Academic Writing as Conversation

Writing as Communication

Many students write because their teacher has assigned a topic and because they want to pass a class. Often, students will use the format of the five-paragraph essay–not because it’s the best way to make their argument–but because the teacher said that it’s the correct–maybe even the only way–to write an essay. The student may or may not care about what they are writing or whether their writing made any impact on the reader.

But this isn’t usually how communication works.

Normally, people don’t write or communicate without a reason. Usually, people choose to communicate because they are responding to some specific situation. The five-paragraph essay or any single set of “rules” about how to write an essay ignores this very important idea about writing. Because of this, essays written using the five-paragraph format can often become awkward and repetitive.

Rather than learning a set of hard-and-fast rules that you have to follow, you should learn strategies that you can apply to a variety of writing tasks and situations so that your writing is more effective. Most of all, you should operate under the following assumption:

Academic writing is no different than any other type of communication. It requires attention to the audience, purpose, and context that produces it.

No one assigns scholars and researchers essays for homework. Instead, professional academic writers use their writing in scholarly journals and books because they want to communicate complex arguments to specific audiences. No one forces them to do this. They choose to write in order to join a larger conversation that they believe is important and urgent. They write essays, articles, and books to join the conversations already happening in their discipline because they have an important idea that needs to be shared.

Your university courses will ask you to do more than write essays that simply repeat what you have learned. Instead, university courses will require you to become scholars-in-training. Through reading and research, you will learn about topics in the discipline and “listen” to the conversations already happening. Through writing research-based argumentative essays, you will join those conversations about knowledge and add to them. As literary scholars Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein put it,

“. . . the best academic writing has one underlying feature: it is deeply engaged in some way with other people’s views. Too often, however, academic writing is taught as a process of saying “true” or “smart” things in a vacuum, as if it were possible to argue effectively without being in conversation with someone else. . . .  To make an impact as a writer, then, you need to do more than make statements that are logical, well supported, and consistent. You must also find a way of entering into conversation with the views of others” (Graff and Birkenstein, p. 3-4).

Your job as a novice academic writer is to learn how to master the moves of the academic conversation.

The Burkean Parlour Metaphor

If you’re still confused about what we mean when we say “join the conversation,” the Burkean Parlour Metaphor might help clarify things.

Kenneth Burke was a 20th-century philosopher and rhetorician who argued that research is always part of an ongoing and unending conversation. When you begin to research a topic, you should do so with the understanding that many voices have already come before you and that many more will continue to come after. When you write your own essays, you are joining that conversation.

Watch the Burkean Parlour Method explained (1:29) to learn more.

Here’s the original quote from Burke’s text The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action.

“Imagine that you enter a parlour. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.” (Burke, 1973)

A “parlour” is an old-fashioned term for a gathering space or living room. The Burkean Parlour metaphor asks students to think about their writing as part of something larger than a single essay or single project. This metaphor shows that the strongest academic writing never stands on its own. Every essay must fit into a larger conversation. As a student, researcher, and writer, you are not inventing or starting the conversation. The parlour already exists. The conversation is already happening. Ignoring those important facts will result in writing that feels out of touch, overly simplistic, or confused.

You can think of the metaphorical parlour as a larger, more general space. Each academic discipline or field of study could be seen as a “parlour.” For example, nursing or computer science are each subjects that have their own conversations. You wouldn’t walk into a nursing class and try to write an essay about computer science. Or, the metaphorical parlour might represent a more specific topic within a discipline or field of study, such as the history of a specific battle or the study of a type of plant.

Parlours are gathering spaces, not lecture halls. In a crowded parlour, you would usually find groups of people talking and conversing with one another, rather than a single voice. The individual groups of conversations represent the subtopics or themes that a researcher might elect to focus on.

The idea of the Burkean Parlour as a metaphor for research might challenge your previous experiences with school research projects. In the past, you may have experienced research assignments as one-and-done reports about fact-based information. Maybe you had to do a report on a certain historical event or social science concept. Maybe you “listened in” to the conversations and then reported on what you discovered. Maybe you didn’t realize that other conversations were happening about the topic.

Joining the Conversation

Learning to write academically is a process of learning the right moves to make in a conversation about knowledge. Academic writers must master how to position themselves –their authorial stance–as well as how to integrate the voices of others in their texts.

Authorial stance

As we join the conversation, we must consider how to position our own thoughts and analysis–our authorial stance. Positioning ourselves in our texts can be very difficult in academic writing. Authors in different disciplines represent their roles as knowledge creators and writers differently. Some disciplines, like the sciences, deemphasize the researcher’s role in the production of knowledge. However, in some social sciences and humanities disciplines, researchers openly explore their positions and points of view because they believe that it is important to explicitly confront potential biases. These differing perspectives on the role of the researcher in knowledge creation are reflected in how disciplinary writers position themselves in their texts. For instance, writers in the science disciplines may be hesitant to use the first-person pronoun “I,” whereas writers in the social sciences and humanities may not be.

You can learn strategies to reflect your authorial stance in the chapter “Mastering Stance and Engagement in Academic Writing.” [hyperlink]

Integrating the voices of others

In academic writing, we almost always incorporate the voices of other scholars and experts into our texts–this is one of the key features of academic writing. You likely already know some of the moves involved in integrating the voices of others in your academic writing: summarizing, paraphrasing, and quoting.

Different disciplines have different strategies for incorporating sources. For instance, scientists rarely quote directly; instead, they use summaries and paraphrasing. On the other hand, humanities and social sciences are more likely to incorporate direct quotations because these researchers are often more interested in language and wording. Keep this in mind as you write assignments in various disciplines.

Summarizing

When summarizing, you put the researcher’s findings or central argument in your own words.

Your summary should also be significantly shorter than the original source.

You can learn more about summarizing in the chapter “Summarizing Sources.” [hyperlink]

Paraphrasing

Paraphrasing means putting a detail from another source into your own words. A paraphrase may be about the same length as the original source, but you will reframe the original idea so that it fits into the context of your writing. You will keep the meaning of the original idea, even though you word it differently.

You can find out more about paraphrasing in the chapter “Paraphrasing Sources.” [hyperlink]

Quoting

When you quote, you take the exact words from a source and include them in your writing. You indicate a direct quote with quotation marks.

Be aware that many novice academic writers use too many direct quotes. Use quotes only when the author of the source uses words in a way that is interesting and engaging. Otherwise, use a paraphrase.

You can find out more about quoting in the chapter “Quoting Sources.” [hyperlink]

Attributions

“Academic Writing as Conversation” by Nancy Bray, Introduction to Academic Writing, University of Alberta, is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0 and was adapted from:

• “Academic Writing as Conversation” by Lisa Dunick, Readings for Writing is in the Public Domain, CC0