Writing Across the University: Academic Discourse as a Conversation
by Fiona Glade
LOGOS
What are
some of the
‘rules’ that you
have been
given about
writing
academically?
LOGOS
Who is her
audience?
PATHOS
Why does
she ask you
to think
about your
own ideas
about
essays?
For many of us, when we began writing for the academic discourse community, we
were given a set of rules to follow: the rules that I recall hearing in my own high school classes
ran the gamut from stern warning— “Never begin a sentence with and, but, or because!” or
“a good essay always has five paragraphs”—to gentle encouragement—“write what you feel:
write towards your own truth” and “revision is a writer’s best friend.” By the time I began
college, many years later, I certainly relied on my recollection of those rules, contradictory as
they often were, when I needed to make sense of my professors‟ expectations. This task was
made all the more difficult, it seemed to me, by the fact that every professor, every class,
wanted something different. For example, while “write what you feel” worked just fine for the
personal narrative essays I was assigned in my basic writing class, the five paragraph rule didn’t
get me a passing grade in my philosophy class. Likewise, while one history professor gave us
time to draft, workshop, and revise our writing, another history professor commented only on
LOGOS
the grammar errors in my essays. To complicate matters even more, the way in which one
What does
professor defined a particular genre was often at odds with the way in which another defined ‘genre’ mean?
the same genre; in other classes, the persona I selected might be acceptable to one professor
yet unacceptable to another.
Like the discourse of any community, academic discourse certainly does rely on rules
and guidelines. Speaking and writing—but especially writing—are the means by which people
in the university engage one another in conversation: writing strategies such as using a shared
vocabulary, a commonly understood format, or a specified genre in written communication
help writers get their message across in a way that their audience of coworkers will understand
more readily. Writing is most often the way in which people in various fields—in college and
beyond—have conversations about their field. Charles Bazerman, who participates in the
academic discourse community as a Professor studying Rhetoric and Composition, reminds us
that “Knowledge produced by the academy is cast primarily in written language” (Shaping
18); therefore, an understanding of the guidelines or rules—sometimes called the
conventions—used in any given genre is necessary in order to participate in academic
conversations.
LOGOS
What does
‘discourse’
mean?
ETHOS
Why does she
use Bazerman
as an example?
Certainly, many of us come to college with some assumptions about what those rules
are. You may have brought with you some ideas of your own about what constitutes a good
essay, or even about the kinds of writing assignments you’ll be asked to complete throughout
your college career. However, it is hard to come up with a definition of academic discourse:
the task of defining such a complex term could take as long as it takes to get a college
degree! We might think of it as a process, much like writing: in order to get to a workable
definition, we need to gain a deeper understanding of the college context, of the genres of
writing we do in college courses, and of the various audiences for whom we write in college
assignments.
LOGOS
How is
audience
connected to
discourse
community?
In fact, a college campus is made up of many different discourse communities. As such,
there is no single academic discourse. Perhaps you’ve found in your own courses that what
works well for one piece of academic writing doesn’t necessarily work well for another, even
when the assignments appear very similar. David Russell, a college professor who teaches
and studies writing, explains that “within academia, the conventions (and beyond them the
assumptions and methodologies) of the various disciplines are characterized more by their
differences than by their similarities” (329). This is significant to an understanding of academic
discourses in general because it demonstrates that while there exist enormous differences
among academic discourses, there are reasons for those differences.
LOGOS
What is the
point that she’s
trying to make
in this essay?
(Thesis or main
claim)
For example, citation guidelines vary greatly among the different academic discourse
communities. Instructors will usually require that you use a certain set of citation conventions
when they give you a writing assignment; however, correct citation formats are different in
each discipline. Writers in the humanities normally follow the guidelines of the Modern
Language Association (MLA): the rules for this citation style include a specific format for in-text
citation as well as a Works Cited page. On the other hand, writers in the Social Sciences often
use American Psychology Association format rules, which include a different format for in-text
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citations, along with a Bibliography. These two different conventions—a Works Cited page
and a Bibliography—certainly serve a similar purpose: they inform the audience, who are
assumed to be members of that academic or professional discourse community, where the
sources were found. However, their different formats exist for a reason: each is indicative of a
particular set of concerns shared by the academic discourse community by which it’s used. In
APA conventions, it’s the date of a source that’s emphasized: this is because the social
science disciplines place higher value on using the most current research available than do
the humanities. Still, even though these differences exist within the university, one value that’s
shared across the disciplines is the importance of citing sources. It’s important, then, to
understand which citation guidelines your instructors expect you to use, since preferences
about citation style reveal far more about the writing for that discipline than meets the eye. In
order to be able to participate more fully in the academic discourse community, we need to
consider not only how to write for each specific context, but also why each of those contexts
has its own set of rules and guidelines.
LOGOS
Why does she
discuss
citation
guidelines.
What does she
prove by this?
Problem-Posing Across the Disciplines
In his article, “Banking Concept of Education,” Paulo Freire asserts that students are often not
encouraged to think for themselves; in the model of education that he describes, while
students are learning to participate in a new discourse community by following the genre
guidelines of that community, they may have very few opportunities to explore and
understand the reasons behind that particular community’s rules and guidelines. Freire
suggests that one way to fix this is to teach and learn using the “problem-posing” approach. In
this model, we learn more about any given topic by generating as many open- ended
questions as possible about that issue.
PATHOS
Connect what
you know
about
audience
from previous
journals.
How did
problemposing help
her keep her
audience in
mind?
PATHOS
Which
communities
are easier for
you to
understand?
Problem-posing is a strategy that can help a writer figure out the conventions of a
discourse community because it fits well into any stage of the writing process. When I was
asked recently to co-author a brief article about writing assessment for a faculty newsletter on
my campus, I relied on problem-posing at the very beginning of my process. Because my coauthor and I were required to keep the article extremely short, we were concerned about
including too many long explanations of terminology; at the same time, we were acutely
aware that a large majority of our audience, while they may have had some smattering of
knowledge of our topic, were on the whole unfamiliar with—or even hostile towards—best
practices in writing assessment. In resolving this difficulty, I problem-posed, coming up with
questions such as When do faculty use writing assessment? And How do they talk about it
when they use it? And How might some of the things my co-author and I know about writing
assessment be useful to my faculty colleagues in their own duties? Answers to these questions,
as they led to an increased understanding of our article’s audience and context, helped direct
our decisions about format, vocabulary, tone, and persona as we drafted the article. More
important, these answers helped us negotiate the very tricky question we’d had about the
purpose of the article: How can we use this article to persuade our audience to believe in us
enough that we can teach them something about a topic of which they may not be fond? In
this way, problem-posing about audience was useful in helping us learn not only how to
understand the expectations and predispositions of our audience, but also how to incorporate
a secondary purpose of persuading along with the primary, assigned purpose of informing.
Problem-posing is particularly useful in helping us to learn about the academic
discourse communities in which we’ll participate throughout our college careers because it
provides a way to help us read those communities. Different fields of study use writing
differently. As context differs, so do genre, medium, and other rhetorical concerns. The
purpose of academic discourses is to put writers in relationship with other writers in their field:
reading the writings of others is the first step towards participating in the conversation. This kind
of reading is a very important part of the writing process: when we read assignments using the
lens of rhetorical concerns, we’ll see the genre, the purpose, the persona, and so on, of each
discipline—those are the categories that constitute the particular version of academic
discourse used by a particular discipline. In other words, as newcomers to the university, we
can’t possibly know how to participate in all of the communities.
In his research on discourse communities, Bazerman found that he “could not
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LOGOS
What are
open-ended
questions?
ETHOS
Why does
she bring in
this personal
example? To
show what?
What does it
tell you
about the
author?
LOGOS
What are
‘rhetorical
concerns’?
How are they
related to
audience?
understand what constituted an appropriate text in any discipline without considering the
social and intellectual activity which the text was part of” and that he “couldn’t see what a
text was doing without looking at the worlds in which these texts served as significant activity”
(Shaping 4). Similarly, Freire, in a book he co-authored with Professor Donaldo Macedo, tells us
that “reading the word” cannot be separated from “reading the world” (16). These arguments
are particularly relevant to academic discourse because they point to the importance of
understanding the rhetorical context of any given text. Clearly, reading and writing are
inextricably connected. Freire, Macedo, and Bazerman show us that any newcomer to the
university can—and should—learn to read the kinds of writing produced in a particular field.
By doing so, we become more than passive consumers of knowledge in that field; rather, we
learn how to produce the knowledge in ways that are valued by that particular field: we
become participants in the scholarly conversation.
PATHOS
She writes
about how
students can
‘participate in
their own
learning. Have
you heard this
before?
Using Freire‟s problem-posing strategy to read academic discourses is a useful way to
learn about the rules and guidelines followed by a particular community. Once you begin to
practice reading your writing assignments in this way, problem-posing will help you more
clearly to address the expectations behind your assignments. What’s even more useful about
the problem-posing approach is that it helps writers to uncover a lot of the unspoken, or
implicit, expectations that may be lurking in writing assignments in different disciplines. In other
words, problem-posing allows writers who are new to academic discourse to participate in their
own learning and to assume authority over their own writing choices.
Consider, too, that each community produces a variety of texts for a variety of
audiences. We need to look beyond the obvious reading materials, such as textbooks, in
order to uncover some of the rules and guidelines of academic discourses. What are some of
the texts you’ve come across so far in your college readings? Your teachers may have
assigned scholarly articles, technical reports, and case studies, among others. Many of these
texts were doubtless written for an audience other than college students. But you have
probably also read a plethora of other texts for your courses, including many syllabi, writing
assignment sheets, and webpages. These texts are often written specifically for students; they
are, therefore, invaluable when we’re learning the rules of a particular academic discourse,
because they provide extremely pertinent information about the often unspoken expectations
of the conventions that writers in that discourse should follow.
Depending on the assumptions you have about academic discourse, the wide range of
writing assignments you’ll come across in college may surprise you. For example, in the
humanities, you may frequently be asked to compose not only informal writings such as journal
entries and reading responses, but also much more formal writings such as argumentative
essays or critical analyses. You will probably also find a mixture of both formal and information
writing assignments in the social sciences. The academic discourse communities of the natural
and applied sciences, on the other hand, more often communicate using very formal genres
of writing, such as laboratory reports and technical papers. It is possible, too, that some
instructors in different disciplines may give you a writing assignment for a lay audience—an
audience consisting of people who are not insiders in the academic discourse community. In
problem-posing about ways to write for such an audience, you might consider not only how
much your readers know about your discipline, but also their specialized knowledge about a
similar discipline. You might also problem-pose about other characteristics of your audience,
such as level of formal education, age, and geographical location. This kind of problemposing will be useful to you in every writing situation, in every new discourse community where
you may find yourself.
Of course, reading and writing cannot be separated. As we learn to read the
conventions of academic discourses, we will almost certainly be tasked with applying them by
writing those discourses at the same time. The audience for your college writing tasks will
almost certainly vary, not just by discipline, but sometimes even within the same class. For
example, in a sociology class you might be asked to write an annotated bibliography for your
department’s webpage, a service-learning report for your community partner, a book report
presentation for your course colleagues, and a research paper for your teacher. Each of
these writings certainly encourages your participation in creating knowledge within the specific
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LOGOS
Why does she
use these
examples?
How does this
affect the
author’s point?
LOGOS
Why does
she go back
to Freir’s
problemposing
strategy?
PATHOS
Why is she
asking
questions
about texts
directly to
the reader?
LOGOS
What is the
purpose of
this
paragraph?
LOGOS
What point
does she
make in this
paragraph?
How does
she connect
it to
problemposing?
PATHOS
She says the
writer is a
‘participant
in the
creation of
knowledge’.
How does
this connect
to being a
scholar and
avoiding
plagiarism?
academic discourse community of Sociology; yet each calls for you to use a different genre.
If you were to problem-pose about ways to write each of those documents, you might ask
questions about the format, audience, and purpose of each one: as you’re no doubt aware,
you’d certainly come up with very different answers! At the same time, there are
characteristics that each of those documents would share, since they’re all part of the
academic discourse community of Sociology: each would need to rely on the most current
research in the field, would need to incorporate specific vocabulary and terminology from the
field, and would need to adopt the appropriate persona to situate the writer as a participant in
the creation of knowledge in that field.
This kind of problem-posing will work to help you learn the expectations for any new
discipline, whether it is based in the humanities, in the natural and applied sciences, or in the
social sciences. Writers in the academic discourse communities of the humanities often write
to persuade their readers to consider a new way of reading a text. These writers commonly
share the expectation that participants in the discourse will study the word in texts such as
works of literature, art, or music to create new knowledge—new ways of thinking—about the
world. One example of this would come from a research paper, sometimes also called a
critical analysis essay, for a Chinese Literature class, for which a college essay would require an
argumentative thesis—one with which the essay’s audience could agree or disagree—that is
supported through the writer’s analysis of literary texts. In another instance, writing a response
to a performance for a Music Appreciation class might require the writer to focus on
convincing readers that the work’s composer was influenced by a specific social movement.
Whatever the assignment, new knowledge is formed in many of humanities‟ academic
discourse communities through participants‟ articulation of an argument designed to
persuade readers to view the word, and therefore the world, in a new way.
Writers in the natural and applied sciences, on the other hand, tend to emphasize a
primary purpose of informing readers, rather than persuading. These discourse communities
share an assumption that an author‟s neutrality is important; therefore, they emphasize
objectivity in their writings. In these disciplines, the purpose is often to inform audiences of new
findings. As such, writers adopt an impersonal, objective persona and a neutral tone using
passive voice: this is so that readers can, if they wish, replicate the experiments and data.
Common genres that you may be asked to write in these disciplines include laboratory
reports, reviews of scholarly or technical publications, or reports of your own field observations.
LOGOS
The writer
mentions
‘purpose’.
Why is this
important in
academic
writing? How
do the
examples in
these
paragraphs
show her
point about
purpose?
The academic discourse communities in the social sciences bear some similarities to the
natural and applied sciences in their shared values. In the social science disciplines, a majority
of writing assignments might also ask writers to inform; their purpose is to assume a high level of
objectivity in providing recent, useful information to readers in the same discipline. Examples
of assignments in the social sciences are a care plan, case notes, and a bibliographic essay.
Persuasiveness in both the social sciences and the natural and applied sciences is represented
in the way that writers maintain credibility within their academic discourse communities.
In order to achieve this, it’s important that participants not only use disciplinary conventions
correctly, but also that they understand the ways of thinking that those conventions reveal,
along with the purpose of the writing. This is how writers demonstrate to their readers that they
are ready to participate in the conversations of that discourse community.
PATHOS
Look at the
goals of this
course. How
is this
connected to
UWP 22?
Overall, though, the common purpose of a vast majority of your writing assignments in
academic discourses will be to demonstrate to your audience that you have learned certain
course concepts and terms. Your teachers will often ask you to engage in critical thinking
through writing about course materials; they likely will also want you to demonstrate that you
can apply the course content—the word—to your own experience of the world. In one sense,
your instructors are asking you to demonstrate that you know how to think like an insider,
following the practices of a member of that disciplinary discourse community: therefore, your
academic writing should reflect the way that scholars communicate with one another in any
given field. These tenets apply across the disciplines: as such, they show new college writers
how to read the discourse of any academic community. Every writing assignment calls us to
problem-pose about the purpose, audience, and genre: every academic discourse has
conventions governing your selections as you respond to these rhetorical concerns.
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LOGOS
Where does
she restate
her thesis?
How is it
different
than the first
time she
stated it?
Participation Across the Curriculum
ETHOS
Why use ‘us’
here?
One challenge that may prevent us from feeling as though we are full participants in an
academic discourse community is that the purpose for writing is almost always decided by
someone else, most often by the instructor. This seems to run contradictory to the idea that our
own college writing can have real purpose, real authority— that it really can contribute to the
making of knowledge in a scholarly discipline. However, full participation in academic
discourse consists of a range of activities. Bazerman establishes that disciplinary knowledge is
influenced by a variety of sources when he argues that “Writing is a form of social action; texts
help organize social activities and social structure; and reading is a form of social
participation” (Shaping 10). In other words, it is actually in the acts of writing and reading that
the genres of academic discourses are created; these acts compose the genres. As
Bazerman points out, the act of writing for and with and in academic discourse communities
is, in itself, a form of social action. In other words, no discourse community can exist without its
members: readers and writers themselves constitute a discourse community. Welcome to the
conversation!
Works Cited
Bazerman, Charles. “The Life of Genre, the Life in the Classroom." Genre and Writing. Ed. W. Bishop and H.
Ostrom. Boynton/Cook, 1997: 19-26.
---. Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science. Madison,
WI: The University of Wisconsin Press. 1988.
Freire, Paulo, and Donaldo Macedo. Literacy: Reading the Word and the World.
Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey. 1987.
Russell, David. “Rethinking Genre in School and Society: An Activity Theory Analysis.” Written
Communication 14.4 (1997): 504-554.
Villanueva, Victor. “The Politics of Literacy Across the Curriculum.” WAC for the
New Millennium: Strategies for Continuing Writing-Across-The-Curriculum Programs. Ed. S. McLeod et
al. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. 2001: 163-78.
Glade, Fiona. “Writing Across the University: Academic Discourse as Conversation.” Everything’s a Text:
Readings for Composition. Eds. Dan Melzer and Deborah Coxwell Teague. Boston: Pearson
Longman, 2011. 399-408.
LOGOS
What is the overall purpose/claim of the article?
How many different kinds of support does the author use?
What types of evidence does the writer use? Are these forms of evidence acceptable for the
audience and subject area?
Does the writer cite sources appropriately?
Does the writer explain and connect the examples to her points?
CONTEXT
Does the writer appeal to what is important to the audience?
ETHOS
What is your impression of the writer’s tone/persona?
Does the writer gain credibility with you? How?
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