Cinnabar and Alabaster

theoretical & disciplinary contexts

Although the motivations for this study are primarily pragmatic and pedagogical in nature, and as such arise from the intersection of my classroom experiences with such broad disciplinary concerns as the nature of academic writing and the degree to which academic writing is teachable vs. an aptitude some possess and others lack, and such culturally-specific influences as the current media hysteria about plagiarism, the primary theoretical influence on this work comes from authorship studies, particularly its demonstration of the discrepancies between how we as a field conceptualize the author and how writers'—particularly our students'—understandings of themselves as authors (or non-authors) play out in their authoring of texts.

In authorship studies, scholars have for a few decades now been gradually recognizing that our theoretical and cultural definitions of what an author is are inconsistent, outdated, and at times almost precisely antithetical to one another; theorists like Terry Eagleton observe that writing, like any art, is no miracle born from nothing but is a produced, social commodity, while we cajole our students to produce "original" works and continue to romanticize notions of the author as a solitary genius and writing as a task of isolation. In field studies of collaborative writing and the inherently social nature of written communication, a number of projects have variously examined how writers work together with other writers in school and workplace settings to solve problems and create text. Few, however, at least outside the specific contexts of seeking cures to plagiarism—commonly conceived of contemporarily as some sort of moral disease—have looked closely at what I consider the pivot-point of writers' authorial coming-out: the points in their texts where they share authorial voice with other thinkers and writers, where they position themselves in relation to those other voices, as framers and re-staters of others' words, as co-representers to their audiences of ideas they need the work of others to completely convey.

methodology

In this dissertation, I will investigate these notions of authorship, textual ownership, and authorial intent by examining the current practices of varyingly experienced writers authoring texts in collaboration with the spoken ideas and existing texts of other authors. Believing that these are common cultural challenges among academic writers, challenges that these writers confront regularly in their own work and attempt to overcome using a variety of strategies, some more successful than others, some the result of deliberate instruction but many the product of writers' interpretation of cultural expectations, I will call upon writers within the academy, both more and less experienced at integrating the ideas and words of others into their own prose, to consider and describe their own actions and rationale. To that end, I will conduct and analyze the results of conversational, semi-structured interviews with writers and collaborative examination of writers' sample texts. This project will draw on both interview methodology, such as is explicated by Steiner Kvale and by James Spradley, and one-on-one text-based conference strategies such as those practiced in the writing center pedagogy of such authors as Murphy and Sherwood or Gillespie and Lerner.

projected chapter breakdown

1. (Guiding metaphors—autonomy vs. participatory authority) [introduce/rationale for project (major claims/argument)]

This chapter will propose that the ways inexperienced and experienced academic writers percieve their authorial roles are different, and that those different perceptions directly influence the way these writers approach textual tasks involving the collaborative interaction of their words and ideas with those of others (as in the production of researched texts and research-based arguments). To this end, this chapter will review studies of student authorship and student interaction in authorial roles, including Amy Robillard's 2004 dissertation, Mary J. Fuller and Jean Anne Lutz's 2002 discourse study, Susan Miller's Textual Carnivals, Bruce Horner's 1997 study in College English, and contemporary impressions made by participants in current plagiarism debates; the examination of these and other sources will demonstrate that the moves student authors make to establish and demonstrate their authority in academic writing—particularly as regards writers' use of sources as claims to wider authority and support for their own—are doomed to insufficiency by the inconsistent expectations and theoretically confusing pedagogy that initiates them.

2. what current work does & falls short of (lit review: authorship theories etc.)

Chapter 2 will examine contemporary theoretical depictions of authorship and their foundational predecessors, with an eye toward the imapact of these theories on the policies and practices of law and pedagogy in common practice today. The chapter will also look closely at the way these theories influence the field's treatment, both theoretically and pedagogically, of collaborative writing, a variously-defined array of practices and skills increasingly deemed relevant in workplace studies. Of particular interest is the common move among collaborative writing scholars of framing their projects in such terms as "In a sense, all writing is collaborative," then going on to interogate some specific practice of coauthoring without engaging with the cultural relevance of their initial pronouncement; it is within this neglected area of study that I position my examination of the beliefs and understandings guiding writers' incorporation of others' ideas and texts into their own commonly-conceived-of-as-solitary creation of what are always, due to the inclusion of these influences, collaboratively generated texts.

3. design/explication of the study (methodologies)

This chapter will introduce the elements of interview methodology and best-practices writing center processes this study will make use of, theorizing and detailing in particular the deviations from more traditional interviewing procedures required to allow writers' descriptions of their process to be recorded and analyzed alongside writers'-and-researchers' collaborative coexamination of writers' previously constructed texts. Additionally, this chapter will discuss technology used to allow the researcher and each studied writer to review the writer's text collaboratively, making and recording both more traditional question-and-answer exchanges and conversational descriptions and analyses of writers' described processes and demonstrated products.

4. data/descriptions/results (interview transc. & analysis)

Chapter 4 will include: samples of writers' texts and their descriptions of the processes and rationales prompting the creation of those texts; writers' and researcher's collaborative analyses of those textual practices; transcriptions of conversational elements from writers' and researcher's examination and discussion of both included samples and larger-scale textual works; a comparison-based examination of the differences apparent in the processes described & products created by different writers working from different levels of experience in the particular situation of creating researched academic texts.

5. from theory into the classroom (changes in attitudes (yes i have jimmy buffet on the brain & wish i were somewhere tropical)

This chapter will consider the implications for both scholars and educators of the practices described and trends suggested by writers'-and-researcher's conversational interviews and collaborative textual analyses. It will include recommendations for reconsidering some current approaches to introducing inexperienced academic writers to the academy's expectations for intertextual work in research-based writing, and will contextualize these recommendations in light of contemporary concerns conflating questions about students' citation practices with the cultural stigmas of cheating and plagiarism.

bibliography
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[Thompson, Celia Helen. Plagiarism or intertextuality? A study of the politics of knowledge, identity and textual ownership in undergraduate student writing. Thesis. U of Technology, Sydney. 2006.] c'mon, CHT, publish this already! 

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