Te a c h i n g t h e C o n v e n t i o n s o f A c a d e m i c D i s c o u r s e 347
> Teresa Thonney
A study of scholarly research articles from six disciplines provides insights about academic
writing that composition instructors can use to prepare students to write across
the curriculum.
Teaching the Conventions of
Academic Discourse
New Voice
Given the current emphasis on disciplinary discourses, it’s not surprising that so little recent attention has been devoted to identifying conventions that are
universal in academic discourse. In this essay, I argue that there are shared features
that unite academic writing, and that by introducing these features to first-year
students we provide them with knowledge they can apply and refine in each new
discipline they encounter.
Some scholars believe that making generalizations about academic writing
is impossible. Just as there is “no autonomous, generalizable skill called ball using
or ball handling that can be learned and then applied to all ball games,” David
Russell argues, there is no “autonomous, generalizable skill or set of skills called
‘writing’ that can be learned and then applied to all genres or activities” (57, 59).
Because there are no “general” skills that students can learn and transfer to all
writing situations, some suggest that students would benefit more from learning
about the ways writing conventions vary across academic disciplines and discourse
communities (Wardle 784).
Others (such as Berkenkotter and Huckin; Freedman) believe that writing
conventions can’t be taught and that trying to teach them “assumes that one can
learn to write academic genres by adhering to a definite rule-set” (Lynch-Biniek).
But linguistic scholars (including Swales; MacDonald; Bazerman; Biber) have dem-
onstrated that patterns and formulas prevail in academic writing, and many have
described the benefits of teaching writing conventions to students (see, for example,
Williams and Colomb). By teaching conventional ways to introduce topics, iden-
tify sources, and organize arguments, for instance, we provide “a valuable tool for
clarifying academic mysteries to large numbers of students” (Birkenstein and Graff).
In fact, Wilder and Wolfe found that students who were explicitly taught language
conventions in a literature course wrote better essays and reported comparable or
higher levels of enjoyment in the course than those receiving no instruction in
writing conventions (170).
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348 T E T Y C M a y 2 0 1 1
As Hassel and Giordano noted in a recent TETYC article, the need for
explicit instruction in writing conventions is particularly acute at open-admission
two-year colleges, where many students, including those testing into college-level
writing courses, are unfamiliar with rhetorical strategies expected in college writing
(25). Even freshmen at universities, when asked to write college papers, can feel like
they are being asked “to build a house without any tools” (Sommers and Saltz 131).
Studies by Carroll, Herrington and Curtis, and McCarthy reveal considerable
variety in the writing undergraduates do and in the disciplinary approaches they
encounter. Disciplines differ in modes of inquiry, in forms of proof, and in meth-
ods of research. These differences manifest themselves in writing, as documented
in corpus-based studies by Swales, MacDonald, Hyland, and others, differences
students will appreciate when they learn to write the genres of their chosen majors.
Despite this variation, some principles appear in all academic writing guides,
no matter the discipline, as Karen Bennett found in her survey of forty-one style
manuals. Some shared features, such as source citation, are, of course, realized differ-
ently across disciplines; but Bennett found “remarkable consensus as regards general
principles, methods of textual construction, and the kinds of grammatical and lexical
features to be used” (43). No first-year student is expected to write like discipline
insiders when writing in entry-level courses that are “predisciplinary in both theory
and practice” (Diller and Oates 54). But research indicates students are rewarded
when they produce prose that resembles that of experienced academic writers.
To determine what rhetorical features appear in the prose of experienced
academic writers, I analyzed twenty-four research articles—four articles from each
of six disciplines: psychology, sports medicine, biology, marketing, literature, and
engineering. The articles were randomly selected from the following peer-reviewed
journals:
American Journal of Community Psychology
American Journal of Sports Medicine
Journal of Cell Biology
Journal of Marketing Research
PMLA (Publications of the Modern Language Association of America)
Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers
My analysis reveals six standard “moves” in academic writing:
> Writers respond to what others have said about their topic.
> Writers state the value of their work and announce the plan for their papers.
> Writers acknowledge that others might disagree with the position they’ve
taken.
> Writers adopt a voice of authority.
> Writers use academic and discipline-specific vocabulary.
> Writers emphasize evidence, often in tables, graphs, and images.
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Introducing first-year composition students to these conventions of academic writ-
ing provides them with knowledge they can use now and refine later when writing
in their chosen disciplines.
Let’s start with the standard way academic writers begin—by summarizing
what others have said about their topic.
1. Academic Writers Respond to What Others Have Written about
Their Topic
When academics write, they join a conversation. To show they understand this they
refer to what others have already written about their subject. This feature appears
in every article of the sample. Consider this passage from a report in the sports
medicine sample articles:
In the past decades, major insights have been gained into how intrinsic factors
and extrinsic signals control and guide the development of dendrites and den-
dritic spines and how patterned neural activity shapes this process (Hering and
Sheng, 2001; . . . Van Aelst and Cline, 2004). Nonetheless, large gaps still exist in
our knowledge about how all these pathways integrate and execute their function
at the molecular level. (Huang, Zang, and Reichardt 527)
By referring to what others have said about a topic, writers accomplish two things:
they show that they are addressing an issue that matters, and they establish that
there is more to be said about it.
Sometimes writers enter the conversation by taking issue with the conclu-
sions of previous researchers, as in this passage from the literature articles:
[Christopher] Lane’s thesis, linking ambivalent national-symbolic identifications
on the part of homosexual writers to specifically colonial rhetorical struc tures, is
convincing (3); however, I would position Auden’s case dif ferently, as paradoxical
to this founding paradox of colonial passion. (Christie 1576)
Others have noted that disciplines vary in the way disagreement gets ex-
pressed. Linton, Madigan, and Johnson found that in literary criticism, for example,
attacks can get personal, unlike in other disciplines where disagreements are ignored
or limited to criticizing research methods (73–74). But the writers in my sample,
including those representing literature, show respect for previous research. Under-
graduates, given their junior status, would be wise to follow suit when disagreeing
with published scholars.
Like published scholars, undergraduates write research-based papers, today
more than ever (Lunsford and Lunsford 793). But they struggle in two notable
ways. First, many students fail to contribute to the conversation. Instead of analyz-
ing, synthesizing, or adding to what others have said, they merely show they have
“done the reading.” Second, in student papers, incorrect or missing source citations
abound. Tinberg and Nadeau’s recent study of first-year students at a community
college reminds us that for students the most in-depth discussion and practice of
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writing occurs in their required writing course (128). One way we can prepare
students for writing across the curriculum is with assignments that involve sum-
marizing, synthesizing, attributing writers, and commenting on what they have said.
2. Academic Writers State the Value of Their Work and Announce the
Plan for Their Papers
One reason academics refer to what has been written about an issue is to establish
that the issue matters. Another reason is to show that their research addresses an
aspect of the issue still unresolved. All twenty-four writers in our sample explain
that their research is necessary, unique, or otherwise of value, as in this passage from
the marketing articles:
The vast majority of research that has assessed the effect of price promotions on
brand evaluation has studied the effect after product trial, rather than pretrial. . . .
Unlike previous studies . . . , we examine the effects of price promotions pretrial
to isolate their informational impact on brand quality perceptions from the
potentially moderating effect of prior personal experience with the brand.
(Raghubir and Corfman 212)
Scholars must sell their work to editors and reviewers; but students too must “sell”
their work to their professors. By explaining why their topic is important, how
their approach to a topic is unique, or even why they chose to write about a topic,
students set their papers apart from papers that lack purpose.
In addition to stating the value of their work early, academic writers help
readers navigate their texts. All twenty-four titles in our sample announce the spe-
cific topic of the article; a few (particularly in the sciences) also convey the research
results. Here is an example from the psychology articles:
Conceptualizing and Measuring Historical Trauma among American Indian
People
From the biology articles:
Process Outgrowth in Oligodendrocytes is Mediated by CNP, a Novel Microtu-
bule Assembly Myelin Protein
Twenty-three of twenty-four articles also include subheadings that announce the
topic of sections:
Effects of Multiple Ankle Sprains on Postural Sway
Matters of Conscience in Machiavelli and Macbeth
Another way academic writers prepare readers for what is ahead is with an
explicit statement of purpose. Here is an example from the engineering articles:
This paper describes the development of a second generation of piezoelectric
paint and the characterization of sensors made with it. (Hale et al. 1)
In some articles, writers announce their hypothesis:
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We hypothesized that there would be an increase in ankle repositioning errors
and postural sway in basketball players who had sustained bilateral ankle sprains,
under conditions in which they had to rely more heavily on ankle proprioceptive
input. (Fu and Hui-Chan 1175)
In other articles, the statement of purpose expresses the writer’s opinion:
I . . . precede my discussion of the trope of the castrato with a brief histori cal
overview of the situation and reception of actual castrati singers. I then show how
Jo hann Jakob Wilhelm Heinse (1746–1803) and Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805)
used the figure of the castrato as a privileged metaphor for the negotiation of
class conflicts, gender con cepts, and the nature of art. (Krimmer 1544)
Many students think the main claim in an academic argument must be an assertive,
polemic statement. But corpus-based analyses reveal that most academic writers
state their main claim matter-of-factly (Conrad 119–20). Statements that begin
with “This paper describes,” “We hypothesized,” and “I then show” (from the above
examples) are not argumentative; they hardly seem like opinions.
Most writers in our sample identify the paper’s organization along with the
purpose. Here is an example from the psychology articles:
First, we will provide an overview of previous work conceptualizing historical
psychological distress among American Indians. Second, we will present a sum-
mary of qualitative data from elders on two American Indian reservations in the
upper Midwest that was used to develop a measure of historical trauma. Third, we
will describe measures of historical trauma and provide measurement characteris-
tics and frequencies on the basis of a sample of 143 parents. (Whitbeck et al. 120)
From the marketing articles:
The article is organized into four sections . . . that systematically investigate the
effect of package shape on volume perceptions, preference and choice, consump-
tion (perceived and actual), and postconsumption satisfaction. (Raghubir and
Krishna 314)
Some composition instructors want students to avoid statements of purpose
that begin “In this paper” and to avoid “blueprint” statements that announce topics.
But such statements are commonplace in academic journals, and many professors
reward students who make reading easy. In their analysis of 50 graded essays (from
various disciplines), Tedick and Mathison noticed “the general pattern was that
subjects received higher holistic scores on the essays—regardless of prompt type—
that they framed well enough for readers to be able to make predictions about the
content to come” (206).
In addition to providing subheadings and overviews, many writers in the
sample stop within their articles to announce what is next, as in this example from
the marketing articles:
In the next section, we discuss relevant research on visual mental imagery in the
design, marketing, and psychology literature, present a conceptual model of how
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visual mental imagery influences the customer appeal of the product designed,
and propose a set of hypotheses. (Dahl, Chattopadhyay, and Gorn 19)
Most writers end by summarizing what has been covered and reiterating the value
of their research, as shown in this example from sports medicine:
To our knowledge, this study provides the longest follow-up in the literature
of patients undergoing meniscal repair with the arrow. . . . Indeed, this study
represents the longest follow-up in the literature on any of the available all-inside
meniscal repair devices. (Lee and Diduch 1140–41)
Every article in the sample includes a statement of purpose, preview sen-
tences, review sentences, and sentences that announce the value of the research.
Student research and writing may not be as complicated as that of the scholars in
our sample, but students write for professors who read many papers—quickly. A
wealth of research has shown that when writers signal where they are going and
how they will get there, readers read faster and remember better what they have
read (Meyer 212–16). This is an important principle for students to learn.
3. Academic Writers Acknowledge That Others Might Disagree with the
Position They’ve Taken
Because scholars recognize that others might disagree with their conclusions, they
sprinkle their writing with qualifiers, or hedges, such as “probably,” “possibly,”
“maybe,” and “it seems,” particularly when writing to colleagues. Writers use hedges
to make statements more accurate and to avoid appearing dogmatic. Examples of
hedges are italicized in the following sentences from our sample. First from the
sports medicine articles:
The onset latency to the ADM was not affected, whereas the onset latency to the
FDI was affected, suggesting, the lesion may be located in the palm, distal to the
motor branch to the ADM. (Akuthota et al. 1228)
From the psychology articles:
[Oppressed people] tend to be passive and unable to recognize their own capacity
to transform their social reality; and their existence is often accepted on the basis
of destiny, bad luck or supernatural will. (Balcazar, Garate-Serafini, and Keys 250)
Writers in the sample also anticipate potential critics by recognizing the limitations
of their findings:
More research, varying the factors previously identified, is necessary to establish
the generalizability of our findings to a broader range of product design contexts.
(Dahl, Chattopadhyay, and Gorn 27)
Professors sometimes complain that students fail to back their claims with
sufficient evidence. While this is sometimes true, the problem can be partly due to
students’ failure to qualify assertions. Some students, especially those who are not
native speakers of English, underuse qualifiers (e.g., “apparently,” “likely,” “possibly”)
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and overuse words expressing certainty (e.g., “really,” “of course,” “certainly”) in
their writing (Gilquin and Paquot 47).
By teaching students how to distinguish between statements of “fact” and
opinion, how to differentiate between generalities and specifics, and how and when
to moderate claims with hedges, we help them write better arguments in any dis-
cipline. Students readily see the difference between “Surveys prove Americans are
changing their attitudes about same-sex marriages” and “Surveys suggest Americans
may be changing their attitudes about same-sex marriage,” and with practice they
learn to moderate sweeping generalities.
4. Academic Writers Adopt a Voice of Authority
Although tentative in their claims, academic writers still write with authority.
Conveying authority is understandably challenging for student writers. David
Bartholomae describes their dilemma: Students “have to speak in the voice and
through the codes of those of us with power and wisdom; and they not only have
to do this, they have to do it before they know what they are doing . . . and be-
fore, at least in the terms of our disciplines, they have anything to say” (156). Even
graduate students have difficulty establishing an ethos of authority when writing as
initiates in their field (Blakeslee 133). But students can learn to imitate techniques
of experienced writers.
Using First or Third Person
Writers in a few disciplines, such as engineering, tend to avoid first person in for-
mal writing. A look at two passages from our sample, the first from marketing, the
second from engineering, is revealing:
In this article, we examine the effect of elongation on (1) perceived volume, (2)
perceived consumption, (3) actual consumption, (4) postconsumption satisfaction,
and (5) choice. As described in Figure 1, our model suggests that package shape
directly affects perceived volume and through this, indirectly and inversely affects
perceived consumption. (Raghubir and Krishna 323)
This paper presents a new approach to model the friction layer in brake systems
in the investigation of noise and vibration, especially high-frequency squeal. . . .
The friction layer is modeled as a coupling stiffness between the brake pad and
the rotor as a combination of the elastic stiffness of the friction layer superim-
posed on the coupling modal stiffness of the brake-pad combination. . . . By
incorporating the earlier results in a two degree of freedom model, the predicted
frequencies were shown to be close to the squeal frequencies obtained from field
tests. (Paliwal et al. 520–21)
The engineering paragraph includes no mention of who completed the research
(“predicted frequencies were shown”). In fact, the paragraph is from a journal
that advises authors: “Papers should be written in the third person in an objective,
formal and impersonal style.”
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But in the rest of the sample, nineteen of twenty writers use first person.
Writers in medicine, marketing, psychology, biology, and literature all make clear
that they formed hypotheses, collected data, and reached conclusions. From the
sports medicine articles:
We compared the results obtained from the injured ankle with those from the
uninjured ankle. (Santilli et al. 1186)
From the psychology articles:
My colleagues and I interviewed 28 adult Bosnians attending a community
mental health program. (Miller 225)
Compared to the engineers, these writers also use more active voice con-
structions—another way to convey authority. For engineers, the average number of
occurrences of passive voice within 500-word excerpts is nearly twice the average
for any other discipline in the sample (15.8 occurrences in engineering versus 8.8
occurrences in sports medicine, 4.3 in psychology, 6.0 in marketing, 7.0 in cell
biology, and 3.25 in literature).
The challenge for student writers is knowing how and when to use first
person. Many students needlessly preface statements with “It seems to me” or “I
think” (Gilquin and Paquot 48–49, 55–57). Others, attempting to convey authority,
adopt the voice of moralizing parent. With direction, however, students improve.
They can learn to judge when writing “I think” has purpose and when writing
“I think” is pointless. (McKinney Maddalena provides excellent help for students
concerning when to use first person.)
Writing Concisely
Another way writers create an ethos of authority is by using a high percentage of
meaning-carrying words. In the 1970s, Jean Ure developed a method for deter-
mining a text’s lexical density by calculating the percentage of lexical words (445).
Lexical words include nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs—classes of words that
convey meaning and to which we continue to add. Grammatical words include
pronouns, auxiliary verbs, conjunctions, prepositions, articles, and other determin-
ers—classes of words to which we don’t add. Thus, the following sentence includes
seven lexical words (in bold print):
Some scientists believe that stem cells can be used to treat diseases.
While spoken language includes many grammatical words (Ure found the per-
centage of lexical words in spoken language to be below 40 percent), written texts
tend to be more lexically dense. In Ure’s study (in 1971), the lexical density of a
textbook was 50.2 percent, and the lexical density of a scholarly journal was 52.8
percent (cited in Ventola 159). The lexical density in our sample ranges between
52.8 percent (in sports medicine) and 56.5 percent (in cell biology). In other words,
more words than not are meaning-carrying words.
Writers in our sample pack meaning into sentences:
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They don’t describe “meniscal healing that was incomplete” but instead write
“incomplete meniscal healing.”
Not “sociologists and geographers who are feminists” but “feminist sociolo-
gists and geographers.”
Not “an outdoor site that is exposed” but “exposed outdoor site.”
The average lexical density rate of the sample is 54.4 percent, higher than that of
most types of writing. When we teach students how to revise for conciseness, we
teach them a sure-fire way to improve the quality and authority of their academic
writing.
5. Academic Writers Use Academic and Discipline-Specific Vocabulary
One obvious marker of academic writing is academic vocabulary. Several studies
of academic writing have focused on familiar sequences of three or more words
referred to as “lexical bundles.” They include phrases such as the following:
in order to
the presence of
the fact that
in the case of
as a result of
Lexical bundles like these account for 20 percent of the words in academic prose
(Biber et al. 995), and using these phrases is one indicator of proficiency in aca-
demic writing. But Viviana Cortes found that students rarely use them in their
writing, and when they do use them it is often not in the way published writers
do. She concludes that students would benefit from explicit instruction in lexical
bundles and their functions (420–21). For example, when an assignment involves
summarizing data from studies, an instructor could show students lexical bundles
commonly used to introduce previous research (such as “studies have shown that”
and “have been shown to”) (Conrad 134). Additional ideas for teaching academic
lexical bundles are found in Graff and Birkenstein’s book They Say / I Say.
Another marker of academic writing is specialized language. Scientists have
long been known for co-opting words and using them in new, specialized ways, as
seen in these phrases from our sports medicine and biology articles:
prolongation of the median motor latency
preactivation of the lower extremity muscles
genomic integrity
But this tendency is not unique to scientists—as additional examples from the
sample illustrate. From the engineering articles:
limits of linearity of piezoelectric paint
From the psychology articles:
estimates of construct loadings
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From the marketing articles:
expectancy disconfirmation
From the literature articles:
textual and libidinal potentials of coloniality
Technical words like these precisely and concisely convey specialized meanings to
others in the field and denote one’s membership in any academic community. In
fact, Robyn Woodward-Kron has demonstrated that “adopting the specialist language
of the discipline is intrinsic to learning disciplinary knowledge” (246).
One way to make students aware of specialist language and lexical bundles
is to have them look for recurring terms, stylistic conventions, and other patterns
in a corpus of academic writing. There are many free resources for corpus-based
research, including the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), with
concordancer, available at http://www.americancorpus.org/; and the Michigan Cor-
pus of Upper-Level Student Papers (MICUSP) at http://micusp.elicorpora.info/.
(Information about additional corpus research and analysis resources is provided by
David Lee at http://tiny.cc/corpora.) Students can use text analysis tools to study
the writing of a specific discipline, to learn how the writing styles of disciplines or
genres vary, or to analyze their own writing. Corpus-based research assignments
also provide students with opportunities to conduct primary research. (See Bowker
and Pearson for assignment ideas.)
6. Academic Writers Emphasize Evidence, Often in Tables, Graphs, and
Images
Academic writing is ultimately judged on the basis of its evidence, and academic
writers use various techniques for highlighting data.
Fourteen (58 percent) of the authors in our sample include tables, graphs,
or charts. Given the prominence of data in academic writing, it is important that
students learn how to “read” quantitative data. Yet, as Joanna Wolfe recently argued,
most first-year students do not understand that writers manipulate “statistical ex-
pressions in order to make an interesting story out of their data” (459). She calls on
composition instructors to discuss quantitative arguments in their courses:
Our students should be able to quickly discern that the statements “there is a
one-in-fifty chance that a bad event will happen” and “there is a 98 percent
chance that everything will be okay” differ only in rhetorical choice between
two mathematically equivalent figures. And students should have practice making
their own arguments from quantitative data, not only so they can see the many
ways in which such claims can be manipulated, but also so they can see the role
that invention plays in statistical data, experimental results, and other quantita-
tive arguments that are often popularly perceived as nonrhetorical “facts.” (455,
original emphasis)
To illustrate the rhetorical nature of graphs, Wolfe provides four graphical
representations of raw data, each lending itself to a different interpretation of the
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data (463–64). With examples like those Wolfe offers, we can show students that
quantitative data are as much “language” issues as they are “math” issues (462).
Images (including photos and drawings) are also common in the sample. All
of the writers representing engineering, sports medicine, and biology use images—to
depict experimental subjects, materials, processes, models, and results. Images are
more prominent in the writing of some disciplines than others, but their rhetorical
power is undeniable.
We process both words and images, Gibson and Zillmann explain, but the
“picture-superiority effect of information acquisition” is well documented (357).
Gibson and Zillmann had subjects read news stories accompanied with varying
images or no images at all. The images influenced subjects more than the words,
even when the images weren’t discussed in a text. Particularly powerful are images
that evoke fear. For example, subjects perceived the risk of getting Blowing Rock
disease from ticks to be higher when photos of child victims accompanied the story
than when photos of ticks accompanied the same story (364–65).
Many have already argued the merits of teaching visual rhetoric in compo-
sition courses and have suggested multimodal assignment ideas. (See, for example,
Bickmore and Christiansen’s article in a recent issue of TETYC; see also Welch,
Lee, and Shuman.) Multimodal assignments are yet another way to prepare students
for academic work across the curriculum.
Suggestions and Conclusion
Despite the variety—including among writers within single discourse communi-
ties—we can give first-year students useful general knowledge about academic
writing. All twenty-four writers in the sample summarize what has been written
about their topics, state the purpose of their writing, establish a reasonable yet
authoritative tone, use the specialized language of their discipline, and emphasize
evidence. When we provide opportunities for practice in these areas in our com-
position courses, we help students develop skills they will use when writing in
other disciplines. A few techniques may facilitate students’ understanding of the
conventions of academic writing:
> Have students read authentic academic texts from various disciplines. Most of the
reading undergraduates do is from textbooks, newspapers, magazines, and
other secondary sources; but authentic academic texts (such as journal articles
or laboratory reports) illustrate the conventions of academic writing. Pro-
viding accessible academic writing is possible no matter what the focus or
pedagogy of a composition course.
> Help students notice how academic writing varies. Learning how academic writ-
ing varies is just as important as learning what it has in common. One way
to make students aware of variety is to show them resources for writing in
different disciplines. For example, www.dianahacker.com/resdoc/ includes
documentation guidelines and sample student papers for humanities, history,
social sciences, and sciences. At www.citationmachine.net students can get
help creating citations in MLA, APA, Turabian, or Chicago styles. Discussing
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why certain moves (such as attributing sources) are realized in different ways
reinforces the importance of audience, purpose, and context. (For discus-
sion of why citation conventions vary, see Hyland; also Linton, Madigan, and
Johnson.) We can’t anticipate all the kinds of writing students will do, but we
can prepare them to expect variety.
> Help students infer and practice academic writing principles—both the universal and
the discipline specific. Having students abstract writing principles by studying
diverse examples promotes understanding (and thus transfer). Ask students
to find patterns, for instance, in how academic authors recognize opposing
views or use hedges. Have them analyze passages documented in different
styles and infer principles underlying all citation systems. To promote under-
standing of discipline-specific conventions, have students analyze the genres
of their majors using concordance software. (Bowker and Pearson’s text
includes assignment ideas, many appropriate for first-year writing courses.)
Or have students report primary research findings in graphs or in papers with
introduction, methods, results, and discussion sections. (For assignment ideas,
see Stoller et al.) Exercises like these help students notice commonality and
variation in academic writing.
> Help students see that academic writing is dynamic. Citation systems have adapted
to accommodate online sources (changes described by Walker). First person
is increasingly common in science writing (a shift explained by McKinney
Maddalena). The familiar IMRAD format (introduction, methods, results, and
discussion) was rare a century ago. (Sollaci and Pereira discuss this change.)
When students realize that language conventions are not fixed “rules,” they
learn that genres and discourse styles evolve to meet the needs of writers.
Discipline-specific studies have shown us how academic writing varies. But we
also need studies that tell us what academic writing has in common. Such studies
can help us provide first-year students with knowledge they can use now when
writing in predisciplinary courses and build on later when writing the specialized
discourse of their chosen fields.
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in College
Some students make very smooth transitions from writing in high school to writing in college, and we heartily wish all of you an easy passage. But other students are puzzled and frustrated by their experiences in writing for college classes. Only months earlier your writing was winning praise; now your instructors are dissatisfied, saying that the writing isn’t quite “there” yet, saying that the writing is “lacking something.” You haven’t changed–your writing is still mechanically sound, your descriptions are accurate, you’re saying smart things. But they’re still not happy. Some of the criticism is easy to understand: it’s easy to predict that standards at college are going to be higher than in high school. But it is not just a matter of higher standards: Often, what your instructors are asking of you is not just something better, but something different. If that’s the case, then you won’t succeed merely by being more intelligent or more skillful at doing what you did in high school. Instead, you’ll need to direct your skills and your intelligence to a new task.
We should note here that a college is a big place and that you’ll be asked to use writing to fulfill different tasks. You’ll find occasions where you’ll succeed by summarizing a reading accurately and showing that you understand it. There may be times when you’re invited to use writing to react to a reading, speculate about it. Far more often–like every other week–you will be asked to analyze the reading, to make a worthwhile claim about it that is not obvious(state a thesis means almost the same thing), to support your claim with good reasons, all in four or five pages that are organized to present an argument .(If you did that in high school, write your teachers a letter of gratitude.)
Now by “argument” we do not mean a dispute over a loud stereo. In college, an argument is something less contentious and more systematic: It is a set of statements coherently arranged to offer three things that experienced readers expect in essays that they judge to be thoughtful:•
· They expect to see a claim that would encourage them to say, “That’s interesting. I’d like to know more.”
· They expect to see evidence, reasons for your claim, evidence that would encourage them to agree with your claim, or at least to think it plausible.
· They expect to see that you’ve thought about limits and objections to your claim. Almost by definition, an interesting claim is one that can be reasonably challenged. Readers look for answers to questions like “But what about . . . ?” and “Have you considered . . . ?”
This kind of argument is less like disagreeable wrangling, more like an amiable and lively conversation with someone whom you respect and who respects you; someone who is interested in what you have to say, but will not agree with your claims just because you state them; someone who wants to hear your reasons for believing your claims and also wants to hear answers to their questions.
At this point, some students ask why they should be required to convince anyone of anything. “After all,” they say, “we are all entitled to our opinions, so all we should have to do is express them clearly. Here’s my opinion. Take it or leave it.” This point of view both misunderstands the nature of argument and ignores its greatest value.
It is true that we are all entitled to our opinions and that we have no duty to defend them. But universities hold as their highest value not just the pursuit of new knowledge and better understanding, but the sharing of that knowledge. We write not only to state what we have think but also to show why others might agree with it and why it matters. We also know that whatever it is we think, it is never the entire truth. Our conclusions are partial, incomplete, and always subject to challenge. So we write in a way that allows others to test our reasoning: we present our best thinking as a series of claims, reasons, and responses to imagined challenges, so that readers can see not only what we think, but whether they ought to agree.
And that’s all an argument is–not wrangling, but a serious and focused conversation among people who are intensely interested in getting to the bottom of things cooperatively.
Those values are also an integral part of your education in college. For four years, you are asked to read, do research, gather data, analyze it, think about it, and then communicate it to readers in a form in which enables them to asses it and use it. You are asked to do this not because we expect you all to become professional scholars, but because in just about any profession you pursue, you will do research, think about what you find, make decisions about complex matters, and then explain those decisions–usually in writing–to others who have a stake in your decisions being sound ones. In an Age of Information, what most professionals do is research, think, and make arguments. (And part of the value of doing your own thinking and writing is that it makes you much better at evaluating the thinking and writing of others.)
In the next few pages, we’re going to walk you through a process of creating an argument in a Humanities or Social Science paper. Note that we’re describing “a” process and not “the” process. We’re not describing the way that everyone does go about writing an argument. We’re certainly not describing the way everyone must go about writing an argument. Further, we can’t cover everything, and some of your teachers will expect something other than what we describe here. There are even some differences between how you write papers in Humanities and in the Social Sciences. But within all these limits, we can lay some groundwork for writing college papers.
We begin with the assignment that gets you started; then we discuss some ways to plan your paper so that you don’t waste too much time on false starts. We conclude with some strategies for drafting and revising, especially revising, because the most productive work on a paper begins after you have gotten your ideas out of the warm and cozy incubator of your own mind and into the cold light of day.
Not all of your instructors will be equally clear about what they expect of your paper. Some will tell you in detail what to read, how to think about it, and how to organize your paper, but others will ask a general question just to see what you can do with it. Some instructors will expect you to stay close to the assignment, penalizing you if you depart from it; others will encourage you to strike out on your own. Some few instructors may want you to demonstrate only that you have read and understood a reading, but most will want you to use your understanding of the reading as a jumping-off point for an analysis and an argument.
So your first step in writing an assigned paper occurs well before you begin writing: You must know what your instructor expects. Start by assuming that, unless you see the words “Summarize or paraphrase what X says about . . . ,” your instructor is unlikely to want just a summary. Beyond this point, however, you have to become a kind of anthropologist, reading the culture of your particular class to understand what is said, what is not, and what is intended.
Start by looking carefully at the words of the assignment. If it is phrased in any of these ways, one crucial part of your task has been done for you:
· “Agree or disagree: ‘Freud misunderstood the feminine mind when he wrote . . . .’”
· “Was Lear justified in castigating Cordelia when she refused to . . . ?”
· “Discuss whether Socrates adequately answered the charge that he corrupted the youth of Athens.”
For questions like these, you start (but it’s only a start) by considering two opposing claims: Freud understood the feminine mind or did not , Lear was or was not justified, Socrates did or did not answer the charges against him. For reasons we will discuss below, you will not want the claim of your paper to be merely yes or no, he did or he didn’t. But an assignment like this can make it easier to get started because you can immediately begin to find and assess data from your readings. You can look at passages from the reading and consider how they would support one of the claims. (Remember: this is only a start. You do not want to end up with a claim that says nothing more than “Freud did (or did not) understand the feminine mind.” “Lear was (or was not) justified in castigating Cordelia “ “Socrates did (or did not) adequately answer the charge.”)
More likely, however, your assignments will be less specific. They won’t suggest opposite claims. Instead, they’ll give you a reasonably specific sense of subject matter and a reasonably specific sense of your task:
· “illustrate,” “explain,” “analyze,” “evaluate,” “compare and contrast,”
· “Discuss the role that the honor plays in The Odyssey. “
· “Show how Molière exploits comic patterns in a scene from Tartuffe.”
None of these assignments implies a main point or claim that you can directly import into your paper. You can’t just claim that “honor does play a role in The Odyssey” or that “MoliËre does exploit comic patterns in Tartuffe.” After all, if the instructor has asked you to discuss how MoliËre used comic patterns, she presumably already believes that he did use them. You get no credit for asserting the existence of something we already know exists.
Instead, these assignments ask you to spend four or five pages explaining the results of an analysis. Words such as “show how” and “explain” and “illustrate” do not ask you to summarize a reading. They ask you to show how the reading is put together, how it works. If you asked someone to show you how your computer worked, you wouldn’t be satisfied if they simply summarized: “This is the keyboard, this is the monitor, this is the printer.” You already know the summary–now you want to know how the thing does what it does. These assignments are similar. They ask you to identify parts of things–parts of an argument, parts of a narrative, parts of a poem; then show how those parts fit together (or work against one another) to create some larger effect.
But in the course of so doing, you can’t just grind out four or five pages of discussion, explanation, or analysis. It may seem strange, but even when you’re asked to “show how” or “illustrate,” you’re still being asked to make an argument. You must shape and focus that discussion or analysis so that it supports a
claim
that you discovered and formulated and that all of your discussion and explanation develops and supports. We’ll talk more about claims — also known as points — in later sections.
A third kind of assignment is simultaneously least restrictive and most intimidating. These assignments leave it up to you to decide not only what you will claim but what you will write about and even what kind of analysis you will do: “Analyze the role of a character in The Odyssey.” That is the kind of assignment that causes many students anxiety because they must motivate their research almost entirely on their own. To meet this kind of assignment, the best advice we can give is to read with your mind open to things that puzzle you, that make you wish you understood something better.
Now that advice may seem almost counterproductive; you may even think that being puzzled or not understanding something testifies to your intellectual failure. Yet almost everything we do in a university starts with someone being puzzled about something, someone with a vague–or specific– dissatisfaction caused by not knowing something that seems important or by wanting to understand something better. The best place to begin thinking about any assignment is with what you don’t understand but wish you did.
If after all this analysis of the assignment you are still uncertain about what is expected of you, ask your instructor. If your class has a Writing Intern, ask that person. If for some reason you can’t ask either, locate the Academic Tutor in your residence hall and ask that person. Do this as soon as possible. You’re not likely to succeed on an assignment if you don’t have a clear sense of what will count as success. You don’t want to spend time doing something different than what you’re being asked to do.
However different your assignments may seem, most will share one characteristic: in each, you will almost certainly be asked to make a point. Now when we talk about the “point” of your paper, you should understand what we do and do not mean. If asked what the point of their paper is, most students answer with something like, “Well, I wanted to write about the way Falstaff plays the role of Prince Hal’s father.” But that kind of sentence names only your topic and an intention to write about it.
When most of your instructors ask what the point of your paper is, they have in mind something different. By “point” or “claim” (the words are virtually synonymous with thesis), they will more often mean the most important sentence that you wrote in your essay, a sentence that appears on the page, in black in white; words that you can point to, underline, send on a postcard; a sentence that sums up the most important thing you want to say as a result of your reading, thinking, research, and writing. In that sense, you might state the point of your paper as “Well, I want to show/prove/claim/argue/demonstrate (any of those words will serve to introduce the point) that
“Though Falstaff seems to play the role of Hal’s father, he is, in fact,
acting more like a younger brother who . . . .”“
If you include in your paper what appears after I want to prove that, then that’s the point of your paper, its main claim that the rest of your paper supports.
A question just as important as what a point is, though, is what counts as a good one. We will answer that question here, even though it gets us ahead of ourselves in describing the process of writing a paper. Many beginning writers think that writing an essay means thinking up a point or thesis and then finding evidence to support it. But few of us work that way. Most of us begin our research with a question, with a puzzle, something that we don’t understand but want to, and maybe a vague sense of what an answer might look like. We hope that out of our early research to resolve that puzzle there emerges a solution to the puzzle, an idea that seems promising, but one that only more research can test. But even if more research supports that developing idea, we aren’t ready to say that that idea is our claim or point. Instead, we start writing to see whether we can build an argument to support it, suspecting, hoping that in the act of writing we will refine that idea, maybe even change it substantially.
That’s why we say we are getting ahead of ourselves in this account of writing a paper, because as paradoxical as it may sound, you are unlikely to know exactly what point you will make until after you have written the paper in which you made it. So for us to talk about the quality of a point now is to get ahead of ourselves, because we haven’t even touched on how you might think about drafting your paper, much less revising it. But because everything you do at the beginning aims at finding a good point, it is useful to have a clear idea about what it is you are trying to find, what makes for a good point.
A good point or claim typically has several key characteristics: it says something significant about what you have read, something that helps you and your readers understand it better; it says something that is not obvious, something that your reader didn’t already know; it is at least mildly contestable, something that no one would agree with just by reading it; it asserts something that you can plausibly support in five pages, not something that would require a book.
Measured by those criteria, these are not good points or claims:
· “1 Henry IV by William Shakespeare is a play that raises questions about the nature of kingship and responsibility.” Sounds impressive, but who would contest it? Everyone who has read the play already knows that it raises such questions.
· “Native Son is one of the most important stories about race relations ever written.” Again, your readers probably already agree with this, and if so, why would they read an essay that supported it? Further, are you ready to provide an argument that this point is true? What evidence could you provide to make this argument? Are you prepared to compare the effect of Native Son with the effects of other books about race relations?
· “Socrates’ argument in The Apology is very interesting.” Right. So?
· “In this paper I discuss Thucydides’ account of the Corcyrean-Corinthian debate in Book I.” First, what significant thing does this point tell us about the book? Second, who would contest this (who would argue that you are not going to discuss Thucydides’ account?).
None of these is a particularly significant or contestable point, and so none of them qualifies as a good one.
What does qualify as a good claim? These might:
· The three most prominent women in Heart of Darkness play key roles in a complex system of parallels: literally as gatekeepers of Africa, representatively as gatekeepers of darkness, and metaphorically as gatekeepers of brutality.
· While Freud argues that followers obey because each has a part of themselves invested in the leader, Blau claims that followers obey in order to avoid punishment. Both neglect the effects of external power.
You should recognize, however, that you will only rarely be able state good points like these before you write your first draft. Much more often, you discover good points at the end of the process of drafting. Writing is a way of thinking through a problem, of discovering what you want to say. So do not feel that you should begin to write only when you have a fully articulated point in mind. Instead, write to discover and to refine it.
One note on the language of point sentences. If you’re like us, you will want your readers to think that your points are terrifically interesting and significant. What almost never accomplishes this is to say: “My point is terrifically interesting and significant.” Many writers try to generate a sense of importance for what they write by simply adding some synonym of the word “important:” “An important question to consider . . .” “It is essential to examine . . . “ “A crucial concern is whether. . .” This isn’t going to work. What convinces readers that a point is important is not the word “important,” but the words that tell us the substance of the point. If, during your first draft, you find yourself using words like “important,” you should make a note to yourself to come back during your revisions to replace “important” with more substantive language. Then don’t forget to do it. It’s really important.
Now: in order to prove that important point — or to go through a process that will help you develop one — you’ll need a strategy for gathering evidence and writing a first draft. We offer advice on these matters in the next section: “Preparing to write and drafting the paper.”
