From Inquiry to Academic Writing Chapter 1

When you write an academic essay, you have to

define a situation that calls for some response in writing demonstrate the timeless of your argument establish a personal investment appeal to readers whose minds you want to change by understanding what they think, believe, and value support your argument with good reasons anticipate and address readers' reasons for disagreeing with you, while encouraging them to adopt your position

These forms of critical thinking

demand an inquiring mind that welcomes complexities and seeks out and weighs many different points of view, a mind willing to enter complex conversations both in and out of the academy

Asking questions based on studying a subject from multiple points of view

follows that academic writers are accustomed to extensive reading that prepares them to examine an issue, knowledgeability, from many different perspectives, research.

Of course, conversations on academic writing

happen on the page: they are not spoken. Still, these conversations are quite similar to the conversations you have through e-mail and instant messaging: You are responding to something someone else has written (or said) and are writing back in anticipation of future responses.

In an academic community

ideas develop through give-and-take, through a conversation that builds on what has come before and grows stronger from multiple perspectives

Analysis reflects

in the best sense of the word, a skeptical habit of mind, an unwillingness to settle for obvious answers in the quest to understand why things are the way they are and how they might be different

Hospitality

is a word Theologian, Martin Marty, is a word he uses to describe a human behavior that has the potential to bring about real understanding among people who do not share a common faith or culture.

Empathy

is the the ability to understand the perspectives that shape what people think, believe, and value.

What is academic writing?

is what you have to learn so that you can participate in the different disciplinary conversations that place in your courses.

Instead

it is the careful expression of an idea or perspective based on reasoning and the insights garnered from a close examination of the arguments other have made on the issue

Making academic arguments is also a social act

like joining a conversation. When we sit down to write an argument intended to persuade someone to do or to believe something, we are never really the first to broach the topic about which we are writing

Inquiry typically begins with

observation, a careful nothing of phenomena or behaviors that puzzle you or challenge your beliefs and values (in a text or in the real world).

Mark Edmundson, a professor of English at the University of Virginia

observes that his students seem to prefer classes they consider "fun" over those that push them to work hard. This prompts him to ask how they consider culture---- especially the entertainment culture---- has altered the college experience.

In her reading on the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s

one of our students observed that the difficulties many immigrant groups experienced when they first arrived in the United States are not acknowledged as struggles for civil rights.

In her attempt to explain the popularity of hip hop culture, Bronwen Low, a professor of education,

provides a window on the steps we can take to examine the complexity of a topic. In the introductory chapters of her book, Slam School:Learning Through Conflict in the Hip Hop and Spoken Word Classroom, she begins with the observation that hip hop "is the single-most influential cultural force shaping contemporary urban youth culture in the United States, and its international reach is growing."

Good writing comes from

returning to your ideas on your own and with your classmates, reconsidering them, and revising them as your thinking develops

The academic writing you will read--- and write yourself---

starts with questions and seeks to find rich answers.

Weed found

that "very few of the 100 claims" he evaluated "proved completely true" and that "a good number were patently false."

He believes

that people need opportunities to share their stories, their values, and their beliefs; in doing so, they feel less threatened by ideas they do not understand or identify with.

In turn, Low explains

that she began to answer these questions by giving herself a "hip-hop education." She attended spoken-word poetry festivals ("slams") across the United States, listened to the music and read both "academic theory and journalism" to, see what others had to say about "poetry's relevance and coolness to youth."

Writers often find that writing a first draft is an of discovery,

that their ultimate focus emerges during this initial drafting process

Moreover

the habits of mind and core skills of academic writing are highly valued in the world outside the academy.

It's the research report a biologist writes

the interpretive essay a literary scholar compresses, the media analysis a film scholar produces

You inform yourself about

the issues that are most pressing; you learn about the candidates' positions on these issues; you consider other arguments for and against both issues and candidates; and you weigh those arguments and your own understanding to determine which candidate you will support

People engaging in productive conversation

try to create change by listening and responding to one another rather than dominating one another. Instead of trying to win an argument they focus on reaching a mutual understanding

Scholars

use specialized language to capture the complexity of an issue or the introduce specific ideas from their discipline. Every discipline has its own vocabulary

As readers

we have a responsibility to test the claims of both science and advertising in order to decide what to believe and act upon.

By habits of mind

we mean the patterns of thought that lead you to question assumptions and opinions, explore alternative options, anticipate opposing arguments, compare one type of experience to another, and identify the causes and consequences of ideas and events.

If we take as an example the issue of terrorism

we would discover that scholars of religion, economics, ethics, and politics tend to ask very different questions about terrorism and to purpose very different approaches for addressing this worldwide problem.

You are behaving "academically"

when you comparison-shop, a process that entails learning about the product in the media and on the Internet and then looking at the choices firsthand before you decide which one you will purchase.

Academic writing is a process of

writing an essay by collecting in writing the material --- the information, ideas, and evidence ---- from which you will shape your own argument.

When you consider a variety of factors---- the quality and functionally of the item you plan to buy, hot it meets your needs, how it compares to similar items before making a shopping choice----

you are conducting an analysis

To become an adept academic writer

you have to learn these practices as well

When you want to find out what "really" happened at an event when your friends are telling you different stories

you listen to all of them and then evaluate the evidence to draw conclusions you can stand behind---- just as academic writers do.

For example, when you deliberate over your vote,

you may consult one of those charts that newspapers often run around election time: A list of candidates appears across the top of the chart, and a list of issues appears on the side.

With these strategies

you will be in a position to use your writing skills to create change where you feel it is most needed

As your exposure to other viewpoints increases, as you take more and different points of view into consideration and build on them,

your own ideas will develop more fully and fairly

Steps to Joining an Academic Conversation

1. Be receptive to the ideas of others. Listen carefully and empathetically to what others have to say. 2. Be respectful of the ideas of others. When you refer to the opinions of others, represent them fairly and use an evenhanded tone. Avoid sounding scornful or dismissive. 3. Engage with the ideas of others. Try to understand how people have arrived at their feelings and beliefs. 4. Be flexible in your thinking about the ideas of others. Be willing to exchange ideas and to revise your own opinions.

Steps to Revising

1. Draft and revise the introduction and conclusion 2. Clarify ant obscure or confusing passages your peers have pointed out 3. Provided details and textual evidence where your peers have asked for new or more information 4. Check to be sure you have included opposing points of view and have addressed them fairly 5. Consider reorganization 6. Check to be sure that every paragraph contributes clearly to your thesis or main claim and that you have included signposts along the way phrases that help a reader understand your purpose ("Here I turn to an example from current movies to show how this issue is alive and well in pop culture.") 7. Consider using strategies you have found effective in other reading you have done for class (repeating words or phrases for effect, asking rhetorical questions, varying your sentence length).

Steps of Drafting

1. Look through the materials you have collected to see what interests you most and what you have the most to say about. 2. Identify what is at issue what is open to dispute 3. Formulate a question that your essay will respond to 4. Select the material you will include, and decide what is outside your focus. 5. Consider they types of readers who might be most interested in what you have to say 6. Gather more material once you've decided on your purpose --- what you want to teach your readers. 7. Formulate a working thesis that conveys the point you want to make 8. Consider possible arguments against your position and your response to them

Steps to Collecting Information and Material

1. Mark your texts as you read. Note key terms; ask questions in the margins; indicate connections to other texts 2. List quotations you find interesting and provocative. You might even write short notes to yourself about what you find significant about the quotes 3. List your own ideas in response to the reading or readings. Include what you've observed about the way the author or authors make their arguments 4. Sketch out the similarities and differences among the authors whose work you plan to use in your essay. Where would they agree or disagree? How would each respond to the others' arguments and evidence?

Steps to Inquiry

1. Observe. Note phenomena or behaviors that puzzle you or challenge your beliefs and values 2. Ask questions. Consider why things are the way they are. 3. Examine alternatives. Explore how things could be different.

Steps to Seeking and Valuing Complexity

1. Reflect on what you observe. Clarify your initial interest in a phenomenon or behavior by focusing on its particular details. Then reflect on what is most interesting and least interesting to you about these details, and why. 2. Examine issues from multiple points of view. Imagine more than two sides to the issue, and recognize that there may well be other points of view too. 3. Ask issue based questions. Try to put into words questions that will help you explore why things are the way they are.

We explore four key habits of mind in the rest of this chapter

1. inquiring 2. seeking and valuing complexity 3. understanding that academic writing is a conversation 4. understanding that writing is a process

Eminem

He set out understand these conflicting responses by examining the differing perspectives of music critics, politicians, religious evangelists, and his peers; and then he formulated an issue-based question: "How can we explain Eminem's popularity given the ways people criticize Eminem personally and his music?" In looking at this issue, the student opened himself to complexity by resisting simple answers to his question about why Eminem and his music evoked such different and conflicting responses.

Issue

Remember that an issue is open to dispute and can be explored and debated. Issue-based questions, then, need to be approached with a mind open to complex possibilities. (We say more about identifying issues and formulating issue-based questions Chapter 4.)

Inquirers

That is, academic writers learn to make inquirers. Every piece of academic writing begins with a question about the way the world works, amd the best questions lead to rich, complex insights that others can learn from and build on.

The newspaper editors have performed a preliminary analysis for you.

They've asked, "Who are the candidates?" "What are the issues?" and "Where does each candidate stand on the issues?"; and they have presented the answers to you in a format that can help you make your decision.

Binary thinking

When we rely on binary thinking--- imagining there are only two sides to an issue--- we tend to ignore information that does not fall tidily into one side or the other.

A literacy narrative

a firsthand, personal account about reading or composing is a well-established genre that is popular both inside and outside the academy. Rodriguez's and Graff's autobiographical stories dealing with aspects of how they become literate and their stories dealing with aspects of how they became literate an their relationship with reading and writing are literacy narratives. Rodriquez's narrative is part of Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, a memoir that also explores the politics of language in American culture. Graff's narrative is embedded in his Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education, which as the subtitle suggests, presents arguments and proposals for altering educational practices.

Academic writing also places

a high value on the belief that good, thoughtful ideas come from conversations with other, many others.

Such habits of mind

are especially important today, when we are bombarded with appeals to buy this or that product and with information that may or may not be true. for example, in "106 Science Claims and a Truckful of Baloney" (The Best American Science and Nature Writing, 2005), William Speed Weed illustrates the extent to which the claims of science vie for our attention alongside the claims of advertising.

Later revisions of an essay, then,

are not simply editing or cleaning up the grammar of a first draft. Instead, they truly involve revision, seeing the first draft again to establish the clearest possible argument and the most persuasive evidence. This means that you do not have to stick with the way a draft turns out the first time.

The conversations that have already been going on about a subject

are the subject's historical context

The first steps in developing these skills

are to recognize the key academic habits of mind and then to refine your practice of them

Seeking and valuing complexity

are what inquiry is all about. As you read academic arguments (for example, about school choice), observe how the media work to influence your options (for example in political ads), or analyze data (for example, about candidates in an election), you will explore reasons why things are the way they are and how they might be different.

Observing phenomena prompts an attempt to understand them by

asking questions (Why does this exist? Why is this happening? Do things have to be this way?) and examining alternatives (Maybe this doesn't need to exist). Maybe this could happen another way instead.).