Academic Writing
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41438 01 001-184 KENN 10e r5jk 12/17/07 12:10 PM Page 51 3 ACADEMIC WRITING Reading critically (Chap. 1) and writing effectively (Chap. 2) are both key skills in academic writing, which calls on your ability to write criti- cally about what you read. The academic disciplines—history, psychology, chemistry, and the like—have different subjects and approaches, but they share the common goal of using reading and writing to build and exchange knowledge. For a taste of academic knowledge building, you can read some of the selections in this book, such as Rosie Anaya’s “The Best Kept Secret on Cam- pus” at the end of this chapter, George Chauncey’s “The Legacy of Antigay Discrimination” (p. 260), Bella DePaulo’s “The Myth of Doomed Kids” (p. 350), Laila Ayad’s “The Capricious Camera” (p. 358), Marie Javdani’s “ Plata o Plomo : Silver or Lead” (p. 448), and Colleen Wenke’s “Too Much Pressure” (p. 533). You may notice that these essays have in common certain features of academic writing: • Each writer attempts to gain readers’ agreement with his or her debatable idea—or THESIS —about the subject. • To support their theses, the writers provide EVIDENCE from one or more other texts. (Ayad’s subject, a photograph, is a kind of text.) 51 41438 01 001-184 KENN 10e r5jk 12/17/07 12:10 PM Page 52 52 Academic Writing • The writers do not merely SUMMARIZE their sources; they grapple with them. They ANALYZE meaning, infer ASSUMPTIONS , and SYNTHESIZE the texts’ and their own views—in short, they read and write critically. • The writers acknowledge their use of sources with documentation that is appropriate for the discipline each is writing in—footnotes in some cases, parenthetical citations and a bibliography in other cases. • Each writer assumes an educated audience—one that can be counted on to read critically in turn. The writers state their ideas clearly, provide information readers need to analyze those ideas, and organize ideas and evidence effectively. Further, they approach their subjects seriously and discuss evidence and opposing views fairly. This chapter will help you achieve such academic writing yourself by responding directly to what you read (below), integrating source material into your ideas (p. 54), orchestrating multiple sources to develop and support your ideas (p. 56), avoiding plagiarism (p. 60), and documenting sources (p. 62). The chapter concludes with a sample research paper (p. 74). RESPONDING TO A TEXT The essay by Rosie Anaya in the previous chapter (p. 47) illustrates one type of critical response: Anaya summarizes Nancy Mairs’s essay “Disability” (p. 13), explores its implications, and uses it as a springboard to her own related subject, which she supports with personal observation and experience. Just as Anaya responds to Mairs’s essay, so you can respond to any essay in this book or for that matter to anything you read or see. Using evidence from your own experiences, reading, and viewing, you can take a variety of approaches: • Like Anaya, agree with and extend the author’s ideas, providing addi- tional examples or exploring related ideas. • Agree with the author on some points, but disagree on others. • Disagree with the author on one of his or her key points. • Explain how the author achieves a particular EFFECT , such as enlisting your sympathy or sparking your anger. • Judge the overall effectiveness of the essay—for instance, how well the writer supports the thesis, whether the argument is convincing, or whether the author succeeds in his or her stated or unstated purpose. These suggestions and this discussion assume that you are responding to a sin- gle work, but of course you may take on two or even more works at the same time. You might, for instance, use the method of COMPARISON AND CONTRAST to show how two stories are alike or different or to find your own way between two arguments on the same issue. 41438 01 001-184 KENN 10e r5jk 12/17/07 12:10 PM Page 53 Responding to a Text 53 Forming a Response Some reading you do will spark an immediate reaction, maybe because you disagree or agree strongly right from the start. Other reading may re- quire a more gradual entry into what the author is saying and what you think about it. At the same time, you may have an assignment that narrows the scope of your response—for instance, by asking you to look at TONE or some other element of the work or by asking you to agree or disagree with the author’s thesis. Whatever your initial reaction or your assignment, you can use the tools discussed in Chapter 1 to generate and structure your response: summary, analysis, inference, synthesis, evaluation. (See pp. 17–20.) Your first goal is to understand the work thoroughly, both what it says outright and what it assumes and implies. For this step, you’ll certainly need to make notes of some sort: For instance, those by Rosie Anaya on pages 40–41 include summaries of Mairs’s essay, key quotations from it, interpretations of its meaning, and the beginnings of Anaya’s ideas in response. Such notes may grow increasingly focused as you refine your response and return to the reading to interpret it further and gather additional passages to discuss. Synthesizing Your Own and Another’s Views Synthesis, as we note in Chapter 1, is the core of academic writing: Knowledge builds as writers bring their own perspectives to bear on what oth- ers have written, making their own contributions to what has come before. When you write about a text, your perspective on it will be your thesis— the main point you have in response to the text or (if you take off in another direction) as a result of reading the text. As you develop the thesis, always keep your ideas front and center, pulling in material from the text as needed for support. In each paragraph, your idea should come first and, usually, last: State the idea, use evidence from the reading to support it, and then interpret the evidence. (As a way to encourage this final interpretation, some writing teachers ask students not to end paragraphs with source citations.) You can see a paragraph structured like this in Rosie Anaya’s essay “Men- tal Illness on Television” in the previous chapter: However, in depicting one type of disability, the media are, if anything, worse than they were two decades ago. Mairs doesn’t address mental illness, but it falls squarely into the misrepresentation she criticizes. It has never been shown, in Mairs’s words, “as a normal characteristic, one that compli- cates but does not ruin human existence” (15). Thus people who cope with a psychological disability such as depression, bipolar disorder, or obsessive- compulsive disorder as part of their lives do not see themselves in the media. 41438 01 001-184 KENN 10e r5jk 12/17/07 12:10 PM Page 54 54 Academic Writing And those who don’t have a psychological disability now but may someday do not see that mental illness is usually a condition one can live with. INTEGRATING SOURCE MATERIAL One key to synthesis is deciding how to present evidence from your reading and then working the evidence into your own text smoothly and informatively. Summary, Paraphrase, and Quotation When you summarize or paraphrase a source, you express its ideas in your own words. when you quote, you use the source’s exact words, in quotation marks. All summaries , paraphrases , and quotations must be acknowledged in source citations . See pages 60–62 on avoiding plagiarism and pages 62–73 on MLA documentation. Summary With SUMMARY you use your own words to condense a paragraph, an entire article, or even a book into a few lines that convey the source’s essen- tial meaning. We discuss summary as a reading technique on page 17, and the advice and examples there apply here as well. When responding to a text, you may use brief summaries to catch readers up on the gist of the author’s argument or a significant point in the argument. Here, for example, is a sum- mary of Barbara Lazear Ascher’s “On Compassion,” which appears on pages 193–95. SUMMARY Ascher shows how contact with the homeless can be unsettling and depressing. Yet she also suggests that these encounters are useful because they can teach others to be more compassionate (193–95). Notice how the summary identifies the source author and page numbers and uses words that are not the author’s. (Any of Ascher’s distinctive phrasing would have to be placed in quotation marks.) Paraphrase When you PARAPHRASE , you restate a specific passage in your own words. Paraphrase adheres more closely than summary to the source author’s line of thought, so it’s useful to present an author’s ideas or data in detail. Generally, use paraphrase rather than quotation for this purpose, since paraphrase shows 41438 01 001-184 KENN 10e r5jk 12/17/07 12:10 PM Page 55 Integrating Source Material 55 that you’re in command of your evidence and lets your own voice come through. (See below for when to use quotations.) Here is a quotation from Ascher’s essay and a paraphrase of it: ORIGINAL QUOTATION “Could it be that the homeless, like [Greek drama- tists], are reminding us of our common humanity? Of course, there is a dif- ference. This play doesn’t end—and the players can’t go home.” PARAPHRASE Ascher points out an important distinction between the New York City homeless and the characters in Greek tragedies: The homeless are living real lives, not performing on a stage (195).