Understanding the Rhetoric of Research

Related Resources
Print-Friendly Page
Authors & Contributors

Why is it important to understand the evolution of rhetorics and writing conventions of journals in our field?

Writing conventions and structures are not "out there" to be chosen from and then overlaid onto or applied to ideas and research. Students must learn the conventions that are particular to their discourse community of choice, and this is not a simple process. Berkenkotter & Huckin (1995) say that "learning the genres of disciplinary or professional discourse would . . . be similar to second language acquisition, requiring immersion into the culture and a lengthy period of apprenticeship and enculturation (cf. Freedman, 1993)" (p. 13). Rhetorics arise from an interaction of writing purposes, contexts, and shared knowledge. In turn, rhetorics build communities that promote ongoing research, teaching, and writing within disciplines. Because of this, understanding the origins of the writing in our discipline can help us understand how and why certain research methods have come to be accepted and how results of research are communicated to others.

Branscombe (1995), Berkenkotter and Huckin (1995), among others note general shifts in the research methods and rhetoric of English and composition studies. They usually start this discussion with the rise of positivistic methods and structures which occurred around the 1940's as more and more scientific "truths" were being discovered and the methods used to determine these truths became accepted as the most effective paths to answer research questions. At this time, researchers in the humanities began to use more empirical methods and therefore rhetorics identified with scientific investigation filtered into the scholarly journals of those fields. However, more recently there has been a significant backlash to some of those methods and theories. With the rise of feminism, resurgence of Marxism, and the current appeal of postmodernism in many English departments, empirical, positivist research methods have come under much scrutiny (Branscombe, 1995). Many scholars have long been questioning "the notion of single, fixed, and determinable Truth" (Branscombe 1995). The new epistemology being advocated is based on ideals of democracy, social constructivism, polyvocality, and often relies on very personal approaches to research. Written modes of these epistemological constructs are generally descriptive, narrative, even confessional, as opposed to the analytical, evidentiary and persuasive rhetorics of positivism (Branscombe 1995).

The wide range of acceptable rhetorics around the time of rising positivism in the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s is evident in the tables of contents of well known English journals. For example, even as the debate between quantitative researchers and qualitative researchers became more heated, we see narrative classroom accounts, linguistic models, poetry, and composing process models listed next to one another in the contents of College Composition and Communication. However, it is important to note that before the rise of quantitative methods and rhetoric, researchers in English departments used personal, descriptive, and narrative voices in their publications. Opinions were to be based on personal experience in classrooms, according to editorial boards; nowhere was purely quantitative research emphasized or encouraged.

It is also important to note how the journals grew out of one another in response to certain needs addressed at conferences dealing with English studies. The progression of many scholarly journals can be traced from public forums (conferences, committee meetings) through informal written newsletters and correspondence, to scholarly journals, and larger academic communities of discourse.