CCR 601: McNabb (2001) "Making the Gesture"

McNabb, Richard. “Making the Gesture: Graduate Student Submissions and Expectations of Journal Referees.” Composition Studies, Vol. 29, No. 1, 2001, pp. 9-26.

Executive Summary:

In response to studies indicating that grad students in rhetoric and composition are not being prepared by their graduate programs to make the professoriate transition and begin publishing, McNabb investigates the textual practices of grad students that might account for their struggles to publish. He analyzes common modes of writing in graduate submissions in comparison to the modes commonly published and/or called for by journal editors and referees and argues that “writing for publication goes beyond producing a coherent, effective, well-supported argument; a writer has to be able to negotiate the publishing system by making the right gestures” (22).

Similar to how Swales defined common “moves” for scientific article writing, McNabb describes “gestures” that grad students can utilize when constructing journal articles destined for publication. The gesture that’s missing from graduate writing, according to McNabb, is the practice of assigning authority to one’s argument by situating that argument within previously published authorities. McNabb identifies six rhetorical modes commonly utilized when writing for publication in our field (description, testimony, history, theory, rhetorical analysis, and research reports) and illustrates how graduate students are prone to writing testimonies. This is problematic since very few testimonies are statistically published and referees will generally ask for manuscripts grounded in theory or history.

Later, McNabb illustrates the discipline’s practice of valuing epistemic introductions by referencing Swales’ “moves” (where an author situates him/herself within a current conversation in the field, specifically “carving a niche” out for how his/her argument is an important contribution to that topic). This is also problematic since graduate students don’t commonly practice these kinds of introduction writing, yet 3 out of 4 published articles follow this approach.

He concludes by suggesting that graduate students should receive explicit instruction in the programs regarding (a) discursive conventions to follow in writing manuscripts, (b) important disciplinary conversations occurring presently and in the past, and (c) how to incorporate and cite this epistemic knowledge.

Quotable Quotes:

· “Scholars construct arguments around other arguments already authorized by the field and institutionalized by its journals—be it rhetorical structure, canonized author, or generic convention” (11).

· “referees and the editors who uphold their decisions require authors to reinvent the conventions of the field, conventions that give an article a more theoretical or historical structure” (16).

· “the validity of an idea is not determined solely by its pertinence within a given disciplinary conceptual framework but rather by the success of its appropriation of the right conventions. What this means for us authors is that one of the merits by which our arguments are judged is on our ability to appropriate the conventions that allow us to authorize our arguments” (16-17).

· Epistemic presentation within article introductions is “a crucial gesture for authorization. When authors submit a manuscript for publication, editors and reviewers require the authors to position their argument within existing conversations. This positioning, however, is more than just showing you are a part of an ongoing conversation; it is the act of carving out an original space for one’s argument” (20).

· Writers in comp/rhet “must use epistemic presentations to introduce their arguments no matter their rhetorical mode to which the writer gestures. But this gesture requires writers to shift their authority away from their own sense of writing and to an authorized disciplinary convention. In order to authorize an interpretation, a writer must be fully cognizant of the discursive conventions of the field” (22).

Citable Citations: Bazerman, Swales, MacDonald, Goggin, Berkenkotter, Huckin, Miller, Brueggemann, Blue, Shephard

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