Option 1: The Profession

Walk the Walk and Talk the Talk: From "A Dissenting Tradition" to "Something We Know About"

There has long been a dissenting tradition in English that has argued for looking closely at the uses students and ordinary people make of language. Its roots go back at least to the early 1900s and the likes of George Brown, Fred Newton Scott, and Gertrude Buck. Its themes and ideas run through the work of teachers like Louise Rosenblatt and Theodore Baird in the middle of this century and appear once more during the 1960s in the talk at Dartmouth. I think they can be seen now in the work of many in composition. In this book I hope to add my voice to theirs. (emphasis added, Joseph Harris, A Teaching Subject, p. xi)

This book does not tell you how to write. It does not contain step-by-step advice about how to draft your paper or how to conduct research. Instead, it introduces you to the research about writing conducted in the field of writing studies, much as your textbooks in biology or psychology introduce you to the research of those fields. Writing about Writing asks you to think about writing as something we know about, not just something we do. (Downs and Warlde, p. 1)

Terry Gross, Fresh Air episode on climate change.

Habermas, Jurgen. Legitimation Crisis. Trans. Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon, 1975.

The two positions can be seen as differing responses to what Jurgen Habermas has called a legitimation crisis. Habermas argues that a profession needs to justify its work to both an audience of experts and the public at large. Since these groups have differing needs and interests, the work of professionals will often seem to be pulled in two directions at once. And so, on the one hand, there is a continuing need to legitimize English as an academic field with its own specialized subject and methods of study. On the other hand, English has long been valued precisely because it seems more than just another specialized area of study, because it offers a place where different kinds of knowledge can be brought together and related to personal experience. (Joseph Harris, A Teaching Subject, p. 5)