Clueless in Academe by Gerald Graff

Author:Gerald Graff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2003-03-20T16:00:00+00:00

WHAT CONVERSATION ARE YOU IN?

I want to suggest in this chapter how a more conversational view of argumentation can demystify academic writing and help high school and college students write better. The first step is to recognize that when student writing is flat and unfocused, the reason often lies in a failure to provide students with a conversation to argue in. I come to this conclusion the hard way, after teaching argument badly for many years. During that time, my most frequent critical comment on student papers was, “What’s your argument?” or “What’s your point?” My students’ lack of improvement suggested that the exhortation to get an argument or a point is about as helpful as advising someone to “Get a life.” Eventually it dawned on me that what counts as a makable “point” or “argument” is not as simple a matter as it seems. How do you go about finding a point if you haven’t already got one? How do you know you’ve got one when you see it?

I thought back on my own writing struggles—how did I know when something I said qualified to be a main point or argument? I realized that it had as much to do with what other people were saying or thinking as it did with the intrinsic qualities of my text. Without those others out there and the conversations they were having I had no chance to have an argument of my own, even if—especially if—I wanted to change that conversation. Any hope I had of being original depended on others, since without them and their conversation my writing would literally be pointless. Here was a clue to why the student writing I was seeing often lacked a clear point: my students were trying to make a point without having a conversation in which to make it, an impossible feat.

Their difficulty was doubtless increased by the nebulous nature of the conversations of the academic humanities, where the kinds of arguments typically made are often mystifying. The problem, however, also arises in other academic disciplines, whose central conversations are often kept from students on the ground that they don’t yet know the fundamentals of the subject, when in fact those conversations are the most fundamental thing of all. But if we can let students in on the secret that intellectual writing and discussion are extensions of their normal conversational practices, much of the mystification can be dissipated and the struggling students have a shot at catching up.

The point I make in this chapter, that students write better when they have conversations to enter, is implicit in much current composition and rhetorical theory, where conversation has become a central concept. The idea that discourse is inherently “dialogical,” that we internalize external conversation in virtually everything we say, has been developed in various ways by influential thinkers such as Bakhtin, Rorty, Derrida, McIntyre, and Vygotsky. The idea is implicit in Kenneth Burke’s celebrated depiction of intellectual history as an endless parlor conversation into which as individuals we drop in and out.

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