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November 14, 2006
in mckee's oversimplified universe
McKee, Alan. Textual Analysis: A Beginner's Guide. Thousand Oaks: Sage. 2003.
...some things are still true (even if his articulation of them exhibits poor grammar):
"We can never just describe a text, because every description is an interpretation, there are always many possible description/interpretations of each text" (80).
"We can make educated guesses about likely interpretations of a text by familiarizing ourselves with relevant intertexts" (114). --he suggests immersion in a culture as "the best way to get a sense of the dominant discourses circulating in [that] culture" (106).
"tricks" he suggests for textual analysis ("to help you see how sense-making practices are working") include "exnomination" (from Barthes, meaning "'outside of naming'")--identifying and examining the presence & significance of unmarked categories--and the "commutation test," "a thought experiment where you replace one element of a text with a similar but different part of culture" (s.a., his example, "what happens if you swap the male and female roles in the 1995 Hollywood film Boys on the Side?")(106-7).
Posted by ttobryan at 01:13 PM | Comments (0)
November 02, 2006
this time
below is the now-current draft of my new prospectus. it's in the hands of all 3 of my committee-members for consideration.
i'm still finalizing that list on the bottom of books i mean to investigate, seeing what which reps send me & clarifying a few suggestions.
i have willing & wonderful volunteers among the teachers here who say they'll share materials & student writing with me.
i have no idea where to start w/the literature i've read heaps & heaps & heaps for years of & have to whittle down to a careful & specific little stack, but i need to get the hell on that, because papers are linear and what i do with the rest kinda depends on the stage i set at the beginning.
forgive me for not doing the formatting:
introduction/abstract____________________________________
In this dissertation, I present a multiple-stage analysis of the rich context within which first-year composition students negotiate among—and learn to make for themselves—claims to authority through the incorporation of outside sources in their research-based academic writing. Believing that student writers' struggles with source-incorporation stem from a larger conceptual divide rather than a simple lack of familiarity with correct citation practices, I examine the various points at which students' knowledge of such practices is influenced and evinced within our field's common practice: in our scholarship, in the textbooks and handbooks we assign, in our lesson-plans and teaching materials, and in the papers they write while practicing their acquisition of the skills and theories we teach (however directly or indirectly that tutelage occurs). The purposes of this twofold analysis are to catalogue, in some detail, what we do know about inexperienced academic writers' awareness of the practices and rationales of appropriate source work, and in the process to identify the things we need to know but don't.
theoretical and disciplinary contexts______________________
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 (Lunsford & Ede, Gere) and of the inherently social nature of written communication (LeFevre, Bruffee, Reither & Vipond), 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 self-positioning: 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.
It is for these reasons that 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. Beyond this grounding, however, the motivations for this study are 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. More specifically, the study aims to engage the specific avenues through which we, as educators and participants in the knowledge-making of our field, bring our expectations about the authorial-establishment involved in academic writing to our students, with varying degrees of theoretical grounding and clarity.
Academic writers are inherently positioned at an intersection-point between being consumers and creators of authored works—of textual artifacts that do the social work they accomplish by the combined virtue of what they say and in whose name they say it. We authenticate ourselves within the academy and vet our authenticity by acting as authors, most productively when those actions are acknowledged as authorial by others, but also in the steps we take toward acknowledgement that no one ever sees, and we depend completely on the creations of other authors—their concepts, their names, their model strategies—to do so. Primarily, we display evidence of this process by means of incorporating other authors' words into our own, using a deliberate and intricate system of introducing, quoting, citing, and contextualizing these words to establish their relation to what we hope to use them for, and in this way we demonstrate both our own knowledge and our connectivity to, respect for, and gratitude toward others' knowledge. In academic contexts, these are not just disciplinary habits, but are fundamentally key practices of fairness, community-membership, and professional validation and it is no wonder, therefore, that we take violations to these expected standards seriously. Our responses to practices we perceive as violations, however, as has been well documented in recent scholarship, reveals a sharp divide between our awareness of the theoretical complexity of the roles and negotiations of authorship and the rigid expectations of rule-observance that we hold our students—and sometimes our colleagues—to, assigning handbook pages detailing the proper punctuation of parenthetical citation and policing written works of all kinds for non-compliance (see Valentine in last month's CCC).
As writing teachers, we know our students struggle with using sources appropriately, effectively, even correctly, and in today's climate we and they are acutely aware of the academic, social, legal, and financial possible-consequences of making mistakes. Accordingly, we devote lesson-plans, reading assignments, and draft workshops to citation practices—always with an eye toward, and often with the stated purpose of, teaching "plagiarism prevention," even while we and our students are still, in many cases, unclear even as to the exact nature of the textual practices constituting the offenses whose charges we aim to avoid, let alone possessing and sharing a sufficient understanding of the largely mysterious process by which writers turn ideas—their "own" as well as others'—into prose.
My hypothesis is that students' continual difficulties with the practices of acceptable source-integration and attribution are more than a measure of their lack of familiarity with the citation rules in their handbooks. Source-integration and attribution practices are rhetorical actions that make and support claims about both writers' content and the writers themselves, and only a more nuanced understanding of these practices within the lived contexts of writers' lives—how they perceive, describe, and approach their own textual practice—will enable us to effectively teach our students to move beyond counting sentences in what they believe should be a block quote both toward a grounded understanding of the choices available to them as authors working in connection with other authors and toward an ability to choose wisely among them. To explore this hypothesis, I propose a study that examines the textual influences on writers' practices and the textual evidence of these practices themselves—the elements external to those lived contexts that can be observed and documented without consulting writers directly and engaging with their descriptions of their understandings and intentions. My expectation is that this examination will fall short of answering the questions it poses, and that these gaps will indicate that a closer, more personal investigation of writers' experience is needed.
methodology___________________________________________
This project relies primarily on methods of textual analysis to examine a variety of textual records and exchanges, all of which serve in different ways to illuminate the matrix of information and influence informing students' work with source materials as part of their constructing academic texts. Specifically, the research design of each of the main sections of this project is different, to reflect the particulars of the areas each seeks to examine and the types of data each will collect and analyze.
Section 1 will focus on the textual analysis of published works from two broad categories: scholarship, as found in books and field journal articles, and textbooks and handbooks intended for use by writing students inside and outside of composition classrooms. Section 2 will be concerned, instead, with the analysis of unpublished works, again falling into two broad categories: instructional materials used and provided to students by composition instructors and papers generated by composition students. Within each section, individual chapters and sub-sections will be examined in ways that seem most productive as in-depth inquiries of those particular genres, writing-situations, or types of material.
Specifically, the methodological approach to each chapter will follow the basic framework Thomas Huckin proposes in his chapter in Bazerman and Prior's What Writing Does and How it Does it on content analysis, which he describes as involving "a synergistic blending of quantitative data gathering and qualitative analysis....Some [studies] may start with a proposition and use data-gathering in a deductive manner to confirm or disconfirm the proposition, whereas others may be more exploratory, using qualitative analysis in an inductive, flexible manner" (16), but in general they should all follow his 6-step (recursive, cyclical, non-linear) process: 1. Pose a Research Question, 2. Define the Appropriate Construct(s), 3. Select an Appropriate Text or Body of Texts as the Study Corpus, 4. Determine Appropriate Units of Analysis (Text Features), 5. Gather Data, & 6. Interpret the Findings.
While each of these proposed chapters centers around a similarly structured, open-ended research question—"What does [each area of inquiry] say about how source materials are/should be viewed relative to authorship in the academy?"—and relies on common constructs of authorship, authority, each inquiry focuses on a different study corpus, relies on different units of analysis as data for that corpus, and accordingly requires a unique approach to the different sections of the project's mostly-common constructs.
• Chapter 1 is imagined around a study corpus comprised of a selection of field publications discussing theories and theory-to-practice applications of source-inclusion and intertextual reference. Literature will be selected for inclusion based on its degree of direct relevance to the topic of inquiry and/or based on the degree to which frequent citation indicates that it is influential; for example, Foucault's definitions of authorship, Baktin's description of the dialogic, and LeFevre's treatment of writing as an inherently social act, although not geared directly towards this project's textual inquiries, are frequently cited by more clearly topic-specific works like Howard's Standing on the Shoulders of Giants, Bazerman's work with intertextuality, or Fuller and Lutz's "Constructing Authority."
• Chapter 2 relies on a study corpus of 6-10 popular textbooks (handbooks and writing guides/rhetorics) assigned to students in introductory college writing courses. Texts will be selected by cross-referencing a list generated by field professionals participating in conversations on the WPA listserv with top publishers' lists of best-selling texts in today's composition-textbook publishing industry. Units of analysis might include, among other data, the number of times or the number of different sections of the text wherein source-use is mentioned, the number of times or the number of different sections of the text wherein authorship is mentioned, the types of headings under which this information appears—citation practices, research, ethics, collaboration, etc—and the relation (or lack of relation) between these topics in the book's treatment of them. Additionally, the way that each text treats these topics—with examples, definitions, explanatory exposition about situational expectations, instructions, exercises, justifications, and open-ended questions—can be categorized for comparison.
• The study corpus for Chapter 3 consists of a collection of teaching materials—handouts, lesson-plans, syllabi, etc.—used by Instructors in the Syracuse University Writing Program. Materials will be selected first based on teachers' volunteering their willingness to participate and second based on their relevance to the topic of this inquiry. The analysis of these materials will center around such units of data as the presence or absence of mention of source-integration-related topics on syllabi and the tone (such as pedagogical, strictly informational, or punitive, as possibilities) of the language used in course materials to discuss plagiarism and/or relate plagiarism to the procedures of source use. When course materials do directly deal with issues related to source-integration and notions of authorship, is this material presented as facts to be memorized, skills to be practiced, or theory to be discussed and debated, for example; concretely might appear as lists or comparisons of elements included in different course's materials: as with textbooks and handbooks, examples, definitions, explanatory exposition about situational expectations, instructions, exercises, justifications, and open-ended questions are possible categories for these elements.
• Chapter 4's study corpus is a collection of 6-10 student essays written by Syracuse University WRT 105 students in the Fall of 2006, responding to writing assignments requiring the inclusion and effective academic treatment of outside sources. Essays will be selected for inclusion based on their teachers' volunteering for participation (only student essays from students taught by teachers volunteering their materials will be included) and students' willingness to grant permission for their work to be used. Units of analysis for this chapter will be the noted, counted, and catalogued incidences of textual features such as the introduction of source-texts, claims to authority, and the deliberate integration of source-texts' ideas with students' claims; for example, in each instance of a student making use of a source in a paper, does he or she provide the author's name, context for the source, a clear distinction between his or her language and the language of the source, and complete citation information? If only some of these elements appear, which ones, and does his or her treatment of the source in other areas of the paper provide the missing information? Does the author integrate the source's language with his or her own in ways that present either the source or the student writer—or both—as authoritative? If so, how?
All of these chapters share a methodological reliance on the open question and the flexibility of an evolving approach; for each, data-gathering will by necessity be a recursive process, beginning with examining a few sample texts, read in their entirety and then more exactingly to identify a list of key features that will be catalogued, searched-for in subsequent samples, and re-examined for relevance and completeness as the investigation proceeds. Analysis of the instances and patterns demonstrated by these features will vary as best befits the materials under examination, the scope of their wider representativeness, and the features they demonstrate.
projected chapter breakdown____________________________
Introduction: This section will recognize our current cultural climate of plariarism-parinoia and debates about the ownership of ideas, introduce some of the conflicting conceptions of authorship/authority in the field & in our pedagogy, and provide a rationale for a several-layer investigation into the more direct of the many influences on student writers' awareness of and appropriation of the expectations surrounding their work with others' works in producing academic writing. It will also outline the scope and chapter-breakdown of the project as a whole.
Section 1: On Authoring within the Academy
Chp. 1: What the field says
This chapter will investigate a selection of current scholarship concerning the integration of sources and such related keywords as "plagiarism," "authorship," and "co-authorship" as they inform Composition's understandings of writers' work with the work of other writers. This chapter seeks to answer the following questions: How does Composition characterize the role of the academic writer, at the intersection between (or as a cultural manager of this intersection?) being a consumer and being a creator of works defined in part by their authorship? How does Composition construct that belief through our descriptions of such terms as authorship, co-authorship, authority, academic status, student-status, plagiarism and publication? How does our scholarship theorize our expectations for our students' practices, and for our influences on those practices? i.e. If scholarship were our only way of knowing about students as users-of-source materials, what would we know about them?
Chp. 2: What the textbooks say
This chapter will examine best-selling field textbooks' and handbooks' treatment of and advice to students concerning sources, research, plagiarism, and "cheating." Do they endeavor to tell students why to engage in particular practices, or only model the notation of the practices themselves? If they offer reasons, what sorts of reasons do they offer? Are "correct" practices presented as dependent on situation and context? As universal? As respectful community membership? As punishment-avoidance? In its analysis of these resources, this chapter seeks to determine the message our assignment of these materials send to students about being an author when interacting with the words of other authors.
Section 2: "We'll Make More": Teaching Students to be Academic Authors
Chp. 3: What the teachers say
This chapter seeks to exemplify, through examination of a selection of syllabi, lesson plans, handouts, etc. currently in use in the Writing Program at Syracuse University, the messages about these concepts delivered to students by teachers' personally-distributed instructional materials—particularly as these messages pertain to source work and authority-claims. It is beyond the scope of this project to reasonably represent the rich array of diverse practices undertaken in classrooms throughout the field, but this chapter seeks to examine what a sample of these materials, in local employ, teach our students about being an (student?) author when interacting with the words of other (non-student?) authors.
Chp. 4: What students' papers say
In order to establish what can be determined about students' understanding of field expectations in this area by looking only at their finished works, this chapter asks "What textual evidence is there in students' finished papers of their incorporation of the words/ideas of other authors? What evidence demonstrates conflicting or revealing claims about authority within and without elements of students' papers directly introducing or framing source-inclusion?" Specifically, this chapter will investigate, sample, and categorize the features of student papers that participate in the framing, summarizing, paraphrasing, quoting, citing, and discussion of direct sources or other noted extra-textual influences.
Conclusion/Chp. 5: What nobody's saying
This chapter examines the limitations of the inquiries conducted in the chapters above, claiming that we can only know so much about how to help students learn to practice a set of behaviors without understanding their existing understandings and the reasons guiding their current practice, and we can only know so much about those understandings and reasons without engaging in directed, collaborative, interview-based research of writers and their texts. To this end, this chapter focuses on the implications of the above analysis and on developing rationales for and proposing a different kind of future study to take up this inquiry where examining these influences must inevitably leave off.
bibliography (scholarship)_____________________________
Barthes, Roland. "Authors and Writers." A Barthes Reader. Ed. Susan Sontag. New York: Hill, 1982. 185-93.
Bazerman, Charles. "Intertextuality: How Texts Rely on Other Texts." What Writing Does and How It Does It: An Introduction to Analyzing Texts and Textual Practices. Ed. Charles Bazerman and Paul A. Prior. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003. 83-96.
Berkenkotter, Carol, Thomas N. Hucken, & John Ackerman. "Social Context and Socially Constructed Texts." in Textual Dynamics of the Professions: Historical and Contemporary Studies of Writing in Professional Communities. Ed. Charles Bazerman and James Paradis. Madison, WN: U Wisconsin P. 1991. 191-215.
Brannon, Lil and C. B. Knoblauch. "On Students' Rights to Their Own Texts: A Model of Teacher Response." College Composition and Communication. 33.2 (May 1982) 157-66. (to me this is actually about/influential of methodology rather than content)
Brodkey, Linda. Academic writing as social practice. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 1987.
Buranen, Lise and Alice M. Roy, eds. Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual Property in a Postmodern World. Albany: SU of New York P, 1999.
Corbett, Edward P.J. "The Theory and Practice of Imitation in Classical Rhetoric." College Composition and Communication 22 (1971): 243-50.
Day, Kami, and Michele Eodice. (First Person)2: A Study of Co-Authoring in the Academy. Logan: Utah State UP, 2001.
Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds. "Beyond 'The Subject': Individuality in the Discursive Condition." New Literary History 31.3 (Summer 2000).
Eliot, T.S. "Tradition and the Individual Talent." 1917. Selected Essays, 1917-1932. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932. 3-11. Rpt. Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern. Ed. Seán Burke. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1995. 73-80.
Foucault, Michel. "What Is an Author?" Language, Counter-Memory Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Donald Bouchard, Ed. Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon, Trans. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1977.
Fuller, Mary J., and Jean Ann Lutz. "Constructing Authority: Student Responses and Classroom Discourse." Discourse Studies in Composition. Eds. Ellen L. Barton and Gail Stygall. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton P, 2002.
Greene, Stuart. "Making Sense of My Own Ideas: The Problems of Authorship in a Beginning Writing Classroom." Written Communication 12.2 (April 1995): 186-218.
Harris, Joseph. "From the Editor: The Work of Others." College Composition and Communication. 45.4 (Dec. 1994) 439-41.
Herrington, Anne J. "Teaching, Writing, and Learning: a Naturalistic Study of Writing in an Undergraduate Literature Course." Advances in Writing Research Volume Two: Writing in Academic Disciplines. Ed. David A. Jolliffe. Ablex: Norwood, NJ. 1988. 133-66.
Horner, Bruce. "Students, Authorship, and the Work of Composition." College English 59.5 (1997): 505-29.
Howard, Rebecca Moore. Standing in the Shadow of Giants: Plagiarists, Authors, Collaborators. Perspectives on Writing: Theory, Research, Practice. Ser. 2. Stamford, CT: 1999.
Huckin, Thomas. "Content Analysis: What Texts Talk About." What Writing Does and How It Does It: An Introduction to Analyzing Texts and Textual Practices. Ed. Charles Bazerman and Paul A. Prior. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003. 13-32.
LeFevre, Karen Burke. Invention as a Social Act. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987.
Lunsford, Andrea A., and Lisa Ede. "Collaborative Authorship and the Teaching of Writing." The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature. Ed. Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi. Durham: Duke UP, 1994. 417-38.
Miller, Susan. Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991.
Mortensen, Peter, and Gesa E. Kirsch. "On Authority in the Study of Writing." College Composition and Communication. 44.4 (1993): 556-572.
Newkirk, Thomas. The Performance of Self in Student Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook. 1997.
Odell, Lee and Dixie Goswami "Writing in a Nonacademic Setting" Ed. Richard Beach and Lillian S. Bridwell. New Directions in Composition Research. Guilford P. New York: 1984. 225-258.
Pecorari, Diane. "Good and Original: Plagiarism and Patchwriting in Academic Second-Language Writing." Journal of Second Language Writing 12 (2003) 317-345.
Peters, John Durham. "John Locke, the individual, and the origin of communication." Quarterly Journal of Speech. 75.4 (1989) 387-399.
Pickering, Wilbur. A Framework for Discourse Analysis. Summer Institute of Linguistics Publications in Linguistics. Ser. 64. U of Texas at Arlington: Summer Institute of Linguistics Inc., 1978.
Prior, Paul. "Tracing Process: How Texts Come Into Being." What Writing Does and How It Does It: An Introduction to Analyzing Texts and Textual Practices. Ed. Charles Bazerman and Paul A. Prior. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003. 167-200.
Porter, James E. "Intertextuality and the Discourse Community." Rhetoric Review 5 (1986): 34-47.
Reither, James and Douglas Vipond. "Writing as Collaboration." College English. 51.8 (Dec 1989) 855-67.
Robillard, Amy E. Reimagining Students' Writerly Authority: Co-Investigation and Representations of Student Writers in Composition Studies. Diss. Syracuse University, 2004.
Rymer, Jone. "Scientific Composing Processes: How Eminent Scientists Write Journal Articles." Advances in Writing Research Volume Two: Writing in Academic Disciplines. Ed. David A. Jolliffe. Ablex: Norwood, NJ. 1988. 211-50.
Scollon, Ron. "Plagiarism and Ideology: Identity in Intercultural Discourse." Language in Society 24.1 (March 1995): 1-28.
Spellmeyer, Kurt. "Inventing the University Student." Composition in the Twenty-First Century: Crisis and Change. Ed. Lynn Z. Bloom, Donald A. Daiker, and Edward M. White. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1996. 39-44.
Stillar, Glenn F. Analyzing Everyday Texts: Discourse, Rhetoric, and Social Perspectives. Rhetoric & Society. Ser. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998.
[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!
Valentine, Kathryn. "Plagiarism as a Literary Practice: Recognizing and Rethinking Ethical Boundaries." CCC 58:1 (Sept. 2006) 89-109.
Williamson, Micheal M. "A Model for Investigating the Functions of Written Language in Different Disciplines." Advances in Writing Research Volume Two: Writing in Academic Disciplines. Ed. David A. Jolliffe. Ablex: Norwood, NJ. 1988. 89-132.
Woodmansee, Martha. "The Genius and the Copyright: Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the 'Author.'" Eighteenth-Century Studies 17 (1984): 425-48.
Woodmansee, Martha. "On the Author Effect: Recovering Collectivity." The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature. Ed. Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi. Durham: Duke UP, 1994. 15-28.
bibliography (textbooks and handbooks) _________________
handbooks (acc. to becky)
Little, Brown
Simon & Schuster
Bedford (hacker 7th ed? 2 diff lunsfords)
St. Martin's
handbooks list-recommended
Hacker's A Writer's Reference (2)
Everyday Writer (Lunsford) (maybe)
--new Thompson (not high-selling b/c it just came out, but if i want to look at the most contemporary stuff, Blakesley (author) says he does much source stuff & recommends i check it out)
rhetorics (acc. to becky)
Axelrod & Cooper (St. Martin's)
Kennedy & Kennedy (Bedford)
Reid (Prentice Hall)
Ramage & Bean (Allyn & Bacon)
rhetorics list-recommended
Axelrod & Cooper—St. Martin's
at SU:
Longman [handbook]
Writing Analytically [rhetoric]
Posted by ttobryan at 09:59 AM | Comments (0)