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

Composition Studies, Spring 2001 by McNabb, Richard

Another manuscript RR received was an historical article on the process of scientific inquiry. As in the manuscript described above, the author began with an anecdote about the process of scientific discovery in atomic experiments. This anecdote served as a "metaphor for the present state of discussions about the epistemic status of rhetoric." Although the author did provide some context, she did not adequately position her argument against the community of researchers on this subject matter. Her two reviewers were quick to point this out:

Currently, you seem too much to be trying to adjudicate between two sides in the rhetoric as epistemic debate. I would say parenthetically that there are more than these two, despite your efforts to reduce them to two, and that more familiarity [with] the rhetoric [of] epistemic literature might help you to formalize a more careful review of the literature.

I would begin with a very brief review of the epistemic debate (with more attention to more of the literature and thus to a wider range of stances within the debate). Don't take sides, but do reflect a sense that the debate is not going anywhere .... Then go directly to the material that now begins on p. 16, to shift the focus entirely. Lay out directly and simply and clearly the idea that practice, or how language is used, is where the focus of analysis should be.

The reviewer goes on to construct one potential outline for presenting her argument. In a further revision the author does redirect the presentation of the article by first incorporating the sources suggested by the reviewers and then showing how her argument-the idea that practice, or how language is used, is where the focus of the rhetoric as epistemic debate should be-is a logical position. By the author's gesture to this problem presentation, she got her article published. It is important to note that the argument remained consistent; how it was presented and framed is what changed. At the urging of the referees, the end product, although a stronger article, had a completely different feel to it than the author's original approach. Writers, therefore, must use epistemic presentations to introduce their arguments no matter the rhetorical mode to which the writer gestures. But this gesture requires writers to shift their authority away from their own sense of writing and to an authorized disciplinary convention. In order to authorize an interpretation, a writer must be fully cognizant of the discursive conventions of the field.

Conclusion

The typical graduate manuscripts I saw as an associate editor suggest that the success of one's argument depends on the appropriation of the correct gestures, that is, the discursive conventions that govern the ways of arguing and evaluating that define the language of the field. As I have tried to illustrate, writing for publication goes beyond producing a coherent, effective, well-supported argument; a writer has to be able to negotiate the publishing system by making the right gestures. I have identified two such gestures present in the scholarship. I believe it is important to continue recognizing the gestures that authorize scholarly work, for this process leads to important discoveries about how knowledge is constructed in the field and how new scholars can participate in the process.