Academic Writing: An Introduction

336 Pages·2009·2.148 MB·English

by  Janet Giltrow, Rick Gooding, Daniel Burgoyne, Marlene Sawatsky

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Academic
Writing
AN INTRODUCTION
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Academic
Writing
AN INTRODUCTION
Second Edition
Janet Giltrow
Richard Gooding
Daniel Burgoyne
Marlene Sawatsky
broadview press
Review Copy
© 2009 Authors
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Academic writing : an introduction / Janet
Giltrow ... [et al.]. -- 2nd ed.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-55111-908-3
1. Academic writing. 2. Report writing. 3. English
language--Rhetoric. I. Giltrow, Janet, 1949-
PE1408.G54 2009 808’.042 C2009-903911-7
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Contents
Preface ix
1 Introducing Genre 1
1A Hearing Voices 1
1B Hearing Genres 4
1C High-School vs. University Writing 8
1D The University as Research Institution 10
2 Readers Reading I 13
2A Who Do You Think You’re Talking To? 13
2B Attitudes Toward Language 16
2C Traditions of Commentary on Student Writing 18
2D An Alternative to Traditional Commentary:
The Think-Aloud Protocol 21
2E Adapting the Think-Aloud Protocol in the
Writing Classroom 23
2F Reading on Behalf of Others 34
2G Reliability of Readers 36
3 Citation and Summary 39
3A Introducing Scholarly Citation 40
3B Is Citation Unique to Scholarly Writing? 45
3C Why Do Scholars Use Citation? 52
4 Summary 57
4A Noting for Gist 59
4B Recording Levels 62
4C Using Gist and Levels of Generality to
Write Summary 63
4D Establishing the Summarizer’s Position 71
4E Reporting Reporting 77
4F Experts and Non-experts 78
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vi CONTENTS
5 Challenging Situations for Summarizers 87
5A High-level Passages 87
5B Low-level Passages 91
5C Summarizing Narrative 95
6 Orchestrating Voices 103
6A Making Speakers Visible: Writing as Conversation 103
6B Orchestrating Scholarly Voices 111
6C Identifying Different Genres and Orchestrating
Non-scholarly Voices 121
7 Definition 135
7A Dictionaries 136
7B Appositions 137
7C Sustained Definitions 142
7D The Social Profile of Abstractions and Their
Different Roles in Different Disciplines 148
8 Readers Reading II 157
8A Think-Aloud and Genre Theory 157
8B The Mental Desktop 164
9 Scholarly Styles I 175
9A Common and Uncommon Sense 175
9B Is Scholarly Writing Unnecessarily Complicated,
Exclusionary, or Elitist? 178
9C Nominal Style: Syntactic Density 180
9D Nominal Style: Ambiguity 185
9E Sentence Style and Textual Coherence 189
10 Scholarly Styles II 195
10A Messages about the Argument 195
10B The Discursive I 197
10C Forecasts and Emphasis 200
10D Presupposing vs. Asserting 205
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CONTENTS vii
11 Making and Maintaining Knowledge I 209
11A Making Knowledge 210
11B Method Sections 215
11C Qualitative Method and Subject Position 221
12 Making and Maintaining Knowledge II 229
12A Modality 230
12B Other Markers of the Status of Knowledge 234
12C Tense and the Story of Research 244
13 Introductions 253
13A Generalization and Citation 254
13B Reported Speech 257
13C Documentation 264
13D State of Knowledge and the Knowledge Deficit 270
13E Student Versions of the Knowledge Deficit 274
14 Conclusions and the Moral Compass of the
Disciplines 277
14A Conclusions 278
14B The Moral Compass of the Disciplines:
Research Ethics 286
14C The Moral Compass of the Disciplines:
Moral Statements 290
Further Readings 295
Glossary 297
References 311
Index 321
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Preface
Consider Academic Writing: An Introduction your invitation to join the
scholarly community.
Possibly you consider this course of studies a requirement—and
maybe it is. Or at least an obligation: people should pay attention to
their writing. Everybody says it’s important. But instead of thinking of
this course as a requirement or an obligation—or a last chance to fix
your grammar—try thinking of it as an invitation to participate in the
knowledge-making activities of research communities.
Should such a direct invitation be necessary? After all, you are (prob-
ably) already admitted to university and enrolled in your courses. That
should be invitation enough. Unfortunately—or not entirely unfortu-
nately, as we will see in a minute—students’ undergraduate situation is
not always entirely hospitable. Lectures and readings can make assump-
tions which you may feel are unwarranted: taking for granted principles
and ways of reasoning which are not familiar to you or are quite unlike
those you are used to from secondary school or from everyday experience.
Moreover, you are probably enrolled in courses in several different disci-
plines. What is assumed in one discipline differs from what is assumed
in another discipline. What your history professor likes and expects in an
essay is different from what your sociology professor likes and expects.
These can seem like inhospitable conditions—not very inviting.
Fortunately, these very conditions of difference—the distinctiveness
of scholarly habits of reasoning, the differences amongst the disciplines—
have also produced rich resources: styles of writing, ways of asking and
addressing questions, habits of attending to the voices of others. These
resources are available to you, and they are means for you to take part in
the work that research communities do.
Getting access to these resources, you will find that many of the
problems that bother the traditional writing classroom will be silenced.
The intimidating problem of “plagiarism,” for example: once you get the
habit of scholarly attentiveness to the voices of others, and appreciation
for the scholarly exchange of ideas, the plagiarism monster will be a mere
wisp, nothing. So too the problem of your “own opinion”: where do
you get to state your own views? Once you join the scholarly conversa-
ix
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x PREFACE
tion, and learn how to orchestrate that conversation, your own position
will emerge, commanding attention. And the problem of your role as a
writer: in the traditional classroom you might read an essay by Carl Sagan
on the galaxy, or by George Orwell on his shooting of an elephant: what
are you supposed to write? Something about another galaxy or another
elephant? An argument in favour of galaxies or elephants, calling for their
protection? In this course of studies, your reading is your writing: just as
the research authors associated with this course of study have read other
research, and represent their reading, you too, as a research author, will
represent your reading, and thereby yourself as a scholar.
As you will soon find, this book refers to a theory of language based
in rhetorical study of genre. Without attempting to define “genre” here
(see Chapter 1), I will say that a genre-based approach to academic
writing sees the disciplines not as accumulations of facts in history or
in anthropology or in other fields but as “forms of life”: ways of doing
things together. As such, disciplines are teeming with attitudes, values,
interests—and motives. Scholars are moved to research, to read, to write;
they identify with their disciplines. In some ways, the writing you do at
university—and in this course—may be the most demanding you have
ever done. But, in other ways, the writing you do in this course may be
the easiest. For it will be motivated: there is a reason for it, a use for it. It
is for making knowledge. And you will be the one making knowledge—
asking questions, advancing proposals, indicating possibilities.
Janet Giltrow
University of British Columbia
April 2005