In WRDS 150, we think of writing as a situated activity. When we study published journal articles, we think of them as scholarly conversations. To say these articles are situated means that aspects of the content and presentation of ideas respond to the expectations of the field or publication venue. We analyze discourse features as we determine the conventions of research in a field.
But we can also think about writing as a situated activity in which we engage certain tools and technologies for taking notes, organizing ideas, creating written conversations, and communicating ideas. Researchers in situated cognition describe how the technology of writing not only supports but changes thought (Norman 1993, Kirsh 2010). From this perspective, writers use technologies to focus awareness on some information in a way that allows certain types of links and connections to occur. Information can be organized in ways that make it easier for us to make inferences and see connections. Gopen and Swan (1990) have built upon these ideas to offer principles for organizing written text. They offer a theory of reader expectation that can help us think in a new way about form in scholarly writing.
This was the topic of today’s class: how to take a situated perspective on form in scholarly writing. Our approach to thinking about form is not focused on identifying modes of development like description, narration, exposition, persuasion, comparison, or cause/effect. Rather, we were interested in learning about how readers interact with written information to understand how to organize and create patterns out of our ideas and improve coherence.
Gopen and Swan (1990) tell us that readers expect information in two key positions: the “topic position” and the “stress position.” These positions scale up and down to different discourse units (e.g. sentence, paragraph). At different units and levels in the paper, we establish a context for ideas and position new information with respect to that context. Failing to do so may result in a failure of communication between writer and reader.
- “If these structural expectations are continually violated, readers are forced to divert energy from understanding the content of a passage to unraveling its structure. As the complexity of the context increases moderately, the possibility of misinterpretation or noninterpretation increases dramatically” (Gopen & Swan (1990) p. 552).
In the scholarly literature review, we are using reporting expressions to give context and positioning to the ideas in the sentence. *It is important to remember that your scholarly conversation should be emphasized throughout the paper. Put the ideas together for others. Give your ideas a context, a pattern, a shape.
To revise your scholarly literature review, keep in mind these structural principles from Gopen & Swan (1990):
- Follow a grammatical subject as soon as possible with its verb.
- Place in the stress position the “new information” you want the reader to emphasize.
- Place the person or thing whose “story” a sentence is telling at the beginning of the sentence, in the topic position.
- Place appropriate “old information” (material already stated in the discourse) in the topic position for linkage backward and contextualization forward.
- Articulate the action of every clause or sentence in its verb.
- In general, provide context for your reader before asking that reader to consider anything new.
- In general, try to ensure that the relative emphases of the substance coincide with the relative expectations for emphasis raised by the structure.
References:
Gopen, George D. and Swan, Judith A. (1990). “The Science of Scientific Writing.” American Scientist, Volume 78 (Nov-Dec 1990): 550-558.
Kirsh, David. (2010). “Thinking with external representations.” AI & Society. Volume 25, Issue 4: 441-454. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-010-0272-8
Norman, Donald A. (1993). Things That Make Us Smart: Defining Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.