Making the gesture: Graduate student submissions and the expectation of journal referees

Composition Studies, Spring 2001 by McNabb, Richard

In "Present Perfect and Future Imperfect," Scott Miller, Benda Jo Brueggeman, Dennis Blue, and Deneen Shepherd conclude from their national survey of graduate students in rhetoric and composition that "by and large, students ... are greatly worried-or, frequently, know very little-about the `future tense,' about the broader professional realities to which they are endeavoring to adapt themselves" (393). Based on their findings, Miller et al. found that a discrepancy exists between the expectations associated with graduate school and the expectations associated with the professoriate. As most students commented, what they learned in the classroom-both as students and as teachers-did not adequately prepare them for their duties as professionals. As a result, the authors argue for the need to reconceive professionalization within departments, stating that professional development issues, such as writing program administration and job market difficulties, "ought to be at the center of rhetoric and composition programs" (397).

Despite the significance of their findings, one of the professional realities the authors do not discuss is the future tense of the graduate student's life as a publishing scholar. This reality, however, is a crucial element of any professional development program. Publication is one of the means by which merit is evaluated by the field; it is essential for professional advancement (see Boyer; Vandenberg; Goggin, "Shaping"). Graduate students, however, seem to have little knowledge of the publishing system. Despite their success at writing seminar papers, they have not always learned the discursive conventions governing the ways of arguing and evaluating well enough to turn these papers into publishable articles. In "Writing in the Graduate Curriculum: Literary Studies," Patricia Sullivan argues similarly, stating that graduate students may know how to read and interpret texts, but they have not always mastered "the arts of discourse well enough to produce" articles or other professional documents (294). Without such knowledge, graduate students will remain outside of the publishing community. Understanding the conventions of published discourse is therefore vital to their success as scholars.

As a former associate editor of a rhetoric journal, I learned first hand how gesturing functions as a discursive convention within rhetoric and composition studies. One cannot merely make statements that have the status of knowledge in rhetoric and composition studies. As Edward Said put it, "you must first pass through certain rules of accreditation, you must learn the rules, you must speak the language, you must master the idioms, and you must accept the authorities of the field... to which you want to contribute" (7-8). Along with Maureen Daly Goggin ("Shaping") and Peter Vandenberg, I find that these rules and regulations are both generated and maintained in the pages of the field's journals. Through their editorial practices, journals put forth the theoretical frameworks and the conceptual instruments and techniques writers must utilize if their arguments are to become accredited through publication. In this essay I argue for the importance of gesturing to the field's discursive conventions when writing for publication. Using graduate student submissions to Rhetoric Review (RR), I discuss two forms of gesturing. I am limiting my data (in both time and place) to Rhetoric Review since it has a known track record for publishing and encouraging graduate student work. I conclude by showing how recognizing these gestures leads to important discoveries about how knowledge is constructed in the field and how emerging scholars can participate in that construction!

A Gesture of Definition

The term gesture, as I am using it, is based on William Epstein's notion of the word. As he defines it, gesture is the critical tactic of "shift[ing] interpretive authority out of the context of everyday human and social activity [our professional practices] and into an independent, already constituted and structured realm of subjects, works, ideas, and linguistic patterns" ("Counter-Intelligence" 65). Gesturing authorizes an argument; it attributes an argument to a disciplinary matrix in order to authorize the argument's use. As a result, gesturing shifts disciplinary authority out of the realm of the material and into the realm of the ideological.

Gesturing is something we cannot avoid whenever we practice our profession. In rhetoric and composition studies, scholars gesture to the conventions institutionalized in journals. Publishing in rhetoric and composition journals requires one to shift authority away from everyday professional practices, that is, the material sites of one's activities-- classrooms, department hallways, conferences-and into a structured realm of epistemological and methodological frameworks. Scholars construct arguments around other arguments already authorized by the field and institutionalized by its journals-be it a rhetorical structure, canonized author, or generic convention.