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

CCR 691: Bazerman and Prior (2003) *What Writing Does and How It Does It*

Bazerman, Charles and Prior, Paul (Eds.). (2003). What Writing Does and How It Does It: An Introduction to Analyzing Texts and Textual Practices. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.

Executive Summary:

For this edited collection, Bazerman and Prior suggest in their introduction that discourse analysis lends itself not only to analyzing verbal discourse in linguistics and sociolinguistics, but also to research in rhetoric, composition, literary studies, and communication studies (among other disciplines). Thus, the authors attempt to combine practices from each of these fields of inquiry to catalog various research methods for scholars interested in textual analysis. They include discussions such as analysis of content, narrative works, intertextuality, code-switching, media texts, textual histories, conversation as well as the analysis of various linguistic and rhetorical features among these practices of analysis. Most chapters provide definitions, methods, methodologies, a review of literature, examples of applied analysis, practice prompts, and suggestions for further reading.

A number of assumptions ground their research methods: (a) that authoring texts is a complex cultural activity not only influenced by the author and his/her social contexts and experiences, but also other authors, other texts, genres, modes of communication, etc. (4); (b) that texts are written, visual, and verbal modes of communication that are produced through various mediums and interfaces including pen, paper, voice, conversation, thoughts, word processing tools, video, digital interfaces, and even sticks, knives, trees, and dirt (6-7); (c) that writing is a “complex literate activity that includes reading and writing, feeling and thinking, speaking and listening, observing and acting” (7); and, lastly, (d) that critical inquiry of texts is most assessable when analysts suspend judgment of what is normal and instead view all texts as being “strange objects worthy of close analytic attention” (7-8).

Quotable Quotes:

· “To understand writing, we need to explore the practices that people engage in to produce texts as well as the ways that writing practices gain their meanings and functions as dynamic elements o specific cultural settings” (2).

· What to consider when analyzing texts: “how texts direct people’s attention to various objects and concerns; how different linguistic, rhetorical, and graphic resources make possible the creation of meaning; how texts depend on and use other texts; how texts influence people’s beliefs and actions; how people learn to recognize, read, and produce genres (texts of certain types); how people actually go about producing texts; and how social systems of activity depend on and promote particular kinds of texts” (3).

An overview of chapters 1-7:

· In “Content Analysis: What texts Talk About” (13-32), Thomas Huckin defines content analysis as “the identifying, quantifying, and analyzing of specific words, phrases, concepts, or other observable semantic data in a text or body of texts with the aim of uncovering some underlying thematic or rhetorical pattern running through these texts” (14). Huckin also outlines the methodological procedures of content analysis (16-19), provides real examples of research using this approach (19-26), and assesses the approach for its criticisms and virtues (26-28).

· In “Poetics and Narrativity: How Texts Tell Stories” (33-56), Phillip Eubanks argues that the structure and function of language using narrative, metaphor, and metonymy have significant social power since these forms subconsciously shape cultural thinking and practices. Eubanks also suggests that poetic and narrative forms not only shape the writing of fiction, but also argumentative and scientific research practices. To exemplify the narrative approach, for instance, Eubanks describes his method of analyzing story-telling features in texts written by Bill gates, noting how he (Eubanks) selected texts, analyzed them, categorized his analyses, and applied narrative and rhetorical theory to make an argument about the functions of social thinking and argumentative processes (36-42). After exemplifying metaphor (42-50) and other figures like metonymy (50-52), Eubanks concludes that “studies of narrative, metaphor, and other figures are not just concurrent or collocated but inherently connected” (53).

· In “Linguistic Discourse Analysis: How the Language in Texts Works” (57-82), Ellen Barton views discourse analysis as “a method for analyzing the ways that specific features of language contribute to the interpretation of texts in their various contexts” (57). Barton explains how linguists—following various methods including ethnography of communication, interactive sociolinguistics, genre analysis, systemic linguistics, and critical discourse analysis—work to explore the ways language is structured in given contexts, analyzing the function (purpose and effects) of these structures. The chapter is divided into sections discussing and exemplifying discourse analysis used in (a) the analysis of oral-written language in linguistics and composition studies (62-65); and, (b) rich feature analysis (e.g. analyzing awkward sentences) (65-74).

· In “Intertextuality: How Texts Rely on Other Texts” (83-96), Charles Bazerman outlines terms and practices for research methods analyzing how texts rely on other texts in making meaning and posits that “intertextaulity is not just a matter of which other texts you refer to, but how you use them, what you use them for, and ultimately how you position yourself as a writer to them to make your own statement” (94). Methodologically speaking, he suggests that you (as researcher of intertextuality) should identify “why you are engaged,” “what questions you hope to answer,” “the specific texts you want to examine,” and “the traces of other texts that you wish to consider,” and then work to “[make] observations and interpretations,” “look for more subtle clues,” “make a list” and “look for a pattern” (91-92).

· In “Code-Switching and Second Language Writing: How Multiple Codes Are Combined in a Text” (97-122), Marcia Z. Buell illustrates how “Code-switching offers particularly rich insights for examination of second- (multi-) language or dialect speakers and writers who must not only negotiate across recognizably distinct languages or language variants, but also must worked through the complexity attached to learning and suing an unfamiliar set of codes” (98). Buell offers an extensive example where she analyzes a student’s essay for code-switching using not only contrastive analysis and interlanguage theory, but also using contrastive rhetoric (106-117).

· In “The Multiple Media of Texts: How Onscreen and Paper Texts Incorporate Words, Images, and Other Media” (123-166), Anne Frances Wysocki unpacks definitions of basic concepts used for analyzing various media texts, including the underlying assumptions for analyzing media texts (123-126), the “categories and terminology to use in analysis” of media texts (126-137), and a suggested “approach for analyzing the visual aspects of a text” (137-140).

· In “Tracing Process: How Texts Come Into Being” (167-200), Paul Prior discusses how and why researchers study writing processes. He defines how major concepts (like inscription, composing, text, and authorship) influence writing as practice. Methods for analysis are catalogued and include practices for “collecting and keeping track of texts,” “intertextual analysis,” “eliciting writers’ accounts,” “observation of writing,” and “integrating data from multiple sources” (172-196). Prior suggests that using multiple methods tracing textual histories (such as “intertextual analysis, participant accounts, and observation of activity” 197) will help researchers carefully consider and analyze how authorship and social contexts influence the composition of texts.

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