Our Love-Hate Relationship with
Academic Discourse

by Matt Parfitt
Boston University

Whenever I discuss my views on this subject, I seem to return to an experience that, I think, encapsulates the “academic discourse” dilemma faced by many teachers of freshman comp, but especially those who work at research universities and strive to introduce students to its conventions. The incident seemed unremarkable at the time, but it has subsequently led me toward a good deal of re-thinking and re-questioning about how I teach freshman writing.

Several years ago, I sat down in our Writing Center with a student named Nathan, who was persistently receiving decent grades in my course but, I felt sure, was seriously under-performing. He seemed to me exceptionally intelligent and reflective, but his writing seemed perfunctory and half-hearted -- competent and polished, but little more. It took a while, but at last he opened up. He explained that he had always found writing for school to be quite easy: “You come up with a thesis, you figure out some arguments to support it, organize them logically and write it up. That's all there is to it. I don't find it that interesting.” Naturally, my ego needed a minute to recover, but the more we talked, the more interested I became in his whole way of thinking about academics. In particular, I became aware of the vast gulf that separated his actual intellectual life -- so full of questions and wonder and concern -- from his school work. He simply didn't see academic writing as a place where he could put his actual thinking onto paper. Moreover, he had come to see the construction of a serviceable thesis statement as the main object of the exercise, but he never had any real conviction about, or commitment to, those thesis statements. “I'm 18: how can I come up with anything really worthwhile to say about Hamlet or World War I or whatever?” Instead, his thesis statements were -- inescapably, from his point of view -- more or less factitious. They got the job done, earned him a B or better, and that's all that really mattered.

Nathan, I assumed, was far from unique -- perhaps just an acute case of a widespread syndrome -- and the following year I began incorporating more exploratory writing into my course, writing that required students to resist structuring their essays around a thesis and instead to structure it around a question or problem. To pursue insight rather than argument. The final product would differ from freewriting in that it would be organized and purposeful: the well-crafted narrative of an intellectual quest rather than the simple haphazard record of the quest itself.

Such question-driven essay assignments have proven to be effective and exciting projects. Paul Heilker has made a strong case for structuring a course around the essay in the tradition of Montaigne -- a more exploratory, reflective and loosely-structured form than the traditional thesis-driven academic paper. But I believed then, as I do now, that it would be irresponsible to abandon thesis-driven writing altogether -- students still need to become skilled in this mode -- so I hoped students would eventually find ways of integrating the two modes, incorporating exploratory, reflective, essayistic content into thesis-driven papers. (I'm having more and more success with this, I think, though it remains something of a struggle.)

One might argue that the forms of expository writing that Nathan and his classmates had been taught -- in high school, and even in my own course -- were simply too confining. And possibly if he'd just been shown that academic writing does in fact allow plenty of room for real thinking, questioning and wondering, the problem would have never arisen. But I'm not convinced the matter is quite so simple. As Jane Tompkins' revealed in her seminal 1987 article, “Me and My Shadow,” successful and experienced professional scholars may also feel a good deal of ambivalence about academic writing -- in fact, may feel much the way Nathan felt. Tompkins described her two selves, two voices, and her growing impatience with the hollowness of her professional voice:

The thing I want to say is that I've been hiding a part of myself for a long time. I've known it was there but I couldn't listen because there was no place for this person in literary criticism. The criticism I would like to write would always take off from personal experience, would always be in some way a chronicle of my hours and days, would speak in a voice which can talk about everything, would reach out to a reader like me and touch me where I want to be touched, like Susan Griffin's voice in “The Way of All Ideology.” (173)

Since publishing this essay, Tompkins has, of course -- alongside any number of other academic writers, especially feminists -- developed just such an alternative discourse, and practiced it with great confidence and fluency. They have found ways to integrate the personal into the academic and to avoid the “agonism” -- the polemical aggression -- that Deborah Tannen finds to be a hallmark of academic writing, and one that does much to undermine its value.

Tompkins, Tannen and kindred thinkers so effectively show that there's plenty to hate about academic discourse that we may need to remind ourselves what there is to love about it. As David Bartholomae argued in his classic article, “Inventing the University,” freshmen need to learn how to speak and write the language of the academic community in order to enter into its conversations: they must learn to work within its “codes” as a necessary condition of success: not only to get good grades but to make the most of what the university can offer them: new ways of thinking and seeing and being. “The movement toward a more specialized discourse begins (or, perhaps, best begins) both when a student can define a position of privilege, a position that sets him against a ‘common' discourse, and when he or she can work self-consciously, critically, against not only the ‘common' code but his or her own.” ( Cross-Talk 610) This notion of working “critically” is also central to Patricia Bizzell's Academic Discourse and Critical Consciousness. Clearly, we want academic writing to afford students the opportunity to think deeply and critically. But phrases like “critical consciousness” and “critical thinking,” like “liberal education” and even “academic discourse” remain at once vague and overdetermined. Do the actual, acceptable forms and styles of academic discourse -- the ones that students are expected to imitate in their college papers -- really encourage this kind of thinking? Or do they in fact too often inhibit it, and instead promote just another sort of conformism and predictability?

Unavoidably, this raises the question: what exactly do we mean by “academic discourse”? There are at least as many academic discourses as there are disciplines: can we identify any essential features that run across the disciplines? How did they come to look the way they do -- and could they look any different? I would speculate that it would be hard to underestimate the influence of scientistic -- or positivist -- thinking on academic discourse(s), even in the humanities. The Enlightenment ideal of a “perspicuous” style that is, in effect, “transparent” to the object of study has permeated the disciplines. In the 19th century, the prestige of empirical science influenced scholars in the humanities to write in quasi-scientistic forms. One might even argue that twentieth century literary theory, from the New Criticism to post-structuralism, has functioned as a tool to endow the study of literature with a quasi-scientific objectivity, and thereby safeguard its place in the academy. Whatever the historical facts (and I'm unable to do more than speculate), academics have tended to take their discourse conventions for granted, supposing them to be, as David Russell has shown, “transparent.” Consequently, we have less complete information on academic discourse conventions than we might.

Ambivalence about academic discourse has been a familiar theme for compositionists for some time, having culminated in the famous, or infamous, Elbow-Bartholomae debate of 1995, in which Peter Elbow argued that being a writer and being an academic may be deeply in conflict. But it's never been clear that this was truly a “debate”: it seemed more of a taking sides, or staking out of positions, than a real dialogue. At any rate, the consequence seems to have been that the composition field only became more polarized, while the space in between “academic discourse” and “personal writing” remained largely unexplored. At my institution, we agreed some years back that our first year students needed to be introduced to the discourse conventions of higher education -- that they needed to learn how to read and how to produce scholarly writing. Well and good, but Nathan's story shows that this doesn't put an end to the matter. What exactly is “academic writing”? What can and should it look like? Are there good, rational reasons behind its formal and stylistic qualities, or they merely conventional?

Elbow and Bartholomae may still stand for a tension that persists in our field -- and, I would speculate, in many of our writing classrooms. Somehow we need to introduce students to the discourse conventions of the academy, but we need to do it in such a way that students find fulfillment and satisfaction in doing it.

Issues:

Many academics feel considerable ambivalence about mainstream academic writing. If we shouldn't avoid introducing students to the discourse conventions of the academy, can and should we teach academic discourse in some “improved” form? What would such a form, or forms, look like?

Do we, as compositionists, need to engage in a critical study of academic discourses across the disciplines? In other words, should it be the task of compositionists to bring to light the discourse conventions of the disciplines and to critique them?

Too heavy an emphasis on the thesis and on thesis-driven writing can lead to a variety of problems. But is it irresponsible to encourage students to write in other forms, such as question-driven essays, when thesis-driven arguments will be expected in most of their college courses?

Resources

Teaching Composition