The Thesis Writer as Prosecuting Attorney: Observations on Critical Writing

FIELD NOTES 73 ARRIS 27 · 2016 The educational goal of developing in student researchers and writers a methodology of inquiry grounded in critical thinking brings focus to issues of relevance, significance, and evidentiary import beyond the mere collection of data. The perception of the field researcher or primary investigator as analogous to a prosecuting attorney arguing a case in court has proved helpful in encouraging students—both undergraduate and graduate —to consider critical writing as, fundamentally, positing an argument. Critical writing differs from the production of an elementary term paper; the latter often reflects the student writer’s less discriminate accumulation of secondary research, content re-presented without analysis or indication that the data collected is evidentiary—that is, that the record of facts is proof of the validity of a critical position or argument. In journalistic terms, the elementary report tells what, when, and who, without the how and why significant, and too often without an assessment of the relevance of either as evidence in a case to be made. Throughout my nearly forty years of teaching, I have assigned and evaluated numerous student research and writing projects ranging from undergraduate research reports to Master’s theses and doctoral dissertations. At all levels of inquiry, the development from reportage to argument, from transplanted Google searches to critical thinking and critical writing, has significantly informed the intellectual growth of students. Most helpful to the process has been the analogy of the critical writer as prosecuting attorney. *** Like most teachers in the various disciplines of history, including art history and architectural history, I include written assignments in both undergraduate and graduate courses. In seminar courses, in which an entire semester is devoted to the study of a single architect (Frank Lloyd Wright) or a limited subject (the Arts and Crafts Movement), two distinctly differThe Thesis Writer as Prosecuting Attorney: Observations on Critical Writing Robert M. Craig Georgia Institute of Technology ent writing exercises were typical in my classes. A descriptive monograph on a single Frank Lloyd Wright building or Arts and Crafts architect prompted research mostly from secondary sources, culminating in a class presentation and written report. A second writing assignment was generally referred to as an “issue paper,” a critical essay that presupposed that after a full semester’s study of a single architect or movement, the student had developed an adequate expertise and was thus able to define and address an issue about that architect (a mini thesis, one might say) and to argue the point. The issue paper was intended to shift the student’s thinking away from the concept of a report (history as recorded information and documentation of accumulated facts published elsewhere) to the concept of a thesis argument (that is, critical writing in which a point of view or set of assumptions is tested out). The student must first comprehend that an argument assesses the degree to which a working hypothesis is true, with evidence gathered from many sources including published works as well as the student author’s discriminating suppositions and knowledge-based speculations presented as a defense . For most students, understanding the difference between collected secondary documentation and primary critical writing was a challenge. The initial problem for students involved their tendency to confuse the concept of an arguable issue with a generalized subject of inquiry. “I want to write about Frank Lloyd Wright,” the student informs me in conference. “What about Frank Lloyd Wright?” “My issue is ‘Frank Lloyd Wright and the city,’” the student suggests. “But that’s not an issue,” I observe. “It’s a topic. What about Frank Lloyd Wright and the city?” “I’ll discuss Wright’s urban buildings,” 74 74 The educational goal of developing in student researchers and writers a methodology of inquiry grounded in critical thinking brings focus to issues of relevance, significance, and evidentiary import beyond the mere collection of data. The perception of the field researcher or primary investigator as analogous to a prosecuting attorney arguing a case in court has proved helpful in encouraging students— both undergraduate and graduate—to consider critical writing as, fundamentally, positing an argument. Critical writing differs from the production of an elementary term paper; the latter often...