From Novice to Apprentice: A Pedagogy of "Academic Discourse" (Adam Katz)
By Adam Katz
DOI: 10.37514/DBH-J.2024.12.1.02 Double Helix, Vol 12 (2024)
Research Article
From Novice to Apprentice: A Pedagogy of “Academic Discourse”
Adam Katz Quinnipiac University
Helen Bromhead (2009), in her The Reign of Truth and Faith: Epistemic Expressions in 16th and 17th Century English, tracked the transformation of English during this period from being a language of “certainty” to one of “doubt.” This dramatic shift, evident to anyone who reads, for example, Shakespeare or Donne next to Dryden or Swift, has long been noted— some might remember T. S. Eliot bemoaning a “dissociation of sensibility” following the period of the metaphysical poets. Bromhead traced the disappearance of some words (“forsooth,” “verily”) and the change in meaning of others (“surely,” “I suppose”) to identify the increasing uncertainty conveyed by epistemic expressions. Bromhead herself did not offer a broader socio-historical explanation for these changes but drew upon Anna Wierzbicka’s (2006) earlier accounts of transformations in English that Wierzbicka often traced back to Locke’s philosophical writings. I open with these references for a couple of reasons. First, Bromhead’s (2009) account of the transformation of epistemic expressions in English is strikingly similar to recent studies of the difference between academic discourse and more “popular” discourses carried out, in particular, by Laura Aull. As one example, and I will return to her work later, Aull (2020) found that as writers become familiar with the stance expectations of academic discourse, they use far fewer “boosters” (markers of stronger epistemic commitment) and far more “hedges” (markers of weaker epistemic commitment or doubt). The second reason is that I would like to introduce Wierzbicka’s (2010) work as providing a vocabulary and method for speaking about language in ways that might be pedagogically helpful. Wierzbicka (along with her associates) identified what she contended is a small number of words with equivalents in all languages. Setting aside the empirical support for her claims, which I cannot address here, I find her approach to be of interest because it allows us, as writing instructors, to trace movement between simpler and more complex expressions in ways that might make epistemic markers more visible to students. For Weirzbicka’s Natural Semantic Primes approach, subtle epistemic expressions like “suggest,” “assume,” “suppose,” “imply,” and so on, along with their nominalizations, can all be traced back to more familiar primes such as “true,” “think,” “know,” “say,” and a few others. The subtler epistemic terms can then be examined as implicating the writer in ongoing conversations in which the views, actual and anticipated, of others must be accounted for. This examination is consistent with Aull’s own account, which sees the weaker epistemic commitments of academic discourse as grounded in the metalinguistic awareness of one’s involvement in complex, overlapping conversations, in which various reference points, layers of arguments, and yet untested claims and hypotheses need to be acknowledged linguistically. Composition pedagogy has always relied on other disciplines, especially as it has struggled against reductive, standardizing pedagogies, such as those asking students to identify “main ideas” and “themes.” David Bartholomae drew heavily upon literary
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criticism, such as the work of Richard Poirier, Edward Said, Harold Bloom, Stanley Fish and others. I see Bartholomae as exemplary because he never failed, even while acknowledging his debt to such thinkers (and readers), to mark the ways they presuppose the very reading capabilities (which is to say, modes of literacy) of their readers (and students) that, for Bartholomae, are the very things we cannot presuppose. Composition has come to rely more upon linguistics, as is the case with Aull and her sometime collaborator Zak Lancaster. Clearly all these inputs enrich our understanding of pedagogy and always leave us with the challenge of ensuring that concepts generated within these disciplinary spaces find their way into assignments that ask students to do the kinds of things that we could show them to be doing and that transfer to practices they can repeat and rework as academic readers and writers. Wierzbicka’s (2010) work on primes seems to me to meet that standard— unlike, I would suggest, attempts to introduce into composition theory poststructuralism, which never proposed any way of helping instructors meet any conceivable objectives of a first-year writing course, even one willing to challenge confining subjectivizations of students. Asking how we might get from “I think” to “I suppose” is a way of reflecting on language that might be made readily accessible to students. The same could be said of David Olson’s (2016) work on the cognitive implications of literacy in his The Mind on Paper, which addresses a metalinguistic phenomenon very similar to that studied by Bromhead (2009) and Aull (2020). Olson provided a very simple model for thinking about the linguistic and cognitive implications of literacy: he proposed that we think about writing as reported speech, but reported speech stripped of everything that, in oral communication, would contribute to the conveyance of meaning, such as gesture and tone. So, Olson argued, in an oral setting, if I am reporting someone else’s speech, I would imitate that speech, including its bodily incarnations—and if I want to discredit that speech, I would do so in the same way, for example by repeating the words of the other in a mocking way. Olson implicitly asked us to imagine how, then, one would preserve this meaning once the body and the presence of others on a scene are removed. Olson’s answer was that we would do so (and those creating written forms of communication did) by loading the lost meanings in verbal expressions: so, for example, if I want to show that I doubt the words I am reporting, and I can’t distance myself from them through gesture and tone, I need to say that so-and-so “claimed” or “seemed to think” that such and such was the case. Olson doesn’t seem to me to quite have said so, but it’s not hard to imagine transferring such practices to our “reporting” of our own speech. Olson, in turn, was relying here upon Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner’s (2011) Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose. Thomas and Turner identified what they called “classic prose,” which they traced back, interestingly, to Descartes, which is to say the same historical “break” upon which Bromhead (2009) focused. (Can such histories be made to come alive for students in first-year writing classes?) Classic prose is predicated upon what we can call a “scenic” principle: write as if you were looking at the events you are describing and you are drawing or inviting your reader into that scene. “Clear” writing would, then, place reader and writer on the same scene, seeing the same thing. This understanding of “clarity” is consistent with many uses of the term and, especially, with the insistence by teachers (and often students themselves) that writing be “clear.” Clarity essentially means unanimity: there would be no disagreement over what is being said. Demands for clarity will strike many of us as naïve, and for good reasons—even Thomas and Turner conceded the “fictional” nature of their ideal of prose. And yet it’s not
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so easy to dismiss, for what else are we looking for when we ask a student, for example, “What are you getting at here?” or something along those lines? But we can direct demands for clarity to the constitution of a disciplinary space, or scene, which does, I would argue, always have what we could call an “ostensive” dimension, in which interlocutors need to confirm that they are indeed looking at the “same thing.” (Imagine looking through a microscope with an untrained eye and asking the biologist alongside you, “What am I looking at here?”) I have begun this article by proposing some ground rules and canonical texts for the ongoing construction of the anomalous discipline of composition (anomalous as in constitutively supplemental to other disciplines) because I want to take up and push to what seems to me its logical conclusion a very salutary development in composition: the Writing about Writing (WAW) movement. Writing about writing, first, solves or at least sharply focuses the problem over which, I think, every writing instructor has agonized: What should students read? We are enjoined, and enjoin our students, to remember that the “content” of the text is not what matters, as it is only a pretext for enacting certain practices as a reader and writer, but it’s not that easy to engage texts in the complex and recursive way we would like without caring at all about the subject matter. So, should we give students texts they are “interested” in, maybe dealing with topics important to their “generation” (social media!)? Aside from the condescending and, for the instructor, potentially humiliating implications of this pandering, why in the world should we assume that our students are all interested in the same thing? Have students vote on texts? Well, what about the minority? And how could we imagine they would choose the kinds of texts a composition course should be teaching, those that are at least a bit “over their heads,” unfamiliar and resistant to their commonplaces? The same goes with having individual students choose their own texts, with the added disadvantage that now we are not reading texts together. Writing about Writing solves the problem by uniting the purposes of the course with its content: The writing course is now “about” the very practices that it aims at providing its students access to. And, insofar as students are in a writing class, perhaps we have some right to assume they will be “interested” in writing. We can achieve precision in the identification of reading and writing practices and provide grounds for assuming that those practices will be nameable and therefore transferable. It is surely no coincidence that WAW and discussions of transfer in writing studies overlap so considerably, in concerns and participants. But, then, why not take the next step, and make the first-year writing course not only about writing but about the first-year writing course? This would entail having students read and engage with texts such as those of (in my own courses) Aull, Bartholomae, Zak Lancaster and Sarah Smith (her fascinating PhD dissertation, Error as Strategic Style)—so far. Students are thereby introduced to the terms and the conversations producing those terms constituting the course they are taking, and studies of student reading and the kinds of formulas found in student and academic writing can be presented and studied in the classroom. These texts are difficult, of course, and I continue here the tradition adopted and advanced by Bartholomae, who insisted that students be given texts and projects to work with that would be of interest to academics, rather than pseudo-projects like “research papers” where students find, summarize and synthesize a few texts on a familiar topic. (Although I don’t want to claim that Bartholomae would necessarily endorse the pedagogy I’m proposing.) If, taking Bartholomae’s side in the Bartholomae-Elbow debate, we assume
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that the purpose of the first-year writing course is to “initiate” students into, or “acculturate” them to, the ways and habits of academic readers and writers, then in my proposed approach we are treating students as apprentice academics. This projects a model for students working in their disciplines, and even a somewhat “utopian” model for the organization of pedagogy in those disciplines, while first of all treating students as apprentices of academic discourse. The first-year writing course is, then, taking students from being novice to being apprentice academic writers. They are apprentices in our classes, which are teaching them to “apprentice” themselves across the disciplines. We might consider this “experiential learning” within the university itself. The simplest way to think of this transformation in modes of literacy from novice to apprentice is, as Bartholomae (2004) put it, “hav[ing] one set of commonplaces replaced with another” (p.103). Bartholomae here was drawing upon a crucial part of the rhetorical tradition, one which is consistent with tendencies in linguistics such as construction grammar and which enables us to speak directly about uses of language with minimal reference to intentions or cognitive states. The commonplaces students bring to the university are those, to refer back to a distinction made earlier, more suited to “boosters”: those that rely upon assumptions that “everyone knows.” The commonplaces students are to replace these with are, for starters, those that indicate epistemic modesty and gesture towards anticipated responses within an ongoing conversation, and are therefore made up of “hedges”: “it might be the case that ________,” “assuming ________, we could suggest,” and so on. Situating the replacement of one set of commonplaces by another in terms of an academic writing course, I would suggest the following formula: replacing lay concepts with concepts in some ongoing inquiry. We would be enabling students to acquire the metalinguistic awareness that concepts not directly put to work in present inquiry are all to some extent “lay” and will undergo transformation within the specific research context. This formula allows us to acknowledge student use of research aids like Wikipedia and AI, while designing the class to let them see that such aids, even when written by experts, will only approximate the work concepts do in the course of research. I am now going to focus on Aull’s (2020) work in particular as a promising site of such apprenticing insofar as her corpus studies of student writing and academic writing suggest lines of research that students can participate in from the moment they arrive in their composition classes. In her How Students Write: A Linguistic Analysis, Aull defined academic discourse (more precisely, she is distinguishing between first-year and upperlevel student writing) in terms of “compression,” “coherence” and “civility.” By “civility,” Aull meant “diplomatic evidentiality . . . blending open-mindedness with well-informed conviction” (p. 6). Cohesion is “explicit coherence across parts of a text” (p. 7). Compression is the “use of dense phrasal detail” (p. 7). It’s worth noting that, while Aull associated specific linguistic features with each of these qualities, compression is the only one that has that feature built into its definition. Aull also noted that compression “makes upper-level writing particularly difficult to read and write, especially for those whose lexical and grammatical habits are distant from standardized written academic English” (p. 7). I will return to this, in my view, highly significant point later. For civility, the linguistic marker Aull pointed out is a prevalence of hedging over boosting (p. 136), while for coherence Aull pointed to a range of markers, including adverbs such as “also,” counters such as “however,” words and phrases showing correlation such as “thus,” and specification and certain determiners such as “same.” A research paper co-authored by Aull and Zak Lancaster
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(2014), “Linguistic Markers of Stance in Early and Advanced Academic Writing: A Corpus Based Comparison,” explores these markers of civility and coherence in greater detail. There, along with their discussion of hedging and boosting, Aull and Lancaster examined a wide range of markers of coherence (without using the term): reformulation and exemplification, and concessive/counter moves. They distinguished between more difficult formulae in each of these categories: for example, specification, requiring the writer to “reduce the scope of propositional content” (p. 16), tends to be more challenging than exemplification. Likewise, more advanced writers use “nevertheless” far more often than do beginning writers, who tend to rely upon “however” for their concede/counter moves, because “nevertheless” commits the writer to following exactly the material that has been conceded (“call[ing] for a greater orientation to refining the scope of one’s meaning by constructing a dialogic stance by conceding and countering complexities” [pp. 21–22]). For Aull and Lancaster (2014), all of these features of academic stance can be correlated to the following general aspects of stance: stance toward the material, stance toward the reader, and stance toward the “larger discourse community” (p. 24). They went on to privilege the latter, “the positioning of one’s argument amid existing views in a larger academic conversation,” first of all, because it is “an aspect of stance construction with which developing students may struggle with the most” (p. 24), but more importantly, I think, because it touches on the nature of academic discourse itself, which is that it is constituted by an ongoing conversation irreducible to the relation between writer and material or writer and reader. Only those participating in some form of disciplinary inquiry can be familiar with the history of those conversations as they are embedded in a particular text. In this context, I find it especially interesting that Aull and Lancaster’s study does not deal with “compression” at all because if compression is what makes academic discourse especially difficult to beginning writers, it may very well be because that is where academic discourse is particularly marked by that history of conversations. Take an example from Aull and Lancaster’s own essay:
It therefore seems that, while more context-attentive, ethnographic studies of student writing are valuable (e.g., Beaufort, 2007; Cheng, 2008; Tardy, 2009), there is still a complementary contribution to be made by descriptive, largescale corpus studies that compare stance patterns across stages from incoming university writers to more advanced academic writers. (p. 3)
Here we have phrasal density, and we could imagine that this would be an especially difficult passage for students to work with: One could work with the notion of “studies of student writing,” but when we then add “ethnographic” and “context-attentive,” a history of conversations within writing studies, ethnography and perhaps other humanistic fields is alluded to in a way that outsiders would find impenetrable. On the face of it, though, it would be far more difficult to do a corpus-based study of compression, since compression is irreducible to the kinds of formulas characteristic of constructions of civility and coherence. And yet it is here where the text as an archive of conversations is especially manifest in academic discourse. But now I am discussing reading, which Aull (and Lancaster) didn’t address at all. In her concluding remarks in How Students Write, Aull (2020) pointed out that “the tenacity of institutionalized discourses calls for more radical options [than adding ‘more blended,
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public-facing, analytical explanatory as well as persuasive argumentative genres’]” (p. 143), but while those options include asking students to take into account other views and perhaps write for academic audiences, they don’t touch on the problem of reading. Aull’s focus on discourse patterns in academic writing is consistent with Bartholomae’s insistence that composition focus on bringing students into academic discourse, despite what seems to be some ambivalence on her part. In her late discussion of compression, right after the passage I quoted above, Aull seemed to question the appropriateness of asking students to practice compression:
Since discourse patterns expressed in student writing can be tacit, especially for novices and students who rarely receive A-grades, this patter of compressed noun phrases merits serious consideration: if we choose to privilege compressed, phrasal discourse, we should have good reasons why. With respect to this and other school discourse patterns, we should examine where intentional, relevant ways of thinking and writing end and where unquestioned discursive socialization begins [emphasis added]. (p. 137)
The good reason for privileging compressed, phrasal discourse is that students need to be able to read texts using it, but, even more important, the distinction Aull wanted to make here between “intentional, relevant ways of thinking and writing” and “unquestioned discursive socialization” needs to be deconstructed. Such practices as “dialogues” and “conversations” necessarily involve “socialization” in the space of discourse, and socialization is always to some extent tacit, involuntary and even “unquestioned.” Only from within a densely constituted conversational space can one raise questions about the terms of the conversation. Bartholomae (2004) recognized this, ambivalently but unmistakably, when he spoke of students learning to write in “our” ways, to replace one set of commonplaces with another (this argument, of course, is central to the “Bartholomae Elbow dispute”). And this recognition of the institutional character of academic writing— that it is a matter of power and not simply ideas—is also, I think, of a piece with his emphasis on the centrality of reading, and close reading, and of the kinds of texts academics would take seriously, in the composition classroom. As Aull pointed out on more than one occasion, academic discourse is “an acquired social language” (p. 144)—and how, exactly, is language acquired, if not at least in part “unquestioningly”? Aull’s (2015, 2020) studies of student writing make much more concrete and precise Bartholomae’s (2004) remarks on the specificity of academic discourse; Lancaster’s (2016) critique of Graff and Birkenstein’s They Say/I Say does even more so, by pointing out that they are right about academic discourse being formulaic but wrong about what the formulas are, showing how valuable the contributions this line of research is making to writing pedagogy. But Aull’s and Lancaster’s neglect of reading, or at least their failure to make it central to learning academic discourse, regresses behind Bartholomae’s work, and I think we see this in Aull’s hesitation to confront students with compression. But we can synthesize Aull’s and Lancaster’s work with Bartholomae’s in the way I proposed earlier: by having students read academic texts, and, moreover, academic texts dealing with writing and writing studies and, more specifically, texts dealing with composition studies itself. Texts like those of Aull, Bartholomae and Lancaster, for example. Following the logic of WAW and its argument that transfer is served by having students work with texts and
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subject matter that provide them with a vocabulary for describing their own practices in a writing course, having students enter discussions of composition pedagogy makes them apprentices in composition studies and more broadly in academic discourse and the study of it. If we are to study the patterns of academic discourse and the patterns of student writing as they struggle to acquire academic discourse, and also wish to provide students with a meta-linguistic awareness of the contingent terms of that discourse, should we not invite them into those inquiries, providing them with “authentic” samples of academic discourse along with samples of their own equally “authentic” apprentice academic discourse to study? Doing so would require us to take the notion of learning academic discourse as language acquisition more seriously and maybe more literally than, to my knowledge, has been done within composition studies so far. The only way you acquire a language is by using it, with all the riskiness, inappropriateness and errors that entails, and that means bringing words and phrases from the academic text into the student’s writing—not just in the form of quotes, which are then summarized and paraphrased, but into the student’s own sentences. If we can usefully point out academic formulas to students, we can ask them to use those formulas, and the next step is to have them write their own sentences around the words from the academic text. To this end, I have designed a kind of prototypical (al though, of course, fairly rare) academic sentence form, involving the use of phrases and clauses distinctive to and from different places in the text within a sentence that articulates those passages in some way, whether by contrast, in terms of causality, or further specification. The student then writes a certain number of follow-up sentences, the purpose of which is to account for the manner in which the passages have been articulated: Where is the contrast, the causal link or specification? The student should continue to use language from the text in these follow-up sentences, perhaps from these same passages but also from elsewhere in the text, as she practices entering and exiting the language of the text, gradually assimilating that language into her own. Aside from the direct engagement with the language of the text, such sentences produce a space for addressing other issues, such as the handling of quoted material and grammar, as not only is writing such complex sentences a challenge for many students, but the language of the text will often need to be “carved” in some way to work in the student’s sentences. Finally, what I am calling “combined” and “follow-up” sentences function as a practice of rereading, as students search for passages in the text that are repeated with a difference in the passages they use for their combined sentences. Here's an example of student work employing combined and follow-up sentences. We were reading Bartholomae’s (2004) “The Argument of Reading,” which works through some critiques of the New Criticism (each of which I would say Bartholomae to some extent endorsed while to some extent demurring from) while retrieving from the New Criticism (by way of engagement with some less celebrated practitioners of close reading) an understanding of “close reading” for the composition classroom. Here the student was working with a later passage where Bartholomae engaged with Terry Eagleton’s critique of what he took to be the inflated pretensions of the political stakes of the New Criticism:
While Eagleton concludes that it was “really rather absurd” that “the Decline of the West was felt to be avertible by close reading” (250), Bartholomae views close reading as the holy grail of “the necessary preparation of a
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writer” (245). Eagleton does not contend that close reading is “necessary” and thinks that the idea it being so is “absurd.” Bartholomae’s firm stance in favor of close reading is solidified again, and again throughout the essay “[arguing] that the introductory course should be a course in ‘close reading,” however, this he says is “the fundamental method of the New Criticism” (245). This seemingly contradicts Eagleton who has previously been in favor of the New Criticism, as he calls “the fundamental method of the New Criticism” (245) “absurd” (250). Eagleton attacks the New Criticism in a rather harsh manner in this section causing his previous words to be reread in a tone of mockery, whereas Bartholomae shifts to a more conciliatory approach. For example, new in Bartholomae’s stance is defending the New Criticism for heling citizens “to understand propaganda and the effects of control through mass media” (251), seemingly going against his previous argument that the “cultural studies course...has shown almost no interest in teaching students how to work with words” (249). Bartholomae now says that the New Criticism helps people understand the words behind “propaganda,” yet this discredits that students are not taught “how to work with words.” Later, he applauds the New Criticism’s close reading as “a means of investigation, a way to exercise discrimination in the face of commercial, political and cultural interests” (251). In this sense, there is a “moral urgency rooted in the sense that ‘words can do unexpected and disturbing things to you” (249). While Bartholomae initially connects this “moral urgency” (249) to Hum 6, there is an evident connection to New Criticism courses as well, for they taught people to see through “propaganda” (251).
In working with the essay up until this point, the student would have developed a reading of Bartholomae’s stance toward “close reading” as “favorable” and would therefore have known that Eagleton’s ridicule of the claim made by critics such as F. R. Leavis that reading literature could reverse cultural decline would likely be opposed by Bartholomae (even though this is not guaranteed, because the relation between “close reading” and “New Criticism” has varied throughout the essay). So, the student looked for a passage where Bartholomae was arguing for “close reading,” of which there are many, and finds one from an earlier discussion of Mariolina Salvatori’s course. I would guess that designating close reading as the “holy grail” for Bartholomae is the student’s attempt to match the “heightened” stakes implicit in a phrase like the “Decline of the West” (a Spengler reference, which the student is extremely unlikely to be familiar with, made by Eagleton ironically, which the student may have some sense of). The first follow-up sentence, as we practiced, includes something from each of the passages included in the combined sentence, lining them up symmetrically. The student then composed another combined sentence, one that continues the argument with Eagleton constructed in the previous one, with Bartholomae now continuing (“solidifying”) his argument for the importance of close reading. Here, the use of “however” to set up a contrast between the two passages is less clear: Bartholomae has been distinguishing between the kind of close reading he’d like to see in the composition classroom from the kind of close reading advanced by the New Criticism, without exactly opposing it. Still, such an interpretive move on the student’s part must be assessed in terms
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of the follow-up. The student now took up Bartholomae’s argument with Eagleton in the context of what seems to be a contradiction in Eagleton’s own argument: Bartholomae had quoted a passage from Eagleton comprised of somewhat too exuberant praise of the New Criticism (but which would nevertheless not be easily seen as ironic by a novice academic reader) followed by the one where Eagleton referred to the New Criticism’s ambitions more bluntly as “absurd.” The student could now “reread” the previous passage and note the tone of mockery (I will acknowledge that classroom discussion may have played a part here) without, though, revising the earlier reading of the two passages as “contradictory” (we could say this marks a particular stage in the student’s meta-awareness of the expectation that a finished text represent a consistent position rather than provide a linear record of the chronology of reading). The student did realize, though, that Bartholomae (2004) had shifted toward a more “conciliatory” approach to the New Criticism than he had displayed earlier, plausibly (or at least thoughtfully) attributing this to Bartholomae’s response to Eagleton’s “harsh” mockery. This realization positioned the student to see what was, in fact, new in Bartholomae’s position at this point, which is a stance more allied to those very political ambitions ridiculed by Eagleton. I would note here that the terms of the assignment compel the student to keep track of Eagleton’s stance toward the New Criticism, Bartholomae’s stance toward Eagleton, and Bartholomae’s stance, as mediated through his conversation with Eagleton, toward the New Criticism—at this point in the essay. Now, the contrast the student went on to set up between Bartholomae’s defense of the New Criticism and his criticism of the “cultural studies course” is, we could say, a misreading—but it is an interesting one, and not just a misreading. Bartholomae had critiqued cultural studies for showing no interest in student writing, certainly not on the level of the sentence, attributing this neglect to a valuation of its political concerns at the expense of a close concern with student reading and writing. The student, I would guess, saw here a “contradiction” between Bartholomae’s support of the political goals of the New Criticism and his seeming dismissal of the political concerns of cultural studies. In that case, the student’s “misreading” is noticing something important in the text. The student continued with this productive misreading by contrasting more of Bartholomae’s (2004) praise of the New Criticism with more of his critique of cultural studies—understandably, for this novice reader and writer, it is a challenge to distinguish between an author making similar sounding observations in different contexts and the author “contradicting himself.” This distinction is a marker of learning (a useful pedagogical heuristic is to require that students assume it is extremely unlikely that a professional academic will simply “contradict himself,” taking that phrase out of commission altogether). In the last two sentences, though, something very interesting happened. The student connected Bartholomae’s previous, on the face of it not only apolitical but even antipolitical, discussion of the Hum 6 course at Harvard as a privileged model for thinking about close reading in composition to Bartholomae’s now more overtly political claims on behalf of close reading. The conclusions are not entirely clear, but the student was now transferring the (to most of the students somewhat bewildering) attribution of “moral urgency” from a more “literary” mode of reading to a different kind of “moral urgency,” that to be found in enabling students to identify and resist propagandistic claims on their attentions. An interesting next step might be to consider whether the ways in which words can do “unexpected and disturbing things to you” has something to do with “exercising
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discrimination in the face of commercial, political and cultural interests.” The student didn’t take this step but positioned herself in relation to Bartholomae’s language in such a way that she (or another student reading her paper) might. Just as important as the way in which the combined and follow-up sentence assignment takes away the student’s recourse to summary and paraphrase and enables her to follow Bartholomae’s argument through some complex byways and even continue it a little is the way in which the assignment has students breaking up compressed phrases and resituating them within her own language. “Absurd” was extracted out of “really rather absurd,” “propaganda” out of “understand propaganda and the effects of control through mass media,” and “moral urgency” out of “moral urgency rooted in the sense . . . .” And, then, “moral urgency” and “propaganda” got put together as the former was now directed more specifically to the latter. This kind of dismantling and redirection of compressed passages creates the conditions for practices I have not yet attempted but will propose here (and attempt later): assignments asking students, first, to “reallocate” all of the words in the compressed passages to new sentences and, second, to create new compressed passages for themselves, such as, for example, “the moral urgency of investigating propaganda through close reading.” There is a specific kind of grammatical problem and lesson bound up in this kind of work, involving the possible conversions of clauses and phrases into each other. If, for example, I were to take the sentence previous to this one and remove the phrase “there is” (in general, it’s a question of removing the verb), we would then have “A specific kind of grammatical problem and lesson bound up in this kind of work,” a very long noun phrase that now needs a verb to be the head of a sentence. Such exercises not only help to demystify the kinds of academic discourse students find most intimidating but also provide indirect lessons in the plasticity of language, its manipulability, which are essential to dissolving the commonplaces students come into the university with. Another reason for designing assignments that have students bringing language from the text directly into their sentences in prominent ways is to resist students’ recourse to AI text generation. ChatGPT and other programs will produce adequate summaries and paraphrases that will be hard to distinguish (and impossible to prove different) from student writing, but so far these models can’t work with language from a text within another’s language in an effective way. Rather than seeing AI in merely negative, preventive terms, I would suggest taking the advent of AIs and the disruption they introduce into pedagogy as a sign that writing classrooms have to be sites of inquiry into language (just as the AIs themselves are products of new modes of inquiry into language) for students as well as faculty. The Turing test should, perhaps, have always been seen in interactive terms: as computers better approximate certain forms of human speech, it is to be expected that humans would start to value, explore, and experiment with forms of speech easier to distinguish from the products of computation. Even from a narrowly career perspective, it might help students to be put in mind that future employers might be suspicious of, say, letters of inquiry, that read too much as if they were AI-generated. As a result, writing courses might have license and even be pressured to encourage student writing that is more saturated in various references, idioms, tones, and so on—which is to say, that constitute archives of conversation operating at various levels, produced within a particular institutional and classroom space. The argument for seeing college writing as a passage from novice to apprentice takes on even more urgency in this context. The kinds of studies of academic discourse and
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student writing conducted by Aull and Lancaster (2014) become even more interesting here, and more interesting in their limits. I’m going to discuss a course in research writing I taught in the spring 2024 semester, in which students were given the kind of work being research assistants for Aull and Lancaster’s project might call for, while pointing out the limitations of even what I was able to do. We worked with the aforementioned Aull and Lancaster’s “Linguistic Markers of Stance in Early and Advanced Academic Writing: A Corpus-Based Comparison,” an essay that distinguishes academic stance in terms of its open-ended, conversational nature, which can in turn be defined in terms of specific linguistic and rhetoric markers. Aull and Lancaster drew upon studies of academic discourse to establish three broad categories of it: first, markers of epistemic commitment, or the prevalence of hedges over boosters; second, code glosses, which include reformulations and exemplifications; and, third, adversative concession/contrast markers. For each category, Aull and Lancaster provided a list of words and phrases to guide a corpus search and distinguish between those words and phrases more commonly used by novice academic writers and those by more advanced ones. As a practice of reading, I have the students reconstruct the (or a hypothetical) argumentative or conversational space by writing the kind of combined sentences I described earlier, but with a specific focus on the ways they specify the concept of “stance” in terms of their continuation of Aull and Lancaster’s (2014) research project. I ask them to, first, construct a “lay” concept of stance by using familiar sources, such as Wikipedia and AI, and then follow the ways Aull and Lancaster differentiated their use of stance in a complex context. Students are asked to do this with the use of contrastive formulas such as “while ‘stance’ could be defined as__________, Aull and Lancaster________.” The way in which Aull and Lancaster worked through their literature review can be followed in a similar way, with the difficulties of working with academic discourse addressed in terms of the histories of conversations presupposed by the discussion. An early point in the discussion, where Aull and Lancaster addressed the debate within composition studies of whether the composition class should presuppose the specific and irreducible nature of disciplinary discourse or, rather, acknowledge some basis for the “general skills” introductory writing course prevalent in the American academy provides a good and instructive example: It is extremely difficult for students to work out this distinction within a composition course, let alone in the subtle way Aull and Lancaster conceded the always already discipline-specific character of academic discourse while making space for their own study presupposing features of academic discourse that cross the disciplines by shifting the question to the need for inquiry into the habits and expectations of incoming students: “[d]espite the importance and prevalence of FY writing in the U.S. model of higher education, however, we know little about what discursive features might characterize argumentative texts produced by incoming student writers” (p. 3). But in the context of preparing students to join Aull and Lancaster’s research project as research assistants, “understanding” such arguments and distinctions can be folded into distinctions students will make in their own work on the corpus—as will, moreover, the practice of using Aull and Lancaster’s categories to examine their own writing. I provide the class with first-year and upper-level student papers from freely available corpora and ask them to identify the features Aull and Lancaster (2014) have singled out as markers of stance. This has turned out to be challenging and productive work, with a fairly simple baseline level, which virtually all students can do (locating words
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like “almost,” “apparently,” “perhaps,” and so on), but since even the more obvious hedges or markers of reformulation and contrast depend on the context for their use, students need to make an argument for their designation within the sentences (at least) in which they are found. Even more, since it is easy enough to see that there are ways of fulfilling the discursive functions of academic discourse in ways that are not included on Aull and Lancaster’s list (presumably designed to set a threshold below which no significant findings could be made), students can be asked to propose new additions to the list. Doing so serves as a marker of their comprehension of Aull and Lancaster’s essay and project while also revealing all kinds of assumptions the students have regarding the working of discourse. So, for example, one student made the following argument (the bolded text is the excerpt from the sample student paper the student is working with):
“Eliza Dresang wrote about a way of thinking she titled Radical Change,
a theoretical construct [that] identifies and explains books with characteristics reflecting the types of interactivity, connectivity, and access that permeate our emerging digital society”
“Identifies and explains” can be seen as a code gloss. Although is it not on the list exactly, it is like ‘that means’ or this means.’ Something is being explained in more detail creating a stronger argument. “Explains” lets us know more implicitly that an explanation is coming. However, it can also be seen as a booster because ‘show’ or ‘shows’ is on the list under booster. This could mean the same thing as ‘explains’ or identifies’. These words can suggest a greater degree of certainty.
“Identify” and “explain” are not code glosses because such words introduce the claims that would then be glossed (“in other words,” “for example,” etc.), but the student here was learning to think in terms of models (“it is like ‘that means’ or ‘this means’”) while distinguishing the explanatory from other functions of discourse. Such a mistaken application of the concept of code gloss lays the groundwork, again with the frame of treating students as emerging apprentice academic writers, for making this further distinction between an explanation “proper” and a “supplementary” explanation or exemplification. Here is another sample, in which an easier identification is made alongside a “mistaken” or at least partial one that would require a more contextual reading:
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“…and they advance one page at a time with a button push rather than by scrolling (1999). Certainly a technological leap at the time, these portable books paved the way for other book formats to emerge.”
“Rather than” is on the list under contrast connector because the sentence states one thing, and then uses rather to state the opposite, creating contrast. The contrast is between advancing by one page and scrolling.
“Certainly” is working as a booster because it is literally showing its certainty.
The student’s work with “rather than” is adequate: It works with a word from the list and identifies the contrast being made here, even if we might want, within an expanded version of the assignment, to examine the implications of the distinction between “advancing by one page” and “scrolling.” But while “certainly” is, indeed, on the list of boosters and, in fact, does function that way here (a strong epistemic commitment to the claim that portable books were a technological leap at the time is expressed), “certainly” is more importantly functioning as a concession (but through which pedagogical practices do we make it possible to establish such levels of importance in the classroom space?), leading into a contrast between what was once relevant about portable books and their lesser relevance within a broader historical context. That there may be a wider variety of means of hedging, glossing, conceding and contrasting than allowed for by Aull and Lancaster’s (2014) list and, moreover, that what functions as a booster on one level might work as a gloss or concession on another, opens up the possibility of transforming Aull and Lancaster’s project, in the classroom and beyond (in the classroom as beyond), into a broader way of glossing and engaging conversationally with discourse. The slippage in the student’s work between code gloss and the claim to be glossed reflects a recognition that all discourse is glossing some other discourse and there is always some tacit concession and contrast in every assertion. In other words, the distinctions between grammar, pragmatics and semantics can be deconstructed in ways that can turn corpus searches, now aided by prompted AI, in specially curated corpora, into routine features of writing and writing pedagogy. Take the sentence I just wrote above: The slippage in the student’s work between code gloss and the claim to be glossed reflects a recognition that all discourse is glossing some other discourse and there is always some tacit concession and contrast in every assertion. A word like “slippage” includes some “concession” to those who might find the student’s work to simply be a mistaken application of Aull and Lancaster’s category, while “countering” with a new framing that suggests a “correctly” apprehended connection along with the “mistake.” “Reflects a recognition,” meanwhile, can be taken as a possible gloss on the claim that “all discourse is
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glossing other discourse”: We can see that “all discourse is glossing all other discourse” because we can see what this student has seen and done. In my own gloss here, I am drawing upon Anna Wierzbicka’s (2010) Natural Semantic Primes (“can,” “see,” “because,” “do”) as a possible way of glossing discourse that might be made available to students. I would like to conclude by returning to the array of theoretical understandings of discourse I set up in introducing my discussion: Wierzbicka, Bromhead, Olson, and Turner and Thomas. What all of these theorists of language have in common is what we could call a “scenic” view of language—all of them insist on framing any utterance as taking place on some scene: for Wierzbicka and Bromhead (2009), any utterance can be dissolved into a scene upon which someone thinks, sees, or says, or hears something and something that someone might have done, and so on; for Olson (2016), there is a scene of speech recapitulated within a scene of writing that supplements the specifically oral elements of the scene of speech; for Thomas and Turner (2011), classic prose imagines and constructs a scene upon which reader and writer face some object or event. Even for Bartholomae (2004), there is always a scene of pedagogy, and this is the disciplinary framing I want to insist on for composition studies and for pedagogies of critical thinking more generally. We can speak of a scene of pedagogy as a scene of inquiry and a scene of apprenticeship, and what counts as a pedagogical scene is that some on the scene guide others to see the same thing as them, a “same thing” that is a construct of the scene itself. One reason for privileging a study of “stance” as I am doing is that “stance” likewise presupposes that it is the scene and everyone’s position on it that confers meaning on any utterance. Academic discourse might be seen as operating on a continuum between scenes directly constructed and engaged in the scene of writing and all those scenes presupposed, embedded in the terms of the discourse, referenced directly or indirectly in the text, with at least potentially recoverable traces left of all these scenes in the discourse. Hence the centrality of “compression,” which we might have an opportunity to bring onto a scaled-up pedagogical scene through a classroom use of machine learning searches into corpora. Signs of scenes near and far, actual and hypothetical, can be made present, while highlighting the presence of all on the pedagogical scene. Take a look at the opening of Bartholomae’s (2004) “The Argument of Reading,” the essay I used in my first-semester composition course in the fall 2024 semester:
It is almost impossible to find a recent account of English (or English as a school subject) that does not begin with a reference to the problem of the new criticism and its legacy in the American classroom. The new criticism is everywhere, we are told; its hold on practice seems firm in spite of the ways its key texts and key figures have been routed by recent developments in theory and critical practice. (p. 244)
There are a couple of hedges from Aull and Lancaster’s (2014) list here, but almost all of the hedging, glossing, conceding and countering was done below the threshold of their list. These omissions are no reflection on Aull and Lancaster’s research, which serves an important purpose well. It is, rather, to widen the scene upon which that research is set, to point to the possibility of articulating the large-scale with the minute, uniting close and distant reading. Bartholomae here was setting up a conversation with the New Criticism, with others about the New Criticism, with present claims and complaints about the New
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Criticism, about the New Criticism’s history and the history of its reception, about its shaping of English, about the distinction between “English” and “English as a school subject,” about the discrepancy between the fate of its theoretical claims and its institutionalization, and so on. I am arguing for a pedagogical scene upon which such a reading scene might be made present, and the opening of a new research space on the pedagogical scene.
References Aull, L. (2015). First-year university writing: A corpus-based study with implications for pedagogy. Palgrave Macmillan. Aull, L. (2020). How students write: A linguistic analysis. Modern Language Association of America. Aull, L., & Lancaster, Z. (2014). Linguistic markers of stance in early and advanced academic writing. Written Communication, 31(2), 151–183. https://doi.org/10.1177/07410 88314527055 Bartholomae, D. (2004). Writing on the margins: Essays on composition and teaching. Palgrave Mac Millan. Bromhead, H. (2009). The reign of truth and faith: Epistemic expressions in 16th and 17th century English. De Gruyter Mouton. Lancaster, Z. (2016). Do academics really write this way? A corpus investigation of moves and templates in They say/I say. College Composition and Communication, 67(3), 437–464. https://doi.org/10.58680/ccc201628067 Olson, D. R. (2016). The mind on paper: Reading, consciousness and rationality. Cambridge University Press. Smith, S. (2016). Error as strategic style: Finessing the grammar checker [Doctoral dissertation, Georgia State University]. https://doi.org/10.57709/8849978 Thomas, F-N., & Turner, M. (2011). Clear and simple as the truth: Writing classic prose (2nd ed.). Princeton University Press. Wierzbicka, A. (2006). English: Meaning and culture. Oxford University Press. Wierzbicka, A. (2010). Experience, evidence and sense: The hidden cultural legacy of English. Oxford University Press.
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From Novice to Apprentice: A Pedagogy of "Academic Discourse" (Adam Katz) — https://center.study/post/pdf-writing-pedagogy-katz