Explanation Points

Publishing in Rhetoric and Composition

John R Gallagher, Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, John R Gallagher, Dànielle Nicole DeVoss

• Verlag: Utah State University Press
• Jahr: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781607328834
• Thema: Languages & Linguistics
• Thema: Linguistics

Explanation Points is a curated collection of disciplinary knowledge and advice for publishing in rhetoric and composition. Covering a variety of topics in an approachable, conversational tone, the book demonstrates how writing faculty from diverse career trajectories and institutions produce, prepare, edit, revise, and publish scholarship.Rhetoric and composition is a uniquely democratic field, made of a group of scholars who, rather than competing with one another, lift each other up and work together to move the field forward. This lively, engaging, story-anchored book offers advice from a range of authors—including emeritus faculty, prolific authors, and early career researchers. Organized by various stages in the writing and publishing process, Explanation Points presents the advice shared between colleagues, passed along from professor to student, or offered online in abbreviated tweets and updates.The best advice book on writing and publishing in the field, Explanation Points is a useful resource for rhetoric and composition scholars including faculty, graduate students, and advanced undergraduate students; writing center administrators, staff, and consultants; graduate pratica and seminars; writing workshop classes; and editors, associate editors, assistant editors, and other academic journal staff.Contributors:
Tim Amidon, Chris Anson, Nancy G. Barron, Ellen Barton, Michael Baumann, Steve Bernhardt, Kristine L. Blair, David Blakesley, Lynn Z. Bloom, Marcia Bost, James Brown, Amber Buck, Rebecca Burnett, Joyce Carter, Kate Comer, Janice Cools, Marilyn Cooper, Craig Cotich, Ellen Cushman, Gabriel Cutrufello, Courtney Danforth, Sid Dobrin, William Duffy, Norbert Elliot, Jessica Enoch, Doug Eyman, Michael Faris, Jenn Fishman, Linda Flower, Brenda Glasscot, Laura Gonzales, Jeffrey T. Grabill, Laurie Gries, Bump Halbritter, Joseph Harris, Byron Hawk, Douglas Hesse, Troy Hicks, Bruce Horner, Asao Inoue, Darin L. Jensen, Erin Jensen, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Gesa E. Kirsch, Sarah Kornfield, Ashanka Kumari, Christina M. LaVecchia, Donna LeCourt, Barbara L'Eplattenier, Heather Lettner-Rust, Justin Lewis, Julie Lindquist, Tara Lockhart, Andrea Abernethy Lunsford, Katie Manthey, Lisa Mastrangelo, Ben McCorkle, Heidi McKee, Cruz Medina, Laura R. Micciche, Holly Middleton, Lilian Mina, Janine Morris, Joan Mullin, Kim Hensley Owens, Jason Palmeri, Mike Palmquist, Steve Parks, Juli Parrish, Staci Perryman-Clark, Mya Poe, Jacqueline Rhodes, Jeff Rice, Jim Ridolfo, Shirley K Rose, Stuart A. Selber, Jody Shipka, Naomi Silver, Ryan Skinnell, Trixie Long Smith, Kyle Stedman, Patrick Sullivan, Carrie Strand Tebeau, Christie Toth, John Trimbur, Chris Warnick, Kathleen Blake Yancey

Section 1

Getting Started

Inventing, Brainstorming, and Managing

1

Love, Beauty, and Truth

On Finding a Dissertation Topic

Lynn Z. Bloom

DOI: 10.7330/9781607328834.c001

I’ve just returned from a storybook wedding: a beautiful bride in a long white dress married Prince Charming on an autumn afternoon ablaze with colored leaves, the couple embraced in love articulated by grandparents, parents, siblings, friends, and of course each other, wedded also to an egalitarian future of true love forever. Because they’ve lived together for a while, they understand many of the dimensions of this partnership, but not all—for who can know everything at the outset of a work continually in progress? Yet they are optimistically committed to the work—and play—that will make the rough places smooth and this dream come true.

Love. There are significant parallels between this romantic account—which may sound like a fairy tale but I believe, based on my own marriage of fifty-eight years, that fairy tales can come true—and writing a dissertation. For finding a dissertation topic—alluring, enticing, worth the effort of penetrating its mysteries and understanding its nuances—is like finding the right person to marry. You have agency in your choice, and you will want to pick the one you love the most. From among many possibilities, you’ve selected the one that most appeals to you, one in which you’re pleased to make a huge investment.

If you’re not happy about your topic, delighted with its potential, able to turn it around and around in the light to admire its many facets, then stop right here and scour the terrain until you find another that lights your fire. The beauty you find in the topic will lead you to love it, and your enthusiasm will inspire your committee. Is it new? Exciting? Is it generative in intellectual possibilities, in potential for publication and further research? Do you want to commit to a relationship with it?

Love will keep you wedded to this project for the long haul until you finish, driven by passion for the topic itself and for the enterprise—the exploration, ingenuity, and work involved. As in a marriage, you will need to love your project beyond measure because there will be times of frustration and irritation, when the research is not working out as smoothly as you’d anticipated, when you’d like to throw it out the window and walk away. Unlike marriage, which expects a lifetime commitment, a research project requires a realistic timetable. Although you can get a ballpark sense of the time involved from your experience in writing a typical twenty-page term paper, a dissertation will require more time than merely multiplying the time spent on each chapter. Each part has to fit into the whole, and building both the infrastructure (such as refining and explaining the methodology, or providing a comprehensive bibliography) and the superstructure (integrating all the separate parts) takes additional time.

We tend to underestimate the time a long project will take. Especially if the topic is cutting-edge, and when new sources—written, material, more ethereal—pop up daily, if not hourly, online, in the culture, among people with a stake in the project—as subjects, committee members, colleagues, specialists, statisticians. Fidelity to your topic can help to keep you from the primrose path of wayward romance; every new thread in the research web takes time and, however enticing, following tangential strands can lead you astray.

Beauty. In your dissertation you are not aiming for perfection but for elegant beauty—always capable of improvement but good enough to remain attractive and to get the job done. “We must labor to be beautiful,” said Yeats, whose aesthetic in “Adam’s Curse” also underlies the work of the doctoral student. Conscientious advisors will help their students to see the beauty in doable projects that can be completed in a predictably finite time. In helping my doctoral students to get through and get out expeditiously, I advise them to plan their research time starting with the ending date.

When do you want to finish? Then, how long will it take to do the research? To write each chapter? To revise the total? To have the work reviewed, and possibly revised again? I encourage them: estimate the amount of time the project will take. Double it. You may by now be in the ballpark; if not, add 25 percent more. You will find beauty by observing that ending date, which is likely to be determined by funding; when will your TAship or research support run out? Every delay will be costly in terms of job market timing and income forgone. If necessary, pare down the scope of your research to keep within the time frame. Stick to the main point, the principal supporting evidence or analysis. You can explore the interesting byways later on.

Short books of 70,000–80,000 words—under 200 pages—represent university presses’ current ideal of beauty. A svelte configuration for your own research, five main chapters, max, plus an introduction and a conclusion will keep that work on the runway. Every chapter you don’t write is a chapter you don’t have to research or revise, joining the lineup of beautiful potential topics for later investigation. Beauty is always a work in progress.

Truth. Mark Twain understood “You can’t pray a lie.” When Huck Finn realizes that the hunt for the fugitive slave is proceeding as he and Jim are “a-floating along” the Mississippi, “talking and singing and laughing,” he thinks he should turn Jim in: “I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing,” but “deep down in me I knowed it was a lie,” “the words wouldn’t come,” “my heart warn’t right.” He examines the evidence, “But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind.” He decides, “All right, then, I’ll go to hell,” inadvertently making the morally right decision, one that he understands deep in his heart. So he is able to “take up wickedness again,” beginning by going “to work and stealing Jim out of slavery again”—a source of pleasure, power, and ingenuity.

Dissertation writers, too, need to be honest with themselves. Once upon a time—this is a cautionary tale—a good friend was trying to write her dissertation amid the responsibilities and distractions of running a household with a husband in medical residency, three rambunctious little children, teaching composition, and a gourmet cook’s perfectionism that made even peanut butter and jelly sandwiches look as if they’d leapt off the pages of a cookbook. She wanted to write about Swift, her foremost literary love, but in those pre-internet days when library searches took weeks and months to nail down the minutiae, she needed a way to get through and get out before the end of the century, then forty years away. To research an eighteenth-century topic would take at least two years and unaffordable trips to England.

So she sought what she always called “a quick and dirty” dissertation topic, one she didn’t love. She figured that the less she had invested in it the more easily she’d stick to the topic’s straight and narrow and the sooner she’d finish. She settled for what she considered a ho-hum topic, serviceable but not, in her eyes, beautiful—an analysis of James Branch Cabell’s fictional county of Poictesme, her advisor’s passion but not her own. Despite some pressure from the advisor to ventriloquize his ideas, she never finished. She could not pray that lie. She couldn’t bring herself to give enough time to Cabell’s never-never land while spending her best efforts on the real world she loved the most—family, teaching, and cooking. Finally she simply stopped writing.

In fact she had another choice. She could have selected a smaller slice of the subject she loved for her dissertation and nibbled away at other portions of the larger Swiftian topic after she finished. Her first words on the topic—staking out the territory, capturing the beauty and truth she loved—didn’t have to be her last. Nor do yours.

Research, like the rest of life, moves on; there will be a lifetime to fall in love with new topics, irresistibly beautiful, and to pursue them in the quest for truth.

2

Sit Down and Write, Get Up and Move

Gesa E. Kirsch

DOI: 10.7330/9781607328834.c002

When you sit by a pond or a slowly winding stream, the city’s impatient tempo drains away, and from the corners of the mind, thoughts come out and sun themselves.

—Lorus Milne and Margery Milne

Pairing these two activities—sitting down to write, getting up to move—has been very productive for me, no matter the writing task or stage of a project at hand.

Sit Down and Write. When I start a new writing project, whether it is a conference paper, essay, article, book chapter, grant proposal, or research report, I give myself permission to write quickly, without stopping, editing, or censoring the thoughts that emerge, just as I often ask my students to begin with freewriting when they explore a new topic. I draw inspiration from writers like Julia Cameron, Peter Elbow, Natalie Goldberg, and Donald Murray, who encourage us to “show up at the page” with pen and paper, allowing ourselves be surprised by what appears in front of us.

When I sit down to write, I jot down phrases, list ideas, misspell words, ramble a bit, jump around, omit transitions, write fragments, break all the rules. I write even when I know that I still have a lot of reading to do, when I do not know what colleagues have said on a subject, when I still have much to learn. I like to get initial thoughts and ideas onto the page to see what excites me about a topic, why I care about the subject matter, what questions emerge, what speculative answers I might offer, why I think the research at hand is worth investigating. Giving myself permission to write early, before an exhaustive literature review, gives me freedom to explore, find my passion, change directions, rethink my position, and later on, to engage more deeply with the authors I will read on the subject matter.

My word choice above was deliberate; I still like to start with pen and paper for exploratory drafts, allowing me to write anywhere, anytime, at the spur of the moment. The simplicity of these two items offers a distraction-free approach; I can avoid format and font choices, autocorrect features, illuminated screens and, most centrally, the temptation to connect to the internet. There is now compelling research that shows that handwriting is a different cognitive process than typing; the former appears to challenge the mind to synthesize, organize, and prioritize in ways that keyboarding does not (for a summary of this research, see Hotz 2016; May 2014). Moreover, I like to set boundaries for technology, limiting interruptions; therefore, I mute all my devices at all times—no beeping, chiming, chirping, or vibrating. When I sit down to write, I protect my time and space, keeping distractions to a minimum.

For a second iteration of my writing, I usually do move to the computer, often energized by freewriting, notes by my side, ready to elaborate, develop a point, articulate an idea, refine questions. All the while, I still aim to observe with interest, not judgment, the writing that unfolds (keeping the internal critic and editor at bay).

Lately, I have been setting a timer for forty-five minutes, enough time to allow me to generate quite a bit of text, hone in on a revision, or tackle an editing or proofreading task. That amount of time goes by quickly but can be quite productive, I find. If I sit still for more than an hour or two, I have discovered, I tend to lose momentum, focus, and energy; hence my need to move.

Get Up and Move. Once my timer rings, I get up and move. If it’s late in the morning, I’ll head out for a short run, take a brisk walk (around campus or my neighborhood), or attend the occasional yoga class. Any of these activities can do wonders: it gets my blood flowing and lungs pumping, brings oxygen to my body, gives me new energy, and lifts my mood. Some of my runs/walks are social, others solo, allowing me to clear my head and observe my environment—the shoreline along the Charles River, the traffic roaring in the distance, the blue sky overhead, fellow runners and walkers enjoying the outdoors. Or, on a rainy day like this morning, I walk with umbrella in hand, feeling the mist on my skin, listening to cars splashing water from puddles, observing other walkers, bundled up tightly, leaning into the wind, the umbrella a shield for all that may come their way. At other times of the year, I listen to the snow crunching underfoot, observe the muted winter tones—gray, white, and black—of a New England cityscape, or squint my eyes against the sun hanging low on the horizon, even at noon time, on a winter’s day. As the epigraph by ...