Hi, everyone! This is Heather from the Purdue Writing Lab.
In today's video, we're going to be talking about ways to think about how
scholarly writing is a conversation. The goal of this video is to
help new graduate students approach writing as an opportunity to
participate in an ongoing dialogue with other scholars.
Whether you are a new Master student or a PhD student,
you will be asked to make and defend arguments through your writing,
and it is important to recognize how your claims contribute to the existing
scholarship of your field. In this video, we will
discuss strategies to locate and join the current scholarly
conversation by finding relevant and reputable sources, and we will also
discuss ways to build your self-confidence as a graduate student writer
by positioning yourself as an active participant within these academic conversations.
This is the first video in our Fall 2020 vidcast series for new
graduate students, so be sure to check out our upcoming
additions to this Introduction to Graduate Writing Series.
In addition to discussing how writing is a scholarly conversation,
this series will include videos exploring how writing is a process,
a social endeavor, and a disciplinary practice. We hope these videos help you to feel more
prepared and more confident as graduate student writers.
Throughout this video, we will be framing writing as a conversation.
Thinking about writing in this way helps us to recognize how the existing
published work in your academic discipline or field allows scholars
to engage or talk with one another.
Academic discourse allows scholars to respond to each other's arguments,
address and shape publishing trends, and move the conversation forward by
offering new or nuanced insight into a topic.
As with any other type of conversation, academic dialogues play by a specific
set of rules in terms of what is considered appropriate for each discipline or field.
To unpack this idea of conversational rules, let's think about how you might shape
different personal conversations in your everyday life. For example,
imagine how you would describe your weekend activities to your best friend.
Next, think about explaining that same information to a respected elder in your family.
Finally, how would you respond to one of your advisors or professors if they asked
you about your weekend? Even though these three conversations
engage with the same subject matter, how would you navigate those discussions
differently based on your conversation partner? For example, how might your vocabulary change?
How would you address the structure or organization of your story?
Would you change the main focus or content of your story altogether?
Depending on your conversation partner, what assumptions about existing shared
knowledge could you make depending on who you're talking to?
We make these kind of conversational decisions every time we talk to someone.
The goal of this video then is to help you feel more prepared
to translate these skills that you already possess into your own academic writing.
Whether you are writing a seminar paper, a journal article or a chapter for your
thesis or dissertation, you are entering a scholarly conversation governed by
your field's discipline specific rules for a particular type of writing.
These rules or genre conventions establish the norms and standards of a writing project.
Keep in mind that these norms and expectations shift over time.
With that said, this is a friendly reminder to check out our other videos in this series
for new graduate student writers, especially if you would like to learn
more about how writing is disciplinary and how discipline specific writing expectations
shape genre conventions in your field.
Let's continue to break down this idea of genre conventions.
Remember, these shift over time and they establish expectations around things like argument,
structure, and execution, and they establish the expected
citation format and the level of hedging for a particular type of writing. Discipline
specific genre conventions also help shape sentence level factors like
vocabulary, idiom usage, and whether active or passive voice is appropriate for a
particular type of writing. The hope of this video is to help
you figure out how you can better understand your field’s existing scholarly conversation
and genre convention so that you can enter that conversation with success.
The previous slides went through quite a bit of information,
so let's take a few moments to pause and reflect. In a moment, I'm going to ask you to set
a timer for 10 minutes, and to journal about your current
understanding of your field's scholarly conversation.
There are a couple of ways you can approach this reflection time,
and if you don't have all of the answers now, do not fret.
If you don't feel confident answering any of these prompts,
find someone who can help you. After this slide, we'll talk more
about resources and next steps. For now though, let's pause here
and set a 10-minute timer. What do you know about
your field's scholarly expectations? What do you know about the document level,
paragraph level, and sentence level writing expectations in your field?
For example, what citation style are you expected to use?
How are journal articles in your field usually structured?
You can also reflect on your field more broadly here if that's helpful to you.
Who are some of the foundational voices in the existing published conversation?
Who are some of the more recent writers?
Who have continued to shape your field and who inspires your work?
How have those more recent writers gone about challenging or building upon older arguments?
How do scholars in your field organize their arguments altogether?
If you're unsure about any of these questions, again, that's okay.
Make a list of questions you have and make a plan to talk to your advisor,
your course professors or your colleagues about them.
When you're ready, set your timer and start journaling.
We'll continue in a moment.
Welcome back! Now that we've taken some time to reflect on what you already know
about your field’s ongoing scholarly conversation and what questions
you still have, let's talk about ways to actually
locate that conversation that you're going to enter as a graduate student writer.
This is an opportunity to talk to your advisor, meet up with fellow students in your
program who are at least a few semesters ahead of you,
and to comb through your course syllabi. Reading through seminar syllabi can help
you get a sense of major journals in your field, and it can also help you to find other
sources to engage with. It's worth noting here that finding
these resources can provide you with a bibliography that you can use to find
other texts involved with, and considered important to, a particular scholarly conversation
Once you find a reputable article for example, check out the sources listed in that
text reference list. This strategy, sometimes called “source
mining" or “data mining,” helps you to trace a scholarly conversation as you dig
through reference lists. Techniques like these can help you to more easily and
more thoroughly engage with scholarly dialogues. As you navigate through scholarly
conversations, it's important to consider the caliber of your sources.
Many of us have probably heard of peer-reviewed sources before,
but what does this actually mean? The peer review process is a rigorous
process within academic publishing
that aims to elevate the integrity credibility and quality of published works within a field.
Peer-review sources have been vetted by a group of experts within a particular
field and this means that a peer-reviewed source has been assessed
not only by an editor, but also by a panel of anonymous reviewers
made up of esteemed scholars within a particular discipline.
This process is meant to allow scholars to self-regulate
and maintain a high standard of work. If you're looking to better understand the
existing scholarly conversation within your field, finding peer-reviewed sources is a way to ensure
that a particular text is credible.
If you need help finding peer-reviewed works or if you are struggling to find
reputable works that relate to your own research interests,
libraries often have features to help you get started. If you are a Purdue student
for example, one of the best ways to locate an existing scholarly conversation is to
use the “Ask a Librarian” chat feature that is available on our library page or
to schedule a consultation with a reference librarian.
If you're viewing this video from a different institution,
check out the resources available to you through your university.
Once you've found a few journal articles, you might also consider
checking out free online resources provided by the Purdue OWL or Online
Writing Lab to learn more about tools like reverse outlining or genre analysis.
These tools are great ways to make sense of the different components that make up
a published work so that you can more easily produce
those components in your own academic writing.
This is a moment to recognize that writing is a process.
We'll talk more about this in a future video for this new Graduate Student
Writer Series, but for now, keep in mind that locating and working
with academic sources plays a large part of that process. Even
when you're not actively accumulating words on the page, you are
engaging with the writing process each time you work with your sources.
Now that we've talked a bit about locating the scholarly conversation,
let's talk briefly about keeping all of this information organized.
One of the most helpful things you can do for yourself as a new graduate
student is to keep track of your sources now. Down the road when you're preparing your
preliminary exams or prospectus or even a regular seminar paper,
you can save yourself a lot of headaches by keeping track of your sources.
Citation managers like Zotero or Endnote help you to generate
proper citations for your sources and even more helpful, they allow you to keep
track of the different texts you're engaging with throughout your coursework.
As you start to keep track of your sources, you might find that you are
engaging with the same source across multiple occasions, course discussions,
research projects and so on.
Here we can start to think about how texts move through scholarly dialogues
and serve the conversation differently depending on how you choose to use that text.
Citation managers also often allow you to annotate your sources
so that you can look back on a particular source later
and have notes to remember the main argument and significance of that text.
Creating an annotation that's even just three or four quick sentences
can help make a huge difference down the road when you're trying to reflect back
on a collection of research. Annotations should be brief
and they should offer a clear overview of the text's main argument or
contribution to a scholarly conversation. You might also use your annotations to
assess how a particular source relates to other texts in your bibliography.
For those of you affiliated with Purdue, our library has “libguides”
or library guides dedicated to helping you navigate different citation managers.
Additionally, the Purdue Writing Lab consults with Purdue writers about
citation usage and management all the time, so reach out to us.
Play around and see what works best for you. Again, if you're feeling lost, reach
out to a librarian or schedule an appointment at your local writing center.
What resources are available to you through your university or community?
We have covered a lot of information so far, so let's slow things down a bit
and go over some general do's and don'ts about how to enter a scholarly conversation.
First, do seek feedback from multiple outside readers.
This is a friendly reminder to those of you at Purdue that the Writing Lab is
here to help writers of all levels. Strong writers benefit
from working with the Lab, too. Next, use proper citations.
Although citation guidelines will shift over time, it's helpful to establish
a base of understanding sooner rather than later.
If you need help, try exploring Zotero or Endnote.
It's also essential to synthesize information and draw
connections between your sources. To successfully enter a scholarly conversation,
you need to enter with an actual understanding of the existing conversation.
It's crucial here to showcase your comprehension and retention of key
concepts, but you won't just be repeating what everyone else has already said.
Remember that having a conversation with someone involves listening to
and soliciting information from someone of course, but it also involves you
contributing something
to the dialogue as well. If you are not contributing to a discussion,
that exchange becomes more of a lecture than a conversation.
Look for gaps or limitations or lingering questions
in the existing conversation and attempt to address those gaps in your own work.
It's also appropriate to posit critiques and ask critical questions in your work.
After all, points of dissent are what move academic conversations
forward. Ask for things to avoid in your academic writing.
Resist the urge to be overly formal or casual in your work. Again, explore the
existing conversation to get a sense of appropriate tone,
word choice, and phrasing patterns. Next, avoid generalizations or making
sweeping statements in your work. Instead, be specific in your writing
and stay within the scope of your project. You won't be demonstrating everything you
know in any particular piece of writing.
Our next point here might feel obvious, but it's one we still need to talk about.
As you enter a scholarly conversation. Do not plagiarize.
Present work that is your own and when you use outside sources to back up or
support your claims, be sure to offer proper citations.
Like plagiarism, we also want to avoid writing
that paraphrases too closely to the original source material.
This is sometimes called “patch writing.” When a writer relies heavily on
paraphrasing or patch writing, they often need to revisit the source
material and strengthen their comprehension of that material.
If you need help integrating your sources in your written
work, consider exploring the Purdue Online Writing Lab
or OWL’s discussion of quoting, summarizing and paraphrasing sources.
If you're a student, staff member or faculty member of
Purdue's main campus, you can also come chat with a tutor in
the Writing Lab or check out our free workshops that cover
a series of topics - like how to use citation managers
and how to integrate sources into your work. If you are affiliated with our main campus,
come visit us. We are here to help you! If you are working at a different
institution, check out the resources available to you through your
campus, and you're always welcome to check out our free
materials through the Purdue OWL, as well as through our YouTube channel.
Thank you all for joining me today! I hope this video helps to give you a
better understanding of how writing is a scholarly conversation.
Go forth and converse with confidence, everyone!