How do you write an academic paper?

I wish I could say that someone had asked me this question, expecting that I would somehow be an authority on it. But that’s just not true. The truth is, I was wondering about the way I write papers, and how that’s changed over time.

When I was in high school, the one time I had to do a research paper, I had all my sources next to me while I wrote, and just wrote it all out, turning to sources to find quotes or whatever. It was a halting process, but it worked.

When I started college, I did the same thing, but I did go through the sources and highlight things first. It saved time.

As I graduated college, I wrote the paper first, without quotes, putting together the ‘prose’ of it all. Then I would go back through and put in the quotes where they fit, filling in transitions and whatnot where appropriate.

And then began graduate school.

On Paradox, Liars, and Revenge

I am looking at three articles right now. The first two both come from The Revenge of the Liar: New Essays on the Paradox, edited by JC Beall. The third is from an upcoming issue of Studia Logica. I’ll get to that. First, though, I want to talk about “Embracing Revenge: On the Indefinite Extendability of Language” by Roy T. Cook.

All three of these articles about the Liar and the Revenge problems. In case anyone is unclear, the Liar is a famous paradox in semantics. You’ve probably heard it before: “This sentence is false.” If it’s true, then it’s false. But if it’s false, then it’s true. So it’s a contradiction however you look at it; a paradox. The Revenge is a response to an attempt to solve this paradox. Revenge, as Cook writes it, works like this: “Given any account that purports to deal adequately with a particular paradox, that account will rely on concepts… which, if allowed into the object language, generate new paradoxes that cannot be dissolved by the account in question” (33). So basically, whatever you do to solve the Liar, there is another, stronger Liar that your solution can’t defeat.

On Truth and Self Reference: A Return to the Realms of Philosophy

I started a philosophy class, and immediately got sick, so I missed the second class. However, in a very interesting attendance policy, I was required to write a paper about the readings we discussed the day I was absent. As I was writing it, I figured it would help to post it here. So here are my thoughts on paradox and self reference:

John Dewey: The Public and its Problems (1-4)

This semester, I am taking a course about Habermas and the public sphere. As part of that, I’m reading Dewey’s book. So far (about 2/3 of the way through it). It’s an interesting book, some very cool ideas about what the public is, what the state is, and how/whether democracy works.

Teaching Style, by Edward P.J. Corbett

I just finished reading Corbett’s article, published in  Style in Rhetoric and Composition (a critical sourcebook) edited by Paul Butler. The article seems to be mostly about why students are unable to analyze style, along with a few suggestions of ways to do it.

What’s interesting is that Corbett seems to believe that the reason students are unable to analyze style is as simple as just not realizing that they can do it. That students don’t quite understand what style is, seeing it “represented as a curious blend of the idiosyncratic and the conventional” (210). He seems to think that students don’t understand style mostly because teachers don’t know how to teach it.

The Question that keeps on asking

I remember when I was a little kid. People used to ask me the same question they ask every kid. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I used to tell them the same thing (Writer or teacher), but as time went on, the question became more serious. No more smiles when the question asked, no more glazed look in the eyes while listening to my answer. No more promise that I’ll be able to do whatever I want. If I said “Writer,” I’d get “You better have something to fall back on.” And when I said “Teacher” I’d get a follow up question about what I’d want to teach.

I got older still, and now the people asking me were either teachers themselves, or guidance counselors and advisers of some kind. I had to pick a major, after all. Then graduation was coming, and I had to figure out what I was doing after graduation. Then graduate school started, and I needed a topic for my Master’s thesis.

It’s a question that keeps on asking. It keeps coming up. What do I want to be when I grow up?

Recently, it’s started asking itself again.

On the Ideal Orator and the way I straddle the void

Primarily, I am here today to write about Cicero, about the first 100 pages of De Oratore. But thinking about Cicero makes me think about my own past. About the void, the separation, between rhetoric and philosophy. Now, I do rhetoric. In college and my first Master’s degree, I did philosophy. So I straddle the void.

More Summer Reading: Humanism and the Holocaust

The next two articles I’ve looked at for the summer of exam reading (part one) are Carolyn Miller’s A Humanistic Rational for Technical Writing and Steven B. Katz The Ethics of Expediency. Both of these I have read about, and even blogged about before. But that was then, and this is now. So let’s start with Humanism and move to the Holocaust. All page number references are from Central Works in Technical Communication.

When I went to reread this article, I found that the things interesting to me the first time were also interesting to me the second, but for different reasons. When Miller says “Technical and scientific rhetoric becomes the skill of subduing language so that it most accurately and directly transmits reality” (48), I initially thought that was important, but obvious. Now I’m not so sure. The purpose of rhetoric seems to be one of moving. Moving other people down a path of reasoning or of action. So now I disagree. Technical and scientific rhetoric is not a skill of subduing language. It’s a skill of using language to transmit the reality that the writer sees.

This could be back to my philosophy roots, but I’m starting to doubt that reality can be directly transmitted.

Research interest introspection

Recently, I was asked to write up a brief summary of my research interests. The question was put to me in a very interesting way. “If I told you right now,” he said, “that you had one year to write your dissertation, what would it be about?”

Great question. And I need to narrow it down a bit. The decisions I come to are not set in stone, but it’s good to have at least an idea of where I’m going.

There are a couple of options, based on my own interests as well as on what I’ve been doing since I started this program. My original interest was basically new media studies. But I’m not sure I really knew what that meant. New Media is kind of a buzz word (or phrase). I knew I was interested in technology, but I also knew that I was interested in technology that doesn’t exist (yet) but probably will. So I started with the idea of how to use technology in the classroom, developing strategies that can be applied to new technology.

My assumption was always to use the context of teaching composition for this research. It just seemed natural. But the same guy who asked me the question originally suggested that I look into teaching philosophy, since I have a background there. And he’s right, there are a lot more possibilities. With composition, I can do podcasts, lectures, and maybe peer response. But that’s about it. At the end of the day, composition is about writing, and there’s not much to do beyond writing.

But philosophy… well, that can be about a number of things. I could have the podcasts, the lectures, and the peer response. But I could also have simulations, games, thought experiments, interactive projects, chatbots, dialogues… the list goes on and on. So that’s very exciting. We’ll call this option A: Developing pedagogical strategies for teaching with new technologies, specifically focused on teaching philosophy.

But there are two other options as well. The first of the two is cultural studies.  I have a bit of a history with cultural studies. I like the way cultural identity affects things, subtly and often in invisible ways. I like to analyze cultural artifacts and see what the culture that created them holds in high esteem, what it derides, and what it strives for. I like to see the definition of achievement, or of heroism, or sacrifice, as it changes between cultures. I wrote a paper last semester about the TV show Heroes, and there’s so much more there that can be mined. I’m not sure how legitimate of a project it is (academically), but if I were to write a dissertation right now, that might be the easiest one to do. So we’ll call this option One: Investigating cultural artifacts in order to understand the unspoken rhetoric of the producing culture.

Then we have the option that covers what I’ve been researching most. Questions and Answers. I think this is very interesting, and I love working on it. I’ve done a lot with it already, and it seems very promising. I’m not even halfway through what I see as a very important and valuable project, and my interest is anything but wavering. It’s interesting, it’s academically significant. The question (no pun intended) is whether or not it’s what I want to do for the rest of my life. Which, of course, is the underlying question for any of these options. Still, this is something else I could write a dissertation on right now if I had to. So we’ll call this option Alpha: Develop a rhetorical taxonomy of questions and answers with the intention of improving how questions are asked and answered in an online environment.

So option A, option 1, and option Alpha. Not sure where I want to go, but they seem like good options. Option A seems to have the most connection to my past (thus making that past more legitimate and useful), option 1 seems to be more fun (since it would basically let me watch TV for research purposes), and option Alpha seems to be the most rich in terms of research possibilities.

Not sure where to go.

Let’s talk about the Phaedrus

The next work on my list is Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, which is one of the major rhetorical dialogues, primarily because of its discussion of the value of writing.

When I first read this dialogue, I had no idea of the subtext. But it’s hard not to see it now. This is a dialogue about Socrates trying to seduce a young man (Phaedrus) by convincing him that he should sleep with those who care about him rather than those who don’t. Basically, that Phaedrus should sleep with Socrates.

It begins early on, when Socrates says “…show me what you are holding in your left hand under your cloak, my friend” (228d), which we would rephrase as “is that a scroll in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?” It continues with constant references to going off alone or sitting (or laying) together (229b) and other shameless flirtation, on both of their parts (230d, 243e, 252b, etc).

But it’s not the flirtation that’s important. What matters is the discussion of rhetoric, and of writing in general.