Introduction

Academic Writing: Overview

Writing in the academy is a context-rich kind of writing. That is, what one person writes contributes to an ongoing, extended written "conversation" about a topic. Someone, somewhere, raises an issue. Someone else reads that first statement and responds with a new idea, agreeing, disagreeing, complementing, or supplementing what the first writer said. A third person, reading what each of the other two have written, pitches in with a heretofore unexamined problem or issue. And so it goes. In this way, Aristotle began a conversation about rhetoric that continues today, even in this textbook and this class. Similarly, Freud began a conversation about the human mind, and that conversation produced the field of psychology. And when Jung responded to Freud, he did so in a way that showed his awareness of the context Freud had provided. And when B. F. Skinner joined the conversation, he did so in a way that showed he was aware of Freud's and Jung's writings. Then the cognitive psychologists joined in and, well, you get the picture.

As you can guess from the last paragraph, academic writing involves more than just writing. Reading supplies the context for a piece of writing, so reading is almost as important in academic writing as writing is. Academic writing is done in the spirit of inquiry and with the recognition that no one person can have the whole answer, even to a narrow question. So the writer in the academy must read and evaluate what others have said before she can contribute to the conversation. (In a similar fashion and for similar reasons, you lurked in a computer-based community in earlier chapters before you jumped in with your own comments.) To write effectively-to join this extended, context-rich, written conversation-you first use the tools of inquiry and analysis.

Inquiry

First, you have to find out what others have said. Kenneth Burke likened this to entering a parlor where a group of people are carrying on a conversation. Before you enter that conversation, you have to listen for a while. You have to find out what the topics are, where the conversation has been, where it is headed. You want to know who is advancing what ideas and who is agreeing and disagreeing on what issues. You want to know whose statements are most influential. In short, you want to know enough about the conversation to feel safe entering it, secure that you won't be saying something that's already been said, that the others are taking for granted, or that the others think is silly, stupid, or just plain obvious. In Burke's parlor, you gain the knowledge you need by listening; in classes, you gain that knowledge by reading.

Analysis

After you've inquired in this way, you have to analyze. Once you know where the conversation is and where it is headed, you have to weigh what is being said to find out what, if anything, you can contribute about the topics under discussion. You'll read what the major writers, researchers, or scholars have written, and you'll weigh what they've said against each other and against your own experience. You'll decide what issues interest you, and you'll follow those threads of the conversation, reading what major and minor figures have contributed. Maybe you'll begin by finding statements you agree or disagree with. That's a good start. Eventually, you'll learn to weigh all that writing and find issues the others have missed, or you'll be able to apply recently developed knowledge to verify, critique, or elaborate upon earlier statements. In short, your skills of analysis will bring you to the point at which you realize that you have something to say, something to add to the conversation. You may have written during this process-taking notes, writing summaries or abstracts of your readings, writing reports for your professor or your classmates-but for the most part, you will come this far by reading. This kind of reading is itself pretty specialized, but you'll have a lot of practice as you do the reading and writing in preparation for writing in all your classes. In most academic settings, however, inquiry is rarely enough; it is usually a step in the process toward a higher goal-analysis. To analyze means to sift through a set of events, circumstances, or readings to make sense of them, to bring coherence to them, to make them meaningful.

This chapter will lead you through two analytical writing projects. The first one, "Analyzing a Virtual Communities," will have some similarities to one of the projects in Chapter 8, "Tales of Cyberspace," if you chose to tell a story about a virtual community you joined. Whereas your goal with that project was to write a narrative essay, one that might have offered some analysis, in this project you will be asked to analyze some feature of a virtual community such as the language participants use, the types of relationships members create, and so on.

The second project, "Writing to Read Critically," will lead you through a procedure of using writing to read critically sources you may find on the Internet as you conduct research for papers and argumentative essays. As will be explained in more detail in that project, although doing research on the Internet can save you much of the time associated with doing research, such as getting to a library, learning its systems and looking up resource materials, and tracking down those materials, in some ways Internet research requires more intellectual work. This is the case because much of what you might find for research in a traditional library has in one way or another already received a "seal of approval." In most cases, what you would find in a library has gone through a series of "filters" by publishers who judge the quality of a piece before agreeing to publish it; by editors who, often with the help reviews by other experts on the topic, certify that the essay, article, or book makes a reasonable contribution to the on going conversation in that field; and by librarians who deem the work valuable enough to include it in their library's collection. By contrast, much of what is "published" on the Internet has not gone through such filtering processes, and although such filtering agencies are emerging daily, the fact remains that much of what you might find on the Internet lacks the levels of validity and reliability often deemed necessary by an academic community to make a serious contribution to the field. As a result, if you do use the Internet for research, you have a greater responsibility than ever to read potential sources very critically.

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