From Library Babel Fish, July 6, 2011
Back in April, I wrote a bit cantankerously about my doubts that research papers as a genre are a particularly useful vehicle for learning and argued for doing away with the traditional “research paper” – the kind that Richard Larson described as a “non-form of writing.” This genre is primarily a vehicle for students to display knowledge by discussing a number of sources they have chosen on a topic using academic conventions for writing from sources. It’s a very common high stakes assignment that often lives at the margins of a course, but plays a big role in a final grade, and it often falls to whoever teaches writing to first year students to explain how it’s done.
Larson objected that drawing an artificial distinction between “research papers” and other kinds of writing suggests other kind of writing needn’t draw on evidence from sources and that the “research paper,” which actually does not involve students in any research design, research method, or proposal of an original hypothesis, is a misrepresentation of research as an activity by defining it as reporting what other people have said. Essentially, he argues “the research paper” should not be taught in writing courses as if it’s a genre unto itself, but that students should be encouraged to incorporate sources into their writing and to learn how to conduct research in the disciplines. Instead of asking English departments or writing programs to perform the service of teaching the “research paper,” we should instead “insist that students recognize their continuing responsibility for looking attentively at their experiences; for seeking out, wherever it can be found, the information they need for the development of their ideas; and for putting such data at the service of every piece they write.”
I still think that’s excellent advice, and would argue that there are any number of contexts in which students could practice the art of drawing on well-chosen evidence to understand and communicate ideas as a key part of their education. I agree with Larson that by isolating reasoning from sources as a practice used only in a certain kind of writing that is peculiar to a school setting diminishes the intellectual necessity of arriving at conclusions by examining the evidence. I am cheered by Andrea Lunsford’s findings that students can write compellingly using evidence when they have a reason to do so.
But I’m dismayed that in public discourse, few people seem to deal with information ethically. They either assume opinions are received as part of a belief system rather than shaped by observation, or seem to believe that facts are something one selects the way one chooses a weapon – for their edge, not as information that should influence what we believe. I worry that when we make research largely about citation formalities and a test of how well one can find and summarize other sources, we are putting a powerful kind of reasoning into a very small box, a small