I slack, you slack

My research question is, “How different is academic writing from other writing disciplines?” I want to know what makes academic writing distinctive from others forms of writing and whether there are different forms that each type of writing follows. If we look at academic vs nonacademic writing, is one more methodical than the other? Is one more time-consuming? What modes of thought go into writing academic texts? What are the writing processes like? Another question I have is whether one is easier than the other? Most of these answers will likely be subjective, depending on the individual and what they’re good at, but I want to see if there is a general consensus: do people prefer one over the other? And one last question that surrounds my research is, is one more beneficial to society than the other?

I’m interested in this subject because I love writing. Over the years, I started from loving fiction writing to poetry, finally landing on academic writing. There is always the question of whether fiction writing has the ability to morph into academic writing. And although I know that the two are very different in their own rights, I do think that we can incorporate the discipline, rules, and guidelines of nonacademic writing into academic writing. Right now, I have a lot of questions that I want to integrate in this research and see if I can bring all of them under one goal: to see how flexible the form of academic writing is and whether it is adaptable at all.

This is a question that I would like to work on because there is a very overt divide between academic and nonacademic writing. I almost see a elitist personality in those that state that academic writing is the only form of writing that is credible and compelling. When did these two disciplines become so fraught with disagreement? Each have their own values and merits so why all the contention?

I will research this question by looking at scholarly articles as well as articles from nonacademic sites to see both sides of the story. Mostly, I will be surveying the literature that is already out there instead of conducting my own research. My search will include examining people’s experiences working with academic vs. nonacademic texts, writing academic vs. nonacademic papers and just the differences in writing within these two disciplines. So far, most of the sources I found are related to the forms of academic writing. As I search for more literature, I will look more upon the forms and methods of nonacademic writing.

Gregory, Judy. “Writing for the Web Versus Writing for Print: Are They Really So Different?” Technical Communication, Volume 51, Number 2. May 2004, pp. 276-285(10).  

Gregory states that much of the literature for nonacademic writing actually adopted the guidelines of writing for print. “For example, key web writing guidelines such as “write for scannability,” “write for restless readers,” and “write in coherent chunks” can be found in the literature about print,” states Gregory. She writes that writing for the web are “extensions of the guidelines for print writing, rather than new ideas.” She suggests using genre to compare writing instead of the medium.

Herndl, Carl G. “Teaching Discourse and Reproducing Culture: A Critique of Research and Pedagogy in Professional and Non-Academic Writing.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 44, no. 3, 1993, p. 349., doi:10.2307/358988.

This research looks at the “theoretical position that supports research in professional and academic writing.” Herndl states that “the studies of scientific and professional writing that emerge from this epistemic tradition are dominated by a research strategy that is descriptive and explanatory, rarely critical.” It looks at the pedagogical relationship between written discourse and the professional, organizational, or disciplinary communities established by discourse, which in turn give that discourse meaning and legitimacy.” One factor is how meaning is made from these discourses. It states that one similarity between professional and nonacademic writing is that both of those texts tend to rely on the “dominant discourse” and stray from discourse that vouches for the other side. While ignoring what doesn’t fall into agreement with their theory, writers only accept one side of the argument to establish themselves and their distinct discourses.

“How Is Academic Writing Different?” News | The University of Sydney, sydney.edu.au/stuserv/learning_centre/help/styleStructure/st_academicWriting.shtml.

Turning to the basics, this article states all the ways that make a text academic. Academic writing avoids “conversational language,” contractions, and usually takes years to publish. This discipline is an amalgam of three skill sets: just being a good writer is not enough. One has to write technically, use appropriate jargon, and follow the right structure as well as develop a style that is fitting in the context in which it is written. Academic writing deals with a lot of specialized topics, getting into the depths of the research subject at hand. This discipline is rigid with its rules and regulations. There are varying expectations for different fields i.e. some of the “Arts and Humanities disciplines expect longer paragraphs, which include topic sentences to show how [an] argument is structured.” This article will help me with setting up a starting point for my research. I know where to start researching–this article will serve as a foundation from which to start my research.

“Metadiscourse in Academic Writing: A Reappraisal.” The Essential Hyland : Studies in Applied Linguistics, doi:10.5040/9781350037939.0016.

In this article, the researcher looks at metadiscourse and the relationships writers have with the texts they’re writing. It is a study “based on a view of writing as social engagement and in academic contexts reveals the ways that writers project themselves into their discourse to signal their attitude towards both the propositional content and the audience of the text.” The article looks at the conceptions of what metadiscourse is and explains that it “focuses our attention on the ways writers project themselves into their discourse to signal their attitude towards both the content and the audience of the text.” Metadiscourse compactly offers methods and tools that writers use to “organize their texts, engage readers, and signal their attitudes to both their material and their audience.” I wonder if nonacademic writing goes through the same processes of creating prose as academic writing does. Is metadiscourse a part of nonacademic writing as well? How are conversations started in each discipline and how are they kept going? And how do they build a relationship with the reader?

Thompson, Geoff, and Puleng Thetela. “The Sound of One Hand Clapping: The Management of Interaction in Written Discourse.” Text – Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse, vol. 15, no. 1, 1995, doi:10.1515/text.1.1995.15.1.103.

Thompson and Thetela explore the interactive nature of written discourse as opposed to spoken discourse. Interactive aspects of written text have two approaches: “one is information-oriented. It concentrates on the ways in which writers take the (imagined) readers’ expectations, knowledge and interests into account in constructing their text and in signalling the relationships between parts of the text.” Writers can manipulate the flow of information which can range from “selecting what information to include or exclude.” From this article, I want to know how reader-friendly academic texts are and whether different types of writing are either more or less reader-friendly. The researchers focus on the idea that “writing can only be properly understood if we recognize the ways in which the text has adapted to the needs of the reader.” This article doesn’t speak to the relationship between academic and nonacademic texts, but it will help my research in grounding some of the information that serves as a foundation to what my research will address.

In Baron’s article, he states that the “computer is simply the latest step in a long line of writing technologies” (17). He gives an anecdote about having a hard time trying to draft something in pencil since he’s gotten so used to the computer to do his writing. His claim is that we have come from pencils and now we are at computers because of the latter’s convenience and efficiency. I agree with that, but I think technology has a tendency to be cyclical in nature.

There’s an aspect to innovation which states that “as innovative uses for the literacy technology are tried out, practitioners may also adapt it to older, more familiar forms in order to gain acceptance from a wider group” (20). We are going back to the basics and it seems we only move forward by looking back at what succeeded in the past.

Another point about Baron’s article is that he states the idea of convenience. But convenience itself doesn’t make people want to try new things. I’ve met a lot of people—a real crowd that purposely go to lengths to preserve the old even though it may be not the most efficient. We see this a lot with music. People buy records because it’s old-timey and retro and cool, but buying records and record players cost a whole lot more than buying the digital CD from iTunes yet people still spend the extra money. In a way, they’re paying for the “feeling” rather than the actual item. So whether it’s a CD or a record, the item is the same, but one is older than the other and one is also better-sounding than the other.

I read an article in my American Studies class called, “Do Machines Make History” that’s related to this a bit. In it, the author, Robert Heilbroner, argues that technological advances don’t make major leaps; they are predictable in the way they evolve because its changes happen in a linear form. We don’t go from curing a headache to curing cancer. That’s an exaggerated example, but it rings true to his theory. Right now, we can kind of guess what the upcoming tech. advances might be–maybe more artificial intelligence or the iPhone 12.

Here is a link to the Heilbroner article; It’s free online with an MSU id: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3101719?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents

Things happen in a certain way and we are all aware of it. In that way, every new writing technology is a step above the last. I’m sure we didn’t just go from the pencil to the computer in one fell swoop– there were technology that came after the pencil that inevitably lead to the creation of the computer. So my mention of that article was to state that I agree with Baron that computers are the latest invention. After a certain point though, we have to reach the peak. There has to be a point where we can’t go any further and so I’m wondering if we’re at that peak now. What could possibly come after this without getting too sci-fi? Maybe computers with a hologram?!!!?

I will admit I never really read comics. I did have a short phase in middle school where I thought Shonen Jump was the coolest, but I quickly passed it. Then, my mom got me some Archie comics, but I never read them as I wanted to look cool and read chapter books. I understand where McCloud is coming from saying that people look down upon comics because it stereotypically is seen as something only middle schoolers read and that nothing of importance is ever portrayed in cartoon form. I did some research and came across this article: https://the-artifice.com/social-stigma-comic-book-reading/ and it briefly highlights the differences between comics and graphic novels which I didn’t realize were different! And now, I feel slightly dumb that I didn’t know that.

When people think of comics, they think superheroes and ideas and themes that only children and pre-teens will understand so when McCloud mentioned this idea of “amplification through simplification,” I started thinking of all the ways that people read “comics” without knowing that they are reading them. And why is it that the more cartoons become simpler, the more people start to relate to them? I see it that the more readers are given the space to place their own imaginations in the story, the more relatable the story becomes. For example, when we think of a regular old smiley face, we can perceive that in however way we want to because it lacks defining or characteric features so it is kind of like an empty canvas. But when this smiley face is drawn with a tongue and eyelashes and freckles, then there is less space to put our own interpretation to it because it also has a “personality” built into it, so to speak.

McCloud states that the definition of comics has a tendency of being too restrictive and also too broad. So if we define comics as being either too restrictive and too broad, then in the former, comics are only for kids and in the latter, everything we read is a form of comics. I think that people just look at the cartoons and decide that comics are for kids without evaluating the theme it covers. When reading McCloud, it was weird seeing that he was talking about all the negative connotations that comics have while using that exact form to tell people how that is just a misconception. He’s using the form that people look down upon to tell them that they’re wrong and that comics can do so much more than just entertain little kids. I think that is a pretty incredible feat because it convinced me of the depth that comics can have so he can call me a happy convert!

I had so many questions while reading Cooper’s Rhetorical Agency as Emergent and Enacted. This is a good thing because I found the subject matter so fascinating as it delves into this kind of mindful thinking that our minds and souls are separate from our bodies. This idea of the “death of the subject” really got me thinking about how one’s intentions and free will does not bring out change, but that change is brought out when individuals realize that their actions are their own and that agency isn’t embodied or singled out to specific acts. I’m confused at the sentence I just wrote because I’m still trying to figure this out! What my understanding is that change occurs with the mental unease a person feels as their agents interact with other agents. But if agents aren’t aware of their intentions and their agency doesn’t arise from their acts, then how does what they do matter at all? If we kill the subject, the rational self, what are we as humans? Just agents living without a soul? You should see my notes on this reading, it’ll tell you how much my mind went around in circles.

So agency is not something that someone can possess because it is embodied through the behaviors, traits, and actions we experience as we live. They are emergent in the way that we inhabit the role/position of an agent. So the bottom line seems to be that we don’t have agency, we’re just agents.

So once we are rid of the “self,” all our experiences go through a filter and we create meaning out of them. So we become known as agents when we start using rhetoric to deal with the world. Agency cannot be attained physically. Change is described as a product of interactions in complex situations so agents can change without ever trying just because of the fact that their their natural response is to change based on the experiences they have in life. Their self-organizing nature allows them to be ordinary people doing ordinary things. Rhetorical agency arrives at the intersection of an a-ha moment and a mental “perturbation” as Cooper states. The epiphany allows the agent to realize in the opportune moment that everything is a part of a larger narrative and we are small stories of a bigger picture. It comes from the complex systems of a person becoming who they are as a person– through emotions, memories, and dispositions.

So agents are perceivers and they are structured so that they think about the consequences of their actions. Is emergent rhetoric brought on by an event, but not past experiences? Can we separate our knowledge of what meaning we made from past experiences from creating new meaning of a similar experience? This reading was deep and it was great, but I’m not sure that I actually understood all of it to be honest. I’m looking forward to reading what other peoples’ interpretations are.

My A/V short, Buying Local, is an accompaniment to my Capstone research project. I’m building off what a part of my research will focus on. The writing process here required a little more preparation than what I’m used to. I had to think about dialogue as well as what props I needed, which was similar to the process of writing a paper, except that in this project, the words were spoken instead of typed. Another similar thing was that I improvised a bit while shooting the different clips and I suppose that’s what writing is if you’re going off of something random that drew your thinking in a particular direction.

In creating this piece, I did not plan out every second of the video. I wanted it to feel open and not constrained. In other words, I didn’t have high standards because I knew I wasn’t good with editing and technical things so I just wanted to capture the gist of the bigger idea. If I had started with the idea that I wanted this video to be extremely funny and this and that, then I would be creating a barrier for myself  in trying to live up to those expectations. If I were more open to the different ways the video could turn out, then I’m allowing different ideas to flow through, making the piece much more interesting and less predictable. I think I was constrained by my lack of creativity in creating witty banter. My voiceover could’ve been more funny if I were a stand-up comedian or something of that sort, but I’m only funny sometimes.

In the future, I would think about the point I’m trying to make more clearly. To me, my video makes sense because I know the background of my project and the research I’m doing. I hope that every seeing the video who don’t know about my research will pick up on what the purpose of my video is. I do want to give credit to the audience because I don’t want to spoon-feed them every detail behind the video, but if it turns out that my point doesn’t come across well, then I will work towards being more clear in the future. This experience let me hone my proficiency in being concise. If I have an assignment due that needs to be between 5 to 7 pages, I will probably stick closer to the 5 than anything else. I like to make my point in the least number of words as I possibly can.  

I now know that making a video is not as bad as I thought it would be—I actually had fun editing! But as for visual texts, I understand that the visual elements of a piece gives a lot more information to the audience–more than words could. For example, I “showed” instead of “told”—quite literally and with written work, it takes more descriptive language to make that happen, but with videos, people can infer and flesh out more information just by seeing what the creator shows and in what way they show it.

The visual conventions of a genre is synonymous to our language and the way we communicate. When we speak, our brains do work that we’re not aware of. For example, in linguistics, there are rules for creating words and we don’t know these rules, yet we just intuitively know when to conjugate and when to use fricatives. And the interesting thing is that no one taught us any of these things. Fricatives are the sound of a consonant made by our mouths pushing air through a narrow tunnel or opening. We wouldn’t be able to make the “f” or “th” sound without fricatives and many of us could live life without knowing this, yet we still use the above two consonants pretty much every time we speak.

Here’s a neat little article from mentalfloss that points to some more rules that we don’t realize that we know: http://mentalfloss.com/article/85935/4-more-unofficial-rules-native-english-speakers-dont-realize-they-know

In the same way, I feel that the way that visual arrangements do some of the work of a genre is another one of those tacit understandings we have. No one had to teach us this; we just sort of learn by living. But once we start actively learning and becoming aware of the work that visually-informative writing does, then everything starts to get really confusing. What’s with that?!? Our brains know more than we are aware of and sometimes our brains use the knowledge unbeknownst to us and we may spend decades of our lives not knowing that we know more than we actually do.

In another sense, kind of related to this, is a question that Wysocki poses. She asks whether our experience of a page or screen would change if the text were a different size/shape/color or texture. I think in this situation, we may not know exactly how we will react to something without seeing it in reality. For me, I find it extremely difficult to imagine something if I can’t physically see the change, but Wysocki states that our brains start working harder when we start imagining things and our visual acuity becomes more clear.

For me, I think it would be interesting to see visual conventions used in a genre that’s not meant to be for that genre. How cool would it be to see a horror story with bright-colored drawings! Would it change the purpose of the text? Would a horror book even be known as a horror book in this case? I can infer that people would probably think it was a joke and not take it seriously, so that just points out how powerful visuals can be. I don’t think anyone would actually read a horror novel with child-like drawings in them. So a question I pose for myself is what kind of an attention should a text/visual attract? I think to answer that, I would need to know which is more important– the text or the visual? And, I would argue that both text/visual should have equal importance.

Intertext is lurking in every corner of written work. We can try to ignore its existence, but its ubiquity lies incarnate in the texts that every writer produces. Texts are interdependent on other texts and we can only understand something as long as we can understand its past. Porter gets so meta as to claim that intertext itself is a text and that every text is intertextual, in one way or another. When writers produce a text, that text represents the discourse community that they are a part of rather than the writers themselves. So Porter suggests that the intertext constrains writing because any writing that is produced creates its own meaning that relates to the intertext. There are many reasons why the boundaries of a discourse community can constrain writing.

For one, the requirement of having to be knowledgeable about a specific discourse community bars outsiders who may not know much from ever joining that community. Maybe gaining entry into a discourse community is strict because writers could change the discourse of that community for the future. Whatever they write has the power to shape how the community evolves, and maybe that is too much power to give to someone who isn’t a dedicated member of that community. So the idea of a lone inspired writer doesn’t exist because the community (the one that they can’t join) is the intertext in this case and writers can’t escape them. No matter what they write, the intertext of the community will be a perpetual part of the writing and the writer. It seems like a bit of a catch-22 in that they want one thing, but can’t afford to give someone (individuality) the resources to do that one thing.

When new writing comes about, the newness of it is not important—it is whether or not writers can look at old documents and bring about different meanings—ideas that have never been thought of before. Thus, they become known as “creative borrowers,” as Porter states. So in the case of the lone inspired writer, are his ideas ever original if they have to fall under certain categories? It’s like nothing he writes could be a surprise because people are expecting a specific thing.

Porter claims that writers can be treated like mere tools of the discourse community, but isn’t that exactly the case? The writers are a tool of their communities because they got their ideas from this community so it’s likely that their work would reflect the ideologies of the community anyway. The readers are a part of this discourse community so they want all writers’ contribution to match their expectations. So in part, being a part of a community makes you responsible to contribute in the same fashion.  And another question is whether the writer has any freedom. Creativity and genius-ness is possible, but one has to get out of a discourse community to achieve it. Communities are like memberships and there are always rules—things you can and can’t do and things you can and can’t say—one has to adhere to be a part of a community, but the compromise of that situation is losing their individual voice.

Porter writes that “writing is an attempt to exercise the will, to identify the self within the constraints of some discourse community” (41).  And being a part of a community means that there is no individuality. So how does one identify themselves within the community if they’re all joined by the same thing. Isn’t the point of a community to be a part of something bigger instead of being singled out? People as individuals shouldn’t be noticed—at least in a community where its goal is to represent a certain discourse.

But whatever the goal of a community, in our own projects, we all want to be an “effective borrower of traces.” (Porter 36) We work to employ these traces to a new theory so that it can move forward.

The study of rhetoric is big, but the thing about rhetoric that helps me to comprehend it is thinking about the smaller ideas it is made of. I don’t think I can explain what rhetoric is as a whole, but I can certainly talk about the little pieces that shape rhetoric into what it is today. In its simplest form, rhetoric is a tool that helps us learn and see truths through a transparent lens. Because rhetoric is different to everyone, the truth is vulnerable to distortion in any imaginable way. Rhetoric then become susceptible to manipulation, as Fish states in “Rhetoric.” Since truth is always subject to change, people can abuse rhetoric’s function and intention by employing whatever far-fetched idea they have about a situation and using rhetoric as a means to get there.

Even though rhetoric encourages people to see all perspectives of an argument, it implies that the truth is never constant; it is ever-changing. A probable truth is as much up for debate as a lie is, in that nothing is fully set in stone. The truth changes based on the situation and circumstance at hand and much of that is contingent on the methods one uses to share their views. In that vein, is there a universal language where everyone can agree on what truth is or is that the job of rhetoric, to show us that everyone can have their own truths? In some cases, I find that rhetoric raises more questions that it answers. And in other cases, I can sum up rhetoric as a way to unite people with pretty words while using a bit of rationale. In a way, people use rhetoric to color statements to match what they want to say and thus rhetoric is a tool that has no boundaries. And because there is no set truth, people can claim anything as their truth–which seems like it could be good or bad, or maybe even both.

I like that rhetoric is associated with the term “meaning-making.” It implies that a person can take out of something whatever they envision in it and because of rhetoric’s reliance on nonverbal communication, we know just how much power we give to our felt senses. As I think this through, I’m wondering whether ignoring our felt senses and choosing to not make meaning out of a situation means that we are not employing rhetoric. Is there even a way where using rhetoric is optional or is that out of our control? Rhetoric is a form of expression that goes beyond what we see and we are employing its functions even when we’re not aware of it.

One thing we can learn is that our individual use of rhetoric teaches us about ourselves as well as about the people around us.

“By exploring the available means of persuasion in a particular situation, he tries them on, and as they begin to suit him, he becomes them.” -Fish “Rhetoric” pg. 127

He becomes his rhetoric and the unpredictability of life helps him to filter every circumstance and situation in a way that is understandable and relatable to him and that sounds like a good definition of rhetoric to me.