Innovative Methods and Practices of Academic Writing and Writing Instruction
WHAT’S PERSONAL ABOUT ACADEMIC WRITING?
Julie Nelson Christoph
University of Puget Sound, Tacoma, WA, USA
All academic writing is written by a person, but how do traces of that person (and, importantly, his/her intellectual biases) appear in academic writing? In the past decade, scholars have fruitfully explored this question (Bizzell, Hindman, Holdstein). In some disciplines, objective thirdperson writing is the ideal, whereas in others, scholars are encouraged to question objectivity and to be “embodied” in their academic writing. As academic writing becomes increasingly transnational and multicultural, questions about “the personal” and “embodiment” in academic writing become even more complicated. For my presentation, I report on my analysis of the published work by a diverse group of twelve wellknown scholars in Rhetoric and Composition, including those who have published personal narrative academic essays and those who have published more traditional, nonnarrative essays. I analyzed each writer’s corpus looking for “strategies of placement” (Christoph) and interviewed the authors themselves about what they perceive as personal to them about their own writing. These scholars report that what is personal in their scholarship is, often, not revealed through explicitly personal narrative but, rather, through such elements as citations and choices about style and diction. These nonnarrative elements were confirmed, as well, by subsequent stylometric (Whitelaw) analysis. I argue that academic writing is fundamentally personal and that through becoming aware of the full range of ways that writers are embodied in texts, we can achieve a more complete understanding of our work as writers, readers, and teachers of the complex academic writings of the present.
References
BIZZELL, P., SCHROEDER, C., and FOX, H. (2002). ALT DIS: Alternative discourses and the academy . Portsmouth: Heinemann.
CHRISTOPH, J.N. (2002). Reconceiving ethos in relation to the personal: Strategies of placement in pioneer women’s writing. College English . 64 (6). p. 660679.
HINDMAN, J.E. (2003). Thoughts on reading “the personal”: Toward a discursive ethics of professional critical literacy. College English . 66 (1). p. 920.
HOLDSTEIN, D.H. and BLEICH, D. (2001). Personal Effects: The Social Character of Scholarly Writing . Logan: Utah State University Press.
WHITELAW, C. and ARGAMON, S. (2004). Systemic functional features in stylistic text classification. Ms., Sydney Language Technology Research Group, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia.