CCR 601: MacDonald (1994) "Professional Academic Writing"

MacDonald, Susan Peck. “Introduction” and “Patterns in Disciplinary Variation.” Professional Academic Writing in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994: pp. 1-50.

Executive Summary:

In the introduction, MacDonald gives an account of academia’s lack of attention placed on investigating academia’s own disciplinary writing practices and outlines the purpose of her investigation as well as the outline of her discussion to come. Besides recent interest in textual analysis of professional writing (mostly writing done by those in the sciences) in rhetoric and composition, MacDonald sees much gap in such investigations, especially in the humanities and social sciences. She does an analysis of three subfields in the humanities (studies of psychological attachment, studies of New England colonial migration, and studies following Renaissance New Historicism) in order to advance our understanding of textual practices in academia so that we may better analyze these practices and so that we can assess, reassess, and perhaps even challenge these practices. Besides introducing her purpose and the contents of her book chapters, MacDonald uses the chapter to argue that scholarly writing (mostly publishing in academic journals) is a process of creating knowledge as well as socializing members within discourse communities, an argument which acts as a major assumption of and framework for her analysis.

In chapter 2, MacDonald identifies four knowledge-making features found in academic writing in the humanities and social sciences, placing each on a continuum of sciences (hard science on one side; soft science on the other): “(1) variations from compactness to diffuseness, (2) variations in explanatory versus interpretive goals, (3) variations from conceptually driven to text driven in the relation between generalization and particular, and (4) variations in the degrees of epistemic self-consciousness that are explicit in texts” (21-22). Her chapter appears to be more of a content analysis of what kinds of problem-solving occur across soft and hard disciplines, rather than textual analysis of what sort of discourse features are commonly used. Once naming some key characteristics that can be used for discriminating between practices commonly used in hard vs. soft sciences, however, MacDonald very briefly applies some of these concepts to introduction writing in academic articles.

The first section distinguishes hard science from soft science by showing that hard science is compact and “urban” (their “knowledge problems” are universal, they have numerous people working on these problems, and they mostly cite new sources) while soft science is diffuse and “rural” (our “knowledge problems” are particular and are not universally agreed upon, we have far fewer people working on each of these problems, and we cite more archival sources). Since compact disciplines may be viewed as producing more progress than diffuse disciplines, the second section explains possible reasons for this supposed progress coming about (such as the arguments that (a) hard science is able to make communal decisions about what they view as problems, and (b) scholarship in hard science progresses by ‘Natural Selection’ where some research ‘survives’ simply because it fits better to the conditions of the current environment). Third, the author further distinguishes the humanities for its practice of recursively generating and complicating interpretive stances on phenomena, rather than explaining phenomena, making generalizations about phenomena, and moving on (as is more common in hard sciences). In the fourth section, MacDonald further describes knowledge making in soft sciences like the humanities as being “interpretive,” mostly “particularistic” in their generalizations, and phenomenon driven, while knowledge making in hard sciences is explanatory, communal in their generalizations, and “conceptually driven” (36).

Quotable Quotes:

• MacDonald quotes David Russell: “Scholars have just begun to study the rhetoric of academic disciplines and other professional communities on a case-by-case basis, to analyze the interactional rules, tacit and explicit, which govern the knowledge-making and communicating activities of various discourse communities and subcommunities….[O]nly such sociorhetorical analysis, discipline by discipline, will proved a foundation on which to construct meaningful generalizations about how writing works—and how students learn to make it work”
• “Two kinds of differences in tandem make fields in the humanities distinctive from more ‘compact’ fields...: (1) the humanities tend to be rooted in phenomena, data, or texts which are potentially worth knowing about for their own sake, not simply as the necessary first step toward generalization; and (2) the humanities tend to involve more intermediary representations—such as literary texts—between raw phenomena and generalization, thereby creating more phenomenal layers” (35-36).

Citable Citations: David Russell, Charles Bazerman, Stephen Toulmin