Two Conceptions of Writing and Knowing

Norman WackerInterdisciplinary Writing Program

University of Washington

Slide 2

Writing as Product, Writing as Process

• Why work-in-progress is a gift.

• Why feedback and revision is the medium of

critical thinking and writing.

Slide 3

What Have You Found Most Difficult About the Writing and Reading Required of You in this

Course?

1.  

2.

3.

List three tough things about doing the kinds of writing and thinking required of you in this class:

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Three Tough Things about Writing in International Studies Courses

• We ask you to show your work, to commit your reading and thinking to writing, holding you highly accountable for your own learning.

• We ask you to read difficult material to capture the state of our understanding of thorny and emerging problems.

• We ask you to frame and evaluate questions about authors’ arguments as you acquire the advanced skills that make knowledge creation in the social sciences possible.

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Why Do We Ask This of You?

Analytical writing and reading are the medium whereby findings of social science research are challenged, expanded and applied.

Note: That doesn’t mean its easy, that you should already know how to do it or that these skills will be mastered in a day. In fact, it probably requires risk, failure and revision, the rhythms as it were of critical thinking.

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Connecting Evidence to an Argument: Goals for the Next Round of Writing

Facts may exist independent of the point-of-view, but in advanced analytical writing there are no raw facts. Facts appear only in the guise of evidence related to an argument.

 The book précis is an account not of facts, but of this intersection between evidence and argument.

The most effective précis will link author claims and evidence and discuss how individual claims advance the overall argument.

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Writing as a Product: Writers Posses Knowledge, Skills and Strategies Before

They Write

• The writer’s knowledge of the subject is complete before the writing begins.

• The writer’s analysis of the facts is complete before the writing begins.

• The writer enacts the rules of grammar, writing conventions and command of audience as she composes.

• The writer transcribes completed ideas, observations and arguments onto the page.

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A Knowledge Defining Process: Writing Unfolds Across Stages of Composition

• Pre-writing: the writer clarifies the task, acquires new knowledge, re-appraises existing knowledge and understanding.

• Drafting: the writer roughs out key ideas and their relationship, clarifies the relationship between claims, evidence and argument.

• Revision: the writer and peers critique the work-in-progress and revise and complete its emerging design.

• Edit: the writer reads the work for clarity, focus and reasoning, standard use of language and grammar.

Slide 9

Writing is a Recursive Process

• New learning disorients us in relation to the old.• New learning unfolds in stages: passive

understanding, sorting, critique and judgments.• Interaction through writing, through discussion

moves thinking forward, but it also moves it beyond familiar reference points.

• Writing is a flexible medium in which to track and bring focus and substance to this recursive process.

Slide 10

Synthesis is the Word of the Week (E. Messen)

• Thinking in its early stages is exploratory, key ideas are identified, but links between them may not be.

• Early thinking is fuzzy and overly inclusive—all the ideas, all the facts are after all contributing to our learning.

• Isolating and selecting key ideas from the many is step 1.

• Stating active connections between them is step 2.• Stepping back and thinking about what the

connections mean is step 3.• Together they are what we mean by synthesis!

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Synthesis: A Process-Oriented Revision Exercise (Step 1)

• What are the key words or concepts (“accounts,” “violence,” “politics”?) that frame your rough draft?

• Imagine the placement of these three terms in a sentence unit.

• Which should be in the subject, the verb, the object position?

• What is their relationship? What is cause, effect, repercussions of the effect?

• Write a sentence in which you state the relationship between these key terms.

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Synthesis: Integrating Key Concepts and Ethnography (Step 2)

• The sentence specifying the relationship between your key terms is a kind of hypothesis. “When Accounts make violence look ______ it seems imperative to use it.”

• State what particular portions of the ethnography have particular relevance to this hypothesis.

• State how well the hypothesis stands the comparison.

• Make a claim about what the comparison teaches about those relationships and their consequences.

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Citation Strategies: Integrating Learning from the Authors’ Texts into Your Text

Writers can:

• quote the Author’s text verbatim• quote and restate the meaning of the quotation• quote the author’s text and comment on its

meaning or significance• describe or paraphrase key ideas or

observations from the author’s text• identify and by identifying synthesize key ideas

or observations across the texts of several authors.

In each case work with the author’s text will be followed by a citation.

Slide 14

Analytical Writing as the Medium of Knowledge Formation

Writing and reading are labor intensive, full of uncertainty and risk.

The authors we read and the writing we produce respond to unresolved or previously unformulated questions.

We are not asked to restate answers, but to appraise them.