Professional Academic Writing in the Humanities and Social Sciences

Preface

PREFACE Increased attention to the social contexts of writing provides the intellectual framework that will be obvious in what follows. But long before scholarship in rhetoric turned its attention to contextual variation, my experiences as writer, teacher, and administrator were leading me toward a growing sense of the strangeness writers feel as they move from one discourse community to another. As a new academic trying to publish literature articles in the 1970s, cut offfrom any research network, I grew increasingly puzzled by the seemingly capricious and inconsistent critiques that accompanied journal submissions. As a teachcr of "basic writing" students, I was frequently jolted by the ways students failed to observe conventions that were, I soon realized, not intuitively obvious except to a trained academic. In the 1980s, I entered enthusiastically into administering a program in writing in the disciplines because I wanted to integrate writing instruction with disciplinary knowledge. I discovered , however, that undergraduate writing tasks outside the heshman composition course could be oddly divorced ii·om professional disciplinary axiomatics-and that course readings often presented students with competing models of discourse to imitate. I encountered new vii PREFACE I ncreased attention to the social contexts of writing provides the intellectual framework that will be obvious in what follows. But long before scholarship in rhetoric turned its attention to contextual variation, my experiences as writer, teacher, and administrator were leading me toward a growing sense of the strangeness writers feel as they move from one discourse community to another. As a new academic trying to publish literature articles in the 1970s, cut offfrom any research network, I grew increasingly puzzled by the seemingly capricious and inconsistent critiques that accompanied journal submissions. As a teacher of "basic writing" students, I was frequently jolted by the ways students failed to observe conventions that were, I soon realized, not intuitively obvious except to a trained academic. In the 1980s, I entered enthusiastically into administering a program in writing in the disciplines because I wanted to integrate writing instruction with disciplinary knowledge. I discovered , however, that undergraduate writing tasks outside the freshman composition course could be oddly divorced from professional disciplinary axiomatics-and that course readings often presented students with competing models of discourse to imitate. I encountered new vii graduate students in literature distressed by the seemingly esoteric language of graduate school after having entered graduate school because of a love of literature. Out of such experiences of pain and confusion has grown my conviction that academics need to do a better job of explaining their text-making axioms, clarifying their expectations of students at all levels, and monitoring their own professional practices. My intellectual indebtedness will be apparent in the pages that follow, but several additional influences have been crucial. Charles Cooper has been particularly supportive and inspiring from the beginning of this project; I am grateful not just for his encouragement and unfailing good cheer but also for the insights into text making, genres, and teaching that have resulted from our daily work in administering writing programs at the University of California, San Diego. M. A. Syverson also has been particularly helpful, both as the coder who helped me with the empirical study reported in chapter 6 and as a reader ofstages ofthe manuscript. Otherfaculty and graduate teaching assistants too numerous to name in disciplines in the humanities and social sciences in UCSD's Third College have indirectly contributed insights. I thank them for responding patiently to my queries or for holding their own disciplinary convictions so strongly as to convince me of how deeply disciplinary convictions shape our academic work. I also thank nearby writing adjunct program administrators-Joan Graham, Ellen Strenski, and Muriel Zimmerman-for fi'equent conversations about administering a program to integrate writing and disciplinary knowledge; their conversations have helped strengthen these same convictions about the difficulties ofnegotiating (' ."ciplinary boundaries. I thank the reviewers for Southern Illinois University Press for comments on an earlier version of this manuscript and thank the anonymous reviewers ofearlier versions ofchapter 2 in Written Communication and College English; Hoger Cherry and readers at Written Communication were especially helpful with the recent article here revised as chapter 6. I thank Avon Crismore and William Vande Kopple for helpful comments on the relation between metadiscourse and my epistemic categories (chapter 6). Finally, I thank my family for their patience and encouragement. Grateful acknowledgment for permission to reprint is extended for: "Problem Definition in Academic Writing," College English 49, viii / Preface graduate students in literature...