Random Reflections before Summer...

As I have come to understand my task as helping students move into academic writing, I have felt myself move further away from Donald Murray's work.

What is academic writing? How do we define academic writing? (Burke "Parlor" quote, Thaiss/Zawacki book, They Say/I Say, Bartholomae's "Inventing the University") Are Murray's articles academic writing? Tom N. sure seems to think so...

• Why IS or is Murray NOT academic writing?
• Was it Murray's intention to teach students academic writing? Or just writing? And what transfers?
• If Murray is not going to help me to help students with academic writing, what IS he going to help me help them with?

Can I use Murray in this other way, to talk about the writing itself--in the service of teaching academic writing. Because there are insights there that I think are important and useful and helpful to actually getting the work done.

And this brings me to this question--Murray teaches the nuts and bolts of writing and can these nuts and bolts be used in any kind of writing? Are they useful in professional or business writing? In academic writing? It would be interesting to hear those who are not creative writers talk about what, in Murray, is useful to them.

So, can Murray be used for this other purpose? Not for direct instruction in academic writing, but for indirect teaching in the craft of writing?

This other thing which sometimes happens while I'm reading is thinking about my students and thinking about Murray as an antidote to what they have learned about writing or assume about the process and how it works. I'm thinking about the things that he says that I want them to hear, still. What are those things? I should make a list:

They have learned, mostly, that writing is about formulas and giving answers. Murray believes that writing is about working through things, answering questions, solving problems and at a very basic level, this is what academic writing is about (although that's certainly not what the students have learned writing is about).

Maybe the thing that I am coming to, and it's not all that complex, is that Murray is part of what I want to teach, just not ALL that I want to teach.

Finally, I see two separate projects here, one more personal than the other:

1. What do I want to do with Murray?
2. What do we want to do with Murray (as a field)?

It occurs to me, how interesting it would have been if Murray had drawn, at least occasionally, on the voices of academic writers, to try to understand their process. His sources are himself, a newspaperman, and creative writers...lots and lots of creative writers. But what about sociologists? What about biologists? What about literary critics or even compositionists? Academics. What do they go through when writing? What does Murray offer us that can transfer to academic writing? Where does he fail us or come up short?

The dilemma I have felt can be captured in the Burke quote:

Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.

Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1941. (p. 110-11)

In Bibliographic Research in Composition Studies, Vicki Byard writes:

Although Burke used this metaphor to describe the drama of human existence...the passage is sometimes quoted in composition scholarship as an apt description of how knowledge is constructed in an academic discipline. When a student or other newcomer first encounters a discipline, she finds its scholars engaged in an intense conversation that has been evolving since the discipline's inception. If the student is intrigued by the conversation taking place, she listens--she studies it--until she is informed enough to join the conversation herself as a publishing scholar. Consistent with Burke's metaphor, the conversation of a discipline--its scholarship--continues beyond any one individual's participation. (3-4)

Where do we situate Murray and his work in this framework of understanding academic writing? On one level, we cannot situate him because in the metaphor, Murray is sort of one of the early and/or founding discussants. On the other hand, Murray doesn't teach us about this conversation. He teaches us other things, but he has little to say about listening to the others--Murray wants us to listen to ourselves. He has little to say about adding to the existing conversation. If academic writing is about listening and then contributing, Murray has little to offer us. But he has a lot to offer us about getting the work done. The mistake--his and mine--may be in assuming that his vision of how writing works will APPLY or TRANSFER to academic writing.

Just think of the process I am going through in trying to imagine this article--it begins with Murray's words, and the words of others. I write, it is tentative, I'm not sure what I want to say yet or how or why. In this, Murray is useful for me. But I am spending a good deal of time with my sources here and Murray doesn't offer me much guidance on how to use these sources to contribute to the conversation.

Burke's parlor metaphor serves as an interesting counter-framework to Murray's work. It helps me work through what Murray does do and what he doesn't do. And of course, at the same time, as I try to work through these questions, I am applying Murray's notions of waiting and listening and tentatively jotting things down. This entire blog is a tribute to Murray.

It would be useful to go to They Say/I Say to think through what they have to say about academic writing (which is also a kind of public writing).

I am trying to write myself towards the position of thinking of Murray's work and this other kind of work as BOTH/AND rather than EITHER/OR.

(And once again, there is a Murray line that resonates with me...).