Joining the Conversation

Imagine that you walk up to a group of your friends who are already talking about some topic. You think you know what they’re talking about, but chances are that you would take a minute to pause and listen to the conversation before joining in. Otherwise, you may find yourself saying something wrong or repeating something that has already been said. Without listening, you may interrupt someone or talk over them.

Now think about a time you were trying to talk to someone or a group of people and you knew they weren’t really listening to what you were saying. They might have ignored your perspective or talked over you. Maybe you’ve had the experience of someone repeating what you already said, as though they came up with the idea on their own. Maybe you’ve had the experience of trying to have a conversation with someone who already seems to know everything, even if you have no idea where they got their “facts” from. Trying to communicate with people who aren’t actively listening and engaged is a frustrating experience.

Writing an essay without listening fully and completely to the conversation–writing without discovering the basic facts of a topic–is a lot like jumping into a conversation without truly knowing what is being discussed.

Research-based at the college level writing is similar to joining into an ongoing conversation, as Burke’s metaphor explains. This semester, we will go through the steps that students need to take to produce strong academic writing.

In high school, your research-based writing likely asked you to report back about information you found and learned. You might have used a simple internet search or Google Scholar to find quick and easily readable sources. Maybe you already knew what you wanted to report on or argue in your thesis. You may have selected the first source you found that seemed to match the beliefs you already held or the thesis you already decided upon. Once you had the required number of quotes for the required number of paragraphs, you were ready to write.

But this type of hit-and-run research is the equivalent of walking into the gathering happening in Burke’s parlor, catching a couple of sentences here and there, and then telling someone about the party as though you were there for everything. Maybe you get a few things right, but it’s more likely that you have missed out on large portions of the conversation.

In college, your professors are also in the metaphorical parlor, listening to and aware of the ongoing conversations.  Unlike less experienced students, they’ve been listening to the conversations for a long, long time. They will know when you’re ignoring important parts of the issue or when you’ve mis-heard or mis-read a source.

While your high school teachers might have been checking to make sure your essay met certain format rules or to see whether your writing made grammatical sense, your college professors will be looking for your depth of knowledge and understanding. Pulling key words and phrases from half-read sources won’t work anymore. Your professors will likely know what’s missing and what you aren’t understanding.

Step 1 of writing in college is to write from deep knowledge.

In college courses, students are expected to do the work necessary to attain a basic level of knowledge about the topics they are addressing. The first step in any writing task is to make sure you’ve read enough–or listened–to know what the agreed upon facts are and where the controversies and disagreements begin.

After all, you cannot make an argument by repeating facts. To make any argument, you need to find the place where the various voices begin to disagree.

But what is deep knowledge?

Deep knowledge means reading more than a Wikipedia page or summary. Deep knowledge means that you know all about the topic you’re discussing. You’ve read widely enough that you have started seeing themes, arguments, and ideas repeat. You understand what is at stake in the conversation and who the stakeholders are. Deep knowledge means that you know enough about the topic to have formed your own opinions and ideas out of the reading, research, and inquiry you’ve done.

You walk into Burke’s crowded parlor and hear the buzz of voices. Here and there, a phrase or sentence jumps out at you as being interesting or important. Some voices are louder than others. Some seem smarter. But how do you know what voices to listen to? How can you choose what voices to respond to?

Maybe in high school you did something like “quote mining.” After all, the Five-Paragraph essay required a certain number of quotes in each paragraph to support each thesis point, and once you found that required number, you were done. More than done, you had successfully met the requirements. But how did you make sure that you had the best quotes?

Step 2 of writing in college is to analyze your sources carefully.

College writing requires a deeper engagement and commitment from the writer than high school writing. Remember, there are no strict rules for college essays. There is no magic number of quotes that will get you an “A” on a paper. So how do you decide what to use? How do you know when you have enough?

The answer will depend on the individual conversation you are joining, and you will have to make choices that best represent the conversation. This means that you will need to look at each source individually for its strengths and weaknesses. You will need to analyze each source for the strength of it argument:

• What claims does the writer make?
• What reasons or premises do they base that claim on?
• What kind of evidence does the writer present to prove their claims?

But in a crowded parlor, not all voices are equal. Some will be loud and emotional. Some may be nothing more than personal opinions. Others will have PhD’s and pages of references to prove their claims. Some will have specific biases. You wouldn’t want to represent a quote from a conspiracy theory website as the equal to an academic journal article. An important step in academic writing is understanding the sources you draw your information from.

As you analyze your sources, it is not enough to identify their claims, reasons, and evidence. You will also have to examine the rhetorical situation that created the source and decide how that impacts their validity for your purposes:

• Who is the author and what authority do they have?
• What audience was the source originally intended for?
• Where and when was the source published?
• What is the purpose of the source?
• How does the source’s rhetorical situation affect how you can use it?

In addition to analyzing individual sources, you will want to start identifying common ideas between them and finding the places where sources agree and disagree. The common ideas are called themes. 

Imagine that you are in Burke’s parlor. You’re listening to the conversation happening around you and beginning to weigh the various voices and ideas that you hear. Suddenly, the door bursts open and someone enters. They shout over the crowd about a topic that may or may not be related to what anyone else is saying. Then they turn and leave.

In high school, you might have written essays that started from a thesis you decided ahead of time. You already knew what you believed or wanted to argue, and you found the sources that matched those previously held beliefs.

Maybe in your previous courses you learned that the Five-Paragraph essay needed to start with a “hook” or an “attention-getter.” You probably were taught to ask a question or give an interesting quote. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this strategy, but often those attention-getting moves can have the same effect as the parlor interloper in the imagined scenario above, especially if the question or quote didn’t specifically tie into the rest of the essay.

Writing an academic argument that does not specifically address an ongoing conversation is a little like becoming the parlor crasher above. Even if your ideas are brilliant, no one will understand why you are sharing them or what they have to do with anything.

Step 3 of writing in college is to remember that everything you write is part of a conversation that you didn’t start and that you won’t finish.

Hopefully, you are already beginning to see that writing back to an ongoing conversation actually makes the writing task easier, or at least more logical. You don’t have to know anything before you begin, because research will help you formulate your questions and ideas. You also don’t have to come up with the perfect or final answer, because the conversation doesn’t end with your essay. As Burke’s parlor shows us, your argument or essay is only one part of a conversation that will continue on.

In a previous chapter we said that college-level academic writing asks students to create new knowledge. You may now be wondering, how do I both create new knowledge and see my writing as part of a conversation that will continue on without me?

As we move forward this semester, you’re going to learn that creating new knowledge doesn’t necessarily mean you’re inventing a brand new idea or coming up with the last word on a topic. Rather, creating knowledge often involves something called synthesis.

Synthesis as Creating Knowledge

Imagine once more that you are in Burke’s parlor. You’re moving from group to group, listening to one conversation and then another. Suddenly, you realize that there are two groups of people who seem to be saying related things. Struck by this realization, you lead one group to the other and introduce them. Suddenly, the conversation shifts and changes. As the groups are brought together, their similarities allow new information and ways of thinking about the topic to emerge. You’ve created a moment of synthesis. You’ve created new knowledge.

Synthesis is the act of bringing together two or more different ideas or systems to form a new system.

Much of what you will be asked to do in your college courses is to synthesize information into a new way of seeing a topic or theme. You don’t need to be the person who bursts into the party with a brilliant idea. Instead, academic writing is more often a way to forge connections between ideas and themes, a way of bringing together parts of the conversation that weren’t speaking before.

This semester, we will be practicing these steps.

In the first unit, we will focus on the topic of First-Year Composition Courses and the goals of academic writing as our topic. You’ll be reading articles that your professor has selected (listening to the conversation) and analyzing them for their argument. Then you’ll work on synthesizing this information into an argument of your own.

Once we’ve practiced the skills needed to listen, analyze, and join a conversation, the second half of the course will allow students to create their own research project following the same steps. You will select a topic, listen to the conversation for knowledge and mastery, create a research question, investigate for information, and then enter the conversation.

By the end of the semester, you should have a clear understanding of how writing to respond to a conversation can result in stronger, more effective, and easier essays to write. You’ll have strategies and skills you can apply to any writing task in any college course. But First Year Composition is about more than learning to write college essays. We’ll be examining the role of argument and rhetoric, so you can begin to develop strategies for communicating beyond the college classroom and effectively adding your voice to important conversations already happening in the larger arena of civic discourse.