lesson 8:2

English 320, web-based Class

Lesson for Week 8: Day 2

8:2

Your assingment for today was to . . .

Read chapter 13 in Lambrecht's Dinner at the New Gene Cafe and a NY Times editorial on contaminated seeds.
Send me a rhetorical analysis of a selected document for your discourse-in-field paper.

Today, we focus on the processes of composition and drafting.

You are now at the stage in writing your discourse-in-your-field paper when your efforts shift from being primarily in the realm of invention to being primarily in the realm of arrangement. You have collected a lot of information (searching the web, interviewing someone, collecting documents, analyzing one document). But now you need to pull the whole thing together. We call this the process of composition, literally "placing (positioning) things alongside each other" in a strategic pattern.

The overall pattern has already been dictated because this is an empirical research report. So you have sections that act like containers waiting for you to fill them--the introduction, the methods, the results and discussion, and the conclusions. Nevertheless, you now need to look at this pattern more carefully and begin to fill in the details.

One way to get the details worked out is to outline the paper. True, outlining has fallen into disrepute among some compositionists, but it is a good way to control your structure. Here's one outline possibility:

I. Introduction

A. Purpose: This is a report of research conducted to answer the question . . .

B. Problem: This research was needed because . . .

C. Literature Review: We already know that . . .

D. Scope: This report focuses only on . . .

II. Methods

A. General division of methods into types

B. Process description that enumerates each step of research

III. Results

A. Intro to the discourse field of (name of field). What people do in this field--work and content.

B. A survey of language and discourse practices in this field: oral and written practices, media, audiences, genre types

C. A discussion of the kinds or types of documents common in the field (classification)

D. Close analysis of a typical document

1. The rhetorical situation: author, audience, exigence, constraints, genre

2. The rhetorical act: the persuasive elements (ethos, logos, pathos with samples drawn from text); the structure; other rhetorical elements you may have found.

IV. Conclusions (so what? Remember conclusions are convictions arrived at on the basis of evidence).

A. Summary of findings

B. Conclusions--what your research has led you to believe or know

An outline aligns material in new ways. This means you need to fetch material from your discovery context (notes and records you took) and import the material into the new structure. This process involves dissociating concepts from their original setting and associating them with a new setting. It involves breaking down old relationships and creating new ones. Sometimes you find that the new structure, the outline, calls for data that you don't have. Then you have one of two choices: go do more research or revise your outline.

Drafting

When you start trying to actually write the paper, the temptation is to bring the notes from your research directly into the new context, but the context of presentation requires you to work the material over, to rephrase it, to write it for a reader. Shifting from your notes to completed text is the process of shifting from writer-based prose to reader-based prose. In other words, you start writing the material now with a reader in mind.

This rewriting of material, making it into full sentences, inserting metadiscourse to guide the reader, and so on, is called drafting. Your attention moves from the macro level represented by the outline to the micro level--the sentence you are trying to craft at the moment. You get the sentence written and you read back through it in its context trying to get flow and then you look at it in light of the larger composition strategy. You're back at the macro level and begin trying to think about the next stride forward, the next sentence, and soon you find yourself back in the process of crafting the next sentence. This process is very intense, and diving into it is so much of a change of perspective that some people experience writer's block, but the only solution is to start writing, even if you start writing your conclusions first.

Remember our discussion of the process of inquiry:

First, there is a period of preparation. This is a time when you first become aware of the task before you, begin to worry, and then try analyze it consciously, even trying to capture your analysis in language.

Second is a period of incubation. The idea here is that you can't spend all your conscious time working on a problem until you have solved it. Eventually, you have to go on to other things. Nevertheless, your mind somehow seems to keep working on the project, almost subconsciously. Perhaps you could say this is a time of letting the problem sit on the back burner a little.

Illumination, the third stage, is sometimes a surprise realization that you have a solution to your problem or a strategy for completing the project. It's almost as though the subconscious mind, having had time to work on the problem, now throws it forward to your conscious mind. Writing down the possible solution or strategy is a way of forming a hypothesis, a solution statement, or a strategic plan.

Finally, you have to test the hypothesis or try out the solution or go through the plan. This stage they call verification. For writers, it is a time of drafting the paper and revising it.

You have come through three of the periods. The composition and drafting processes are the first part of the verification period. You verify you hypothesis, first, by actually trying to create the solution to the problem by writing the report you have decided will work. The second part of the verification stage has to do critically appraising the solution (paper) you've produced. That has to do with revision, but that's a topic for next time.

Your Assignment for next time is to . . .

1. Write a blog entry.

2. Write a first complete draft of your discourse-in-your-field paper, but do not send it to me. I don't read preliminary drafts in this class; however, if you wish to rewrite a paper after I grade it, you can request to do so, and I usually agree. Get someone to read it for you and give you feedback. You should have two or three things you want your reviewer to comment on, perhaps on the overall structure of the report, perhaps on the internal consistency of the results section, or perhaps on the sentence structure and grammar. Tell your reviewer specifically what you want to know. You don't have to have the letter of transmittal, the title page, the table of contents, or the abstract done yet, but you do need the whole report from the introduction through the conclusions, along with the references, done. Remember that I linked several examples of this paper back in lesson 4.2 (scroll down to the bulleted list). They can help you get an idea of what the genre and topic are. Also, if you are unclear about how to document your sources go to NDSU's Center for Writer's Page on Documenting Sources.