Unit I writing discussion Board

WHAT IS ACADEMIC WRITING?

In the strictest sense, academic writing is what scholars do to communicate with other scholars in their fields of study, their disciplines. It’s the research report a biologist writes, the interpretive essay a literary scholar composes, the media analysis a film scholar produces. At the same time, academic writing is what you have to learn so that you can participate in the different disciplinary conversations that take place in your courses. You have to learn to think like an academic, read like an academic, do research like an academic, and write like an academic — even if you have no plans to continue your education and become a scholar yourself. Learning these skills is what this book is about.

Fair warning: It isn’t easy. Initially you may be perplexed by the vocabulary and sentence structure of many of the academic essays you read. Scholars use specialized language to capture the complexity of an issue or to introduce specific ideas from their discipline. Every discipline has its own vocabulary. You probably can think of words and phrases that are not used every day but that are necessary, nevertheless, to express certain ideas precisely. For example, consider the terms centrifugal force, Oedipus complex, and onomatopoeia. These terms carry with them a history of study; when you learn to use them, you also are learning to use the ideas they represent. Such terms help us describe the world specifically rather than generally; they help us better understand how things work and how to make better decisions about what matters to us.

Sentence structure presents another challenge. The sentences in academic writing are often longer and more intricate than the sentences in popular magazines. Academics strive to go beyond what is quick, obvious, and general. They ask questions based on studying a subject from multiple points of view, to make surprising connections that would not occur to someone who has not studied the subject carefully. It follows that academic writers are accustomed to extensive reading that prepares them to examine an issue, knowledgeably, from many different perspectives, and to make interesting intellectual use of what they discover in their research. To become an adept academic writer, you have to learn these practices as well.

Academic writing will challenge you, no doubt. But hang in there. Any initial difficulty you have with academic writing will pay off when you discover new ways of looking at the world and of making sense of it. Moreover, the habits of mind and core skills of academic writing are highly valued in the world outside the academy.

Basically, academic writing entails making an argument — a text that is crafted to persuade an audience — often in the service of changing people’s minds and behaviors. When you write an academic essay, you have to

· define a situation that calls for some response in writing;

· demonstrate the timeliness of your argument;

· establish a personal investment;

· appeal to readers whose minds you want to change by understanding what they think, believe, and value;

· support your argument with good reasons; and

· anticipate and address readers’ reasons for disagreeing with you, while encouraging them to adopt your position.

Academic argument is not about shouting down an opponent. Instead, it is the careful expression of an idea or perspective based on reasoning and the insights gathered from a close examination of the arguments others have made on the issue.

Making academic arguments is also a social act, like joining a conversation. When we sit down to write an argument intended to persuade someone to do or to believe something, we are never really the first to broach the topic about which we are writing. Thus, learning how to write a researched argument is a process of learning how to enter conversations that are already going on in written form. This idea of writing as dialogue — not only between author and reader but between the text and everything that has been said or written about its subject beforehand — is crucial. Writing is a process of balancing our goals with the history of similar kinds of communication, particularly others’ arguments that have been made on the same subject. The conversations that have already been going on about a subject are the subject’s historical context.

WHAT ARE THE HABITS OF MIND OF ACADEMIC WRITERS?

The chapters in the first part of this book introduce you to the habits of mind and core skills of academic writing. By habits of mind, we mean the patterns of thought that lead you to question assumptions and opinions, explore alternative opinions, anticipate opposing arguments, compare one type of experience to another, and identify the causes and consequences of ideas and events. These forms of critical thinking demand an inquiring mind that welcomes complexities and seeks out and weighs many different points of view, a mind willing to enter complex conversations both in and out of the academy. We discuss academic habits of mind in the rest of Chapter 1 and refer to them throughout this book.

Such habits of mind are especially important today, when we are bombarded with appeals to buy this or that product and with information that may or may not be true. For example, in “106 Science Claims and a Truckful of Baloney” (The Best American Science and Nature Writing, 2005), William Speed Weed illustrates the extent to which the claims of science vie for our attention alongside the claims of advertising. He notes that advertisers often package their claims as science, but wonders whether a box of Cheerios really can reduce cholesterol.

As readers, we have a responsibility to test the claims of both science and advertising in order to decide what to believe and act upon. Weed found that “very few of the 100 claims” he evaluated “proved completely true” and that “a good number were patently false.” Testing the truth of claims — learning to consider information carefully and critically and to weigh competing points of view before making our own judgments — gives us power over our own lives.

The habits of mind and practices valued by academic writers are probably ones you already share. You are behaving “academically” when you comparison shop, a process that entails learning about the product in the media and on the Internet and then looking at the choices firsthand before you decide which one you will purchase. You employ these same habits of mind when you deliberate over casting a vote in an election. You inform yourself about the issues that are most pressing; you learn about the candidates’ positions on these issues; you consider other arguments for and against both issues and candidates; and you weigh those arguments and your own understanding to determine which candidate you will support.

Fundamentally, academic habits of mind are analytical. When you consider a variety of factors before making a shopping choice — the quality and functionality of the item you plan to buy, how it meets your needs, how it compares to similar items — you are conducting an analysis. That is, you are pausing to examine the reasons why you should buy something, instead of simply handing over your cash and saying, “I want one of those.”

To a certain extent, analysis involves breaking something down into its various parts and then reflecting on how the parts do or don’t work together. For example, when you deliberate over your vote, you may consult one of those charts that newspapers often run around election time: A list of candidates appears across the top of the chart, and a list of issues appears on the side. With a chart from a credible news source in hand, you can scan the columns to see where each candidate stands on the issues, and you can scan the rows to see how the candidates compare on a particular issue. The newspaper editors have performed a preliminary analysis for you. They’ve asked, “Who are the candidates?” “What are the issues?” and “Where does each candidate stand on the issues?”; and they have presented the answers to you in a format that can help you make your decision.

But you still have to perform your own analysis of the information before you cast your ballot. Suppose no candidate holds your position on every issue. Whom do you vote for? Which issues are most important to you? Or suppose two candidates hold your position on every issue. Which one do you vote for? What characteristics or experience are you looking for in an elected official? And you may want to investigate further by visiting the candidates’ Web sites or by talking with your friends to gather their thoughts on the election.

As you can see, analysis involves more than simply disassembling or dissecting something. It is a process of continually asking questions and looking for answers. Analysis reflects, in the best sense of the word, a skeptical habit of mind, an unwillingness to settle for obvious answers in the quest to understand why things are the way they are and how they might be different.

This book will help you develop the questioning, evaluating, and conversational skills you already have into strategies that will improve your ability to make careful, informed judgments about the often conflicting and confusing information you are confronted with every day. With these strategies, you will be in a position to use your writing skills to create change where you feel it is most needed.

The first steps in developing these skills are to recognize the key academic habits of mind and then to refine your practice of them. We explore five key habits of mind in the rest of this chapter:

inquiring,

seeking and valuing complexity,

understanding that academic writing is a conversation,

understanding that writing is a process, and

reflecting.

ACADEMIC WRITERS MAKE INQUIRIES

Academic writers usually study a body of information so closely and from so many different perspectives that they can ask questions that may not occur to people who are just scanning the information. That is, academic writers learn to make inquiries. Every piece of academic writing begins with a question about the way the world works, and the best questions lead to rich, complex insights that others can learn from and build on.

You will find that the ability to ask good questions is equally valuable in your daily life. Asking thoughtful questions about politics, popular culture, work, or anything else — questions like, What exactly did that candidate mean by “Family values are values for all of us,” anyway? What is lost and gained by bringing Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy to the screen? What does it take to move ahead in this company? — is the first step in understanding how the world works and how it can be changed.

Inquiry typically begins with observation, a careful noting of phenomena or behaviors that puzzle you or challenge your beliefs and values (in a text or in the real world). Observers attempt to understand phenomena by asking questions (Why does this exist? Why is this happening? Do things have to be this way?) and examining alternatives (Maybe this doesn’t need to exist. Maybe this could happen another way instead.).

For example, Steven Pearlstein, a professor of public affairs at George Mason University, observes that only a small percentage of the students he teaches are enrolled as majors in the humanities. This prompts him to ask why this is the case, particularly because students express their appreciation for the opportunity to read popular works of history. In his essay “Meet the Parents Who Won’t Let Their Children Study Literature,” he also points out that faculty at other universities, including Harvard, share his concern that fewer and fewer students are majoring in English or history. He wonders why this is the case and finds that parents, the media, and politicians all advise students to steer clear of the liberal arts. He wonders further why parents in particular would adopt such a view, and he examines different explanations such as parents’ anxieties over debt, the trends toward professionalism, and parents’ own interests. Parents, he concludes, want to see a “direct line” between what their children study and a job. This, Pearlstein argues, is unfortunate since the available data show that students completing a major in the humanities have many job opportunities. In the end, he asks what happens to students who major in fields to please their parents and who lack the motivation to study what they are passionate about. For that matter, what will happen if fewer and fewer students learn “discipline, persistence, and how to research, analyze, communicate clearly and think logically”?

In her reading on the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, one of our students observed that the difficulties many immigrant groups experienced when they first arrived in the United States are not acknowledged as struggles for civil rights. This student of Asian descent wondered why the difficulties Asians faced in assimilating into American culture are not seen as analogous to the efforts of African Americans to gain civil rights (Why are things this way?). In doing so, she asked a number of relevant questions: What do we leave out when we tell stories about ourselves? Why reduce the struggle for civil rights to black-and-white terms? How can we represent the multiple struggles of people who have contributed to building our nation? Then she examined alternatives — different ways of presenting the history of a nation that prides itself on justice and the protection of its people’s civil rights (Maybe this doesn’t need to exist. Maybe this could happen another way.). The academic writing you will read — and write yourself — starts with questions and seeks to find rich answers.

Steps to Inquiry

1. Observe. Note phenomena or behaviors that puzzle you or challenge your beliefs and values.

2. Ask questions. Consider why things are the way they are.

3. Examine alternatives. Explore how things could be different.

A Practice Sequence: Inquiry Activities

The activities below will help you practice the strategies of observing, asking questions, and examining alternatives.

1. Find an advertisement for a political campaign, and write down anything about what you observe in the ad that puzzles you or that challenges your beliefs and values. Next, write down questions you might have (Do things have to be this way?). Finally, write down other ways you think the ad could persuade you to vote for this particular candidate (Maybe this could happen another way instead.).

2. Locate and analyze data about the students at your school. For example, you might research the available majors and determine which departments have the highest and lowest enrollments. (Some schools have fact books that can be accessed online; and typically the registrar maintains a database with this information.) Is there anything that puzzles you? Write down any questions you have (Why are things the way they are?). What alternative explanations can you provide to account for differences in the popularity of the subjects students major in?

ACADEMIC WRITERS SEEK AND VALUE COMPLEXITY

Seeking and valuing complexity are what inquiry is all about. As you read academic arguments (for example, about school choice), observe how the media work to influence your opinions (for example, in political ads), or analyze data (for example, about candidates in an election), you will explore reasons why things are the way they are and how they might be different. When you do so, we encourage you not to settle for simple either/or reasons. Instead, look for multiple explanations.

When we rely on binary thinking — imagining there are only two sides to an issue — we tend to ignore information that does not fall tidily into one side or the other. Real-world questions (How has the Internet changed our sense of what it means to be a writer? What are the global repercussions of fast-food production and consumption? How do we make sense of terrorism?) don’t have easy for-or-against answers. Remember that an issue is open to dispute and can be explored and debated. Issue-based questions, then, need to be approached with a mind open to complex possibilities. (We say more about identifying issues and formulating issue-based questions in Chapter 5.)

If we take as an example the issue of terrorism, we would discover that scholars of religion, economics, ethics, and politics tend to ask very different questions about terrorism and to propose very different approaches for addressing this worldwide problem. This doesn’t mean that one approach is right and the others are wrong; it means that complex issues are likely to have multiple explanations, rather than a simple choice between A and B.

In her attempt to explain the popularity of hip-hop culture, Bronwen Low, a professor of education, provides a window on the steps we can take to examine the complexity of a topic. In the introductory chapters of her book, Slam School: Learning Through Conflict in the Hip Hop and Spoken Word Classroom, she begins with the observation that hip-hop “is the single-most influential cultural force shaping contemporary urban youth culture in the United States, and its international reach is growing.” She then defines what she means by hip-hop culture, distinguishing it from “rapping,” and helps readers understand hip-hop culture as encompassing graffiti art and “a whole culture of style,” including “fashion” and “sensibility.” Motivated by a sense of curiosity, if not puzzlement, Low asks questions that guide her inquiry: What is it that makes hip-hop culture so compelling to young people across such a wide spectrum of race, culture, and gender? Further, how can social, cultural, and literary critics better understand the evolution of new forms of language and performance, such as spoken-word poetry, in “youth-driven popular culture”? Notice that she indicates that she will frame her inquiry using the multiple perspectives of social, cultural, and literary critics. In turn, Low explains that she began to answer these questions by giving herself a “hip-hop education.” She attended spoken-word poetry festivals (“slams”) across the United States, listened to the music, and read both “academic theory and journalism” to see what others had to say about “poetry’s relevance and coolness to youth.”

In still another example, one of our students was curious about why her younger brother struggled in school and wondered if boys learn differently than girls. She began her inquiry by reading an article on education, “It’s a Boy Thing (or Is It?),” and realized that researchers have begun to study the question that she was curious about. However, rather than presenting a clear-cut answer, the author of this article, Sara Mead, pointed out that researchers have generated a number of conflicting opinions. Mead’s article motivated our student to deepen her inquiry by examining different perspectives in the disciplines of cognitive theory, education, counseling psychology, and sociology. She was able to refine her question based on an issue that puzzled her: If educators are aware that boys have difficulty in school despite receiving more attention than girls receive, how can research explain what seems like a persistent gap between the achievement of boys and girls? In looking at this issue-based question, the student opened herself up to complexity by resisting simple answers to a question that others had not resolved.

Steps to Seeking and Valuing Complexity

1. Reflect on what you observe. Clarify your initial interest in a phenomenon or behavior by focusing on its particular details. Then reflect on what is most interesting and least interesting to you about these details, and why.

2. Examine issues from multiple points of view. Imagine more than two sides to the issue, and recognize that there may well be other points of view, too.

3. Ask issue-based questions. Try to put into words questions that will help you explore why things are the way they are.

A Practice Sequence: Seeking and Valuing Complexity

These activities build on the previous exercises we asked you to complete.

1. Look again at the political ad you selected earlier. Think about other perspectives that would complicate your understanding of how the ad might persuade voters.

2. Imagine other perspectives on the data you found on the students in your school. Let’s say, for example, that you’ve looked at data on student majors. How did you explain the popularity of certain majors and the unpopularity of others? How do you think other students would explain these discrepancies? What explanations would faculty members offer?

ACADEMIC WRITERS SEE WRITING AS A CONVERSATION

Another habit of mind at the heart of academic writing is the understanding that ideas always build on and respond to other ideas, just as they do in the best kind of conversations. Academic conversations are quite similar to those you have through e-mail and social media: You are responding to something someone else has written (or said) and are writing back in anticipation of future responses.

Academic writing also places a high value on the belief that good, thoughtful ideas come from conversations with others, many others. As your exposure to other viewpoints increases, as you take more and different points of view into consideration and build on them, your own ideas will develop more fully and fairly. You already know that to get a full picture of something, often you have to ask for multiple perspectives. When you want to find out what “really” happened at an event when your friends are telling you different stories, you listen to all of them and then evaluate the evidence to draw conclusions you can stand behind — just as academic writers do.

Theologian Martin Marty starts a conversation about hospitality in his book When Faiths Collide (2004). Hospitality is a word he uses to describe a human behavior that has the potential to bring about real understanding among people who do not share a common faith or culture. As Marty points out, finding common ground is an especially important and timely concern “in a world where strangers meet strangers with gunfire, barrier walls, spiritually land-mined paths, and the spirit of revenge.” He believes that people need opportunities to share their stories, their values, and their beliefs; in doing so, they feel less threatened by ideas they do not understand or identify with.

Yet Marty anticipates the possibility that the notion of hospitality will be met with skepticism or incomprehension by those who find the term “dainty.” Current usage of the term — as in “hospitality suites” and “hospitality industries” — differs from historical usage, particularly biblical usage. To counter the incredulity or incomprehension of those who do not immediately understand his use of the term hospitality, Marty gives his readers entrée to a conversation with other scholars who understand the complexity and power of the kind of hospitality shown by people who welcome a stranger into their world. The stranger he has in mind may simply be the person who moves in next door, but that person could also be an immigrant, an exile, or a refugee.

Marty brings another scholar, Darrell Fasching, into the conversation to explain that hospitality entails welcoming “the stranger . . . [which] inevitably involves us in a sympathetic passing over into the other’s life and stories” (cited in Marty, p. 132). And John Koenig, another scholar Marty cites, traces the biblical sources of the term in an effort to show the value of understanding those we fear. That understanding, Marty argues, might lead to peace among warring factions. The conversation Marty begins on the page helps us see that his views on bringing about peace have their source in other people’s ideas. In turn, the fact that he draws on multiple sources gives strength to Marty’s argument.

The characteristics that make for effective oral conversation are also in play in effective academic conversation: empathy, respect, and a willingness to exchange and revise ideas. Empathy is the ability to understand the perspectives that shape what people think, believe, and value. To express both empathy and respect for the positions of all people involved in the conversation, academic writers try to understand the conditions under which each opinion might be true and then to represent the strengths of that position accurately.

For example, imagine that your firm commitment to protecting the environment is challenged by those who see the value of developing land rich with oil and other resources. In challenging their position, it would serve you well to understand their motives, both economic (lower gas prices, new jobs that will create a demand for new houses) and political (less dependence on foreign oil). If you can demonstrate your knowledge of these factors, those committed to developing resources in protected areas will listen to you. To convey empathy and respect while presenting your own point of view, you might introduce your argument this way:

Although it is important to develop untapped resources in remote areas of the United States both to lower gas prices and create new jobs and to eliminate our dependence on other countries’ resources, it is in everyone’s interest to use alternative sources of power and protect our natural resources.

As you demonstrate your knowledge and a sense of shared values, you could also describe the conditions under which you might change your own position.

People engaging in productive conversation try to create change by listening and responding to one another rather than dominating one another. Instead of trying to win an argument, they focus on reaching a mutual understanding. This does not mean that effective communicators do not take strong positions; more often than not they do. However, they are more likely to achieve their goals by persuading others instead of ignoring them and their points of view. Similarly, writers come to every issue with an agenda. But they realize that they may have to compromise on certain points to carry those that mean the most to them. They understand that their perceptions and opinions may be flawed or limited, and they are willing to revise them when valid new perspectives are introduced.

In an academic community, ideas develop through give and take, through a conversation that builds on what has come before and grows stronger from multiple perspectives. You will find this dynamic at work in your classes when you discuss your ideas: You will build on other people’s insights, and they will build on yours. As a habit of mind, paying attention to academic conversations can improve the thinking and writing you do in every class you take.

Steps to Joining an Academic Conversation

1. Be receptive to the ideas of others. Listen carefully and empathetically to what others have to say.

2. Be respectful of the ideas of others. When you refer to the opinions of others, represent them fairly and use an evenhanded tone. Avoid sounding scornful or dismissive.

3. Engage with the ideas of others. Try to understand how people have arrived at their feelings and beliefs.

4. Be flexible in your thinking about the ideas of others. Be willing to exchange ideas and to revise your own opinions.

A Practice Sequence: Joining an Academic Conversation

The following excerpt is taken from Thomas Patterson’s The Vanishing Voter (2002), an examination of voter apathy. Read the excerpt and then complete the exercises that follow.

Does a diminished appetite for voting affect the health of American politics? Is society harmed when the voting rate is low or in decline? As the Chicago Tribune said in an editorial, it may be “humiliating” that the United States, the oldest continuous democracy, has nearly the lowest voting rate in the world. But does it have any practical significance? . . .

The increasing number of nonvoters could be a danger to democracy. Although high participation by itself does not trigger radical change, a flood of new voters into the electorate could possibly do it. It’s difficult to imagine a crisis big and divisive enough to prompt millions of new voters to suddenly flock to the polls, especially in light of Americans’ aversion to political extremism. Nevertheless, citizens who are outside the electorate are less attached to the existing system. As the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset observed, a society of nonvoters “is potentially more explosive than one in which most citizens are regularly involved in activities which give them some sense of participation in decisions which affect their lives.”

Voting can strengthen citizenship in other ways, too. When people vote, they are more attentive to politics and are better informed about issues affecting them. Voting also deepens community involvement, as the philosopher John Stuart Mill theorized a century ago. Studies indicate that voters are more active in community affairs than nonvoters are. Of course, this association says more about the type of person who votes as opposed to the effect of voting. But recent evidence, as Harvard University’s Robert Putnam notes, “suggests that the act of voting itself encourages volunteering and other forms of government citizenship.”

1. In this excerpt, Patterson presents two arguments: that increasing voter apathy is a danger to democracy and that voting strengthens citizenship. With which of these arguments do you sympathize more? Why? Can you imagine reasons that another person might not agree with you? Write them down. Now do the same exercise with the argument you find less compelling.

2. Your instructor will divide the class into four groups and assign each group a position — pro or con — on one of Patterson’s arguments. Brainstorm with the members of your group to come up with examples or reasons why your group’s position is valid. Make a list of those examples or reasons, and be prepared to present them to the class.

3. Your instructor will now break up the groups into new groups, each with at least one representative of the original groups. In turn with the other members of your new group, take a few moments to articulate your position and the reasons for it. Remember to be civil and as persuasive as possible.

4. Finally, with the other members of your new group, talk about the merits of the various points of view. Try to find common ground (“I understand what you are saying; in fact, it’s not unlike the point I was making about . . .”). The point of this discussion is not to pronounce a winner (who made the best case for his or her perspective) but to explore common ground, exchange and revise ideas, and imagine compromises.

ACADEMIC WRITERS UNDERSTAND THAT WRITING IS A PROCESS

Academic writing is a process of defining issues, formulating questions, and developing sound arguments. This view of writing counters a number of popular myths: that writing depends on inspiration, that writing should happen quickly, that learning to write in one context prepares you to write in other contexts, and that revision is the same as editing. The writing process addresses these myths. First, choosing an idea that matters to you is one way to make your writing matter. And there’s a better chance that writing you care about will contribute in a meaningful way to the conversation going on about a given issue in the academic community. Second, writers who invest time in developing and revising their ideas will improve the quality of both their ideas and their language — their ability to be specific and express complexity.

There are three main stages to the writing process: collecting information, drafting, and revising. We introduce them here and expand on them throughout this book.

◼ Collect Information and Material

Always begin the process of writing an essay by collecting in writing the material — the information, ideas, and evidence — from which you will shape your own argument. Once you have read and marked the pages of a text, you have begun the process of building your own argument. The important point here is that you start to put your ideas on paper. Good writing comes from returning to your ideas on your own and with your classmates, reconsidering them, and revising them as your thinking develops. This is not something you can do with any specificity unless you have written down your ideas. The following box shows the steps for gathering information from your reading, the first stage in the process of writing an academic essay. (In Chapter 2, these steps are illustrated and discussed in more detail.)

Steps to Collecting Information and Material

1. Mark your texts as you read. Note key terms; ask questions in the margins; indicate connections to other texts.

2. List quotations you find interesting and provocative. You might even write short notes to yourself about what you find significant about the quotations.

3. List your own ideas in response to the reading or readings. Include what you’ve observed about the way the author or authors make their arguments.

4. Sketch out the similarities and differences among the authors whose work you plan to use in your essay. Where would they agree or disagree? How would each respond to the others’ arguments and evidence?

◼ Draft, and Draft Again

The next stage in the writing process begins when you are ready to think about your focus and how to arrange the ideas you have gathered in the collecting stage. Writers often find that writing a first draft is an act of discovery, that their ultimate focus emerges during this initial drafting process. Sometimes it is only at the end of a four-page draft that a writer says, “Aha! This is what I really want to talk about in this essay!” Later revisions of an essay, then, are not simply editing or cleaning up the grammar of a first draft. Instead, they truly involve revision, seeing the first draft again to establish the clearest possible argument and the most persuasive evidence. This means that you do not have to stick with the way a draft turns out the first time. You can — and must! — be willing to rewrite a substantial amount of a first draft if the focus of the argument changes, or if in the process of writing new ideas emerge that enrich the essay. This is why it’s important not to agonize over wording in a first draft: It’s difficult to toss out a paragraph you’ve sweated over for hours. Use the first draft to get your ideas down on paper so that you and your peers can discuss what you see there, with the knowledge that you (like your peers) will need to stay open to the possibility of changing an aspect of your focus or argument.

Steps to Drafting

1. Look through the materials you have collected to see what interests you most and what you have the most to say about.

2. Identify what is at issue and what is open to dispute.

3. Formulate a question that your essay will respond to.

4. Select the material you will include, and decide what is outside your focus.

5. Consider the types of readers who might be most interested in what you have to say.

6. Gather more material once you’ve decided on your purpose — what you want to teach your readers.

7. Formulate a working thesis that conveys the point you want to make.

8. Consider possible arguments against your position and your response to them.

◼ Revise Significantly

The final stage, revising, might involve several different drafts as you continue to sharpen your insights and the organization of what you have written. As we discuss in Chapter 12, you and your peers will be reading one another’s drafts, offering feedback as you move from the larger issues to the smaller ones. It should be clear by now that academic writing is done in a community of thinkers: That is, people read other people’s drafts and make suggestions for further clarification, further development of ideas, and sometimes further research. This is quite different from simply editing someone’s writing for grammatical errors and typos. Instead, drafting and revising with real readers, as we discuss in Chapter 12, allow you to participate in the collaborative spirit of the academy, in which knowledge making is a group activity that comes out of the conversation of ideas. Importantly, this process approach to writing in the company of real readers mirrors the conversation of ideas carried on in the pages of academic books and journals.

Steps to Revising

1. Draft and revise the introduction and conclusion.

2. Clarify any obscure or confusing passages your peers have pointed out.

3. Provide details and textual evidence where your peers have asked for new or more information.

4. Make sure you have included opposing points of view and have addressed them fairly.

5. Consider reorganization.

6. Make sure that every paragraph contributes clearly to your thesis or main claim and that you have included signposts along the way, phrases that help a reader understand your purpose (“Here I turn to an example from current movies to show how this issue is alive and well in pop culture.”).

7. Consider using strategies you have found effective in other reading you have done for class (repeating words or phrases for effect, asking rhetorical questions, varying your sentence length).

ACADEMIC WRITERS REFLECT

Reflection entails pausing and taking note of what you are doing — finding answers to complex questions about why unemployment persists or solving a problem to ensure that schools can be safe places where all kids can learn — and observing yourself for a moment. For example, as you are skimming articles to find answers to questions or searching for possible solutions, it’s valuable to monitor what you feel you are learning, particularly if you are accustomed to doing research in an online environment where it’s easy to get distracted. Monitoring entails asking yourself a few questions: What did I just read? Did I comprehend the writer’s argument? Do I need to go back and reread the argument? It’s equally useful to evaluate what you are learning and what you still want or need to know to ensure that you discuss an issue in complex ways that avoid binary thinking. Try to formulate strategies, based on your own self-assessment, to address any challenges, such as comprehending a technical argument. What other sources of information can you consult? Whom can you ask for additional help? Finally, apply what you learn about your own learning by compiling a repertoire of strategies that can guide you in the reading, writing, and problem solving that you are doing in different classes.

Reflection is essentially having an awareness of our own thought processes. What do I want to accomplish? Is this the right question to ask? What other questions could I be asking? Where should I look for answers? What steps should I take? Why? Educator Jackie Gerstein developed the following cycle of questions for taking control of our own learning:

· Was I resourceful in terms of finding information, resources, and materials?

· Did I ask other people for feedback and information; to collaborate?

· Did I share my work and findings with others?

· Did I learn something new?

· Did I try to either make something better or create something new, rather than just copy something that already exists?

· Did I approach learning as an open-ended process, open to new and all possibilities?

· Did I accept failure as part of the process and use it to inform my learning?

—JACKIE GERSTEIN

Gerstein is insistent when she explains, “If we don’t create a process of reflecting . . . then we are leaving learning up to chance.”

Reflection in writing can focus on different types of knowledge: (1) the content of an issue, such as how economic resources are distributed in different neighborhoods and schools or trade policies that affect employment; (2) the strategies one might use to write an essay to persuade readers that immigration policies do not affect opportunities in employment as much as trade policies do; (3) the procedures for developing an argument, such as using stories of people affected by unemployment or the failures of providing safe environments for kids in and out of school; and (4) the conditions under which certain kinds of strategies might work in one context or another. That is, stories might be a powerful way to raise an issue for a class in sociology or education, but some hard data might be more appropriate in developing a persuasive argument in economics. Making decisions like this one emphasizes the role of reflection — monitoring, evaluating, developing strategies, and taking control over your own learning.

Finally, reflection is an important habit of mind because the act of thinking and questioning encourages us to critically examine our own lived experiences. In his memoir Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about a moment in his life when he first became literate, and he explains in the following passage how literacy — reading and writing — opened up a world that he wanted to know more about. Here Coates, recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant,” addresses his son, as he does throughout his memoir, to tell a story of a time when his mother would make him write when he was in trouble. For us, the story he conveys is about the power of reflection that comes from writing — the significance of writing to make thinking visible, to ask questions that prompt Coates to consider his actions in the present, and to envision future actions based on what he has learned.

Your grandmother taught me to read when I was only four. She also taught me to write, by which I mean not simply organizing a set of sentences into a series of paragraphs, but organizing them as a means of investigation. When I was in trouble at school (which was quite often) she would make me write about it. The writing had to answer a series of questions: Why did I feel the need to talk at the same time as my teacher? Why did I not believe that my teacher was entitled to respect? How would I want someone to behave while I was talking? What would I do the next time I felt the urge to talk to my friends during a lesson? [Our emphasis].

Coates admits that his mother’s assignment never really taught him to “curb” his behavior, but these early lessons were a powerful source of learning to “interrogate” the world. Reflecting on the past, present, and future drew Coates into “consciousness,” as he puts it. “Your grandmother was not teaching me how to behave in class. She was teaching me how to ruthlessly interrogate the subject that elicited the most sympathy and rationalizing — myself.”

Researchers are consistent in describing the importance of encouraging us to think critically on our own lived experiences before we begin to think about how we can participate in a project, take action, and create meaningful change in our surroundings. The following steps can help you pause and make sure learning is actually happening.

Steps to Reflection

1. Monitor. Pause and ask yourself some questions: Did I comprehend the writer’s argument? Do I need to go back and reread the argument?

2. Evaluate. Assess what you are learning and what you still want or need to know to ensure that you discuss an issue in complex ways that avoid binary thinking.

3. Formulate strategies. Identify some next steps, based on your own self-assessment, for addressing any challenges, such as comprehending a technical argument, solving a problem you have formulated, or answering a question you have posed. What other sources of information can you consult? Whom can you ask for additional help?

4. Apply what you learn about your own learning. Write down some of the challenges you have faced in writing — formulating a question, collecting materials, drafting, or revising, for example. How have you dealt with those challenges? How would you apply what you have learned to completing other academic writing assignments?

A Practice Sequence: Reflection Activities

The activities that follow will give you an opportunity to practice monitoring your work, evaluating what you are learning, formulating strategies, and documenting how you will apply what you learned.

1. Reflect upon and write about the steps you are taking to collect information for what you are writing, to draft your essay, and to revise your work.

· Pause and consider the approach you are taking and whether this is the best way to fulfill your goals as a writer and reach your audience.

· Assess what you are learning about taking a process approach to writing.

· Formulate some next steps for your writing.

· What have you learned so far about writing that you can apply to this and other kinds of academic tasks? That is, if you have faced some uncertainties, what did you do to address these moments? Did you talk to others in your writing group? Were they helpful? Or did you seek other forms of help to get what you needed?

2. Earlier we suggested that you might find a political advertisement or data about majors at your school to analyze. Choose one of these two areas of inquiry.

· As you try to find information, monitor the steps you are taking by pausing for a moment. How is the process going for you? Are you getting what you need? Why or why not?

· Assess what you are learning from your search for relevant information and data.

· Formulate next steps if you are having trouble finding what you want.

· Write down what you have learned about locating information and what you still need to know in order to find relevant, timely information in an efficient way.

The five academic habits of mind we have discussed throughout this chapter — making inquiries, seeking and valuing complexity, understanding writing as a conversation, understanding writing as a process, and reflecting — are fundamental patterns of thought you will need to cultivate as an academic writer. The core skills we discuss through the rest of the book build on these habits of mind.

Moreover, the kind of writing we describe in this chapter may challenge some models of writing that you learned in high school, particularly the five-paragraph essay. The five-paragraph essay is a genre, or kind, of writing that offers writers a conventional formula for transmitting information to readers. Such a formula can be useful, but it is generally too limiting for academic conversations. By contrast, academic writing is a genre responsive to the role that readers play in guiding writing and the writing process. That is, academic writing is about shaping and adapting information for the purpose of influencing how readers think about a given issue, not simply placing information in a conventional organizational pattern. We expect academic readers to critically analyze what we have written and anticipate writers’ efforts to address their concerns. Therefore, as writers, we need to acknowledge different points of view, make concessions, recognize the limitations of what we argue, and provide counterarguments. Reading necessarily plays a prominent role in the many forms of writing that you do, but not necessarily as a process of simply gathering information. Instead, as James Crosswhite suggests in his book The Rhetoric of Reason, reading “means making judgments about which of the many voices and encounters can be brought together into productive conversation.”

BECOMING ACADEMIC: THREE NARRATIVES

In the following passages, three writers describe their early experiences as readers. A well-known journalist and writer, Ta-Nehisi Coates reflects upon his growing sense of curiosity at Howard University, which he refers to as Mecca, the site where he is motivated to learn about the history of black people and where he learns to formulate questions to help him better understand who he is as an individual. The passage we include here is taken from his award-winning book Between the World and Me, and is addressed to his son. Coates makes many references to authors he has read and public figures he admires. We invite you to do some research to learn about who these people are and their significance in the ways Coates writes about his education. Richard Rodriguez and Gerald Graff are well known outside the academy. In this excerpt from Hunger of Memory, Rodriguez describes what it was like growing up as a bookish bilingual “scholarship boy” in a Spanish-speaking household. In the other excerpt, from Beyond the Culture Wars, Graff narrates how he disliked reading books, especially literature and history books, well into his undergraduate years as an English major. Both of their narratives turn around moments of recognition triggered by exposure to the ideas of others. As you read the selections, consider these questions:

· Where are the turning points in each narrative? What are the most important things the writers seem to learn?

· What incidents or insights did you find most interesting in the narratives? Why?

· What seem to be the key ideas in each narrative? Do these ideas strike you as being potentially useful in your own work as a thinker and writer?

· Do you find that the writers exhibit academic habits of mind (making inquiries, seeking and valuing complexity, seeing writing as a kind of conversation, and reflecting)? If so, where?

TA-NEHISI COATES

Between the World and Me

A journalist, educator, and writer, Ta-Nehisi Coates received the 2015 National Book Award for Between the World and Me, from which the following excerpt is taken. He has also written a memoir, The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, and he is a regular contributor to The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, race, and the persistence of racial inequality in the United States. His writings have appeared in the Washington Post, The New York Times Magazine, Time, and the Village Voice. Most recently, he has been working on an eleven-issue series of Black Panther for Marvel. When the Black Panther character debuted in an issue of Fantastic Four in 1966, he was the first black superhero in mainstream American comics.

When I came to Howard, Chancellor Williams’s Destruction of Black Civilization was my Bible. Williams himself had taught at Howard. I read him when I was sixteen, and his work offered a grand theory of multi-millennial European plunder. The theory relived me of certain troubling questions — this is the point of nationalism — and it gave me my Tolstoy. I read about Queen Nzinga, who ruled in Central Africa in the sixteenth century, resisting the Portuguese. I read about her negotiating with the Dutch. When the Dutch ambassador tried to humiliate her by refusing her a seat, Nzinga had shown her power by ordering one of her advisers to all fours to make a human chair of her body. That was the kind of power I sought, and the story of our own royalty became for me weapon. My working theory then held all black people as kings in exile, a nation of original men severed from our original names and our majestic Nubian culture. Surely this was the message I took from gazing out on the Yard. Had any people, anywhere, ever been as sprawling and beautiful as us?

I needed more books. At Howard University, one of the greatest collections of books could be found in the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, where your grandfather once worked. Moorland held archives, papers, collections, and virtually any book ever written by or about black people. For the most significant portion of my time at The Mecca, I followed a simple ritual. I would walk into the Moorland reading room and fill out three call slips for three different works. I would take a seat at one of these long tables. I would draw out my pen and one of my black-and-white composition books. I would open the books and read, while filling my composition books with notes on my reading, new vocabulary words, and sentences of my own invention. I would arrive in the morning and request, three call slips at a time, the works of every writer I had heard spoken of in classrooms or out on the Yard: Larry Neal, Eric Williams, George Padmore, Sonia Sanchez, Stanley Crouch, Harold Cruse, Manning Marable, Addison Gayle, Carolyn Rodgers, Etheridge Knight, Sterling Brown. I remember believing that the key to all life lay in articulating the precise difference between “the Black Aesthetic” and “Negritude.” How, specifically, did Europe underdevelop Africa? I must know. And if the Eighteenth Dynasty pharaohs were alive today, would they live in Harlem? I had to inhale all the pages.

I went into this investigation imagining history to be a unified narrative, free of debate, which, once uncovered, would simply verify everything I had always suspected. The smokescreen would lift. And the villains who manipulated the schools and the streets would be unmasked. But there was so much to know — so much geography to cover — Africa, the Caribbean, the Americas, the United States. And all of these areas had histories, sprawling literary canons, fieldwork, ethnographies. Where should I begin?

The trouble came almost immediately. I did not find a coherent tradition marching lockstep but instead factions, and factions within factions. Hurston battled Hughes, Du Bois warred with Garvey, Harold Cruse fought everyone. I felt myself at the bridge of a great ship that I could not control because C.L.R. James was a great wave and Basil Davidson was a swirling eddy, tossing me about. Things I believed merely a week earlier, ideas I had taken from one book, could be smashed to splinters by another. Had we retained any of our African inheritance? Frazier says it was all destroyed, and this destruction evidences the terribleness of our capturers. Herskovitz says it lives on, and this evidences the resilience of our African spirit. By my second year, it was natural for me to spend a typical day mediating between Frederick Douglass’s integration into America and Martin Delany’s escape into nationalism. Perhaps they were somehow both right. I had come looking for a parade, for a military review of champions marching in ranks. Instead I was left with a brawl of ancestors, a herd of dissenters, sometimes marching together but just as often marching away from each other.

I would take breaks from my reading, walk out to the vendors who lined the streets, eat lunch on the Yard. I would imagine Malcolm, his body bound in a cell, studying the books, trading his human eyes for the power of flight. And I too felt bound by my ignorance, by the questions that I had not yet understood to be more than just means, by my lack of understanding, and by Howard itself. It was still a school, after all. I wanted to pursue things, to know things, but I could not match the means of knowing that came naturally to me with the expectations of professors. The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free. Slowly, I was discovering myself. The best parts of Malcolm pointed the way. Malcolm, always changing, always evolving toward some truth that was ultimately outside the boundaries of his life, of his body. I felt myself in motion, still directed toward the total possession of my body, but by some other route which I could not before then have imagined.

I was not searching alone. I met your uncle Ben at The Mecca. He was, like me, from one of those cities where everyday life was so different than the Dream that it demanded an explanation. He came, like me, to The Mecca in search of the nature and origin of the breach. I shared with him a healthy skepticism and a deep belief that we could somehow read our way out. Ladies loved him, and what a place to be loved — for it was said, and we certainly believed it to be true, that nowhere on the Earth could one find a more beautiful assembly of women than on Howard University’s Yard. And somehow even this was part of the search — the physical beauty of the black body was all our beauty, historical and cultural, incarnate. Your uncle Ben became a fellow traveler for life, and I discovered that there was something particular about journeying out with black people who knew the length of the road because they had traveled it too.

I would walk out into the city and find other searchers at lectures, book signings, and poetry readings. I was still writing bad poetry. I read this bad poetry at open mics in local cafes populated mostly by other poets who also felt the insecurity of their bodies. All of these poets were older and wiser than me, and many of them were well read, and they brought this wisdom to bear on me and my work. What did I mean, specifically, by the loss of my body? And if every black body was precious, a one of one, if Malcolm was correct and you must preserve your life, how could I see these precious lives as simply a collective mass, as the amorphous residue of plunder? How could I privilege the spectrum of dark energy over each particular ray of light? These were notes on how to write, and thus notes on how to think. The Dream thrives on generalization, on limiting the number of possible questions, on privileging immediate answers. The Dream is the enemy of all art, courageous thinking, and honest writing. And it became clear that this was not just for the dreams concocted by Americans to justify themselves but also for the dreams that I had conjured to replace them. I had thought that I must mirror the outside world, create a carbon copy of white claims to civilization. It was beginning to occur to me to question the logic of the claim itself. I had forgotten my own self-interrogations pushed upon me by my mother, or rather I had not yet apprehended their deeper, lifelong meaning. I was only beginning to learn to be wary of my own humanity, of my own hurt and anger — I didn’t yet realize that the boot on your neck is just as likely to make you delusional as it is to ennoble.

The art I was coming to love lived in this void, in the not yet knowable, in the pain, in the question. The older poets introduced me to artists who pulled their energy from the void — Bubber Miley, Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, C. K. Williams, Carolyn Forché. The older poets were Ethelbert Miller, Kenneth Carroll, Brian Gilmore. It is important that I tell you their names, that you know that I have never achieved anything alone. I remember sitting with Joel Dias-Porter, who had not gone to Howard but whom I found at The Mecca, reviewing every line of Robert Hayden’s “Middle Passage.” And I was stunned by how much Hayden managed to say without, seemingly, saying anything at all — he could bring forth joy and agony without literally writing the words, which formed as pictures and not slogans. Hayden imagined the enslaved, during the Middle Passage, from the perspective of the enslavers — a mind-trip for me, in and of itself; why should the enslaver be allowed to speak? But Hayden’s poems did not speak. They conjured:

You cannot stare that hatred down

or chain the fear that stalks the watches

I was not in any slave ship. Or perhaps I was, because so much of what I’d felt in Baltimore, the sharp hatred, the immortal wish, and the timeless will, I saw in Hayden’s work. And that was what I heard in Malcolm, but never like this — quiet, pure, and unadorned. I was learning the craft of poetry, which really was an intensive version of what my mother had taught me all those years ago — the craft of writing as the art of thinking. Poetry aims for an economy of truth — loose and useless words must be discarded, and I found that these loose and useless words were not separate from loose and useless thoughts. Poetry was not simply the transcription of notions — beautiful writing rarely is. I wanted to learn to write, which was ultimately, still, as my mother had taught me, a confrontation with my own innocence, my own rationalizations. Poetry was the processing of my thoughts until the slag of justification fell away and I was left with the cold steel truths of life.

These truths I heard in the works of other poets around the city. They were made of small hard things — aunts and uncles, smoke breaks after sex, girls on stoops drinking from mason jars. These truths carried the black body beyond slogans and gave it color and texture and thus reflected the spectrum I saw out on the Yard more than all of my alliterative talk of guns or revolutions or paeans to the lost dynasties of African antiquity. After these readings, I followed as the poets would stand out on U Street or repair to a café and argue about everything — books, politics, boxing. And their arguments reinforced the discordant tradition I’d found in Moorland, and I began to see discord, argument, chaos, perhaps even fear, as a kind of power. I was learning to live in the disquiet I felt in Moorland-Spingarn, in the mess of my mind. The gnawing discomfort, the chaos, the intellectual vertigo was not an alarm. It was a beacon.

RICHARD RODRIGUEZ

Scholarship Boy

Richard Rodriguez was born into a Mexican immigrant family in San Francisco, California, and spoke only Spanish until age six. He had a formidable education, receiving a BA from Stanford University and an MA from Columbia University; studying for a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley; and attending the Warburg Institute in London on a Fulbright fellowship. Instead of pursuing a career in academia, he became a journalist. He is perhaps best known for his contributions to PBS’s The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and for his controversial opposition to affirmative action and bilingual education. His books include Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1981), Mexico’s Children (1990), Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father (1992), and Brown: The Last Discovery of America (2002).

I stand in the ghetto classroom — “the guest speaker” — attempting to lecture on the mystery of the sounds of our words to rows of diffident students. “Don’t you hear it? Listen! The music of our words. ‘Sumer is i-cumen in. . . .’ And songs on the car radio. We need Aretha Franklin’s voice to fill plain words with music — her life.” In the face of their empty stares, I try to create an enthusiasm. But the girls in the back row turn to watch some boy passing outside. There are flutters of smiles, waves. And someone’s mouth elongates heavy, silent words through the barrier of glass. Silent words — the lips straining to shape each voiceless syllable: “Meet meee late errr.” By the door, the instructor smiles at me, apparently hoping that I will be able to spark some enthusiasm in the class. But only one student seems to be listening. A girl, maybe fourteen. In this gray room her eyes shine with ambition. She keeps nodding and nodding at all that I say; she even takes notes. And each time I ask a question, she jerks up and down in her desk like a marionette, while her hand waves over the bowed heads of her classmates. It is myself (as a boy) I see as she faces me now (a man in my thirties).

The boy who first entered a classroom barely able to speak English, twenty years later concluded his studies in the stately quiet of the reading room in the British Museum. Thus with one sentence I can summarize my academic career. It will be harder to summarize what sort of life connects the boy to the man.

With every award, each graduation from one level of education to the next, people I’d meet would congratulate me. Their refrain always the same: “Your parents must be very proud.” Sometimes then they’d ask me how I managed it — my “success.” (How?) After a while, I had several quick answers to give in reply. I’d admit, for one thing, that I went to an excellent grammar school. (My earliest teachers, the nuns, made my success their ambition.) And my brother and both my sisters were very good students. (They often brought home the shiny school trophies I came to want.) And my mother and father always encouraged me. (At every graduation they were behind the stunning flash of the camera when I turned to look at the crowd.)

As important as these factors were, however, they account inadequately for my academic advance. Nor do they suggest what an odd success I managed. For although I was a very good student, I was also a very bad student. I was a “scholarship boy,” a certain kind of scholarship boy. Always successful, I was always unconfident. Exhilarated by my progress. Sad. I became the prized student — anxious and eager to learn. Too eager, too anxious — an imitative and unoriginal pupil. My brother and two sisters enjoyed the advantages I did, and they grew to be as successful as I, but none of them ever seemed so anxious about their schooling. A second-grade student, I was the one who came home and corrected the “simple” grammatical mistakes of our parents. (“Two negatives make a positive.”) Proudly I announced — to my family’s startled silence — that a teacher had said I was losing all trace of a Spanish accent. I was oddly annoyed when I was unable to get parental help with a homework assignment. The night my father tried to help me with an arithmetic exercise, he kept reading the instructions, each time more deliberately, until I pried the textbook out of his hands, saying, “I’ll try to figure it out some more by myself.”

When I reached the third grade, I outgrew such behavior. I became more tactful, careful to keep separate the two very different worlds of my day. But then, with ever-increasing intensity, I devoted myself to my studies. I became bookish, puzzling to all my family. Ambition set me apart. When my brother saw me struggling home with stacks of library books, he would laugh, shouting: “Hey, Four Eyes!” My father opened a closet one day and was startled to find me inside, reading a novel. My mother would find me reading when I was supposed to be asleep or helping around the house or playing outside. In a voice angry or worried or just curious, she’d ask: “What do you see in your books?” It became the family’s joke. When I was called and wouldn’t reply, someone would say I must be hiding under my bed with a book.

(How did I manage my success?)

What I am about to say to you has taken me more than twenty years to admit: A primary reason for my success in the classroom was that I couldn’t forget that schooling was changing me and separating me from the life I enjoyed before becoming a student. That simple realization! For years I never spoke to anyone about it. Never mentioned a thing to my family or my teachers or classmates. From a very early age, I understood enough, just enough about my classroom experiences to keep what I knew repressed, hidden beneath layers of embarrassment. Not until my last months as a graduate student, nearly thirty years old, was it possible for me to think much about the reasons for my academic success. Only then. At the end of my schooling, I needed to determine how far I had moved from my past. The adult finally confronted, and now must publicly say, what the child shuddered from knowing and could never admit to himself or to those many faces that smiled at his every success. (“Your parents must be very proud. . . .”)

At the end, in the British Museum (too distracted to finish my dissertation) for weeks I read, speed-read, books by modern educational theorists, only to find infrequent and slight mention of students like me. (Much more is written about the more typical case, the lower-class student who barely is helped by his schooling.) Then one day, leafing through Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, I found, in his description of the scholarship boy, myself. For the first time I realized that there were other students like me, and so I was able to frame the meaning of my academic success, its consequent price — the loss.

Hoggart’s description is distinguished, at least initially, by deep understanding. What he grasps very well is that the scholarship boy must move between environments, his home and the classroom, which are at cultural extremes, opposed. With his family, the boy has the intense pleasure of intimacy, the family’s consolation in feeling public alienation. Lavish emotions texture home life. Then, at school, the instruction bids him to trust lonely reason primarily. Immediate needs set the pace of his parents’ lives. From his mother and father the boy learns to trust spontaneity and nonrational ways of knowing. Then, at school, there is mental calm. Teachers emphasize the value of a reflectiveness that opens a space between thinking and immediate action.

Years of schooling must pass before the boy will be able to sketch the cultural differences in his day as abstractly as this. But he senses those differences early. Perhaps as early as the night he brings home an assignment from school and finds the house too noisy for study.

He has to be more and more alone, if he is going to “get on.” He will have, probably unconsciously, to oppose the ethos of the hearth, the intense gregariousness of the working-class family group. Since everything centers upon the living-room, there is unlikely to be a room of his own; the bedrooms are cold and inhospitable, and to warm them or the front room, if there is one, would not only be expensive, but would require an imaginative leap — out of the tradition — which most families are not capable of making. There is a corner of the living-room table. On the other side Mother is ironing, the wireless is on, someone is singing a snatch of song or Father says intermittently whatever comes into his head. The boy has to cut himself off mentally, so as to do his homework, as well as he can.1

The next day, the lesson is as apparent at school. There are even rows of desks. Discussion is ordered. The boy must rehearse his thoughts and raise his hand before speaking out in a loud voice to an audience of classmates. And there is time enough, and silence, to think about ideas (big ideas) never considered at home by his parents.

Not for the working-class child alone is adjustment to the classroom difficult. Good schooling requires that any student alter early childhood habits. But the working-class child is usually least prepared for the change. And, unlike many middle-class children, he goes home and sees in his parents a way of life not only different but starkly opposed to that of the classroom. (He enters the house and hears his parents talking in ways his teachers discourage.)

Without extraordinary determination and the great assistance of others — at home and at school — there is little chance for success. Typically most working-class children are barely changed by the classroom. The exception succeeds. The relative few become scholarship students. Of these, Richard Hoggart estimates, most manage a fairly graceful transition. Somehow they learn to live in the two very different worlds of their day. There are some others, however, those Hoggart pejoratively terms “scholarship boys,” for whom success comes with special anxiety. Scholarship boy: good student, troubled son. The child is “moderately endowed,” intellectually mediocre, Hoggart supposes — though it may be more pertinent to note the special qualities of temperament in the child. High-strung child. Brooding. Sensitive. Haunted by the knowledge that one chooses to become a student. (Education is not an inevitable or natural step in growing up.) Here is a child who cannot forget that his academic success distances him from a life he loved, even from his own memory of himself.

Initially, he wavers, balances allegiance. (“The boy is himself [until he reaches, say, the upper forms] very much of both the worlds of home and school. He is enormously obedient to the dictates of the world of school, but emotionally still strongly wants to continue as part of the family circle.”) Gradually, necessarily, the balance is lost. The boy needs to spend more and more time studying, each night enclosing himself in the silence permitted and required by intense concentration. He takes his first step toward academic success, away from his family.

From the very first days, through the years following, it will be with his parents — the figures of lost authority, the persons toward whom he feels deepest love — that the change will be most powerfully measured. A separation will unravel between them. Advancing in his studies, the boy notices that his mother and father have not changed as much as he. Rather, when he sees them, they often remind him of the person he once was and the life he earlier shared with them. He realizes what some Romantics also know when they praise the working class for the capacity for human closeness, qualities of passion and spontaneity, that the rest of us experience in like measure only in the earliest part of our youth. For the Romantic, this doesn’t make working-class life childish. Working-class life challenges precisely because it is an adult way of life.

The scholarship boy reaches a different conclusion. He cannot afford to admire his parents. (How could he and still pursue such a contrary life?) He permits himself embarrassment at their lack of education. And to evade nostalgia for the life he has lost, he concentrates on the benefits education will bestow upon him. He becomes especially ambitious. Without the support of old certainties and consolations, almost mechanically, he assumes the procedures and doctrines of the classroom. The kind of allegiance the young student might have given his mother and father only days earlier, he transfers to the teacher, the new figure of authority. “[The scholarship boy] tends to make a father-figure of his form-master,” Hoggart observes.

But Hoggart’s calm prose only makes me recall the urgency with which I came to idolize my grammar school teachers. I began by imitating their accents, using their diction, trusting their every direction. The very first facts they dispensed, I grasped with awe. Any book they told me to read, I read — then waited for them to tell me which books I enjoyed. Their every casual opinion I came to adopt and to trumpet when I returned home. I stayed after school “to help” — to get my teacher’s undivided attention. It was the nun’s encouragement that mattered most to me. (She understood exactly what — my parents never seemed to appraise so well — all my achievements entailed.) Memory gently caressed each word of praise bestowed in the classroom so that compliments teachers paid me years ago come quickly to mind even today.

The enthusiasm I felt in second-grade classes I flaunted before both my parents. The docile, obedient student came home a shrill and precocious son who insisted on correcting and teaching his parents with the remark: “My teacher told us. . . .”

I intended to hurt my mother and father. I was still angry at them for having encouraged me toward classroom English. But gradually this anger was exhausted, replaced by guilt as school grew more and more attractive to me. I grew increasingly successful, a talkative student. My hand was raised in the classroom; I yearned to answer any question. At home, life was less noisy than it had been. (I spoke to classmates and teachers more often each day than to family members.) Quiet at home, I sat with my papers for hours each night. I never forgot that schooling had irretrievably changed my family’s life. That knowledge, however, did not weaken ambition. Instead, it strengthened resolve. Those times I remembered the loss of my past with regret, I quickly reminded myself of all the things my teachers could give me. (They could make me an educated man.) I tightened my grip on pencil and books. I evaded nostalgia. Tried hard to forget. But one does not forget by trying to forget. One only remembers. I remembered too well that education had changed my family’s life. I would not have become a scholarship boy had I not so often remembered.

Once she was sure that her children knew English, my mother would tell us, “You should keep up your Spanish.” Voices playfully groaned in response. “¡Pochos!” my mother would tease. I listened silently.

After a while, I grew more calm at home. I developed tact. A fourth-grade student, I was no longer the show-off in front of my parents. I became a conventionally dutiful son, politely affectionate, cheerful enough, even — for reasons beyond choosing — my father’s favorite. And much about my family life was easy then, comfortable, happy in the rhythm of our living together: hearing my father getting ready for work; eating the breakfast my mother had made me; looking up from a novel to hear my brother or one of my sisters playing with friends in the backyard; in winter, coming upon the house all lighted up after dark.

But withheld from my mother and father was any mention of what most mattered to me: the extraordinary experience of first-learning. Late afternoon: In the midst of preparing dinner, my mother would come up behind me while I was trying to read. Her head just over mine, her breath warmly scented with food. “What are you reading?” Or, “Tell me all about your new courses.” I would barely respond, “Just the usual things, nothing special.” (A half smile, then silence. Her head moving back in the silence. Silence! Instead of the flood of intimate sounds that had once flowed smoothly between us, there was this silence.) After dinner, I would rush to a bedroom with papers and books. As often as possible, I resisted parental pleas to “save lights” by coming to the kitchen to work. I kept so much, so often, to myself. Sad. Enthusiastic. Troubled by the excitement of coming upon new ideas. Eager. Fascinated by the promising texture of a brand-new book. I hoarded the pleasures of learning. Alone for hours. Enthralled. Nervous. I rarely looked away from my books — or back on my memories. Nights when relatives visited and the front rooms were warmed by Spanish sounds, I slipped quietly out of the house.

It mattered that education was changing me. It never ceased to matter. My brother and sisters would giggle at our mother’s mispronounced words. They’d correct her gently. My mother laughed girlishly one night, trying not to pronounce sheep as ship. From a distance I listened sullenly. From that distance, pretending not to notice on another occasion, I saw my father looking at the title pages of my library books. That was the scene on my mind when I walked home with a fourth-grade companion and heard him say that his parents read to him every night. (A strange-sounding book — Winnie the Pooh.) Immediately, I wanted to know, “What is it like?” My companion, however, thought I wanted to know about the plot of the book. Another day, my mother surprised me by asking for a “nice” book to read. “Something not too hard you think I might like.” Carefully I chose one, Willa Cather’s My Ántonia. But when, several weeks later, I happened to see it next to her bed unread except for the first few pages, I was furious and suddenly wanted to cry. I grabbed up the book and took it back to my room and placed it in its place, alphabetically on my shelf.

“Your parents must be very proud of you.” People began to say that to me about the time I was in sixth grade. To answer affirmatively, I’d smile. Shyly I’d smile, never betraying my sense of the irony: I was not proud of my mother and father. I was embarrassed by their lack of education. It was not that I ever thought they were stupid, though stupidly I took for granted their enormous native intelligence. Simply, what mattered to me was that they were not like my teachers.

But, “Why didn’t you tell us about the award?” my mother demanded, her frown weakened by pride. At the grammar school ceremony several weeks after, her eyes were brighter than the trophy I’d won. Pushing back the hair from my forehead, she whispered that I had “shown” the gringos. A few minutes later, I heard my father speak to my teacher and felt ashamed of his labored, accented words. Then guilty for the shame. I felt such contrary feelings. (There is no simple roadmap through the heart of the scholarship boy.) My teacher was so soft-spoken and her words were edged sharp and clean. I admired her until it seemed to me that she spoke too carefully. Sensing that she was condescending to them, I became nervous. Resentful. Protective. I tried to move my parents away. “You both must be very proud of Richard,” the nun said. They responded quickly. (They were proud.) “We are proud of all our children.” Then this afterthought: “They sure didn’t get their brains from us.” They all laughed. I smiled.

GERALD GRAFF

Disliking Books

Gerald Graff received his BA in English from the University of Chicago and his PhD in English and American literature from Stanford University. In his distinguished academic career, he has taught at numerous universities and is currently a professor of English and education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is probably best known for his pedagogical theories, especially “teaching the controversies,” an approach he argues for most famously in his book Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (1993), from which this excerpt is taken. His other well-known books include Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society (1979), Professing Literature: An Institutional History (1987), and Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind (2003).

I like to think I have a certain advantage as a teacher of literature because when I was growing up I disliked and feared books. My youthful aversion to books showed a fine impartiality, extending across the whole spectrum of literature, history, philosophy, science, and what by then (the late 1940s) had come to be called social studies. But had I been forced to choose, I would have singled out literature and history as the reading I disliked most. Science at least had some discernible practical use, and you could have fun solving the problems in the textbooks with their clear-cut answers. Literature and history had no apparent application to my experience, and any boy in my school who had cultivated them — I can’t recall one who did — would have marked himself as a sissy.

As a middle-class Jew growing up in an ethnically mixed Chicago neighborhood, I was already in danger of being beaten up daily by rougher working-class boys. Becoming a bookworm would have only given them a decisive reason for beating me up. Reading and studying were more permissible for girls, but they, too, had to be careful not to get too intellectual, lest they acquire the stigma of being “stuck up.”

In Lives on the Boundary, a remarkable autobiography of the making of an English teacher, Mike Rose describes how the “pain and confusion” of his working-class youth made “school and knowledge” seem a saving alternative. Rose writes of feeling “freed, as if I were untying fetters,” by his encounters with certain college teachers, who helped him recognize that “an engagement with ideas could foster competence and lead me out into the world.”2 Coming at things from my middle-class perspective, however, I took for granted a freedom that school, knowledge, and engagement with ideas seemed only to threaten.

My father, a literate man, was frustrated by my refusal to read anything besides comic books, sports magazines, and the John R. Tunis and Clair Bee sports novels. I recall his once confining me to my room until I finished a book on the voyages of Magellan, but try as I might, I could do no better than stare bleakly at the pages. I could not, as we would later say, “relate to” Magellan or to any of the other books my father brought home — detective stories, tales of war and heroism, adventure stories with adolescent heroes (the Hardy Boys, Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates), stories of scientific discovery (Paul de Kruif’s Microbe Hunters), books on current events. Nothing worked.

It was understood, however, that boys of my background would go to college and that once there we would get serious and buckle down. For some, “getting serious” meant prelaw, premed, or a major in business to prepare for taking over the family business. My family did not own a business, and law and medicine did not interest me, so I drifted by default into the nebulous but conveniently noncommittal territory of the liberal arts. I majored in English.

At this point the fear of being beaten up if I were caught having anything to do with books was replaced by the fear of flunking out of college if I did not learn to deal with them. But though I dutifully did my homework and made good grades (first at the University of Illinois, Chicago branch, then at the University of Chicago, from which I graduated in 1959), I continued to find “serious” reading painfully difficult and alien. My most vivid recollections of college reading are of assigned classics I failed to finish: The Iliad (in the Richmond Lattimore translation); The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, a major disappointment after the paperback jacket’s promise of “a lusty classic of Renaissance ribaldry”; E. M. Forster’s Passage to India, sixty agonizing pages of which I managed to slog through before giving up. Even Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Fitzgerald, whose contemporary world was said to be “close to my own experience,” left me cold. I saw little there that did resemble my experience.

Even when I had done the assigned reading, I was often tongue-tied and embarrassed when called on. What was unclear to me was what I was supposed to say about literary works, and why. Had I been born a decade or two earlier, I might have come to college with the rudiments of a literate vocabulary for talking about culture that some people older than I acquired through family, high school, or church. As it was, “cultured” phrases seemed effete and sterile to me. When I was able to produce the kind of talk that was required in class, the intellectualism of it came out sounding stilted and hollow in my mouth. If Cliffs Notes and other such crib sheets for the distressed had yet come into existence, with their ready-to-copy summaries of widely taught literary works, I would have been an excellent customer. (As it was, I did avail myself of the primitive version then in existence called Masterplots.)

What first made literature, history, and other intellectual pursuits seem attractive to me was exposure to critical debates. There was no single conversion experience, but a gradual transformation over several years, extending into my first teaching positions, at the University of New Mexico and then Northwestern University. But one of the first sparks I remember was a controversy over Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that arose in a course during my junior year in college. On first attempt, Twain’s novel was just another assigned classic that I was too bored to finish. I could see little connection between my Chicago upbringing and Huck’s pre–Civil War adventures with a runaway slave on a raft up the Mississippi.

My interest was aroused, however, when our instructor mentioned that the critics had disagreed over the merits of the last part of the novel. He quoted Ernest Hemingway’s remark that “if you read [the novel] you must stop where the nigger Jim is stolen by the boys. This is the real end. The rest is cheating.” According to this school of thought, the remainder of the book trivializes the quest for Jim’s freedom that has motivated the story up to that point. This happens first when Jim becomes an object of Tom Sawyer’s slapstick humor, then when it is revealed that unbeknownst to Huck, the reader, and himself, Jim has already been freed by his benevolent owner, so that the risk we have assumed Jim and Huck to be under all along has been really no risk at all.

Like the critics, our class divided over the question: Did Twain’s ending vitiate the book’s profound critique of racism, as Hemingway’s charge of cheating implied? Cheating in my experience up to then was something students did, an unthinkable act for a famous author. It was a revelation to me that famous authors were capable not only of mistakes but of ones that even lowly undergraduates might be able to point out. When I chose to write my term paper on the dispute over the ending, my instructor suggested I look at several critics on the opposing sides, T. S. Eliot and Lionel Trilling, who defended the ending, and Leo Marx, who sided with Hemingway.

Reading the critics was like picking up where the class discussion had left off, and I gained confidence from recognizing that my classmates and I had had thoughts that, however stumbling our expression of them, were not too far from the thoughts of famous published critics. I went back to the novel again and to my surprise found myself rereading it with an excitement I had never felt before with a serious book. Having the controversy over the ending in mind, I now had some issues to watch out for as I read, issues that reshaped the way I read the earlier chapters as well as the later ones and focused my attention. And having issues to watch out for made it possible not only to concentrate, as I had not been able to do earlier, but to put myself in the text — to read with a sense of personal engagement that I had not felt before. Reading the novel with the voices of the critics running through my mind, I found myself thinking of things that I might say about what I was reading, things that may have belonged partly to the critics but also now belonged to me. It was as if having a stock of things to look for and to say about a literary work had somehow made it possible for me to read one.

One of the critics had argued that what was at issue in the debate over Huckleberry Finn was not just the novel’s value but its cultural significance: If Huckleberry Finn was contradictory or confused in its attitude toward race, then what did that say about the culture that had received the novel as one of its representative cultural documents and had made Twain a folk hero? This critic had also made the intriguing observation — I found out only later it was a critical commonplace at that time — that judgments about the novel’s aesthetic value could not be separated from judgments about its moral substance. I recall taking in both this critic’s arguments and the cadence of the phrases in which they were couched; perhaps it would not be so bad after all to become the sort of person who talked about “cultural contradictions” and the “inseparability of form and content.” Perhaps even mere literary-critical talk could give you a certain power in the real world. As the possibility dawned on me that reading and intellectual discussion might actually have something to do with my real life, I became less embarrassed about using the intellectual formulas.

The Standard Story

It was through exposure to such critical reading and discussion over a period of time that I came to catch the literary bug, eventually choosing the vocation of teaching. This was not the way it is supposed to happen. In the standard story of academic vocation that we like to tell ourselves, the germ is first planted by an early experience of literature itself. The future teacher is initially inspired by some primary experience of a great book and only subsequently acquires the secondary, derivative skills of critical discussion. A teacher may be involved in instilling this inspiration, but a teacher who seemingly effaces himself or herself before the text. Any premature or excessive acquaintance with secondary critical discourse, and certainly with its sectarian debates, is thought to be a corrupting danger, causing one to lose touch with the primary passion for literature. . . .

The standard story ascribes innocence to the primary experience of literature and sees the secondary experience of professional criticism as corrupting. In my case, however, things had evidently worked the other way around: I had to be corrupted first in order to experience innocence. It was only when I was introduced to a critical debate about Huckleberry Finn that my helplessness in the face of the novel abated and I could experience a personal reaction to it. Getting into immediate contact with the text was for me a curiously triangular business; I could not do it directly but needed a conversation of other readers to give me the issues and terms that made it possible to respond.

As I think back on it now, it was as if the critical conversation I needed had up to then been withheld from me, on the ground that it could only interfere with my direct access to literature itself. The assumption was that leaving me alone with literary texts themselves, uncontaminated by the interpretations and theories of professional critics, would enable me to get on the closest possible terms with those texts. But being alone with the texts only left me feeling bored and helpless, since I had no language with which to make them mine. On the one hand, I was being asked to speak a foreign language — literary criticism — while on the other hand, I was being protected from that language, presumably for my own safety.

The moral I draw from this experience is that our ability to read well depends more than we think on our ability to talk well about what we read. Our assumptions about what is “primary” and “secondary” in the reading process blind us to what actually goes on. Many literate people learned certain ways of talking about books so long ago that they have forgotten they ever had to learn them. These people therefore fail to understand the reading problems of the struggling students who have still not acquired a critical vocabulary.

How typical my case was is hard to say, but many of the students I teach seem to have grown up as the same sort of nonintellectual, nonbookish person I was, and they seem to view literature with some of the same aversions, fears, and anxieties. That is why I like to think it is an advantage for a teacher to know what it feels like to grow up being indifferent to literature and intimidated by criticism and what it feels like to overcome a resistance to talking like an intellectual.

A Practice Sequence: Composing a Literacy Narrative

A literacy narrative — a firsthand, personal account about reading or composing — is a well-established genre that is popular both inside and outside the academy. Coates’s, Rodriguez’s, and Graff’s, autobiographical stories dealing with aspects of how they became literate and their relationship with reading and writing are literacy narratives. Coates’s narrative is part of Between the World and Me, a memoir that examines racial identity and the politics of race in the United States. Rodriguez’s narrative is part of Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, a memoir that explores the politics of language in American culture. Graff ’s narrative is embedded in his Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education, which, as the subtitle suggests, presents arguments and proposals for altering educational practices.

We would like you to write your own literacy narrative. The following practice sequence suggests some strategies for doing so.

1. Reflect on your experiences as a reader. Spend some time jotting down answers to these questions (not necessarily in this order) or to other related questions that occur to you as you write.

· Can you recall the time when you first began to read?

· What are the main types of reading you do? Why?

· How would you describe or characterize yourself as a reader?

· Is there one moment or event that encapsulates who you are as a reader?

·

· What are your favorite books, authors, and types of books? Why are they favorites?

· In what ways has reading changed you for the better? For the worse?

· What is the most important thing you’ve learned from reading?

· Have you ever learned something important from reading, only to discover later that it wasn’t true or sufficient? Explain.

2. Write your literacy narrative, focusing on at least one turning point, at least one moment of recognition or lesson learned. Write no fewer than two pages but no more than five pages. See where your story arc takes you. What do you conclude about your own “growing into literacy”?

3. Then start a conversation about literacy. Talk with some other people about their experiences. You might talk with some classmates — and not necessarily those in your writing class — about their memories of becoming literate. You might interview some people you grew up with — a parent, a sibling, a best friend — about their memories of you as a reader and writer and about their own memories of becoming literate. Compare their memories to your own. Did you all have similar experiences? How were they different? Do you see things the same way? Then write down your impressions and what you think you may have learned.

4. Recast your literacy narrative, incorporating some of the insights you gathered from other people. How does your original narrative change? What new things now have to be accounted for?

5. Like Graff, who takes his own experience as a starting point for proposing new educational policies, can you imagine your insights having larger implications? Explain. Do you think what you’ve learned from reading Coates’s, Rodriguez’s, and Graff ’s literacy narratives has implications for the ways reading is taught in school?

From Reading as a Writer to Writing as a Reader

Reading for class and then writing an essay might seem to be separate tasks, but reading is the first step in the writing process. In this chapter we present methods that will help you read more effectively and move from reading to writing your own college essays. These methods will lead you to understand a writer’s purpose in responding to a situation, the motivation for asserting a claim in an essay and entering a particular conversation with a particular audience.

Much if not all of the writing you do in college will be based on what you have read. This is the case, for example, when you summarize a philosopher’s theory, analyze the significance of an experiment in psychology, or, perhaps, synthesize different and conflicting points of view in making an argument about race and academic achievement in sociology.

As we maintain throughout this book, writing and reading are inextricably linked to each other. Good academic writers are also good critical readers: They leave their mark on what they read, identifying issues, making judgments about the truth of what writers tell them, and evaluating the adequacy of the evidence in support of an argument. This is where writing and inquiry begin: understanding our own position relative to the scholarly conversations we want to enter. Moreover, critical readers try to understand the strategies that writers use to persuade readers to agree with them. At times, these are strategies that we can adapt in advancing our arguments.

READING AS AN ACT OF COMPOSING: ANNOTATING

Leaving your mark on the page — annotating — is your first act of composing. When you mark the pages of a text, you are reading critically, engaging with the ideas of others, questioning and testing those ideas, and inquiring into their significance. Critical reading is sometimes called active reading to distinguish it from memorization, when you just read for the main idea so that you can “spit it back out on a test.” When you read actively and critically, you bring your knowledge, experiences, and interests to a text, so that you can respond to the writer, continuing the conversation the writer has begun.

Experienced college readers don’t try to memorize a text or assume they must understand it completely before they respond to it. Instead they read strategically, looking for the writer’s claims, for the writer’s key ideas and terms, and for connections with key ideas and terms in other texts. They also read to discern what conversation the writer has entered, and how the writer’s argument is connected to those he or she makes reference to.

When you annotate a text, your notes in the margins might address the following questions:

What arguments is this author responding to?

Is the issue relevant or significant?

How do I know that what the author says is true?

Is the author’s evidence legitimate? Sufficient?

Can I think of an exception to the author’s argument?

What would the counterarguments be?

Good readers ask the same kinds of questions of every text they read, considering not just what a writer says (the content), but how he or she says it given the writer’s purpose and audience.

The marks you leave on a page might indicate your own ideas and questions, patterns you see emerging, links to other texts, even your gut response to the writer’s argument — agreement, dismay, enthusiasm, confusion. They reveal your own thought processes as you read and signal that you are entering the conversation. In effect, they are traces of your own responding voice.

Developing your own system of marking or annotating pages can help you feel confident when you sit down with a new reading for your classes. Based on our students’ experiences, we offer this practical tip: Although wide-tipped highlighters have their place in some classes, it is more useful to read with a pen or pencil in your hand, so that you can do more than draw a bar of color through words or sentences you find important. Experienced readers write their responses to a text in the margins, using personal codes (boxing key words, for example), writing out definitions of words they have looked up, drawing lines to connect ideas on facing pages, or writing notes to themselves (“Connect this to Edmundson on consumer culture”; “Hirsch would disagree big time — see his ideas on memorization in primary grades”; “You call THIS evidence?!”). These notes help you get started on your own writing assignments.

Annotating your readings benefits you twice. First, it is easier to participate in class discussions if you have already marked passages that are important, confusing, or linked to specific passages in other texts you have read. It’s a sure way to avoid that sinking feeling you get when you return to pages you read the night before but now can’t remember at all. Second, by marking key ideas in a text, noting your ideas about them, and making connections to key ideas in other texts, you have begun the process of writing an essay. When you start writing the first draft of your essay, you can quote the passages you have already marked and explain what you find significant about them based on the notes you have already made to yourself. You can make the connections to other texts in the paragraphs of your own essay that you have already begun to make on the pages of your textbook. If you mark your texts effectively, you’ll never be at a loss when you sit down to write the first draft of an essay.

Let’s take a look at how one of our students marked several paragraphs of Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton’s American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (1993). In the excerpt below, the student underlines what she believes is important information and begins to create an outline of the authors’ main points.

The first paragraph reads as follows:

“The spatial isolation of black Americans was achieved by a conjunction of racist attitudes, private behaviors, and institutional practices that disenfranchised blacks from urban housing markets and led to the creation of the ghetto. Discrimination in employment exacerbated black poverty and limited the economic potential for integration, and black residential mobility was systematically blocked by pervasive discrimination and white avoidance of neighborhoods containing blacks. The walls of the ghetto were buttressed after 1950 by government programs that promoted slum clearance and relocated displaced ghetto residents into multi-story, high-density housing projects.”

In this paragraph, the words “racist attitudes,” “private behaviors,” “institutional practices,” “ghetto,” “the walls of the ghetto were buttressed after 1950,” and “relocated displaced ghetto residents into multi-story, high-density housing projects” are underlined.

The annotation for the underlined words, “racist attitudes,” “private behaviors,” and “institutional practices” reads, “1. racist attitudes 2. private behaviors 3. & institutional practices lead to ghettos (authors’ claim?)”

An arrow emerging from the word “housing” reads, “Ghetto = “multistory, high-density housing projects.” Post-1950.”

The annotation for the sentence, “The walls of the ghetto were buttressed after 1950 by government programs that promoted slum clearance and relocated displaced ghetto residents into multi-story, high-density housing projects” reads, “remember this happening where I grew up, but I didn’t know the government was responsible. Is this what happened in There Are No Children Here?”

The second paragraph reads as follows:

In theory, this self-reinforcing cycle of prejudice, discrimination, and segregation was broken during the 1960s by a growing rejection of racist sentiments by whites and a series of court decisions and federal laws that banned discrimination in public life. (1) The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed racial discrimination in employment, (2) the Fair Housing Act of 1968 banned discrimination in housing, and (3) the Gautreaux and Shannon court decisions prohibited public authorities from placing housing projects exclusively in black neighborhoods. Despite these changes, however, the nation’s largest black communities remained as segregated as ever in 1980. Indeed, many urban areas displayed a pattern of intense racial isolation that could only be described as hypersegregation.” In this paragraph, the words “(1) The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed racial discrimination in employment, (2) the Fair Housing Act of 1968 banned discrimination in housing, and (3) the Gautreaux and Shannon court decisions prohibited public authorities from placing housing projects,” “nation’s largest black communities remained as segregated as ever in 1980,” and “hypersegregation” are underlined.

An annotation pointing to “nation’s largest black communities remained as segregated as ever in 1980” reads, “Authors say situation of “spatial isolation” remains despite court decisions. Does it?”

The paragraph reads as follows: “Although the racial climate of the United States improved outwardly during the 1970s, racism still restricted the residential freedom of black Americans; it just did so in less blatant ways. In the aftermath of the civil rights revolution, few whites voiced openly racist sentiments; realtors no longer refused outright to rent or sell to blacks; and few local governments went on record to oppose public housing projects because they would contain blacks. This lack of overt racism, however, did not mean that prejudice and discrimination had ended.” In this paragraph the words “racism still restricted the residential freedom of black Americans” are underlined and an annotation pointing toward it reads, “Subtler racism, not on public record.” The annotation for this paragraph reads, “Lack of enforcement of Civil Rights Act? Fair Housing Act? Gautreaux and Shannon? Why? Why not?”

Notice how the student’s annotations help her understand the argument the authors make.

She numbers the three key factors (racist attitudes, private behaviors, and institutional practices) that influenced the formation of ghettos in the United States.

She identifies the situation that motivates the authors’ analysis: the extent to which “the spatial isolation of black Americans” still exists despite laws and court decisions designed to end residential segregation.

She makes connections to her own experience and to another book she has read.

By understanding the authors’ arguments and making these connections, the student begins the writing process. She also sets the stage for her own research, for examining the authors’ claim that residential segregation still exists.

READING AS A WRITER: ANALYZING A TEXT RHETORICALLY

When you study how writers influence readers through language, you are analyzing the rhetoric (available means of persuasion) of what you read. When you identify a writer’s purpose for responding to a situation by composing an essay that puts forth claims meant to sway a particular audience, you are performing a rhetorical analysis. Such an analysis entails identifying the features of an argument to better understand how the argument works to persuade a reader:

· how the writer sees the situation that calls for a response in writing

· the writer’s purpose for writing

· intended audience

· kinds of claims

· types of evidence

We discuss each of these elements as we analyze the following preface from E. D. Hirsch’s book Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (1987). Formerly a professor of English, Hirsch has long been interested in educational reform. That interest developed from his (and others’) perception that today’s students do not know as much as students did in the past. Although Hirsch wrote the book decades ago, many observers still believe that the contemporary problems of illiteracy and poverty can be traced to a lack of cultural literacy.

Read the preface. You may want to mark it with your own questions and responses, and then consider them in light of our analysis (following the preface) of Hirsch’s rhetorical situation, purpose, claims, and audience.

E. D. HIRSCH JR.

Preface to Cultural Literacy

E. D. Hirsch Jr., a retired English professor, is the author of many acclaimed books, including The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them (1996) and The Knowledge Deficit (2006). His book Cultural Literacy was a best seller in 1987 and had a profound effect on the focus of education in the late 1980s and 1990s.

Rousseau points out the facility with which children lend themselves to our false methods: . . .“The apparent ease with which children learn is their ruin.”

— JOHN DEWEY

There is no matter what children should learn first, any more than what leg you should put into your breeches first. Sir, you may stand disputing which is best to put in first, but in the meantime your backside is bare. Sir, while you stand considering which of two things you should teach your child first, another boy has learn’t ’em both.

— SAMUEL JOHNSON

To be culturally literate is to possess the basic information needed to thrive in the modern world. The breadth of that information is great, extending over the major domains of human activity from sports to science. It is by no means confined to “culture” narrowly understood as an acquaintance with the arts. Nor is it confined to one social class. Quite the contrary. Cultural literacy constitutes the only sure avenue of opportunity for disadvantaged children, the only reliable way of combating the social determinism that now condemns them to remain in the same social and educational condition as their parents. That children from poor and illiterate homes tend to remain poor and illiterate is an unacceptable failure of our schools, one which has occurred not because our teachers are inept but chiefly because they are compelled to teach a fragmented curriculum based on faulty educational theories. Some say that our schools by themselves are powerless to change the cycle of poverty and illiteracy. I do not agree. They can break the cycle, but only if they themselves break fundamentally with some of the theories and practices that education professors and school administrators have followed over the past fifty years.

Although the chief beneficiaries of the educational reforms advocated in this book will be disadvantaged children, these same reforms will also enhance the literacy of children from middle-class homes. The educational goal advocated is that of mature literacy for all our citizens.

The connection between mature literacy and cultural literacy may already be familiar to those who have closely followed recent discussions of education. Shortly after the publication of my essay “Cultural Literacy,” Dr. William Bennett, then chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities and subsequently secretary of education in President Ronald Reagan’s second administration, championed its ideas. This endorsement from an influential person of conservative views gave my ideas some currency, but such an endorsement was not likely to recommend the concept to liberal thinkers, and in fact the idea of cultural literacy has been attacked by some liberals on the assumption that I must be advocating a list of great books that every child in the land should be forced to read.

But those who examine the Appendix to this book will be able to judge for themselves how thoroughly mistaken such an assumption is. Very few specific titles appear on the list, and they usually appear as words, not works, because they represent writings that culturally literate people have read about but haven’t read. Das Kapital is a good example. Cultural literacy is represented not by a prescriptive list of books but rather by a descriptive list of the information actually possessed by literate Americans. My aim in this book is to contribute to making that information the possession of all Americans.

The importance of such widely shared information can best be understood if I explain briefly how the idea of cultural literacy relates to currently prevailing theories of education. The theories that have dominated American education for the past fifty years stem ultimately from Jean Jacques Rousseau, who believed that we should encourage the natural development of young children and not impose adult ideas upon them before they can truly understand them. Rousseau’s conception of education as a process of natural development was an abstract generalization meant to apply to all children in any time or place: to French children of the eighteenth century or to Japanese or American children of the twentieth century. He thought that a child’s intellectual and social skills would develop naturally without regard to the specific content of education. His content-neutral conception of educational development has long been triumphant in American schools of education and has long dominated the “developmental,” content-neutral curricula of our elementary schools.

In the first decades of this century, Rousseau’s ideas powerfully influenced the educational conceptions of John Dewey, the writer who has the most deeply affected modern American educational theory and practice. Dewey’s clearest and, in his time, most widely read book on education, Schools of Tomorrow, acknowledges Rousseau as the chief source of his educational principles. The first chapter of Dewey’s book carries the telling title “Education as Natural Development” and is sprinkled with quotations from Rousseau. In it Dewey strongly seconds Rousseau’s opposition to the mere accumulation of information.

Development emphasizes the need of intimate and extensive personal acquaintance with a small number of typical situations with a view to mastering the way of dealing with the problems of experience, not the piling up of information.

Believing that a few direct experiences would suffice to develop the skills that children require, Dewey assumed that early education need not be tied to specific content. He mistook a half-truth for the whole. He placed too much faith in children’s ability to learn general skills from a few typical experiences and too hastily rejected “the piling up of information.” Only by piling up specific, communally shared information can children learn to participate in complex cooperative activities with other members of their community.

This old truth, recently rediscovered, requires a countervailing theory of education that once again stresses the importance of specific information in early and late schooling. The corrective theory might be described as an anthropological theory of education, because it is based on the anthropological observation that all human communities are founded upon specific shared information. Americans are different from Germans, who in turn are different from Japanese, because each group possesses specifically different cultural knowledge. In an anthropological perspective, the basic goal of education in a human community is acculturation, the transmission to children of the specific information shared by the adults of the group or polis.

Plato, that other great educational theorist, believed that the specific contents transmitted to children are by far the most important elements of education. In The Republic he makes Socrates ask rhetorically, “Shall we carelessly allow children to hear any casual tales which may be devised by casual persons, and to receive into their minds ideas for the most part the very opposite of those which we shall wish them to have when they are grown up?” Plato offered good reasons for being concerned with the specific contents of schooling, one of them ethical: “For great is the issue at stake, greater than appears — whether a person is to be good or bad.”

Time has shown that there is much truth in the durable educational theories of both Rousseau and Plato. But even the greatest thinkers, being human, see mainly in one direction at a time, and no thinkers, however profound, can foresee the future implications of their ideas when they are translated into social policy. The great test of social ideas is the crucible of history, which, after a time, usually discloses a one-sidedness in the best of human generalizations. History, not superior wisdom, shows us that neither the content-neutral curriculum of Rousseau and Dewey nor the narrowly specified curriculum of Plato is adequate to the needs of a modern nation.

Plato rightly believed that it is natural for children to learn an adult culture, but too confidently assumed that philosophy could devise the one best culture. (Nonetheless, we should concede to Plato that within our culture we have an obligation to choose and promote our best traditions.) On the other side, Rousseau and Dewey wrongly believed that adult culture is “unnatural” to young children. Rousseau, Dewey, and their present-day disciples have not shown an adequate appreciation of the need for transmission of specific cultural information.

In contrast to the theories of Plato and Rousseau, an anthropological theory of education accepts the naturalness as well as the relativity of human cultures. It deems it neither wrong nor unnatural to teach young children adult information before they fully understand it. The anthropological view stresses the universal fact that a human group must have effective communications to function effectively, that effective communications require shared culture, and that shared culture requires transmission of specific information to children. Literacy, an essential aim of education in the modern world, is no autonomous, empty skill but depends upon literate culture. Like any other aspect of acculturation, literacy requires the early and continued transmission of specific information. Dewey was deeply mistaken to disdain “accumulating information in the form of symbols.” Only by accumulating shared symbols, and the shared information that the symbols represent, can we learn to communicate effectively with one another in our national community.

Now let’s take a look at the steps for doing a rhetorical analysis.

◼ Identify the Situation

The situation is what moves a writer to write. To understand what motivated Hirsch to write, we need look no further than the situation he identifies in the first paragraph of the preface: “the social determinism that now condemns [disadvantaged children] to remain in the same social and educational condition as their parents.” Hirsch wants to make sure his readers are aware of the problem so that they will be motivated to read his argument (and take action). He presents as an urgent problem the situation of disadvantaged children, an indication of what is at stake for the writer and for the readers of the argument. For Hirsch, this situation needs to change.

The urgency of a writer’s argument is not always triggered by a single situation; often it is multifaceted. Again in the first paragraph, Hirsch identifies a second concern when he states that poverty and illiteracy reflect “an unacceptable failure of our schools, one which has occurred not because our teachers are inept but chiefly because they are compelled to teach a fragmented curriculum based on faulty educational theories.” When he introduces a second problem, Hirsch helps us see the interconnected and complex nature of the situations authors confront in academic writing.

◼ Identify the Writer’s Purpose

The purpose for writing an essay may be to respond to a particular situation; it also can be what a writer is trying to accomplish. Specifically, what does the writer want readers to do? Does the writer want us to think about an issue, to change our opinions? Does the writer want to make us aware of a problem that we may not have recognized? Does the writer advocate for some type of change? Or is some combination of all three at work?

Hirsch’s main purpose is to promote educational reforms that will produce a higher degree of literacy for all citizens. He begins his argument with a broad statement about the importance of cultural literacy: “Cultural literacy constitutes the only sure avenue of opportunity for disadvantaged children, the only reliable way of combating the social determinism that now condemns them to remain in the same social and educational condition as their parents” (para. 1). As his argument unfolds, his purpose continues to unfold as well. He identifies the schools as a source of the problem and suggests how they must change to promote literacy:

Some say that our schools by themselves are powerless to change the cycle of poverty and illiteracy. I do not agree. They can break the cycle, but only if they themselves break fundamentally with some of the theories and practices that education professors and school administrators have followed over the past fifty years. (para. 1)

The “educational goal,” Hirsch declares at the end of paragraph 2, is “mature literacy for all our citizens.” To reach that goal, he insists, education must break with the past. In paragraphs 5 through 11, he cites the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Dewey, and Plato, tracing what he sees as the educational legacies of the past. Finally, in the last paragraph of the excerpt, Hirsch describes an “anthropological view, . . . the universal fact that a human group must have effective communications to function effectively, that effective communications require shared culture, and that shared culture requires transmission of specific information to children.” It is here, Hirsch argues, in the “transmission of specific information to children,” that schools must do a better job.

◼ Identify the Writer’s Claims

Claims are assertions that authors must justify and support with evidence and good reasons. The thesis, or main claim, is the controlling idea that crystallizes a writer’s main point, helping readers track the idea as it develops throughout the essay. A writer’s purpose clearly influences the way he or she crafts the main claim of an argument, the way he or she presents all assertions and evidence.

Hirsch’s main claim is that “cultural literacy constitutes the only sure avenue of opportunity for disadvantaged children, the only reliable way of combating the social determinism that now condemns them to remain in the same social and educational condition as their parents” (para. 1). Notice that his thesis also points to a solution: making cultural literacy the core of public school curricula. Here we distinguish the main claim, or thesis, from the other claims or assertions that Hirsch makes. For example, at the very outset, Hirsch states that “to be culturally literate is to possess the basic information needed to thrive in the modern world.” Although this is an assertion that requires support, it is a minor claim; it does not shape what Hirsch writes in the remainder of his essay. His main claim, or thesis, is really his call for reform.

◼ Identify the Writer’s Audience

A writer’s language can help us identify his or her audience, the readers whose opinions and actions the writer hopes to influence or change. In Hirsch’s text, words and phrases like social determinism, cycle of poverty and illiteracy, educational reforms, prescriptive, and anthropological indicate that Hirsch believes his audience is well educated. References to Plato, Socrates, Rousseau, and Dewey also indicate the level of knowledge Hirsch expects of his readers.

Finally, the way the preface unfolds suggests that Hirsch is writing for an audience that is familiar with a certain genre, or type, of writing: the formal argument. Notice how the author begins with a statement of the situation and then asserts his position. The very fact that he includes a preface speaks to the formality of his argument. Hirsch’s language, his references, and the structure of the document all suggest that he is very much in conversation with people who are experienced and well-educated readers.

More specifically, the audience Hirsch invokes is made up of people who are concerned about illiteracy in the United States and the kind of social determinism that appears to condemn the educationally disadvantaged to poverty. Hirsch also acknowledges directly “those who have closely followed recent discussions of education,” including the conservative William Bennett and liberal thinkers who might be provoked by Bennett’s advocacy of Hirsch’s ideas (para. 3). Moreover, Hirsch appears to assume that his readers have achieved “mature literacy,” even if they are not actually “culturally literate.” He is writing for an audience that not only is well educated but also is deeply interested in issues of education as they relate to social policy.

Steps to Analyzing a Text Rhetorically

1. Identify the situation. What motivates the writer to write?

2. Identify the writer’s purpose. What does the writer want readers to do or think about?

3. Identify the writer’s claims. What is the writer’s main claim? What minor claims does he or she make?

4. Identify the writer’s audience. What do you know about the writer’s audience? What does the writer’s language imply about the readers? What about the writer’s references? The structure of the essay?

Hirsch’s writings on cultural literacy have inspired and provoked many responses to the conversation he initiated decades ago. Eugene F. Provenzo’s book Critical Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, published in 2005, is a fairly recent one. Provenzo examines the source of Hirsch’s ideas, his critiques of scholars like John Dewey, the extent to which Hirsch’s argument is based on sound research, and the implications of Hirsch’s notion of cultural literacy for teaching and learning. Despite its age, Hirsch’s book remains relevant in discussions about the purpose of education, demonstrating how certain works become touchstones and the ways academic and cultural conversations can be sustained over time.

A Practice Sequence: Analyzing a Text Rhetorically

To practice the strategies of rhetorical analysis, read “Hirsch’s Desire for a National Curriculum,” an excerpt from Eugene F. Provenzo’s book, using these questions as a guide:

· What motivates Provenzo as a writer?

· What does he want readers to think about?

· What is Provenzo’s main point?

· Given the language Provenzo uses, who do you think his main audience is?

EUGENE F. PROVENZO JR.

Hirsch’s Desire for a National Curriculum

Eugene F. Provenzo Jr. is a professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning in the School of Education at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. His career as a researcher has been interdisciplinary in nature. Throughout his work, his primary focus has been on education as a social and cultural phenomenon. One of his prime concerns has been the role of the teacher in American society. He is also interested in the impact of computers on contemporary children, education, and culture. He is author or coauthor of numerous books, including Teaching, Learning, and Schooling: A Twenty-First Century Perspective (2001); Internet and Online Research for Teachers (Third Edition, 2004); and Observing in Schools: A Guide for Students in Teacher Education (2005).

To a large extent, Hirsch, in his efforts as an educational reformer, wants to establish a national curriculum.

Our elementary schools are not only dominated by the content-neutral ideas of Rousseau and Dewey, they are also governed by approximately sixteen thousand independent school districts. We have viewed this dispersion of educational authority as an insurmountable obstacle to altering the fragmentation of the school curriculum even when we have questioned that fragmentation. We have permitted school policies that have shrunk the body of information that Americans share and these policies have caused our national literacy to decline.

This is an interesting argument when interpreted in a conservative political context. While calling for greater local control, Hirsch and other conservatives call for a curriculum that is controlled not at the state and local level, but at the national level by the federal government.

Putting contradictions like this aside, the question arises as to whether or not Hirsch even has a viable curriculum. In an early review of Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy, Hazel Whitman Hertzberg criticized the book and its list of 5,000 things every American needs to know for its fragmentation. As she explained:

Hirsch’s remedy for curricular fragmentation looks suspiciously like more fragmentation. Outside of the dubious claim that his list represents what literate people know, there is nothing that holds it together besides its arrangement in alphabetical order. Subject-matter organization is ignored. It is not hard to imagine how Hirsch’s proposal would have been greeted by educational neoconservatives had it been made by one of those professors of education who he charges are responsible for the current state of cultural illiteracy.

Hertzberg wonders what Hirsch’s “hodgepodge of miscellaneous, arbitrary, and often trivial information” would look like if it were put into a coherent curriculum.

In 1988 Hirsch did in fact establish the Core Knowledge Foundation, which had as its purpose the design of a national curriculum. Called the “Core Knowledge Sequence,” the sequence offered a curriculum in six content areas: history, geography, mathematics, science, language arts, and fine arts. Hirsch’s curriculum was intended to represent approximately half of the total curriculum for K–6 schools. Subsequent curriculum revisions include a curriculum for grades seven and eight as well as one at the preschool level.

Several hundred schools across the United States currently use Hirsch’s model. A national conference is held each year, which draws several thousand people. In books like What Your First Grader Needs to Know (1991) as well as A First Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: What Our Children Need to Know (1989) and The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy (1993), along with the Core Knowledge Sequence, one finds a fairly conservative but generally useful curriculum that conforms to much of the content already found in local school systems around the country.

Hirsch seems not to recognize that there indeed is a national curriculum, one whose standards are set by local communities through their acceptance and rejection of textbooks and by national accreditation groups ranging from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics to the National Council for Social Studies Teachers and the National Council of Teachers of English. One need only look at standards in different subject areas in school districts across the country to realize the extent to which there is indeed a national curriculum.

Whether the current curriculum in use in the schools across the country is adequate is of course open to debate. Creating any curriculum is by definition a deeply political act, and is, or should be, subject to considerable negotiation and discussion at any level. But to act as though there is not a de facto national curriculum is simply inaccurate. First graders in most school districts across the country learn about the weather and the seasons, along with more basic skills like adding and subtracting. Students do not learn to divide before they learn how to add or multiply. Local and state history is almost universally introduced for the first time in either third or fourth grade. It is reintroduced in most states at the seventh or eighth grade levels. Algebra is typically taught in the ninth grade. Traditions, developmental patterns of students, textbook content, and national subject standards combine to create a fairly uniform national curriculum.

Hirsch’s complaint that there is no national curriculum is not motivated by a desire to establish one but rather a desire to establish a curriculum that reflects his cultural and ideological orientation. It is a sophisticated assault on more inclusive and diverse models of curriculum and culture — one that represents a major battle in the culture wars of the last twenty years in the United States.