a must. In order to join the conversation at that level, a person must demonstrate the ability to add to the world’s body of knowledge by producing new knowledge directly. For undergraduates, in some fields, such as biology and chemistry, the ability to conduct primary research is expected, but conducting new research that adds to the world’s body of knowledge is generally beyond these expectations. In other fields, such as some social sciences, including speech communications, primary research may be valuable in that it allows students to test hypotheses by applying a concept to a world-based experience. Do men in groups speak differently in all-male groups than they do in mixed groups, as the research suggests? How does that play out in the workplace where you are employed? A field observation may be in order. In the humanities, the analysis of primary documents, such as novels, films, plays, and works of art, is a standard activity, though the expectation of the value of those insights is tempered according to the writer’s position in the academy. No one expects that a first-year student will give us insights into the workings of a Shakespeare sonnet that we’ve not seen before, though that student may offer an interpretation that is unique to her and thus produce something new.

secondary research

Secondary research reports on primary research

research that examines the reports of primary research conducted by others, such as peerreviewed articles

Secondary research consists of reading the reports of the primary research conducted by others. These reports are found in peer-reviewed articles, scholarly books, and theses and dissertations. Secondary sources also include published data, such as labor statistics produced by the US government, since these are the result of the primary research conducted

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by those government agencies and employees. Note that with secondary research, you are one step removed from the primary research; thus, you are in a secondary position. To join an ongoing conversation, you must first learn about it, study it, and understand it. Secondary research, reading the published research of experts, as presented in peer-reviewed articles and scholarly books, is the main way you develop your credibility as an academic writer. Conducting secondary research is the mainstay of academic research, whether standing alone as a means of presenting one aspect of a field or as a means of forming the basis for primary research by revealing gaps in knowledge or new questions that a researcher may explore.

Tertiary research examines others’ reports of secondary research A less commonly known and used term is tertiary research. Tertiary tertiary research means “third in order.” Tertiary research consists of reading someone research related to someone else’s else’s account or reporting of the secondary research. account or reporting

Many professional organizations, such as the American Psychological of secondary research Association (APA), maintain websites where they present information to the public. That information is of a professional but general nature, synthesizing the knowledge of the field. It is usually not the first reporting of a research project, such as would be found in an academic journal. Reading this does not constitute secondary research but rather tertiary research, since now you are two removes away from the primary research that was conducted; thus, you are in a tertiary position. Other tertiary sources may be private companies’ websites, government websites, and often popular but credible sources, such as The Atlantic magazine of The New York Times, when they are presenting the latest developments in academic fields or reporting on advances in other fields. Also, most documentaries present general information based on a mix of secondary and primary sources. Another very popular source is Wikipedia. All these sources summarize and synthesize the research of others, though it’s important to assess the credibility of tertiary sources. Tertiary research is usually conducted alongside secondary research. However, it may not be acceptable in some disciplines and with some professors. Many will put a limit on what sources you may use and many ban the use of Wikipedia, for example, or any newspaper for purposes other than providing background knowledge. Tertiary research can provide that crucial background knowledge of the conversation of a field and may augment secondary research. 233

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To join an ongoing conversation, college writers must conduct research. Primary research studies the world itself, such as through surveys, experiments, observations, and interviews. Secondary research consists of studying the reports of others’ primary research, often through academic peer-reviewed articles or scholarly books. Tertiary research consists of reading the reports of others about secondary research, often through highly credible sources, such as The New York Times and professional organizations’ websites, as well as popular online sources, such as Wikipedia. Primary, secondary, and tertiary research are all appropriate in different rhetorical situations and are often used concurrently.

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ACTION POINTS With a few classmates, think about a research paper you’ve had to write in the past. What limitations were put on your researching? Was there a type of source that you had to use or could not use? Were there expectations of a variety of sources? Most importantly, was the reasoning behind these limitations explained clearly? With a partner, do a quick online search of the term “tertiary research.” Skim a few sites. What do you find there that isn’t explained here? Based on what you’ve found, write up your own tentative guidelines about the use of sources, especially tertiary. With a partner, go to a professional website of a discipline you are considering majoring in, such as the American Sociological Association. If you’re unsure of the organization, use Google to search. If research is reported at that organization’s site, is it mostly tertiary or secondary? Is any primary research presented? What value, ultimately, might this site hold for you as a student of that field? Work with two or three classmates. Using journal databases, assess across a few disciplines the sources referenced in a group of journal articles from those disciplines. What limitations do you believe the journals put on the use of sources? Do you they accept Wikipedia, even as a background source? Report on what you find. What can you conclude about expectations for research across disciplines?

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Jun recognized that research can be repurposed for new projects and used past research in a new presentation.

Conducting and Repurposing Research For her communications class, Jun, a student from Seoul, conducted research on cultural differences between American and Korean students in their style of engagement with professors, a subject she very much wanted to learn about, since she felt slighted by certain professors who refused to hear her questions or comments but readily responded to American students. She believed that the differences, when left unspoken, could have a negative impact on international students’ efforts to connect with professors and other students and she hoped that by studying the issue, she could better understand and respond to it when it happened again. She conducted her research, gathered and synthesized numerous sources, and presented her findings for her English class in a ten-page report, with charts and graphs. Jun later attended a diversity conference at another college with students from around the state. As part of a panel, she presented some of what she found in her research, using a PowerPoint presentation to support her talk, which was limited to five minutes. Soon after, Jun was able to draw upon her research to develop a short, persuasive speech in her communications class on the need for cultural-awareness education in college classes. She used some of the same images she used in her PowerPoint but now augmented them with charts and graphs from her research paper. And finally, she emailed a former teacher and advisor in Korea and told her, informally, about the research she’d been doing and how that has influenced the way she lives in America. Through her research, repurposed for different situations, Jun reached diverse audiences and further developed her research interests. 236

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37 What Academic Databases Are Academic databases offer access to a wide range of scholarly resources in multiple media, languages, and formats, and allow you to broaden and refine your research. A key component of information literacy is being able to identify what types of information are available and where they are located. But where do you start? It may be that you do not know for sure what you’re looking for, let alone where to find it. Fortunately, as a college student, much of the work has already been done for you. Your college librarians and their colleagues have created access to most of the world’s scholarship, which we’ve referenced several times throughout this book. These are academic databases and getting to know them can significantly enhance your power as a college writer.

academic database collections of scholarship organized for the types of research that students and professors do

ACCESS POINT When you have to research something for school, where is the first place you go? Do you go to Google? Wikipedia? What do those sites offer that you find valuable? What drawbacks are you aware of?

Academic databases are tailored to academic researchers A database is a structured set of data usually available on a computer and accessible in different ways. Academic databases are set up specifically

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for the kind of research that students, professors, and researchers do in colleges. This means that the data available on academic databases are tailored to them. They include information about journal articles, newspaper articles, videos, sound files, eBooks, and art work, and offer full access to most of these resources. Databases do not produce, publish, or disseminate information but only organize access to the information. However, the way the access is organized turns out to be a very valuable tool. Modern databases allow a researcher to search across thousands of different media and media types, refine searches, share research with others, cite the sources in multiple styles, and conduct very specific searches in multiple languages. Academic databases are usually available anywhere there is Internet access.

Academic databases can help clarify research An academic database is used to find the sources researchers need to support their research, of course, but a good researcher first needs to know what to look for. Academic databases can help identify sources you may not know even exist. For example, in a marketing class, you may be interested in the impact of digital technology on sales and promotion. You might just type in those key words in the search box of a database and get hundreds, if not thousands of hits. Those will include everything the database offers. What to do with all those hits? One thing a database can do for you is filter searches by medium. For your search on digital technology and sales, you could limit your search to audio and video works, just to see what’s available in those media. Typing in those search terms and choosing the media to search, you’d then find a video specific to the topic which you can watch from your computer or device. Another thing a database can do is help you clarify your search terms. For example, when you search for digital technology and sales and promotion, you may quickly realize that the term most used is digital marketing, which has a more expansive meaning than simply sales and promotion. In this way, clarifying search terms also helps situate you more squarely in the ongoing conversation, which enhances your credibility as a writer and makes your research efforts more fruitful. Further, a database can help you clarify your research by suggesting narrowed topics to explore. While you are conducting your preliminary research on digital marketing, the databases offer suggestions in the 238

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search boxes, for example, digital marketing and consumer privacy, an area you realize you are interested in exploring. In this way, the databases are more than mere static portals to information but operate heuristically, spurring your curiosity as a researcher and opening new possibilities.

Academic databases can be general or specific to a discipline Academic databases are of two types: general academic databases and subject databases. The two most popular general academic databases are ProQuest and Academic Search Premier, provided by EBSCOhost. Each is large. ProQuest offers access to over 90,000 sources with coverage of thousands of journals, newspapers, websites, dissertations, and theses from around the world and spanning six centuries. Academic Search Premier is more focused on academic scholarship and offers access to over 2,000 academic journals and professional magazines, as well as video content from the 1930s forward. It supports research in all fields. As a college writer early in your career, ProQuest and Academic Search Premier may be your go-to databases, but as you move further into your discipline, you may find the subject guides and indexes more useful. Essentially, these subject guides are subsets of the larger, general databases. For example, the ABI/Inform Trade and Industry Database is powered by ProQuest but limits its results to relevant business publications. Similarly, Regional Business News Index is powered by EBSCOhost but limits the results to business- and trade-focused newswires from your region. Not only is this database limiting the subject matter but also the medium and geographic scope as well. As with the general academic databases, the subject databases can broaden or narrow the scope of your research and inform you of what’s available. Using the Regional Business Index, for example, can open your eyes to regional business magazines that you might not know exist and which probably would have been lost in a general database search.

Academic databases offer multiple tools Most college libraries offer online tutorials on how to use the databases as well as face-to-face group and individual instruction. A reference librarian will almost certainly be available during library hours, in person, by phone or online, and most colleges offer 24-hours a day remote access to a reference librarian via chat or phone. 239

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Academic databases, in general, are relatively straightforward to use, but offer options that can both refine and complicate your search. Learning from a professional is most valuable, but the students I’ve worked with have offered a few suggestions that I’ll pass on. First, having sufficient background knowledge to develop effective search terms is important. This is part of information literacy and applies directly here. A broad or poorly defined research question will yield poorly focused search terms that in turn will yield poor results, either far too few sources or far too many. ProQuest and Academic Search Premier offer a thesaurus as well as a list of related search terms that can help you focus your research question, and you might also consider general reference works, such as encyclopedias and Wikipedia, to focus your research. Second, be persistent. Finding the right search terms takes a bit of time but is well worth it. Don’t be shy about getting help. Librarians are professionals at finding, accessing, and evaluating information in all types of media using all kinds of strategies, and essential to that is knowing how to formulate a search around key terms. Third, especially early in your search, you may want to limit your results only to peer-reviewed journals and only to those available in full-text. This means that you’ll be starting with the most highly credible sources, peer-reviewed, and those which you have access to immediately. Then you’ll have the choice of reading only the abstract or accessing the entire article as an HTML file or PDF. If you are not finding what you need, you can expand your search, such as including non-full-text sources and then using your library’s interlibrary loan service to access them. Finally, the databases offer many tools that are useful to your research. Since many writers maintain a running bibliography, as a References page in APA or Works Cited in MLA, as they conduct secondary research, immediately recording the proper citation of any article saves a lot of time. The databases can help. Once you open the details of a source you’ve found, a toolbox appears. One of the tools offers full citations. Clicking on that opens a window with the source cited in many different citation systems, including APA and MLA. You can simply copy and paste the citation into your own document, but you should always double check that the citation is accurate. Other tools are worth exploring as well, especially downloading the source to your computer or device, but also including creating your own folder of resources, which you can return to at any time or emailing the source to yourself or others. In general, these more advanced features become more useful later in your academic career, when you may be conducting more in-depth and intensive research. 240

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The academic databases are searchable sets of data that allow you access to a wide variety of resources in many different media. They are created by and curated by professional information managers and offer you a way to define and refine your research, by suggesting search terms, limiting or expanding possible media, and narrowing to discipline-specific resources. Both the general and subject guides have tools that allow you to access and manage your research, including citing your sources in different citation systems.

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ACTION POINTS With a few classmates, discuss your experience conducting research online. How have you been trained, if you have? What strategies do you use? If you’ve used academic databases before, what were the circumstances? Did you receive any training? How successful were your efforts? With a partner, explore your college library’s tutorials, or those from another library, on academic databases. Work through a few or all of them. What is new there? What did you not know that you wish you had when conducting research in the past? With a partner, explore ProQuest and Academic Search Premier. Develop a set of search terms for a writing project you are currently working on or may work on in another class. Explore the various tools offered to refine your search. Try to filter your search by type of media, currency of publication, or even language. What other surprising features did you find? Reference librarians are experts in the field of information literacy, and using academic databases wisely is part of that. With a few classmates, ask your reference librarian to show you her tips on making the most of the databases and how to avoid common errors.

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38 What Note-Taking for Writing Means Note-taking for college writers is a generative act that utilizes a reliable system to foster critical thinking and effective planning and drafting. In a typical semester, a college writer will take pages of notes. These notes are essentially of two types. The first are notes from a lecture, lab, or textbook. These notes serve primarily as a study aid. The second are from articles or books for use in writing. These notes serve primarily as material for written texts, such as essays and research papers. Note-taking for writing is different from note-taking for a lecture, lab, or reading. While it displays many of the same features, note-taking for writing is generative. This means the notes you take as part of your writing process must help you generate ideas that work together to respond to the rhetorical situation you find yourself in.

ACCESS POINT Every student has taken notes many times. When you’re taking notes as part of a writing project, what’s your usual practice? How formal is that practice? How effective do you feel you are? What might you do to get better?

Note-taking allows you to join the conversation We might say that note-taking forms the bridge between what has been said before, in articles or books, and what you will say yourself. In this sense, note-taking enables you to join the academic conversation. As such, good note-taking encourages engagement. It calls upon you to offer your own questions and insights and to make connections among

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the ideas of others. By making that effort, encouraged by your system, you enter the current of the ongoing conversation and begin to see why it matters and why you might care. In the words of Nancy Sommers, a professor at Harvard who conducted extensive research on college writers, engaging in the academic conversation helps you “move from having an opinion to having an idea and learn why you care about that idea.” Such active note-taking naturally engages your critical mind. Another essential characteristic of good note-taking is the synthesizing of material. It’s almost impossible for you to take notes and not transform the ideas in some way. Even summary, which is a more or less objective recounting of the main ideas of a text in shorter form, is a kind of synthesis in that it requires you to decide which ideas are the most important and then determine how those ideas fit together (see the chapter on summary, paraphrase, and quotation). Beyond summary, the active collocation of notes, which means placing notes side by side, from different sources, requires you to see similarities and differences that suggest new connections, new tensions, and potential significance, which you then record.

Note-taking calls for a consistent method Although there are probably as many note-taking systems as there are writers, most good college writers have developed a system that has most or all of these features. First, the system requires the writer to record the full citation of every source. Personally, I keep a running Works Cited page, if I’m working in MLA, or a References page if APA. Every time I start a new article or book, I record it. In this way, I both keep my citations complete and I get a sense of satisfaction from adding to my list of references. As the list grows, so does my sense of accomplishment and my sense that I’m doing the work necessary to develop credibility and competence with the subject. Second, the system requires the writer to record the source with every note. Usually, I simply keep the author’s last name in parentheses after the note. Later, as I’m drafting, I may work the author’s name into my main sentence. At other times while drafting, I’ll leave the author’s name in parentheses in preparation for formal documentation. For quotations or paraphrases, I also always include page number for print sources. As you probably know, there’s nothing worse than writing your paper and not being able to find the source of that perfect quotation, leaving you to scour every page of every source you’ve read. Third, the system encourages quotation, paraphrase, and summary. Usually, good note takers do not simply record quotation after quotation. 244

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When you’re drafting, the work of deciding whether to quote or paraphrase becomes disruptive and you end up quoting far too much simply out of ease. It’s much better to decide as you’re taking a note what type of note is most appropriate. As I take notes, I try to quote only very memorable, apt, or unusual statements. Fourth, the system supports the structure of the paper. Usually, good note takers are working from a preliminary outline. This preliminary outline provides placeholder spaces for notes, usually expressed as key questions or issues. Here, notes are not arranged by source but by their relevance to the key questions or issues. As I take notes, I place the notes in different places in a note-taking document corresponding to an outline of some kind. In this way, the preliminary outline evolves into a more developed outline that I can write from. The term I use for this is populate. Good note takers populate a rough or preliminary outline with their notes. In addition to these features, most good note-taking systems require the writer to develop their own thoughts, questions, and insights. Whether that’s a parallel column in a two-column note-taking system as described below or italicized sentences or phrases below each note, the note-taking system offers a physical space for the writer to engage with the ideas.

The two-column note-taking method A very useful system of note-taking is the two-column method (Figure 38.1 on next page). The two columns are usually arranged following the structure of the preliminary outline, which may be no more than a set of questions. Each question gets two cells in a row. As you take notes, you group all the notes that address the particular question or issue together. In this way, you’ve taken a step toward synthesizing. The second column is a place for you to work. What do you want to say about the note? Why was it important enough to write down in the first place? How does it address the question or issue? How does it connect with other notes? What questions arise when you look at the notes together? By actively engaging with the note in this way, you’ve taken an important step toward synthesizing sources. When it is time to draft, you may likely find that your work is much easier, with your sources contextualized with other sources and your responses and insights already developed. Then, you can concentrate on writing effective sentences and paragraphs, confident that you’ve already done much of the hard, critical thinking. 245

Active Voices Main Research Question Notes

Comments

Question 1? i Note 1 – Quotation (author A) i Note 2 – Paraphrase (author B) i Note 3 – Quotation (author B)

My question about note 1 My thought about note 2 My connection of note 1 with note 2

Question 2? i Note 4 – Summary (author A) i Note 5 – Paraphrase (author B)

My question about note 4 My connection of note 5 with note 4

Question 3? i Note 6 – Quotation (author A)

My thoughts on note 6

Question 4? i Note 7 – Summary (author A) i Note 8 – Paraphrase (author B)

My question about note 7 My connection of note 8 with note 7

Question 5? i Note 9 – Quotation (author B)

My idea about significance of note 9

Figure 38.1 A two-column note-taking document showing notes from two sources, A and B, populating different parts of a preliminary outline.

Note-taking fosters effective drafting As we’ve seen, effective note-taking systems tend to produce an outline or plan that is populated with source material and your ideas and questions. When you’ve read all the sources you feel are necessary and sufficient, you may read through your notes critically and assess how well they work together, rearranging them into an order that makes sense. You may have to move some notes to different sections or create new sections for them. Inevitably, you’ll have more notes than you can use, and you’ll have to cut some of them. To satisfy the desire not to lose your work, you may wish to create a new document to hold these notes in case you decide you need them for this or some future project. To turn the notes into a draft, simply weave the rearranged notes into sentences and paragraphs, remaining open to new possibilities for thinking (see the chapter on writing as a process). Allow the notes to give rise to ideas as you write, draw upon them and build off them, but don’t feel you must obey your original thoughts. They are there as ideas as well as to spur new thinking.

Using digital tools to enhance note-taking Since writing today is done almost exclusively electronically, it’s a good idea to take notes on a device as well. It makes copying and pasting 246

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direct quotations possible and it allows the easy manipulation of notes and their rearrangement. By highlighting and dragging notes from place to place, you can see new connections and open up new possibilities of research and thought. Many college writers prefer to read print sources and annotate them in the margins, and then later convert their annotations to notes. You may wish to consider your annotation system to accommodate this, such as by using stars or arrows to indicate points not to miss in your note-taking. Others take notes using digital annotation programs, such as Adobe Reader, to be able to collect their comments into notes in a word-processing program faster. Many note-taking programs and apps are available and some of the top-rated ones are Evernote, Microsoft One Note, Simple Note, and Google Keep. You might have to learn to use these, but the time is well spent. These programs allow you to access your notes across devices at any time. Note-taking for college writers is more than recording information; it is generative, meaning it helps build and develop ideas. Note-taking allows a writer to join an ongoing conversation by interacting with the ideas of others. Good note-taking requires a system, preferably one that allows the writer to keep track of all bibliographic information, such as a running Works Cited or References page, but also one that encourages the critical interaction with the note, such as a two-column method that captures the writer’s thoughts. Such a system fosters effective drafting. Finally, digital technology offers tools to make note-taking more effective.

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ACTION POINTS Compare with a classmate your current note-taking system by sharing your notes from your last reading assignment in this or another class. What are the principles you follow? How consistent are you? How did you learn this system and what strengths and weaknesses does it have? Based on your discussion, what might you want to keep from your system and what might you want to change? With a classmate or two, explore Evernote, Microsoft One Note, Simple Note, and Google Keep, as well as any other note-taking app you might be interested in or already use. Which seems most suited for your technological capacities and needs? Why? The Cornell note-taking system is famous. Read about it online (and any similar systems you run across) and consider how it could be modified for writing a paper you are currently working on. How does it compare to the two-column method described here? Might you adopt it, or adapt it, for note-taking for lectures, labs, and course reading? Write a one-paragraph plan for note taking for your next project. Talk with a professor about his note-taking system and how he learned it. Develop a set of specific questions before you go. Ask to see a sample. Finally, ask what advice he would give, given his experience working with many students across many classes, for effective note-taking for writers.

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39 What Citing Sources Means Citing sources makes explicit the network of knowledge that forms the conversation you are joining as well as provides a reader full access to that conversation. In your school career, you’ve probably been told many times to cite your sources, especially any time you included a quotation. If so, and if you’re like most student writers, citing sources was just something you were supposed to do to avoid plagiarism and get a good grade. On the other hand, if you’ve been out of school for some time, citing sources may be a demand that is a bit intimidating. What do you cite? Why? How? Many student writers in this situation cite sources out of fear. But framing the practice of citing sources strictly in terms of rules and punishment misses the point. Academic writers cite sources to make explicit the network of knowledge they are working in.

ACCESS POINT Have you ever told a joke only to have it repeated by a friend who didn’t give you credit? How did you feel about that? How did it make the joke-thief look, in your view?

Citing sources presents a network of knowledge One thing we’ve talked a lot about is how academic writing is joining a conversation. Experts have studied issues or phenomena and know

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a lot about them. Academic writers do more than merely present what experts know but say something about what is known, how the pieces of knowledge fit together, what the strongest areas of agreement are, and what is still left unknown. For example, a scholar working on a peer-reviewed article could be working with a hundred sources or more. She might write something that looks like this. Scholars disagree about X, but they agree, mostly, on Y. Scholar A says . . . while Scholar B argues . . . However, Scholar C takes a slightly different tack . . . Here, citing sources presents the network of knowledge that constitutes the conversation the writer is joining. It makes explicit the voices that are part of that conversation and it ties specific knowledge to specific people. That may seem obvious but imagine the same presentation of ideas without the acknowledgments. The above example might look like this. It’s fairly clear that X, but what’s not so clear is Y. It’s probable that . . . though it might also be true that . . . However, what’s uncertain is . . . This may look like an extreme example, but it’s the skeleton of the argument that is left when the cited sources are removed. The result is that the writer is presenting herself as the one who knows the subject, rather than as the one who is presenting the conversation about the subject. This is, of course, direct plagiarism. While this is clearly wrong ethically, it also says something about the writer’s credibility. By not citing sources, she shows she does not know the expectations of the academic situation, so her credibility as a college writer is weakened. By contrast, citing all of her sources demonstrates the breadth of her research and shows she is fairly presenting the network of knowledge she is joining; this strengthens her credibility.

Citing sources invites the reader to follow your reasoning

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There’s a second reason to cite sources, and that is to give the reader a means of following the path of the writer’s reasoning. By citing sources, both in the text of the writing and in the bibliography, the writer gives the reader the opportunity to look at the conversation more independently and deeply. She can, for example, follow an in-text citation to the bibliography and then to the original. She can read the original herself and compare it with what the writer has said. In so doing, she becomes a full participant in the conversation, not just a passive recipient of what is written.

Chapter 39 • What Citing Sources Means

Academic discourse is about knowledge building in a collaborative way. Cited sources are the means by which a reader can join that conversation in a more active way.

Citing sources demonstrates your scholarship It’s important to recognize that citing sources is not a sign of weakness, that it doesn’t suggest you don’t know enough to say things on your own. To the contrary, citing sources is an expression of strong scholarship. A scholar publishing an academic article will often cite a hundred or more sources. But how do you know when to cite something? A good rule of thumb is this. Any time you write something that you couldn’t have written without reading something or doing some research, cite it. This holds for lectures and conversations, too, so it’s good practice to cite them, even comments of classmates if they’ve added to your thinking. Rather than making your ideas seem weak, the network of knowledge you’re presenting shows the breadth and ground of your thinking. In other words, it shows how much you’ve listened thoughtfully to others, which is a trait of good scholarship. But what about common knowledge? What counts as that? There exist various definitions, such as “common knowledge is generally known by the educated reader.” The problem with those definitions is that what counts as an educated reader changes in different academic settings. For example, an educated reader for a paper in a graduate seminar would be very different than an educated reader for an introductory class. So rather than looking at examples of the kinds of statements that have to be cited or don’t have to be cited, let’s consider two simple questions to account for this.

common knowledge knowledge that is understood to be known by most people

i What’s the effect of not citing something? i What’s the effect of citing something? Imagine you are taking a communications class, and for your paper you are looking at group communication patterns at work. Imagine you were to write a sentence like this: “In the age of the Internet, communication has changed dramatically.” It’s unlikely anyone is really going to argue with that statement. But you could ask, what’s the effect of not citing such a statement? The answer might be that the reader will see this as a general statement establishing the context for what follows.

ACCESS POINT Have you ever failed to cite sources when you should have? What was the context? Why do you think that happened? Were they any consequences?

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Now ask the second question: What’s the effect of citing it? It might provide a bit more concrete context and increase your effectiveness and credibility. With this in mind, you revise your statement to make it more grounded in an ongoing conversation, perhaps something like this: “In the age of the Internet, communication has changed dramatically, leading to what Barry Wellman (2002) and others have called ‘glocalization.’” The effect of the citation here is that conversation is more clearly defined, appropriately for the class you’re writing for and the subject you’re writing on. Your credibility is enhanced as it shows your knowledge of the specific ongoing conversation. Most importantly, by asking the question, you have spurred yourself to go a little further and dig a bit deeper. As a result, your writing is stronger and your ethos is enhanced. Citing sources, then, can be a kind of heuristic, spurring you to more complex and deeper thinking. It can be seen as an inherent part of the composing process rather than something merely tacked on as a means of satisfying some rule. Citing sources is part of quality scholarship.

Citing sources as part of the composing process citation styles often associated with academic disciplines or discourse communities, these provide formats and methodologies for organizing a work’s cited material

Whether in MLA or APA or some other style, there are various citation styles and techniques to use depending on your courses and disciplines in which you write. I’ll leave it to you to learn the various ways to produce an in-text citation, that is, one embedded in the sentences you write, as well as the style of bibliography for each citation system. And I’ll leave it to you learn a process for keeping your sources straight, from the note-taking stage to the final editing stage. There are numerous online resources that can support this process. However, you should cite sources as part of your composing process. A good place to start is to develop a means of creating a bibliography page as you go. Keep a Works Cited or References page going as a separate document and then add to it each time you work with a new source. This is essential in keeping track of your research, but it also gives you a sense of accomplishment as you see your bibliography growing. Similarly, keep the source identifier, for example, author’s last name and page number where present, attached to each note you take. As you plan and develop your writing and as you draft, undoubtedly you will move notes around, putting similar ones together, for example, whether contrasting or corroborating. Having a system of identifying each note, of citing the source, is invaluable. You may have had the frustrating experience of finishing a piece of writing only to find that the perfect

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quotation you’ve used is without the source. Even with electronic search capacities, you probably wasted valuable time looking through the ten or fifty sources you had. Citing sources is more than an arbitrary rule. It is a means of presenting the network of knowledge you, as a writer, are working within. It also allows the reader to be a full participant in the conversation, following your reasoning, challenging your use and interpretation of source material. Finally, citing sources can serve as a heuristic, helping you to deepen your claims and put them on a more solid footing. This can be done by asking two questions: “What’s the effect of not citing this?” and “What’s the effect of citing this?” Good college writers have developed a system that makes citing sources part of their composing process.

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ACTION POINTS Talk with a few classmates: What have you been taught about citing sources and when? Did the teaching make citing sources seem more rules-based or more rhetorical, that is, meaning making? How so? How have the ideas in this chapter changed—or solidified—what you already knew and believed about citing sources? With a partner or two, explore the key differences between MLA and APA styles. On paper, create a document with two columns and make a list of the differences, including what gets cited in in-text citations, what the bibliography looks like, what formatting is required, etc. Bonus question: Why is MLA style used in the humanities and APA (or a similar style) in the sciences and social sciences? Find the website associated with an academic journal in your discipline. If you’re not sure which journals are common in your field, search for that first. What citation system is required? Does the journal have its own citation requirements? For example, the American Journal of Education tells authors, “Do not use APA style,” while laying out a style that is very close. What did you find? What’s the reasoning behind the requirements? Determine in your other classes what citation system they require and why. Also, how strict have you found your instructors in enforcing the specifics of the citation system they require and why? Is there a reason for the use of this citation system beyond convention?

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40 What Plagiarism Is Knowing about the three types of plagiarism— direct, patchwork, and paraphrase—can help writers work with sources better and develop their ideas. For many people, “plagiarism” has only one meaning: taking the exact words from a source and presenting them as one’s own. This is called direct plagiarism. When a student presents someone else’s writing as her own, that’s a kind of fraud. That does occur on college campuses, of course, though not as often as people think. Usually, direct plagiarism occurs at the sentence or paragraph level, rarely more.

direct plagiarism occurs when a writer takes the exact words from a source and presents them as his or her own

ACCESS POINT Plagiarism is one of the few offenses that can result in what Rebecca Moore Howard, a professor at Syracuse University, has called “the academic death penalty.” Failure of a class, expulsion from college, or loss of a teaching position can result. Wrongly or rightly, that’s the case. Based on your understanding of what college means, why do you think plagiarism is treated so severely?

But there are two far more common kinds of plagiarism that you need to know about: paraphrase plagiarism and patchwork plagiarism. These are usually not deliberate but occur either as an error in writing methods or as a stage of writing development.

paraphrase plagiarism occurs when a writer takes the ideas of another writer in nearly the exact words as the original

Paraphrase plagiarism occurs when a writer takes the ideas of another patchwork writer in nearly the exact words as the original. In other words, they don’t plagiarism paraphrase properly. Patchwork plagiarism occurs when a writer takes occurs when a writer takes the ideas of the ideas of another writer and “patches them together” as her own.

another writer and patches them together as his or her own

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Plagiarized text is easily spotted Imagine that a student is working on a research paper that reviews the literature on fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS). As part of the research, the student wants to explain how much alcohol a pregnant woman must drink for FAS to be likely to occur, what is called the threshold. This is the paragraph the student writes: 1

There are many theories as to how and why the fetus can be damaged, but most FAS researchers agree on the premise that there is a threshold for fetus damage. 2Finding a threshold is an important part of fetal alcohol research, yet relatively few researchers have studied this aspect. 3Threshold can be defined as the level of exposure to toxin below which average group performance is not adversely affected (Jacobsen & Jacobsen, 1994). 4How much alcohol makes the threshold is the gray area. 5 Exactly how much is uncertain, but animal and human testing has given scientists a ballpark figure as to an approximate amount of drinks before fetal damage begins. 6Human studies indicate that seven standard drinks per week may be the threshold for the most sensitive neurobehaviors but may not apply to all women and all babies (Jacobsen & Jacobsen, 1994). An instructor might scan this paragraph and immediately recognize patchwork plagiarism. Why? First, all the information comes from a single source, in this case Jacobsen and Jacobsen. Note that sentences 3 and 6 cite Jacobsen and Jacobsen; no other sources are cited. It’s clear the writer has only taken ideas from this one source and patched them together. But what makes this obvious as patchwork plagiarism is the topic sentence of the paragraph. The writer offers her claim as “most FAS researchers agree . . .” However, that’s dishonest. The writer isn’t writing about “most researchers” but, in fact, writes about a single research article. The topic sentence misrepresents the writer’s thinking by falsely suggesting that she has developed an idea by reading multiple researchers when in fact she has taken all her material from a single source, Jacobsen and Jacobsen. Second, an instructor would also likely suspect direct and paraphrase plagiarism. Why? Look at the third sentence again: Threshold can be defined as the level of exposure to toxin below which average group performance is not adversely affected (Jacobsen & Jacobsen, 1994). This sentence does not sound like a writer in an introductory course. The instructor would likely check the original, in this case found in the magazine Alcohol Health and Research World, and find this sentence: 256

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In human neurobehavioral studies, threshold is usually defined in terms of the level of exposure to a toxin below which average group performance is not adversely affected (35). Notice that the italicized words in the original are identical to the italicized words in the student’s writing. This is an example of direct plagiarism. Moreover, in the sixth sentence, the student has written, Human studies indicate that seven standard drinks per week may be the threshold for the most sensitive neurobehaviors but may not apply to all women and all babies. And here’s the original: . . . supporting the suggestion that seven standard drinks per week is a threshold level for most neurobehavioral effects (Jacobson et al. 1993). The italicized words in the student writer’s sentence are very close to the original. For example, she has changed “is a threshold level” in the original to “may be the threshold.” This indicates paraphrase plagiarism, where the structure of the original sentence is retained and only a few of the words altered or replaced.

Patchwriting as a stage of development The example above contains what Rebecca Moore Howard, a scholar who has looked closely at the phenomenon of plagiarism, has called patchwriting. As Howard defines it, patchwriting is when a student copies an original passage, maintains its structure and meaning, and only changes a few words or phrases. It’s as if the original is retained with only a “patch” or two of the student’s own words.

patchwriting when a student copies an original passage, maintains its structure and meaning, and only changes a few words or phrases

Howard’s argument is that as students move into the discourse of the academy, there’s a necessary stage of borrowing and imitating, which is evident in patchwriting. However, she maintains that this is not an acceptable means of presenting the material in academics, as it indicates an incomplete understanding. However, Howard sees this not as something to be condemned but rather as a “pedagogical opportunity,” one inviting the instructor to intervene in a positive way and help the student understand the material and how better to present that understanding in writing.

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Revising paraphrase and patchwork plagiarism How can you avoid or move beyond paraphrase plagiarism? You can either quote sources directly or properly paraphrase them. Sentence three above, for example, could be presented with a quotation as follows: Threshold can be defined as “the level of exposure to toxin below which average group performance is not adversely affected” (Jacobsen & Jacobsen, 1994, p. 30). To move beyond patchwork plagiarism, you’ll have to do a bit more research and then synthesize sources since your credibility is severely weakened by relying upon a single piece of evidence. Instead of one source, you would want to include at least two but usually three sources for each topic you discuss. Then, looking over those sources, you can interrogate them, line them up, and see what conclusions you might reach.

Text revised for plagiarism enhances credibility Alerted to the errors with patchwork and paraphrase plagiarism, our student conducted further research and rewrote her paper. Notice in her revised paragraph that there are several sources presented now (Klaassen as well as Sokol have been synthesized into the sixth sentence, for example), the sentences have been rewritten in the student’s own words, and quotation has been used effectively. 1

There are many theories as to how and why the fetus can be damaged, but most FAS researchers agree that there is a threshold for fetus damage. 2Finding a threshold is an important part of fetal alcohol research. 3Jacobsen and Jacobsen (1994) define threshold as “the level of exposure to toxin below which average group performance is not adversely affected” (p. 30). 4 But how much alcohol is required to reach the threshold is the gray area. 5Testing on animals and humans, for example, has given scientists only an approximate figure for the number of drinks required for fetal damage to begin. 6Some experts have found that “seven standard drinks per week” for an average woman may be the threshold (Jacobsen & Jacobsen, 1994, p. 1), but Klaassen (1986) has found that this number may vary, with some fetuses being affected by far fewer drinks and others not being affected by more; even more confusing, one study suggests that the FAS threshold may be nearer to 42 alcoholic drinks per week (Sokol, 1988). Jacobsen and Jacobsen (1994) conclude that threshold figures are only approximations since damage may occur that has not been detected in the studies; thus, they note that the Surgeon General suggests abstinence 258

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throughout pregnancy since it’s impossible to say how even small doses of alcohol may affect some babies. In addition to avoiding plagiarism in the revised paragraph above, our student writer has enhanced her credibility significantly. First, by relying upon multiple sources, she shows that she has done her homework and is cognizant of at least the broad outlines of the current state of research. Second, and perhaps most importantly, she has more accurately presented the current state of research. Notice in the original version, in which our writer relied upon a single source, her claim was this: Most FAS researchers agree . . . that there is a threshold for fetus damage. While that statement is dishonest as the writer is reporting not on “most researchers” but a single research study, it is not necessarily inaccurate. However, it is incomplete. After conducting more research, this is what our writer is able to claim. But how much alcohol is required to reach the threshold is the gray area. This claim complicates the original claim and better represents the current state of research, which the rest of her paragraph presents. So, not only does the extended research help our writer avoid patchwork plagiarism, it allows her to know more completely and to present more accurately the current state of research. By attempting to avoid plagiarism, our writer has conducted better research, changed her claim, and enhanced her credibility. Plagiarism is a term that refers to the improper use of others’ ideas. In academic writing, it is generally of three types: direct plagiarism, the taking of a source text unchanged as one’s own; patchwork plagiarism, the piecing together of ideas from a single source as one’s own; and paraphrase plagiarism, the adoption of an original source’s sentence structure and changing only a few words or phrases. Patchwriting, which is a combination of patchwork and paraphrase plagiarism, may be a stage of development for academic writers. Through sufficient research and properly synthesizing, quoting, and paraphrasing sources, writers can avoid plagiarism and enhance their credibility.

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ACTION POINTS Given the definitions of plagiarism presented in this chapter, do you think you have ever inadvertently or developmentally plagiarized? Talk this over with a classmate or two. When and in what ways did you plagiarize? Why do you think that happened? What do you know now? The 2016 presidential election offered at least one highprofile case of plagiarism, Melania Trump’s address to the Republican National Convention, but it was far from the only case coming out that year or, indeed, any other year. Go online and search using the terms “news articles plagiarism” or “plagiarism 2016 president” and see what you find. You might also search “famous plagiarism cases” and see what historical figures have been implicated. What happened? What were the consequences? With a couple of peers, take a look at the advice about plagiarism that online writing guides, such as the Purdue OWL, offer. What seems useful? What seems different from what is presented in this chapter? What can you conclude about plagiarism that may be helpful to you going forward? Libraries, learning centers, writing centers, academic advising or counseling centers, and college catalogs often offer tips, as well as warnings, about avoiding plagiarism. With a partner, check out a few of these sites. What do they offer? How punitive and how learning-focused does the advice seem?

41 What Bullshit Is Bullshit is unconcerned with the truth and is distinct from lies, which seek to misrepresent the truth. Bullshit is a serious threat to democracy and can be a danger in the misuse of academic language. “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.” Harry Frankfurt wrote that famous line in his essay “On Bullshit,” which first appeared in 1986. A philosophy professor at Princeton, Frankfurt expanded the essay into a book in 2005, which quickly appeared on The New York Times bestseller list and remained there for over half a year. In our era of “fake news,” of Russian bots that troll social media, and of cable “news analysts” that shout invectives meant to provoke suspicion if not hatred in our culture, the ability to detect and resist bullshit would seem a necessary capacity for a literate person. As stated in the first chapter on “What the academy is,” a democracy depends upon an educated citizenry. Bullshit, as Frankfurt has defined it, aims to undermine the thinking of the listener and thus, when raised to the level of public discourse, poses a serious threat to democracy.

bullshit according to Frankfurt, distinct from lies and exaggeration, information disseminated whose aim is to undermine the thinking of the receiver

ACCESS POINT Think of a time you have had to talk about something when you didn’t know what you were supposed to talk about. Maybe you were at a job interview and were asked about a leadership role you had. Or maybe in a debate club you were called upon to respond to an argument when you weren’t prepared. What did you do? How did you feel about that?

Frankfurt outlines the antecedents of bullshit, a term he uses at least partly due to its shock value, to distinguish it from lies and exaggeration.

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Everyone from Jonathan Swift to St. Augustine have reflected upon lies and liars and assessed their perniciousness, and all the major world religions posit truthfulness as a virtue not to be compromised. But what Frankfurt has helped us see is a particular kind of untruthfulness that has gained prominence in the modern age and seems to have exploded in the age of the Internet. In the early years of the digital revolution, from the 1990s through the 2000s, access to digital technology around the world was hoped to herald an era of democratization not seen since the ancient Greeks and perhaps even better: Everyone would have access to knowledge and knowledge-making, which would decentralize power and liberate the world from oppressive class structures. But rather than a digital world where everyone has an equal voice, we seem to have developed a digital world where those with access to digital tools and the money to employ them have subtle but surprising power, irrespective of truth, a world where faceless entities with political and social agendas manipulate our worldviews, often without our knowledge. All this is a far cry from the idealistic view of a democratized world and why we need the concept of bullshit, to distinguish it from the historically dominant view that there are true and there are false statements. Today, there are still true and false statements but also a powerful third category of statement, that which is untethered from truth: bullshit.

Bullshit is indifferent to truth So, what is bullshit? As Frankfurt shows, it is not unrelated to the phenomena other similar terms apply to. A “bull session,” for instance, connotes a display of verbal performances that are designed not so much to speak truth but to display the speaker’s masterful position in the world. One might imagine a group of old men at a bar talking up their past heroics in sports. No one necessarily takes the stories as factual; that’s not the point. The stories are meant to express powerful experience: the grand victories, the ridiculous defeats. Similarly, when someone makes a statement that is obviously untrue or exaggerated as a means of making some point, we might object by saying, “That’s bull.” In both cases, however, it would be, if not unfair, at least beside the point to call such statements “lies.” A lie is a statement contrary to fact that someone makes purposefully to deceive the listener. The liar is connected to the truth in that he measures his statement against it, and his intention is to deceive us about the truth. In essence, the liar says, “I know the facts 262

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about X but I want you not to know them.” The measure of a successful lie is whether the audience believes it. By contrast, bullshit and the bullshitter are unconcerned about the truth. Though the bullshit statement is shaped as truth, as the lie is, the bullshitter’s aim has nothing to do with misrepresenting truth but in bolstering his own positionality or agenda. Whether the statement is true or false is completely beside the point. In essence, the bullshitter says, “I don’t care about the facts; I want you to like me/follow me/give me power.” The measure of a successful bullshit statement is not whether the audience believes it but whether the audience likes it or approves of it; the measure of a successful bullshitter is whether the audience follows, votes for, or approves of him or her. As Frankfurt says, “When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all bets are off . . . He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies are.”

Bullshit proliferates on social media You may have heard the saying, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” That helps us understand why bullshit seems to have proliferated so rapidly in the age of the Internet. What marks today’s world as different from pre-Internet societies are what we usually consider the era’s virtues: speed and ubiquity. When Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, the news reached Europe by steamship a week later. Today, every bit of information—true, false, bullshit—can travel around the world in an instant. Moreover, that information has the potential to be produced by almost anyone and consumed by almost everyone. It is everywhere, and it is instantaneous. Add to that a growing mistrust and skepticism of our major institutions, from government to higher education to Wall Street, which may itself be a consequence of the flattening of authority the Internet has helped along, and the fertile ground for bullshit is established. But there’s one more element that has helped bullshit explode. Alberto Brandolini, an Italian software developer and systems analyst, has defined in a Twitter post what he calls “the bullshit asymmetry.” Brandolini states that “the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.” What this means is that it takes much 263

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more time to refute bullshit than it does to produce it. And given the speed and ubiquity of the Internet, by the time any piece of bullshit is refuted, the bullshitter may have created two or three new pieces of bullshit, and our attention has moved on to them.

Bullshit has no place in the academy, but . . . We might ask why bullshit is discussed in this book. Surely, bullshit, which seems so political, has no place in academic writing, which is based on the best evidence available and seeks the best reasoning. While as an ideal that is certainly true, academic writing has been accused of unnecessarily obfuscating apparent truths. How does that work? Consider that sentence above: “academic writing has been accused of unnecessarily obfuscating apparent truths.” While such a sentence may not be bullshit, it may not be as clear as it could be, though I do think it’s the most accurate way of presenting the truth. So, to say that academic writing has been accused of lying is untrue, with rare exception. That is, no academic would knowingly lie when acting as an academic. There’s no question that some academics have published false research or plagiarized. When they’ve done that, they have violated the academic code of the search for the truth and thus were not acting as academics. jargon specialized language within a discourse community

Where academic writing has been accused more potently of bullshit is with the use of jargon that is often impenetrable to those outside the discourse community. It’s important to recognize that the word jargon refers simply to specialized language and thus is a neutral term; however, in everyday use, the word “jargon” has acquired the connotation of nonsense. Thus “academic jargon” implies language that is disconnected from the truth that “others” know. When jargon is used not as a necessity for accuracy and precision but to purposely obscure, then academic writing can be said to fit the definition of bullshit. As an undergraduate learning to write in the academy and as a scholar attempting to write your way into a discipline, when does the adoption of the discipline’s jargon help you seek and understand the truth, the academic enterprise, and when does it tilt into self-promotion and deception, the realm of bullshit? Being aware of and learning to recognize bullshit will help you analyze evidence and write with clarity, authority, and credibility.

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Harry Frankfurt first defined bullshit in rhetorical terms, as statements that are untethered from the truth. Whereas lies are tethered to the truth and measured against them, bullshit is measured by its effect on the audience: Does the audience like, approve of, or agree with the bullshitter? As opposed to a liar, who seeks to deceive about the truth, a bullshitter seeks to deceive about his intentions, pretending to speak truth in order to gain prestige or power. Truth or falseness is irrelevant. Academic writing, relying upon highly specialized knowledge and terms, jargon, has sometimes been accused of being bullshit when the jargon is used not for precision but for obfuscation, the clouding of truth.

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ACTION POINTS Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist and polymath, has attacked what he sees as academic “sludge,” writing so convoluted and jargon-laden as to be not only incomprehensible but deceiving in that it appears to say something when in fact it does not or when it says something in a way so difficult to penetrate that the reader can’t evaluate the truth claims. When, in your view, does the acceptable use of jargon become unacceptable? Who is to make such a determination? Do a Google search for “American president” and “bullshit” and see what you find. While President Trump has received prolific attention for his fallacious claims (some say President Lyndon Johnson was the best bullshitter), see what articles you uncover that comment on other presidents’ interactions with media and the public. Report on your findings. With a partner or two, find an article in the academic journal Philosophy and Literature through your college’s library. Then find an article in The New England Journal of Medicine. Read the openings of each. Which is clearer? Which seems to rely most upon jargon? Does either slide into the arena of bullshit? Is such a comparison even fair? Are you in a position to make such a claim? Next time you are with friends in a social spot, pay attention to how people are talking. How many times do you and your friends slide into making wild claims about someone, something, or some event? Is this bullshit? Is it simply fun exaggeration? Does it matter? If it doesn’t matter in this context, when might it matter and why?

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42 What Wikipedia and YouTube Are in the Academy Wikipedia can be used to focus your research and provide background knowledge, while YouTube offers access to primary sources. In 2005, the journal Nature asked experts to test the accuracy of 42 science entries from both the Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia. The results surprised many. Nature reported in December of that year that “the average science entry in Wikipedia contained about four inaccuracies; Britannica about three.” Moreover, only eight significant errors were found, four in Wikipedia and four in Britannica. Soon after, Encyclopedia Britannica, the longest-running reference work in the English language, responded, claiming that the Nature study was “so poorly carried out and its findings so error laden that it was completely without merit.” Not surprisingly, the editors of Nature defended their conclusions, explaining that their methodology included blind reviews of both sources as well as other accepted protocols. “We do not intend to retract our article,” they wrote. Regardless of the validity of the Nature study, the growth and use of Wikipedia as a general information resource is unquestioned and unrivaled. At the time of this writing, there are more than five million articles in the English version of Wikipedia, increasing by about 20,000 per month, available in nearly 300 languages. Over 37 million registered users can make edits and every month about 27,000 people do. Wikipedia is a crowdsourced,

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open-access, and free online encyclopedia available anywhere you have access to the Internet.

ACCESS POINT When you look at the Wikipedia logo, the incomplete sphere made up of puzzle pieces, what comes to mind? What do you think the logo is meant to represent? Why do you think it is significant to the role Wikipedia plays, or hopes to play, in the world of information and knowledge creation? How might that role differ from that of a traditional print encyclopedia?

Wikipedia as a gateway to research questions In spite of Wikipedia’s growth, ease of access, and apparent accuracy, you probably won’t want to cite Wikipedia as a source in your college writing. In fact, neither would you cite the Encyclopedia Britannica. That’s not what general reference works are for. However, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use them, only that you should know how to use them strategically. As a college writer, one way to use Wikipedia is as a gateway to research questions. Imagine you are taking an environmental studies class and you see something on Twitter about a new kind of battery, lithium-air, that may make electric cars much more viable. Since you don’t know a lot about batteries, you go to Wikipedia to see what some of the latest developments are. In so doing, you come across a potential application of lithium-air batteries to solar cells, possibly revolutionizing the use of solar panels. You now have a tentative research question: How might lithium-air batteries revolutionize the solar energy industry? Wikipedia allowed you to move from having an initial idea to having a wider view of the field and then on to a more focused research question, which is where your academic research begins. While no substitute for good library and database research, Wikipedia can also serve as a gateway to secondary sources in the field. Most Wikipedia pages have a list of references at the bottom of the entry. You 268

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can follow the links directly on the Wikipedia page or access the cited documents via your college library as a means of supplementing your more rigorous search strategies.

Wikipedia as an introduction to a field of knowledge You might also use Wikipedia as an introduction to a field of knowledge. If you’re new to a field, reading academic sources can be challenging since the authors and primary audiences share so much background knowledge. Wikipedia can provide a broad, generalist’s view of the field. For example, perhaps in an education class you’re doing research on Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck’s ideas of growth mindsets and their application in middle schools. You read about children’s moral development in early adolescence, but you don’t know much about developmental psychology. Wikipedia can provide you a quick overview of the entire field through its contents list at the side of the page and you can read the pertinent sections, including moral development. Then, when you go back to your research based on Dweck’s work, you’re better grounded in the field and your reading is more efficient. Related to grasping an overview of a field, you can use Wikipedia to fill specific gaps in your knowledge. Perhaps you’re doing some research in a sociology class on how eat-local movements create cultural groups, and the biological concept of microclimates is mentioned but not really explained. Though knowledge about microclimates is somewhat tangential to your research, having it can help you understand how and why social groups might form. Wikipedia can provide you a brief, short overview of the subject, enough to make you conversant so that, with your new knowledge of microclimates, you can better understand the eat-local movement.

YouTube as a source of alternative media and primary sources Unlike Wikipedia, which provides information produced by the Wikipedia community, YouTube is a channel for information produced by individuals, groups, or organizations. The content is raw, meaning YouTube does not process the postings nor assess the credibility. As you no doubt know, you can find videos on nearly everything on YouTube, from how-to videos for replacing your cell phone screen, to educational videos on the importance of Planck’s constant to quantum mechanics. The credibility of these videos, however, may be difficult to establish. 269

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As a college writer, YouTube can offer access to alternative media in an accessible form on academic topics as well as quick background knowledge. For example, if you’re in an introductory astronomy class and studying gravity wells, you might check out a few videos on YouTube that illustrate the phenomenon in a way that may be more effective than print media. You wouldn’t necessarily rely on these videos as definitive sources, but you could augment what you’ve learned from lectures, class discussions, and readings with what you glean from the videos. Also, as a college writer, YouTube can be a source of video material for your multimodal compositions. If you’re working in a digital medium, you can embed videos from YouTube either in their entirety or edited and citing them as you would any other source. You might ask how doing so affects the strength of your argument using the three classical appeals outlined by Aristotle. How might embedding a portion of video enhance your credibility, your ethos, as a writer? How is the logic of your argument, the logos, strengthened? And how might the video impact the emotional appeal of your argument, the pathos? By weaving in video, you affect the quality of your argument relative to the discipline and your audience. On the other hand, YouTube also can offer access to primary sources. For example, in doing your research on the application of Dweck’s growth mindsets in middle schools, you might do a YouTube search and find a half-dozen or more videos of Dweck herself discussing the topic. In your own research, you could then refer to her words directly, quoting and citing appropriately. Wikipedia has its uses for college writers depending on the rhetorical situation. Some professors forbid its use while some accept it in a limited way. Regardless, Wikipedia can be useful to develop your research question, to get an overview of an academic field, and to fill in gaps in your knowledge. In contrast, YouTube offers alternative media to support your studies as well as access to primary sources. Finally, weaving in a YouTube video may enhance your argument as part of a multimodal composition.

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ACTION POINTS Talk with a few classmates: How do you use Wikipedia and why do you use it, if you do? Have you ever used it as a source in your writing? If so, what were the circumstances and what was the reception? If not, why not? Have you ever been told you can’t use Wikipedia? What were the reasons given? How do the ideas in this chapter change or not change your views? Do a quick search on YouTube on an academic topic you’re interested in or are currently researching. Choose one or two videos to watch. Then read the Wikipedia entry on the same topic. What does each offer? What value might the YouTube videos offer you in your research? What might the Wikipedia page? A few good topics to explore are lithium-air batteries, microclimates, gravity wells, and growth mindsets. With a partner or two, explore the recommended use of Wikipedia in college research. Have there been studies on the subject? What were the results? What are the current recommendations and who’s making them? How does what you find compare with what is presented here and your own understanding? You might start with Harvard’s site, “What’s Wrong with Wikipedia?” Then perhaps move to Academic Search Premier or ProQuest. Finally, feel free to move to Google to conduct your search. Create a team of three. Each of you is to talk to a professor, one in the sciences, one in the social sciences, and one in the humanities. Ask about the professors’ beliefs about the appropriateness and usefulness of Wikipedia and YouTube. Do they have policies about their use? What’s the basis of those policies? Do they ever use those resources themselves? To what end? Come back and compare results.

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43 What Writing in the Humanities Is Writing in the humanities emphasizes careful analysis of cultural artifacts, read as texts, and often framed by a theoretical perspective. Writing in the humanities has its origins in the close reading and careful interpretation of religious texts. Called “exegesis” in the West, it originally referred to work on Biblical texts, though now refers to similar activities in all the world’s major religions. Today, the term can be used to describe the careful analysis of any text that has as its aim the understanding and appreciation of meaning.

ACCESS POINT When you were in high school English classes, what kinds of papers did you have to write? What was the common purpose and process? Did they seem highly formulaic or fairly loosely constructed?

Writing in the humanities interprets texts What do we mean by “texts” here? Texts can refer to any human composition seen as having meaning. That can range from a poem to a work of architecture, from a Super Bowl advertisement to a production of a Shakespeare play. Close reading of these kinds of texts is a mainstay in the writing of the humanities: literature, film, music, drama, art, art history, rhetoric, philosophy, and history, though history, and less often philosophy, may be housed in social science departments as they use some of the methods of social science.

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As a student of the humanities, you are often called upon to read closely a text of some kind, which means to read it with great care of the details and to make sense of those details in an interpretation. But you might also write a research-based paper about what others have said about primary texts, synthesizing your secondary research into a kind of literature review or as a means of establishing a means of interpretation. Reflective analyses or response papers are also common and present your experience with texts, such as making sense of an art exhibit or a theatre production. cultural artifacts the cultural productions of human beings studied by the humanities in order to better understand and interpret cultural values

What all these kinds of writing have in common is that they arise out of the goal of the humanities, which is to interpret the meaning and significance of the cultural production of human beings. These cultural productions are often called cultural artifacts and the humanities seek to understand the meaning of them, their significance to the culture that produced them, and the impact on people who receive them. As a writer, your goal in writing in the humanities is to participate in that endeavor by demonstrating your understanding of the meaning of a cultural artifact read as a text and to argue the significance of that understanding to your audience, which more often than not is your instructor. As you move further into your field, the audience may expand, such as to the larger discipline through an academic journal, or to the general population through, for example, a film review for a newspaper or online source.

Writing in the humanities involves observation, analysis, and interpretation From the purpose of writing in the humanities, we can infer some sense of process. Such writing is marked first by careful observation of an artifact. Generally, the writer begins with a relatively objective summary, such as of the plot of a novel or a description of a painting. This summary establishes both the object of study and the writer’s fitness to interpret that object. The writer then moves quickly to analysis, breaking the whole into significant parts and looking for patterns. This is followed by an interpretation of the meaning of those patterns. Usually, such a reading is not done naïvely, however, as if the meaning of something is self-evident. Instead, a reading is done through what is called an interpretive frame.

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Writing in the humanities forefronts an interpretive frame An interpretive frame is a bit like a window you might look through, though in this case, the glass is not clear but colored. The window frame itself encloses certain objects and blocks out others, so that you can focus on them. Moreover, because the glass is colored, some objects stand out more than others. Let’s say, for example, that you’re looking at a popular movie franchise, such as the Bourne movies, and your film class has introduced certain theories of gender, such as “hegemonic masculinity,” by R.W. Connell. With this theory as your interpretive frame, you study the film carefully for incidents and dialogue that tell you something about gender and, especially, masculinity.

interpretive frame a set of ideas, rules, beliefs, or values through which a reader approaches, understands, and makes sense of a text

The frame allows you to include certain aspects of the text and exclude others. Moreover, since the glass in the frame is colored, certain aspects of the text, which can be interpreted in multiple ways, take on meaning as part of a larger interpretation. In this way, you develop a hypothesis about hegemonic masculinity in the Bourne movies by a close reading of the texts through the lens of Connell’s theory. You may then assess the films for what they are saying about gender roles to the larger population and perhaps also the power of the theory to reveal underlying meaning in the films. This latter is important because the humanities, as do other fields, recognize that the power of theory is measured by its ability to explain phenomena and that no theory is absolute or neutral. Generally, the theories used in the humanities are of different types: how things are constructed either in and of themselves or how a reader makes meaning of a textual construct; how cultural identity, such as sexuality or class, informs the meaning; or how historical and social context informs the meaning. Almost always, these theoretical approaches are part of the curriculum of a course you may be taking, if even these are not made prominent. That is, your textbooks and your instructors may present the theories directly as means of interpreting cultural artifacts, or they may suggest them by their approach to teaching the subject. Alternatively, you may find theoretical approaches made prominent in secondary research which you then learn and apply yourself.

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Writing in the humanities is thesis driven Since you’re approaching a text without a clear sense of what you’re going to find, your writing is thesis driven. Your thesis may begin as only a hunch or question and then move toward an answer or resolution that arises from the analysis you conduct. In the revision process, you may develop some kind of thesis statement which you may choose to make present at the beginning of your text or at some other strategic point. Because writing in the humanities is heavily interpretive, the thesis is carefully qualified and limited, using what are called hedge terms, such as “may” and “suggest.” The use of the personal pronoun “I” is common in the humanities, as well, as is the active voice since interpretation of texts implicates the interpreter. Few scholars in the humanities believe there’s any such thing as a wholly objective interpretation. Thus, a writer in the humanities may well write, “I broke the scene into three distinct parts and analyzed the speech of the main character in each” rather than “The scene was broken into three distinct parts and the speech of the main character was analyzed.” In the humanities, MLA style is nearly always used as it emphasizes the author of an idea, again, emphasizing the interpreter, rather than the date, as in APA. This is because ideas may have value regardless of their date of origin. Aristotle, writing on ethical behavior, for example, is still a good source over two thousand years after he first made his ideas public. Writing in the humanities has evolved from religious exegesis, which emphasizes the close reading of texts. The close reading involves observation, analysis, and interpretation. The interpretation is almost never naïve; that is, the interpretation involves an interpretive frame, which is the application of a theoretical approach. Writing in the humanities is thesis driven and foregrounds the writer, as in the use of hedge terms, the personal pronoun “I,” and the MLA citation system.

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ACTION POINTS If you took high-school English in the recent past, what were you taught about writing essays there? Were the principles taught in that class targeted strictly to humanities-type classes or were they taught more as universal principles? Based on what you’ve read here, what are the most useful ideas you can take from that instruction? Talk with a few classmates. If English classes or high school were long ago for you, interview a younger classmate. Go online and locate the movie reviews in The New York Times. Read a couple. Is there a formula? Where is the thesis located? How is the argument made? What evidence is presented? How much summary is offered? How much close reading is conducted? See if you can develop a theory of writing a movie review. How might that theory relate to writing in a humanities class you are taking or have taken? Use your library database to look at an academic journal in one of the disciplines in the humanities, such as The Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Shakespeare Quarterly, or International Journal of Art and Art History. Skim through the various articles and read the opening paragraphs. How many include a close reading of text? How many include an explicit application of an interpretive frame or theory? How many include a review of literature, that is, a presentation of others’ interpretations? Look at a textbook from a humanities class, whether from a class you are in now or borrowed from the library. First, look at the writing prompts, generally at the end of a chapter or a literary selection. What do the writing prompts generally ask you to do and how are those prompts related to what is offered here? Second, are there interpretive frames presented, either in separate chapters or woven into the body of the textbook?

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44 What Writing in the Sciences Is Writing in the sciences supports and mirrors the scientific method, emphasizing replicability and objectivity. In the West, writing in the sciences has its origins in the scientific revolution of the Renaissance. Scientists, breaking from the strictures of religious doctrine, sought to understand the natural world directly. They developed a method to limit individual bias and to emphasize inductive over deductive reasoning, a method which is now known as the scientific method. Though this itself may be a kind of bias, it has held up for nearly 500 years and continues, largely unchanged, mainly because it works so well.

ACCESS POINT When you took science classes in high school, such as biology or chemistry, what kinds of writing did you do? Think about all writing—from the most informal to the most formal. What were the common characteristics? That is, what were you trying to accomplish and how?

You’re probably familiar with the scientific method from various science classes you’ve taken. It is generally presented as having distinct stages: observing phenomena, asking a research question, formulating a hypothesis, testing the hypothesis through observation or experiment, and interpreting and explaining the results.

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Writing in the sciences mirrors the scientific method scientific method the method scientists use to organize the stages of an experiment: observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses

The structure of finished writing in the sciences often mirrors the stages of the scientific method. Thus, writing in the sciences is sometimes mistakenly thought of as being of central importance only in the latter stages of a scientist’s work—interpreting and explaining the results. However, writing is important in all the stages as it is through writing, in journals and notebooks, that scientists develop their questions, gather their data, formulate their hypotheses, and sketch out conclusions. Any theory of a process of writing in the sciences needs to include those aspects as well. You’ll encounter many opportunities to write in the sciences in the disciplines of biology, chemistry, astronomy, physics, mathematics, earth and environmental sciences, and geology. In those classes, you’ll be called upon to keep logs, write lab reports, compose presentations, reflect upon practices, and write research reports. As you move further in your studies and into a profession, you may be called upon to write more specialized documents, such as research proposals, grant proposals, project reports, and journal articles. Overall, the goal of the sciences is to explain how the natural world works, from the largest structures, such as galaxy clusters, to the smallest, such as subatomic particles, and everything in between. Writing is both one of the means of furthering those pursuits and the principal means of communicating results and furthering the discipline. As a writer in college science classes, your more limited goal is to communicate your scientific knowledge and abilities, generally to your instructor. But you also have the goal of demonstrating your membership in an academic discourse community, especially if you are majoring in that scientific discipline.

Writing in the sciences uses established genres IMRAD an acronym for introduction, methods, research, and discussion; a genre used in scientific writing

As science aims to minimize bias and ensure replicability, writers rely upon established genres, such as IMRAD, which is an acronym for “introduction, methods, research, and discussion,” that express the scientific method and are easily identified and understood by readers. While these formats are common, they are often modified. For example, conclusions may be woven into a discussion section or be separated out, depending on the writer’s sense of effectiveness. Nonetheless, each genre has multiple parts and each part has its own purpose and expected content. To understand how this works as a writer, you might think of a document as made up of sections, each with its own purpose. Each section is like a little box which needs to be filled with particular information in

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an appropriate manner. For example, the purpose of a methods section is to present the steps the researcher took to complete her work and only that; it would not include the results nor any discussion of the significance of the study. For the ease of the reader, each section might also include subsections. The methods section, for example, may include a subsection, often set off by a subheading, identifying the limitations of the method and labeled “limitations,” wherein the writer indicates problems with the methodology that may have impacted the results. Studying these genres with an eye for the purpose and the content of sections and subsections is key to success in any scientific writing situation.

Writing in the sciences relies upon presentation and design While it may not appear so at first glance, presentation and design are very important in science writing. Because much scientific data is quantitative data, writers often rely upon non-linguistic texts, such as tables and graphs, to carry essential information. And even though very little consideration is purportedly given to aesthetics, a great deal of thought is given to how data and results are presented for efficiency and effectiveness. Is a table or a bar graph a better presentation of the data? What should the table look like and how can it best be situated on the page? The effectiveness of a science writer is affected by her ability to meet expectations in presentation and design.

quantitative data information that can be measured and is expressed in numbers, such as statistics or physical quantities

Writing in the sciences is hypothesis driven Scientific writing is generally hypothesis driven. This means that after the observation of an issue or situation, often including a literature review, a gap in knowledge is identified and a research question developed to address that gap. Then, a hypothesis is formulated as a tentative answer, in testable form, to the research question. This hypothesis drives the research and focuses the writing. The end of the report then includes a confirmation or refutation, to some degree, of the hypothesis, sometimes including a reformulation of the hypothesis. It’s very common to end by identifying areas of future research.

Writing in the sciences is collaborative, time sensitive, and impersonal Overall, writing in the sciences can be said to express the values inherent in quantifiable evidence, replicable design and results, and systematic and 281

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explicit methodology. Collaboration is very common. Teams of researchers often author a paper together, with the lead researcher often taking the role of lead writer, whose name comes first in the list of authors. Currency is also highly valued as scientific knowledge tends to be cumulative. A new finding builds upon and modifies earlier findings. research currency the quality of evaluating a source for its relevance to research based on its publication date

The different disciplines of the sciences tend to have their own, though similar, citation systems and styles, all of which clearly forefront dates, similar to APA style. Chemistry, for example, has the American Chemical Society style guide. Biology has the Council of Biology Editors’ style guide. Mathematics follows the American Mathematical Society guide. Many instructors in college courses offer their own guidance on citation systems. What all of them have in common is the foregrounding of research currency, that is to say, the dates of publication. In contrast with writing in the humanities, writing in the sciences tends to downplay individual authors. Thus, in-text citations tend to include the authors’ names in the parenthetical citation at the end of the sentence rather than embedded in the sentence itself. For example, a science writer, reporting on lithium-ion batteries, might write, “The narrow safety range of lithium-ion battery use means that careful system management is a major concern” (Lanuang, L., 2012). Finally, stylistically, the passive voice is preferred to the active, suggesting a greater objectivity of the writers. Thus, a scientist might write, “A spectral analysis was performed…” rather than “We performed a spectral analysis….” Instead of “I conclude that…” a scientist might write, “It can be concluded that….” Science writing uses the present tense to refer to facts and accepted conclusions but the past tense to refer to work that has been done which may have led to the conclusions. For example, a scientist would write, “Newton’s first law of physics states that an object at rest stays at rest.” The present tense is used to indicate that Newton’s law is still current today. However, a scientist would write, “Johannes Kepler analyzed the astronomical data of Tycho Brahe.” The past tense is used to indicate that the action occurred in the past. Contemporary writing in the sciences has its origin in the scientific revolution of the Renaissance. It uses established genres, such as IMRAD, that reflect the scientific method, though science writing is integral to the entire scientific enterprise, as expressed in journals and logs. Writing in the sciences uses presentation and design sparingly but strategically, is time sensitive, is hypothesis driven, and aims at objectivity. Writing in the sciences is often collaboratively produced.

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ACTION POINTS If you’re taking a science class now or have taken one recently, whether in college or high school, think about the kind of writing you did or are doing. What kind of writing is expected? Make a list and include note-taking, journal writing, reports, and any other kind of linguistic texts you produce. Compare your list with a few classmates and discuss how the ideas here relate to the writing you’ve done or are doing in the sciences. With a partner, go online and locate the science section of The New York Times. Find an article that is interesting to you and read it. Journalism is not necessarily science writing but is writing about science-related topics. How is the New York Times article different from science writing as you’ve come to understand it and what features of science writing are still reflected in it? Use your library database to look at an academic journal in one of the disciplines in the sciences, such as The International Journal of Biological Sciences, The Journal of Geosciences, or The New England Journal of Medicine. Skim through the various articles. How many explicitly demonstrate the IMRAD structure? How many include a hypothesis somewhere in the introductory section? Of those with explicit hypotheses, how many include in the conclusion or discussion sections an assessment of the validity of the hypothesis? Look at a textbook from a science class, whether from a class you are in now or borrowed from the library. First, look at the writing prompts, generally at the end of a chapter section. What do the writing prompts ask you to do? How do these writing activities express some aspect of the scientific method? How do they ask you to demonstrate your membership in the scientific discourse community?

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Fossil Free Stanford While climate change remains a controversial subject among politicians and some members of the the academic community, leading scientists contend that the evidence urges a call for action. Opportunities for action can be found close to Students at Stanford University organized Fossil Free, a group home, as close as the that petitions for divestment from fossil fuels. financial investments of the college. In the 1980s, when much of the world was demanding an end to South Africa’s racist policy of apartheid, students at colleges and universities organized to demand that their institution divest from companies that did business with the white government of South Africa. Such financial pressure added to the political pressure, which eventually led to the end of apartheid. Similarly, students in recent years have been demanding that their institutions divest from the fossil fuel industry, most notably coal and petroleum. In 2013, Fossil Free Stanford, a local student-led group, petitioned the board of trustees to divest from fossil fuels, primarily coal. Stanford, like many large universities, has investments in the billions of dollars, so divesting from fossil fuels sends both a financial and political statement. Stanford Board of Trustees agreed and divested from coal. But students pressed for more. In 2015, Fossil Free Stanford began an “indefinite sit-in” in 2015 to pressure the Stanford Board to divest from oil and gas as well. Michael Peñuelas, a graduate student and organizer, said, “We refuse to let Stanford stand idly by and continue to remain invested in the companies perpetuating the climate crisis.” Not all such efforts have the expected outcomes, however. The Stanford Board, after review, supported numerous initiatives to combat climate change, including a greenenergy system for the campus, investing in green energy research, and the creation of a climate-change task force. But divesting from the entire fossil fuel industry proved more challenging. The advisory panel could not determine that the social benefit of divestment outweighs the benefits of oil and gas in developing countries. Despite the board’s decision to not divest, their response and openness to receive feedback suggests the success of Fossil Free Stanford’s message. 284

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45 What Writing in the Social Sciences Is Writing in the social sciences reflects its mixed heritage, leaning heavily on the scientific method but also humanities-based practices such as narrative analysis and close reading. While studying human behavior has been around as long as humans have and has been recorded in both philosophy and literature, the modern social sciences are relatively young.

Writing in the social sciences is grounded  in positivism Dating from the early 1800s, the modern social sciences are an outgrowth of a movement called positivism, which holds that all assertions must be verifiable scientifically or through logical or mathematical reasoning. When applied to human behavior, at the individual or group level, a positive philosophy of science gave birth to the modern social sciences.

ACCESS POINT When you took social science classes in high school, such as sociology or psychology, what kinds of writing did you do? Make a quick list, ranking them from the most informal to the most formal. What were the common characteristics? That is, what were you trying to do?

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We can deduce that the goal of the social sciences is to understand how human behavior, social interactions, and the systems and structures that govern and influence them form and operate and to ground that understanding in positivist ways. The social sciences include psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, political science, geography, speech and communication studies, linguistics, and jurisprudence (law). It might also include history and, sometimes, philosophy.

Writing in the social sciences draws upon primary and secondary research As a student in social science classes, you’ll be asked to write in many different forms, though often with an emphasis on secondary research. Thus, a literature review, in which you synthesize information from multiple sources, is common. This may stand alone, as a kind of research paper, or be a major part of another writing project. You might also be asked to write about primary research you conduct. For example, you may be tasked with using a theory to observe and interpret some phenomenon. In an education class, this may take the form of observing children’s behavior in a controlled environment, such as an elementary school classroom, and then interpreting your observations through the lens of a theory of child development. In an administration of justice class, you may be tasked with analyzing the effects of a particular law by interviewing an affected person and putting the results of that interview into the context of broader research. As you move further into the discipline and into a professional role, you may write case studies, field reports, annotated bibliographies, grant and research proposals, and academic articles.

Writing in the social sciences uses mixedmethod research Because human beings and the social structures they inhabit are the objects of study, the social sciences are limited in their research methods in a way the natural sciences may not be. It’s simply not ethical, possible, or reasonable to conduct certain kinds of experiments on human beings. The social sciences, then, turn to different methods of gathering data, such as surveys, questionnaires, observations, interviews, and case studies. mixed-method research gathering and interpreting both quantitative and qualitative data

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The results of these methods are usually not as conclusive as in the natural sciences and thus rely upon interpretation and/or testing for significance. Because the results are often not absolute, social scientists may use mixed-method research, which involves gathering and interpreting both quantitative and qualitative data.

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As we’ve seen in writing in the sciences, quantitative research gathers numerical data and analyzes it. In the social sciences, such quantitative data is gathered through observation, questionnaires, or surveys. These data are then analyzed statistically, such as through a t-test, which would indicate the probability that an assertion based on the data is valid for the larger population and therefore is likely to be significant. The social sciences also use qualitative data, which relies upon linguistic artifacts, such as diaries or journals, interviews, and other narratives. These data are subjected to careful examination, as well. For example, there are different methods for analyzing a narrative, each appropriate for different purposes and with different kinds of evidence. Some focus on the structural aspects, while others focus on the performative or linguistic nature of the narrative. The results, however, are interpretive, not statistical, and thus their persuasiveness lies in the analysis and presentation of that analysis. A central approach to qualitative research is grounded theory, in which inductive reasoning, in three distinct phases, ultimately explains a process. The application of this approach in itself is persuasive as it is part of the discourse community’s expectations, though the effectiveness is tempered by the quality of the analysis.

qualitative data information that can be measured and expressed linguistically, such as interviews and narratives

grounded theory in the social sciences, inductive reasoning that constructs theory through methodic gathering and analysis of data

Writing in the social sciences uses established genres As the social sciences aim to explain all human behavior and functioning, a preference for scientific genres is evident. In many of the social science journals, the IMRAD structure is common. Research questions drive the inquiry and may lead to a hypothesis, similar to the natural sciences. Generally, there’s an introduction that frames an issue, usually through a literature review, and which then identifies a gap in knowledge. The writer then lays out a method for filling that gap, and possibly offers a hypothesis, what the researcher believes may be a viable answer to the research question. At the end is a confirmation or refutation, to some degree, of the hypothesis and, as in the natural sciences, an assessment of the significance of the findings and a call for further research.

Writing in the social sciences may be thesis driven Because the social sciences borrow methodologies from the humanities, especially close reading and textual analysis, writing in the social sciences may be thesis driven, similar to that of writing in the humanities. That is, rather than a hypothesis offered to a research question, an idea or question may be developed in response to a larger context or issue. 287

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While the thesis may only be derived at the end of a first draft of writing, during the revision process, some kind of thesis is generally moved to or presented at the beginning of the document. From there, the development of the argument may be similar to that in the humanities, with a close reading of evidence giving rise to an evolving thesis. This may be dictated by the relatively strict protocols of grounded theory.

Writing in the social sciences uses presentation and design, is time sensitive, and is often impersonal As in the natural sciences, social science writing presents quantitative data, especially statistical evidence in charts, tables, and graphs. Consequently, the presentation and design are carefully considered. Beyond this, the use of headings and subheadings to clarify purpose for the writer and to guide the reader are common. Since knowledge is cumulative in the social sciences, currency of research is highly valued. In psychology, the APA style citation system forefronts dates of research as does the style system of the American Sociological Association (ASA). Other disciplines favor different citation systems, such as the Chicago Manual of Style in political science. Many instructors will have their own preferences. All of them foreground the currency of research by featuring the date of publication. Writing in the social sciences tends to emphasize the passive voice, especially when presenting more quantitative data. For example, a social scientist might write, “A survey was distributed among participants via email and follow-up phone interviews were conducted” rather than “I distributed a survey among participants. . . . ” However, when the data is more qualitative, the active role of the person interpreting those data may be appropriate. Check with your instructor and analyze samples of the genre for guidance. The modern social sciences have their origin in the positivist movement of the early 1800s and rely upon the scientific method as well as methods borrowed from the humanities. Writing in the social sciences draws upon primary and secondary research and uses recognizable genres. The social sciences often use a mixed-method research approach, which relies upon writing to conduct. Writing in the social sciences pays attention to presentation and design, may be hypothesis or thesis driven, and more or less impersonal, depending on the method used and the evidence presented.

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ACTION POINTS If you’re taking a social science class now or have taken one recently, whether in college or high school, think about the kind of writing you did or are doing. What kind of writing is expected? Make a list and include note-taking, journal writing, reports, and any other kind of linguistic texts you produce. Most importantly, did you have to write an extended essay, such as a research or application paper? What were the expectations for the writing, especially as they relate to the ideas presented in this chapter? Compare your findings with a few classmates. With a few classmates, do a quick online search for tips on writing in the social sciences. Watch a few of the suggested videos and take notes: Which ideas seem useful to you, based on what you’ve gathered from this chapter and from your experience writing in social science classes? Which seem less useful? As a small group, figure out your own principles for writing in the social sciences. Use your library database to look at an academic journal in one of the disciplines in the social sciences, such as The Journal of Applied Psychology, The American Journal of Sociology, or Political Science Quarterly. Skim through the various articles. How many include a hypothesis somewhere in the introductory section? Of those with explicit hypotheses, how many include in the conclusion or discussion sections an assessment of the validity of the hypothesis? What kinds of charts, graphs, and tables are included? How are they designed and presented? Look at a textbook from a social science class, whether from a class you are in now or borrowed from the library. First, look at the writing prompts, generally at the end of a chapter section. How do these writing activities express some aspect of the scientific method? How do these writing activities express some aspect of writing in the humanities, such as close reading of texts? How do they ask you to demonstrate your membership in the discourse community? If you can, compare textbooks from different disciplines in the social sciences, such as abnormal psychology and anthropology.

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In early 2018, nine students from Oglethorpe University in Georgia took an early morning bus ride to Charlotte, North Carolina, to volunteer with Campus Pride, a national umbrella group working with students across the country promoting the rights of LGBTQ students. Campus Pride was begun in 2001 as a Students from Oglethorpe University organized an alternative spring nonprofit organization to break by working with the national group Campus Pride. help student leaders and campus groups create a safer environment for LGBTQ students. Students who identify as LGBTQ—lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer—want more than “tolerance”; like all students, they expect and demand complete acceptance. Yet progress comes slowly, and in spite of the landmark 2012 Supreme Court ruling legalizing gay marriage, acceptance is far from certain on American campuses. The nine Oglethorpe University students, all seasoned volunteers, know that while inclusiveness is a hallmark of colleges across the country, it remains an elusive and changing goal. Small things matter and the students came to work, choosing an “alternative break” to the usual spring break. In Charlotte, they were greeted by Shane Windmeyer, the founder of Campus Pride, who showed the students the organization’s headquarters, explained its mission, and showed them Campus Pride’s “campus index,” which shows what LGBTQ-related services each college and university in the country offers and what is missing. During the week, the students lent their hands and their hearts to the organization, working on computers, answering phones, and even organizing closets. They helped a local LGBTQ advocacy group, Time Out Youth, prepare for a Trans Visibility Day. As one student wrote, “What we gained most of all was a sense of unified and empowered community.” Because of work in the social sciences, these students were able to support work the work of Campus Pride by increasing mindfulness of LGBTQ-related services at universities across the country. 290

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46 What Writing in Business, Health Sciences, and Other Applied Fields Is Writing in the applied fields is problem-solving oriented and carefully crafted to audience expectations, genre, and purpose. Writing in the applied fields has been around as long as writing has. The ancient Sumerians, who around 3,000 BCE developed the system of writing that was the seminal influence of all modern writing in the West, used their earliest writings to record business transactions. But more than simply record the transaction, such writing was intended to influence and control future actions as well since it formed a contract in a way that augmented or supplanted oral contracts. Thus, writing from the earliest times has had the power to shape behavior and influence the world.

ACCESS POINT Have you held a position in which you’ve had to write, such as a job or in a club? What kind of writing did you do? Reports, emails? If you have or even if you haven’t, what do you think are the most important things to think about when doing this kind of writing?

While applied writing may be under-emphasized in schools, it constitutes perhaps the greatest amount of writing done in the world every day. Everything from an email message requesting a meeting to a corporate annual report, writing in the world to influence the world is how and why most people write. When that writing occurs in a formal context,

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such as in a health care clinic, a fish-and-wildlife office, or a marketing department, it demonstrates features common to the writing taught and practiced in the applied fields.

Writing in applied fields is academic writing turned toward the world applied fields including business, health sciences, education, social work, and computer science; writing that occurs when when the academic study of a particular field is turned to directly impact the world that it is a part of

Today, when we think of writing in applied fields, we think about writing that occurs when the academic study of a particular field is turned to directly impact the world that it is part of. These fields include business, health sciences, education, social work, and computer science. Other applied fields, like engineering technologies, are called the applied sciences, since they turn the findings of academic disciplines to practical application in the world. In actuality, everyone who writes in a profession also writes in an applied field. For example, while a cellular biologist may study biology and analyze the working of cellular organisms, that study remains relegated to the lab and the library and produces writing that relates directly to the production of knowledge, whether in lab reports or academic articles. But when a cellular biologist works as a member of an organization, she adopts a role closer to that of a person in business, attempting to have a real-world impact on someone or some operation. Her writing then consists of research proposals, recommendation reports, and grant applications. In this context, her writing is practical and varied, including everything from interoffice emails to budget requests. Some fields seem to be primarily applied, such as business administration, which can include management, marketing, accounting, and other subfields. The same could be said about any of the health sciences. It’s important, however, to separate writing in the applied field from the writing about the applied field. For example, while studying nursing, you’ll write in academic genres, such as research papers. In other words, you’ll be writing about the applied field. But in the applied field, as a nurse, you’ll write primarily reports and charts. Similarly, the study of business in college tends to be like that of the humanities and social sciences, borrowing from both. For example, while earning a business degree, you may be tasked with studying management styles using a case-study approach, similar to social sciences. In a case study, you pay close attention to the development of a person or group over time as a means of understanding a larger phenomenon or principle. Or you might be tasked with analyzing the effectiveness of corporate branding, conducting a close reading of primary texts as

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someone in the humanities would, or using a grounded theory approach as someone in the social sciences would. But in business writing classes, you would turn your attention to the kind of writing that is common in conducting business and which gets things done in the world. You’d focus on writing business letters, memos, and reports. Those reports may include some of the kind of academic writing mentioned above, especially synthesizing findings from secondary research, but the overall purpose and the genres are very different, with the purpose not to demonstrate knowledge but to have an impact on the world. Purpose becomes the driving factor. Similarly, in a class focusing on writing in the health sciences, you might focus on such things as intake and discharge reports, where accuracy, clarity, and conciseness are at a premium and whose purposes include communicating activities but also documenting events for legal reasons. In general, the goal of writing in business, the health sciences, and other applied fields is to have an impact on the world, such as to secure funding, to report on a patient’s progress, to recommend a particular action, or to communicate activities. Thus, it is focused on solving a problem or filling a need.

Writing in applied fields emphasizes audience and genre Writing in the applied fields is heavily influenced by audience expectations and genre, in addition to purpose. Very often, the genres are strictly controlled and learning to write within them is a first step into the discourse community. For example, a discharge report that a registered nurse must complete has sections calling for very specific information, which must be completed fully. Similarly, an audit report, developed by an independent accountant, follows very strict protocols, with specific parts and specific purposes. Engineering firms regularly produce a design statement, which is a very clearly defined genre with expectations governing not only structure but the writer’s stance. Most often, practitioners learn to write these kinds of documents on the job, though more and more academic programs are including training in writing in the professions. Audience is also key. A writer in an applied field situates herself relative to the audience needs, expectations, and biases. In the audit report, for example, an accountant is writing specifically to the business owner but also to the larger community of accountants and legal experts. Thus, the writing is very carefully crafted to communicate the necessary information 293

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and at the same time to meet all legal requirements and discourse community expectations.

Writing in the applied fields tends toward a formal, impersonal style From this, we can understand why the language used in writing in applied fields is usually relatively formal and carefully crafted for clarity and objectivity. Concise and direct language is highly valued and, depending on the situation, may be highly technical. At the same time, accessibility is a key consideration and shaped relative to the audience. A report to an expert would be written in different language than would be a report to the general public. active voice a type of sentence where the subject performs the action stated by the verb

passive voice a type of sentence that makes the object of an action into the subject of a sentence

The use of passive or active voice differs depending on the field. Active voice is encouraged in business, especially letters where clarity and conciseness are valued, though even in annual reports, the use of “we” to refer to the corporation is common. However, the passive voice is most commonly used in the health sciences, such as in charts and less formal writing, especially what are called agentless passives. For example, the sentence “Dr. Johnson was paged” is in the passive voice and contains no agent, that is, no person who did the paging. Finally, citation systems vary across applied fields. Many fields use APA style or some variation, while the UCLA Anderson School of Management and the Harvard Business School recommend the Chicago Manual of Style. Each field is different and instructors at different colleges have their own preferences. Writing in the applied fields is the most common kind of writing performed every day in the world. Everyone who writes in a profession writes in an applied field if the writing seeks to influence the world, such as through grant proposals or recommendation reports. Writing in the applied fields is driven by purpose and heavily dependent on specific genres, which are often learned in the field; it also pays careful attention to audiences. Writing in the applied fields tends to be fairly formal and impersonal.

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ACTION POINTS Poll your classmates to see who has had a job writing, whether that was in an office or for a school newspaper. Ask them about what kind of writing they did, what the demands were that were different from academic writing, and how they felt writing in that setting. What principles, strategies, or practices have they transferred, or recommend transferring, from an applied context to academic writing in general? Writing resumés is a significant part of anyone’s professional career. With a partner or two, go online to look at resources on writing effective resumés. Watch a few videos or scan some websites. What principles might you want to adopt? What practices may you want to avoid? How does resumé writing relate to writing in applied fields in general? Publicly traded companies make public their annual reports as well as a letter to shareholders. With a partner or two, go online and locate the annual report, often published as a Form 10-K, and the letter to shareholders of a business or corporation you’re interested in. Skim a section or two of the annual report and then read the letter to shareholders. How would you characterize the language? Compare and contrast this with some of the language used in the body of the report. What can you say about the different levels of formality, especially relative to audience and purpose? If you’re in an applied field right now, look at one or more of your textbooks for the kind of writing you are asked to do. Are there chapters specifically related to writing in the field as opposed to writing in the discipline? If not, are there sections within chapters? What kinds of writing are you asked to do and how is it similar to, or different from, the kind of academic writing you have been asked to do in other classes?

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Campus Sustainability Sustainability is a popular topic right now and for good reason. Waste and energy consumption are two major problems the world faces. And so it’s not surprising that students are seeking ways to be active voices in forging solutions. At colleges and universities across the country, students The Campus Sustainability Fund at the University of Washington, are leveraging their studies Seattle, awarded funds that helped develop a composting program to create environmentally for UW. sound practices. In the applied fields, grant writing is among the tools writers can use to bring about action and change. At the University of Washington, in Seattle, the Campus Sustainability Fund awards grants to student groups to complete projects that improve the university’s already high-ranking sustainability efforts. Ranging from a few hundred dollars to nearly a hundred thousand dollars, the grants support projects as diverse as a one-day student-led information rally on the costs and solutions to food waste, to a multi-year project to eliminate yard waste, a project that brought together students from UW’s architecture and design programs with student members of SEED, an organization that trains students to promote greater equity and diversity in education. Together, they worked with Grounds Management to create a green waste composting program for use on campus, thus reducing waste, reducing greenhouse gases, making local compost available to other groups on campus, and providing student leadership opportunities. The “Yard Waste Composting Program for UW” received nearly $80,000. The total cost of approximately $150,000 was recouped in savings within four years. Student-led sustainability projects are growing around the country, from private liberal arts college Luther College in Iowa to Colorado State in Fort Collins, Colorado. The Sierra Club, the Princeton Review, and Sustainable Endowment Institute all rank colleges for sustainability. Writing and communication skills gained through education allow writers to apply their calls for action in impactful ways. 296

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Bibliography Ambady, Nalini, and Robert Rosenthal. “Half a Minute: Predicting Teacher Evaluations from Thin Slices of Nonverbal Behavior and Physical Attractiveness.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 64, no. 3 (1993): 431-441 Benda, Jonathan P. “Qualitative Studies in Contrastive Rhetoric: An Analysis of Composition Research.” (1999). https://www.academia.edu/971025_Qualitative_ studies_in_contrastive_rhetoric_An_analysis_of_composition_research. Brandolini, Alberto (@ziobrando). “The bullshit asimmetry: the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.” Twitter, January 11, 2013. https://twitter.com/ziobrando/status/ 289635060758507521?lang=en Burlew, Rusty. “ Temperature Regulation in a Winter Cluster.” Honey Bee Suite (blog), January 3, 2011. https://honeybeesuite.com/ temperature-regulation-in-a-winter-cluster/. Campus Pride. “With Glitter and Love for All: Oglethorpe University Alternative Break Students Volunteer at Campus Pride.” March 8, 2018. https://www. campuspride.org/with-glitter-and-love-for-all-oglethorpe-university-alternative-break-students-volunteer-at-campus-pride/. Carey, Benedict. “Journal’s Paper on ESP Expected to Prompt Outrage.” New York Times, January 5, 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/06/ science/06esp.html. Carr, Nicholas. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Atlantic, July/August 2008. Community College Survey of Student Engagement (website). Center for Community College Student Engagement, University of Texas at Austin. AccessedJune 4, 2018. http://www.ccsse.org/. Corbyn, Zoë. “Stanford Students Begin ‘Indefinite’ Sit-in Over Fossil Fuel Divestment.” Guardian, November 16, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/ nov/17/stanford-students-begin-indefinite-sit-in-over-fossil-fuel-divestment. Council of Writing Program Administrators, National Council of Teachers of English, and National Writing Project. Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing. Printed by the author, 2011. PDF. http://wpacouncil.org/files/ framework-for-success-postsecondary-writing.pdf. cupcake811, “How to Make a Prezi,” Instructables. Accessed May 27, 2018. http:// www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Make-a-Prezi/. Dillard, Annie. The Writing Life. New York: HarperCollins, 1989. Doheny, Kathleen. “Spanking: More Harm Than Good?” HealthDay News, April 27, 2016. http://www.webmd.com/children/news/20160427/ spanking-more-harm-than-good#1. Elbow, Peter. “Closing My Eyes as I Speak: An Argument for Ignoring Audience.” College English 49, no. 1 (1987): 50-69. Elbow, Peter. Writing Without Teachers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

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Active Voices Frankfurt, Harry G. On Bullshit. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Giles, Jim. “Internet Encyclopaedias Go Head to Head.” Nature, December 14, 2005. https://www.nature.com/articles/438900a#article-info. Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005. Graff, Gerald. “Hidden Intellectualism.” Pedagogy 1, no. 1 (2001): 21-36. Hall, Stephen S. “Specter Of Cloning May Prove A Mirage.” New York Times, February 17, 2004. Irvin, L. Lennie. “A Word or Two on the Writing Process.” The Write Place: Guides for Writing and Grammar (blog), accessed June 20, 2018. http://www.lirvin. net/WGuides/wprocess.htm. Jacobson, Joseph L., and Sandra W. Jacobson. “Prenatal Alcohol Exposure and Neurobehavioral Development: Where is the Threshold?” Alcohol Health & Research World 18, no. 1 (1994): 30-36. King, Martin Luther, Jr. “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” April 16, 1963. Kristof, Nicholas D. “Bush’s Sex Scandal.” New York Times, February 16, 2005. Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. New York: Anchor Books, 1995. Liebling, A. J. “Look at the Record.” The Wayward Press, New Yorker, October 14, 1961. Luther College. “Research & Student Projects.” Center for Sustainable Communities. Updated February 26, 2018. https://www.luther.edu/sustainability/education/ research/. Martin, Shannon, Robert Rector, and Melissa Pardue. Government Spends $12 on Safe Sex and Contraceptives for Every $1 Spent on Abstinence. Washington, DC: Heritage Foundation, 2004. McComiskey, Bruce. Post-Truth Rhetoric and Composition. Boulder, CO: Utah State University Press, 2017. Najafzadeh, Medhi, and Sebastian Schneeweiss. “From Trial to Target Populations— Calibrating Real-World Data.” New England Journal of Medicine 376, no. 13 (2017): 1203-1205. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMp1614720. National Public Radio. “Science.” Accessed May 15, 2018. https://www.npr.org/ sections/science/. National Survey of Student Engagement (website). Indiana University School of Education. Accessed June 1, 2018. http://nsse.indiana.edu/. Perl, Sondra. “The Composing Processes of Unskilled College Writers.” College Composition and Communication 28, no. 8 (1977): 12-28. RAINN. “Campus Sexual Violence: Statistics.” Accessed August 15, 2018. https:// www.rainn.org/statistics/campus-sexual-violence. Ratcliffe, Krista. Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005. Rinnert, Carol, and Hiroe Kobayashi. “Differing Perceptions of EFL Writing among Readers in Japan.” The Modern Language Journal 85, no. 2 (2001): 189-209.

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Index A AAS (associates in applied sciences), 7 AAS (associates in arts and sciences), 7 ABI/Inform Trade and Industry Database, 239 academic databases, 237–2442 academic discourse identity and, 40–42 metatext of, 204 academic discourse community, 33–37 academic freedom, 65–69 academic resources, utilizing, 16 Academic Search Premier, 239, 240 academy description of, 1–3 goal of, 3 knowledge in, 5–9 action, provoking, 85 active study, 18–20 active voice, 294 ad hominem fallacy, 128 ad populum fallacy, 127 affordances, 80–81, 89 Alta Gracia apparel company, 193 Ambady, Nalini, 209 American Association of University Professors (AAUP), 66, 67, 223–224 analysis, 78–79, 187–189, 191–192, 274 analytical summary, 182 applied fields, writing in, 291–295 argument design and, 212–213 explanation of, 93–98 presentation and, 211 Rogerian, 141–145 Toulmin’s model and, 136–138 Aristotle, 1, 72, 120, 210, 270, 276 Art of Rhetoric, The (Aristotle), 72, 120 Asperger’s syndrome, student with, 23 assessment of evidence, 94 Rogerian argument and, 143–144 associates degrees, 7 Associates in Nursing, 7 audience, 72–73, 293–294

authority common forms of, 29–30 writing with, 29–32

B BA (bachelor of arts), 6–7 baccalaureate/bachelor’s degree, 6–7 backing, 135–136 Bacon, Francis, 217–218 Bartholomae, David, 30 BAS (bachelor of applied science), 6–7 Becker, Alton L., 142–143 becoming and academic, 39–43 Bem, Daryl J., 184 Benda, Jonathan, 60 BFA (bachelor of fine arts), 6–7 bias, limiting, 12 Blink (Gladwell), 209 Bozich, Joe, 193 Brandolini, Alberto, 263 BS (bachelor of science), 6–7 bullshit, 261–266 business writing, 291–295

C calendars, 20–21 Campus Pride, 290 Carr, Nicholas, 129, 169, 170 certainty, questioning, 12 certificates, 7 citation styles, 252–253 citations academic databases and, 240 in applied fields, 294 explanation of, 249–254 notetaking and, 244 claims, 94–95, 107–112, 133–136, 137–138 climate change, 284 Clinton, Hillary, 127 close readings, 273–274 code meshing, 55, 60 code switching, 55–56 collaboration, 163–164, 281–282 color of font, 213 commitment, 14 common beliefs, 190

301

Active Voices common knowledge, 251 communities, 33–37 community colleges, 2 complexity, 13, 116 comprehensive exams (comps), 6 compromise, 144 concessions, 109–110, 113, 115–116 Confederate monuments, 92 context analyzing, 79–80 as cue, 155 contextual constraint, 79 contextual knowledge, 218 contrast, 191 conversancy, 27 corroboration, 12 Cougar Pantry, 105–106 Coulter, Ann, 113 counterarguments, 12, 45, 94, 113–117 creativity, 19 credibility, 116, 120–121, 220–221, 250, 252, 258– 259, 270 critiques, 74 cues, 154–155 cultural artifacts, 274 curiosity, 19, 227

D degrees, types of, 5–6 delivery, 122 design, 209–214, 281, 288 dialectical relationship, 100 dialects, 53–57 digital notetaking tools, 246–247 digital revolution, 87 Dillard, Annie, 175–176 direct plagiarism, 255 disciplinary lens, 108 discourse, 35 discovery stage, 150 discussion, argument as, 96–97 dissertations, 6 diversity, 215 doctorate degrees, 6 drafting, 148–149, 150, 153, 158, 159, 246 Driscoll, Dana Lynn, 48 dualism, 14 Dudley, Barbara, 230

E EdD (doctor of education), 6

302

editing, 148–149, 150. See also revising Education Amendments Act, 126 effective practices, 20–21 either/or fallacy, 130 Elbow, Peter, 111 emotion, appeal to, 122–123, 128–129 emotional disposition, transfer of, 48 engagement, 17, 19, 228 epistemology, 175 ethos, 119–121, 123–124, 141, 188, 193, 210–211, 270 evaluation of evidence, 94 Rogerian argument and, 144 evidence, 94, 99–104, 107–110, 122, 138, 195–200, 220–221 evolving claims, 111 exegesis, 273 exigence, analyzing, 81–82, 85

F family values, 39–40 feedback, 55, 159 flexibility, 19 flexible writing process, 149–151 Flower, Janet, 148 fonts, 212–213 food insecurity, 105–106 Fossil Free Stanford, 284 Foucault, Michel, 217–218 Frankfurt, Harry, 261–262, 263 freedom of speech, 67, 70, 113–116 Freud, Sigmund, 195

G Galileo Galilei, 66 Geisler, Cheryl, 29–30 general education (Gen-Ed) requirements, 7 genre analyzing, 78–79 in applied fields, 293–294 as cue, 154 in the sciences, 280–281 in the social sciences, 287 GI Bill, 2 Gladwell, Malcolm, 209 Google Translate, 59–63 ground, 133–134, 137–138 grounded theory, 287 growth, levels of, 14

H habits of mind, 18–20, 227–228

Index hasty generalization fallacy, 129 hate speech, 70, 113–114 Hayes, John B., 148 health sciences, writing in, 291–295 Heffner, Raymond, 167 heritage, 44 heuristic, 137 historical monuments, 92 Hodge, Donnie, 193 hooks, bell, 41 horizontal knowledge transfer, 46–48 Horner, Bruce, 60 How People Learn, 45 Howard, Rebecca Moore, 257 HU Stands, 126 humanities, writing in the, 273–277 Hunger of Memory (Rodriguez), 40 hypothesis, 95, 175, 176–177, 226, 279, 281

I identity academic discourse and, 40–42 heritage and, 44 personal, 41–42 impersonal writing, 282 IMRAD, 280–281, 287 informal research, 155 information literacy, 217–222, 237, 240 intellectual development, 13–14 interpretation, 274 interpretive frame, 275 invention stage, 148–149, 150, 154

J jargon, 264 JD (juris doctorate), 6 judgment, 12, 95–96 Jung, Carl, 195

K kairos, 119–120, 123–124, 141, 188 Kennedy, John F., 119–120 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 111, 122–123, 182–183 knowledge in academy, 5–9 what counts as, 7–8 knowledge transfer, 45–50 Kobayashi, Hiroe, 60

L land-grant colleges, 2 language, 53–57. See also Google Translate

layout, 212 learning, methods of, 23 LGBTQ students, 290 Liebling, A. J., 220 Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman, The (Sterne), 203 lifelong learning, 201 literature review, 182, 286 logical fallacies, 127–132 logos, 119–120, 121–122, 123–124, 141, 188, 193, 210–211, 270 Lord, Audre, 41 Lyceum, 1

M MA (Master of Arts), 6 “Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the House, The” (Lord), 41 MBA (master of business administration), 6 McCracken, Andy, 223–224 MD (medical doctorate), 6 meaning argument focusing on, 94 questioning, 13 MEd (master of education), 6 medium analyzing, 80–81 as cue, 155 Mencken, H.L., 13 metacognition, 19, 48, 228 metatext, 177, 203–207 MFA (master of fine arts), 6 mixed-method research, 286–287 Morrill Act (1890), 2 MS (Master of Sciences), 6 Muir, David, 127 multimodal literacy, 88, 89 multimodal texts, 88–90 multiplicity, 14 Murray, Charles, 67 Murray, Donald, 147–148

N National Campus Leadership Council (NCLC), 223–224 National Council Licensure Exam (NCLEX), 7 National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), 53 negative freedom, 67–68 Nixon, Richard, 119–120 non-sequitur fallacy, 130 notetaking, 23, 26–27, 243–248

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Active Voices

O objectivity, 279 observation, 12, 274 openness, 19, 227 opportune moment, assessing, 123 organizing stage, 148–149, 150, 153 outlines, 156–158, 245

P paraphrase, 181, 183–184, 244–245 paraphrase plagiarism, 255, 258–259 passive voice, 282, 288, 294 Pasteur, Louis, 153 patchwork plagiarism, 255–256 patchwriting, 257 pathos, 119–120, 122, 123–124, 141, 188, 193, 210– 211, 270 “Pay It Forward, Pay It Back,” 230 peer review, 161–165 Penrose, Ann, 29–30 Peñuelas, Michael, 284 Perkins, David N., 46, 48 Perl, Sondra, 148 Perry, William G., 13–14 persistence, 19, 228 personal identity, 41–42 PhD (doctor of philosophy), 6 Pike, Kenneth, 142–143 plagiarism, 250, 255–260 planning and organizing stage, 148–149, 150, 153–154 Plato, 1–2 Polanyi, Michael, 66 Pompeo, Monica, 67 positive freedom, 65–66 positivism, 285 post-truth rhetoric, 127 Powell, Roger, 48 prereading, 26–27 presentation, 209–214, 281, 288 prewriting, 153–158, 159 primary research, 155, 231–235, 286 problematizing, 13 professional degrees, 7 ProQuest, 239, 240 PsyD (doctorate of psychology), 6 pull-quotes, 211 purpose, analyzing, 73–74

Q qualifications, 109–110

304

qualifier, 135–136, 138 qualifying statements, 12 qualitative data, 287 quantitative data, 281 questioning, like an academic, 12–13 questions for prereading, 26–27 prewriting and, 154 research and, 226–227 quotation, 181, 182–183, 184, 244–245

R Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN), 126 Ratcliffe, Krista, 142 reading for conversancy, 27 note taking and, 26–27 with a purpose, 25–28 reason appeal to, 121–122 errors in, 127–132 rebuttals, 12, 94, 113, 114–115, 116, 135–136, 138 recursiveness, 149 Regional Business Index, 239 registered nurse (RN), 7 relativism, 14 reliability, 101–102, 110 religious beliefs, 68 replicability, 227, 279, 280 report, 187, 189, 191–192 research academic databases and, 237–238 conducting, 225–229, 236 confirming or refuting, 227 prewriting and, 155 primary, 231–235

R repurposing, 236 secondary, 231–235 in the social sciences, 286 tertiary, 231–235 research currency, 282, 288 research logs, 220 respond, 187, 189–192 responsibility, 19 revising, 148–149, 150, 153, 159, 178 rhetoric, 72 Rhetoric (Young, Becker, and Pike), 142–143 rhetorical appeals, 119–125

Index rhetorical listening, 142–143 rhetorical questions, 177, 204–206 rhetorical situation, 71–84 Rinnert, Carol, 60 Rodriguez, Richard, 40 Rogerian argument, 141–145 Rogers, Carl, 142 Rosenthal, Robert, 209

S Salomon, Gavriel, 46, 48 sciences, writing in the, 279–283 scientific method, 279–280 scope of evidence, 108–109 secondary research, 155, 231–235, 286 self-awareness, 203–204 sexual assault awareness campaign, 126 shared governance, 223–224 significance, 190–191 slippery slope fallacy, 130–131 social media, 77, 263–264 social sciences, writing in the, 285–289 Socrates, 66 Sommers, Nancy, 244 sources citing, 249–254 synthesis and, 195–200 Sprout Up, 38 Standard Written English, 53–57, 60 Sterne, Laurence, 203 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 123 structure, 188–189 student, being a, 17–22 student-led governance, 223–224 Students’ Right to Their Own Language (SRTOL), 53–54 study skills, 20 studying, 20–21 sufficiency of evidence, 102, 110 summary, 181–182, 184, 244–245, 274 sustainability, 296 synthesis, 195–200, 244 systemic change, 38

T taxonomy, 33 Teaching to Transgress (hooks), 41 tentative titles, 170–172 tertiary research, 231–235 text box, 211 texts, 87–91 thesis, 94, 111, 176–179, 276, 287–288

thesis statement, 175, 177–178 “thin slicing,” 209–210 thinking like an academic, 11–15 time management, 20–21 Title IX, 121, 126 titles tentative, 170–172 two-part, 169–173 tone, 122 Toulmin, Stephen, 133 Toulmin’s model, 133–140, 141, 188 transfer of disposition or emotion, 48 translingual space, 60 triangulating, 227 Trump, Donald, 127 two-column notetaking method, 23, 245–246 two-part title, 169–173

U Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 123 understanding, argument as, 95–96 Uses of Argument (Toulmin), 133

V validity, 101–102, 110 vertical knowledge transfer, 46–47

W walkouts, student, 85, 166–167 warrant, 133–136, 137–138 white space, 212 Wikipedia, 233, 240, 267–271 Windmeyer, Shane, 290 Workers Rights Consortium, 193 writers’ stance, 74–75, 142 writing in applied fields, 291–295 with authority, 29–32 in the humanities, 273–277 in the sciences, 279–283 in the social sciences, 285–289 teaching as process, 148–149 transfer of knowledge about, 48–49 Writing Life, The (Dillard), 175 writing process, 147–152

Y Yiannopoulos, Milo, 70 Young, Richard, 142–143 Young, Vershawn Ashanti, 55 YouTube, 267, 269–271

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