In the last two postings, I’ve been trying to make sense of how both Gerald Graff and Laurel Richardson’s views of writing—in terms of content and form—relate to each other.  At first, they seem to be unrelated to me.  Richardson calls for us to consider writing as thinking; to write is to think.  She seems to be responding especially to the notion that in order to write one must know beforehand what one wishes to say.  In addition, Richardson thinks that the forms in which we write help to create knowledge themselves.  There are some things that one might only think of when trying to write a monologue, or in a strict poetic form.  Richardson’s position resists the trend in academia to write in a particular style, an opaque form that makes its content that much harder to understand.  Gerald Graff has a similar view, which he calls Arguespeak—the cryptic language in which scholars speak and write, and a way of communicating in which students are often denied explicit instruction.

Initially, it seems that Graff and Birkenstein’s They Say/I Say method of academic writing is in line with Richardson: they propose a form in which students can write, a form that ensures students’ ideas will remain focused and cogent.  But, there is a difference between the Graff-Birkenstein method and Richardson’s call for writing as thinking.  The difference is this: Richardson suggests formal conventions like genre, poetic rhythm, or characterization; the Graff-Birkenstein method gives students the language to think, isolating the core of a student’s idea.  This distinction is important because it sheds light on the inadequacy of my terms, content and form.  And especially form.  What is the difference between the conventional form of a genre—lyric poetry, for example—and the providing of (some) exact language with which students should think?  What effect does thinking in someone else’s sentences have on students’ own thoughts?  While it might ensure that they preserve cogency, how will it effect aspects of writing like voice, for example?

To be clear, Graff and Birkenstein suggest that after students master the basic idea—how to weave others’ ideas into their own—they are free to alter templates to be more original.  In this sense, the Graff-Birkenstein method is one way to train students to think a certain kind of way—a way that does not come easily to some (or many) students.  This is said with great clarity by two graduate students at University of Wisconsin-Madison who, addressing a colleague’s concern that the They Say/I Say method is too formulaic, write: “It seemed to us that our colleague had conflated Graff and Birkenstein’s transparency with a sort of rote, mechanistic method of learning that reduced the complexity of writing to a set of skills that could be grasped and implemented easily.” I agree.  (I wonder if I myself, in my first previous few postings, have fallen into this trap of rash opinion-making: mistaking clarity for glibness; treating content and form so separately; suggesting that Graff was either an education or and English professor.) As with most tools and methods, this one could be of great value to the writing teacher.  That is, as long as it is one tool among others.  A course in which this is the only way of writing—or, a teacher who teaches it as the “right” way, the only way—would be limiting students to only one way of thinking and expressing ideas.  And, unfortunately, as often happens when administrators wish to implement standardized pedagogy, it is quite possible that what would be a valuable tool might be misused as a magic wand.  This is precisely what happened with 6-Traits of Writing, Reading/Writing Workshops, and even Do Nows.  They Say/I Say is a valuable way to help students organize their ideas.  But, administrators must remember the most important word of that sentence: a.

Related posts:

1. Why Graduate Students Should Write Like Shite, Part 3
2. Why Graduate Students Should Write Like Shite, Part 2
3. Teaching as Political Activism

Richardson then goes on to describe how the wide gap between content and form came to be.  She points to the 17th century, where the “world of writing [was] divided into two separate kinds: literary and scientific” (925).  Literature became synonymous with falsehood, science with truth.  What’s more, literary writing became associated with flowery poetry while science was plain and to the point.  Despite changes in 20th century, the distinction still remains mostly intact.  This is certainly the case in education where any research done in the era of No Child Left Behind must be “science-based” (Lewis & Moorman, 2007).  Richardson concludes the chapter with a series of writing exercises and tips for graduate students and other qualitative researchers.

The Richardson you read above, however, was not always so innovative.  Her dissertation (Richardson [Walum], 1963), for examples, reads like the voiceless template writing Graff advocates. Richardson begins her dissertation, “The major concern of this thesis is the explication and testing of a theory in the sociology of knowledge. Empirically, it is a study of the relationship between production of pure mathematics and social sanctions” (1).  Her voice is frigid.  There is no “I” here.  And it doesn’t get better.  Her introductory paragraph ends with the liveliness of a funeral march: “The thesis concludes with a summary of the theoretical orientations, procedures, and findings.  The major contributions are assessed and suggestions for future research are presented” (3).  Presented?  By whom?  As we continue, in the third paragraph of Chapter II, there is some sign of life: she uses the word my.  All at once there is a sense of Laurel Richardson, that she’s wriggled loose of academe’s suffocating grip.  Before reading her small possessive adjective, you wondered if a human being wrote this at all.  That simple two-letter word invites you into her page.  That is, until she follows my with: “orientation is not to the construction of a master conceptual scheme wherein all sociological concepts are integrated into a systemic whole” (4).  Richardson of 2000 wouldn’t know Richardson of 1963 if she, well, looked in a mirror.

The point of the juxtaposition between early and late Richardson isn’t to suggest the researcher a hypocrite.  Rather, it’s to temper her recent ideas with a harsh academic reality: breaking the rules of academic writing is not as simple as it seems.  There are times in young scholars’ careers when playing by the rules is necessary for advancing.  When Richardson wrote for her three-person committee at University of Colorado, she pretended like she had never even heard of form, let alone style.  Importantly, Richardson has chronicled at length (Richardson, 1997) the struggles she has faced trying to get her work accepted by others in her field.  Her representations of research as poems and plays are gleefully received by some, but woefully read by others who see her work as nearer a wordy prank than scholarship.

It is with great caution that a young scholar bends the accepted forms of academic writing.  There are resources available and pockets of alternative-minded professors out there, but young careers are fragile things.  Both Graff and Richardson are well established in their careers; they can write however their scholarly hearts desire.  They can also encourage their advisees to break the rules, if they like.  But graduate students beware: you do so at you own risk.

Part 4 to come soon…

Related posts:

1. Why Graduate Students Should Write Like Shite, Part 2
2. Why Graduate Students Should Write like Shite, Part I
3. The Importance of Articles in Teaching Writing

It’s not only a handful of scholars who treasure content over form. Content runs amok throughout academia. In his book Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind, Gerald Graff (Graff, 2004) describes how the school system—universities especially, but also secondary schools—has become an exclusivist system only concerned with the perpetuation of itself. He draws attention to the problems of academic disciplines, the gibberish with which scholars speak about their scholarship, and the way in which students are forced to play a game of insincere studentship just to get through school. Unlike his contemporary Stanley Fish, who thinks that scholarship is an end unto itself and that’s the way it should be (Fish, 2008)—Graff thinks that scholars have a responsibility to make their work accessible to non-academics. Not dumbed-down, but accessible.

Students suffer because academics yatter with only other academics in mind. In what he calls the Law of Relative Invisibility of Intellectual Differences, Graff (Graff, 2004) claims that “to the non-egghead, any two eggheads, no matter how far apart, are virtually indistinguishable” (7). Despite this yen for elitism, Graff describes how intellectualism creeps into popular culture with greater and greater frequency. College-educated audiences crave intelligent entertainment. In addition, “academic ideas are increasingly popularized, not only by the media but by academic writing itself, as university presses court the wider audiences of trade houses while trade houses increasingly publish academics” (19). So, not only is the populous craving intellectualism, the universities are craving the masses.

Graff then goes on to reveal to us “one of the most closely guarded secrets that academia unwittingly keeps from students” (21). He calls it Arguespeak. For Graff, much of scholarship is a matter of making arguments. But, because students don’t know this secret, they flounder about trying to decode their instructors’ magic spells. He goes on to write that “the first step toward demystifying academia is to start being more explicit about the academic centrality of persuasive argument” (22). Academic culture is more like a volleyball game in which an idea gets tossed back and forth between players. Students, however, don’t see academics played this way because “the game is fractured into so many unconnected courses and subjects that it drops out of sight” (27). Graff sets out to change that.

In response to the popularity of Clueless in Academe, Graff and his wife wrote a guide to academic writing (Graff & Birkenstein, 2005) called They Say / I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing. The writing manual lays out a series of templates for students to adopt and adapt in their writing. The templates, the authors argue, help ensure that students frame their own ideas in response to the thoughts of others’, thereby ensuring that Arguespeak is at the center of their own writing. For example, one template might look like this: While some say Shakespeare’s plays are _____________, I think Shakespeare’s plays are ________________. By writing within this template, a student is sure to frame his ideas in terms of others’.

This is where Graff’s astute point about the opacity of the academy starts to wobble. His template method for academic writing ensures students’ ideas are cogent at the expense of the craft of writing itself. He pries apart thinking and writing/content and form, isolating the former and relinquishing the latter. He seems to think that content and form are distinct, that writing and thinking are unrelated. This might be fine with him. There are others, however, for whom writing and thinking are very much conflated.

Part 3 to come next week…

Related posts:

1. Why Graduate Students Should Write Like Shite, Part 3
2. Why Graduate Students Should Write like Shite, Part I
3. The Importance of Articles in Teaching Writing