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Writing With Substance: You Can Haz it! SRSLY!

Finding Things to Read

Reading well and reading regularly are essential for improving both the style and substance of your writing. In the first two weeks of this course, you'll find that I will either supply your reading by assigning specific essays or guide your reading by directing you to search for material on different subjects online. It should go without saying (though I think it must be said) that you will perform well in your college courses if you read all the material assigned to you, take notes on what you read, and record your thoughts about what you read in written form.

In this class, however, I also want you to learn how to find relevant material to read on your own, especially academic material available through our library resources. From some perspectives, you, a new student in a college course, are not the audience for academic scholarship. It is written with the specialized vocabulary that experts use when they write for other experts. But the idea that you shouldn't bother with it because of its intended audience simply exacerbates the divide between the knowledge produced under the auspices of universities and everyday readers. If you make it a goal of your college education to read as much of this scholarship as you can, you will help close that divide and you will also find that with persistence, you really can understand some of this work when you read it and use it in your own written work. For instance, if you found the article "Educational heterogamy: Does it lead to cultural differences in child-rearing?" in the September issue of the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, you might be intimidated by the fact you don't know what "educational heterogamy" is. But doing a simple google search will turn up a dictionary entry that suggests that the term refers to marriage between people with different educational backgrounds. The authors of the article in question explore the ways in which those different backgrounds might affect raising a child.

Of course, you will find a number of articles whose content is too difficult for you at the present moment. In some cases, you will have to find other sources that can provide or distill the same knowledge in a different form, or concede that you aren't (yet) in a position to understand (or need to understand) advanced research. The trick is––(as always) not really a trick so much as a willingness––to be persistent, flexible, and prepared to ask for help when you're stuck. You will also find that you feel less persistent, flexible, and prepared when you are most busy; try to start projects that require reading and research as soon as you are given an assignment.

The more time you spend wandering around our library resources, you will also find that there are academic journals that publish research on subjects that you might have thought were not appropriate for study. In August of 2014, The Journal of Popular Culture featured articles on Battlestar Galactica and Superman; in June of 2012, The Journal of Popular Music Studies published an article on Ke$ha.

In our class meetings, we'll discuss what peer-reviewed scholarship looks like in its hard-copy and online forms, as well as how academic research differs from commercial publications (including news sites and other online sources whose revenue comes from advertising). One of the most obvious differences is that you'll access scholarship using our university library's databases (and other university and public library sites wherein content is produced by scholars); another and more crucial distinction is that the editorial and publication process ensures that research conforms to academic standards for content and style and is produced primarily for the purpose of contributing knowledge within a specific academic field or fields. Such research may be corporately funded, but is generally not written for profit by its producers.

Some of the work you did in Assignment [] will help us talk about the impact that profit motives have on information; we can't always (and perhaps should never wholly) dismiss the value of work we read that contains or is supplied alongside advertising, but we can put some stock, at least, in the reliability of work that does not. I'm not saying here that anything that is published in a journal is quality work; scholars find problems with and critique this work all the time. But this is a feature, not a bug, of academic scholarship; we build knowledge by attempting to build on what others produce, and sometimes that means venturing the claim that other scholars were wrong. Debates and conflict may shake your confidence in some of the material you've learned, but that shaking can be useful in forcing you to weigh information carefully and acknowledge ambiguity or uncertainty. Journal editors have, upon occasion, had to issue retractions that renounce the validity of work they've published. But those occasions are limited overall.

Complicating the distinctions we might try to make between purely academic and public writing and journalism is the fact that scholars regularly write in public venues in addition to the work they produce for scholarly journals. We see it, for instance, in their blogs or on news and political sites, and, as with anything else we find online, we must assess the credibility and utility of what we learn there by attending to the background of the writer, the venue for which he or she writes, and, though it's not always easy, the substance of the work.

I'd like to make one final point here before we turn to the databases that will allow you to find books and scholarly essays to read about one of the best sources of information on the web. I'm referring to Wikipedia. You will find (and may have already found) that some teachers and professors discourage its use. I think it's worth acknowledging that there are some valid reasons that these people do not want you to cite it as a source in a college-level writing assignment. Some of them might tell you not to cite it because "anybody can edit it," a fact which, for them, means that what's there can not be trusted. I'll get to that conception momentarily. The primary reason not to cite it in your college papers, I think, is that it's an encyclopedia, a source that was, historically, too general to be appropriate for use in an academic setting. Wikipedia is better than the old encyclopedias, however, because it's constantly updated.

If you want a good sense of how often people update the information there, go to the Listen to Wikipedia site, which gives visual and aural representations of the process of editing, and you'll be treated quite literally to the sights and sounds of the construction and revision of knowledge. The frequency of revisions and new entries can't tell us how accurate the content is, of course, nor can it change the fact that those editing or revising are overwhelmingly male. Nonetheless, the site is generally transparent about its methods and practices, and they are more rigorous than many online sites. I agree with the Guardian's John Naughton, who recently described it as "imperfect" but also the "most viable" way of aggregating and assessing information in the networked world. (For more on Wikipedia's "lessons," take a look at this online book by Harvard's Jonathan L. Zittrain, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It; you can also read scholarly studies of Wikipedia's accuracy and perceived accuracy such as this one by Thomas Chesney of Nottingham University or another on its utility for medical information; and studies of the limitations in coverage such as this one. Note too that these are relatively old studies and more recent research no doubt exists.) Ultimately, I think you should feel free to consult Wikipedia on pretty much everything that interests you. It is a great place to start. I am happy to admit that I read and learn from entries there on a daily basis. Yet I also think it is not a great place to stop; it is not (often) a good source to cite in a college essay; and it is definitely not a site whose content can simply be adapted or reassembled in a paper. Use it to inform the searches you do in academic databases; use it to help you evaluate what you find in other sources (and vice versa), and use it find additional sources and related topics.

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Reading
In a textbook I adopted in my most recent writing courses, students are encouraged to craft their own writing in response to something somebody else said about a topic. This book, called They Say / I Say, has some real virtues. For instance, the book is constructed around the concept of discourse (a word that invokes conversation, dialogue, and debate), because its authors want to ensure that you see the stakes of participating in a civic society. They remind us that knowledge is something that we circulate socially--that is, with other people. What we say has ramifications for others; what those people say should matter to us and we should have an opportunity to respond, because we are all here together and need to talk to one another about what we're seeing and experiencing.

I like the way that the textbook is transparent about the fact that there are "moves that matter"--that is, that there constructions that are characteristic of academic discourse that scholars sometimes assume students would simply intuit. Rather than allow these "moves" to be made by the professionals alone, they provided for students a series of formulas, common ways of organizing claims that writers use to respond to one another.

They provided many "moves," I think, but the students who read the book (or refused to read it) often concluded from it that there were several different ways to agree and disagree with an author, and they simply needed to adapt the formulas to suit their own views.

On one hand, yes. Learning the structures that academics employ to make statements of all sorts will enable you to ability to express your ideas in college assignments. But putting these constructions to work in your own prose won't do much more than ensure you've got a formula down. And simply agreeing or disagreeing with somebody else is not enough. Even if you can articulate good reasons for your disagreement or agreement, can you honestly say that laying out those arguments has increased your knowledge and made you more curious intellectually about a topic? I suspect being able to make such claims often allows us to feel satisfied rather than learned, knowledgeable or fulfilled. Supporting your agreement or disagreement has an end point, whereas genuine learning does not.

It is very important to be engaged in conversation with others, of course. We are social animals and even the most scholarly, solitary monks needed to share their thoughts with their peers. Dialogue is useful for all the reasons that Socrates noted in his famous philosophical works. He may indeed have supplied us with the single best method for thinking critically. Yet such dialogue is most useful (and most substantive) when the parties are sufficiently informed or have something to bring beyond an initial opinion--which is to say, when both parties can contribute to the knowledge they produce together through dialogue with knowledge they have sought and thought about on their own.

Here I want to distinguish between experience and knowledge. We all have experiences that inform our thoughts and responses to what we see, hear, and read. But experience alone does not constitute knowledge. And you're in college to gain something you didn't have before or already. Much of what you gain will come from reading and the experiences you gain concurrently in the classrooms you inhabit daily. Neither one nor the other is complete on its own. Still, if I had to choose which one will improve your writing more quickly, I'd come down on the side of reading on your own. Reading, of course, is a great way to gain knowledge about something you haven't experienced; the best articles, books, plays, and poems are powerful precisely because they encourage understanding and empathy and allow you to experience vicariously what others have suffered, endured, or enjoyed. Reading widely and with focus can also help you convert something you experienced yourself into knowledge, if only because what you read can broaden your own subjective sense of what you experienced with other perspectives that complicate or support yours.

Reading is necessary in academic work in particular because we can't know everything just by what we've lived through or what we've read by a certain age. Reading is also necessary because it allows us to see how other people articulate knowledge, and, therein, it gives us a sense of how we, too, can formulate our own ideas. To say so is not to say we all plagiarize from one another, but rather, to admit that we learn what constitutes good prose by reading it and imitating the style, structure, and diction we've seen elsewhere. I owe the strength of my own writing to reading for precisely this reason. I'm certainly not telling to you to copy the sentences of published writers and submit them as your own work. I am telling you, though, that the more you read, the more ideas you will have about how to express your knowledge in written form.

This last point is, I think, is akin to the "moves" that the authors of They Say / I Say were hoping to provide for students. Rather than seeing them written out as formulas, and rather than reading them exclusively in essays by people who write for The New York Times and other mainstream news sources, we will (most often) examine them in writing produced for the people to whom you will likewise be submitting your writing: scholars. Scholars articulate claims in ways that are not all that different from the kinds of claims you see in twenty-first century journalism. In fact, some of the people who write for papers like The New York Times and The Washington Post have advanced degrees and work for universities like the one you attend. But academic work, when it's in its purest state, is not really involved in the business of selling papers or advertisements. In the ideal formulation of academic enterprise, those who produce it are free to pursue ideas for the sake of ideas.

This is not to say, of course, that academic writers live in an "ivory tower" and that their work is not useful for the so-called "real world." Academic writers are indeed invested in their work because of its relationship to "the real world"––since they are not actually special enough to get their own not-real world––and because of the knowledge that this only-one-world requires. It is to say, however, that we often define "useful" in ways that aren't only, or even centrally, concerned with profiting in a narrow, economic sense. This book and the platform that hosts it are a good example of the sort of utility I mean. (I will add here and elsewhere that the university's place in relation to the world is complex, as is the scholar's relationship to capitalism. Even monks have to eat, you see. In fact, two of the subjects we will consider in the first half of this class, the "Ed Tech" industry and the use of student data, and labor in the academy, will give you a glimpse into the business of learning that is instructive on both of these points.)
Next up: Finding Things to Read