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

Composition Studies, Spring 2001 by McNabb, Richard

The first of the two gestures concerns the mode that the article takes. In examining all the submitted manuscripts from 1990 through 1998, I found that the scholarly articles reflected six dominant modes of discourse described by Goggin: description, testimony, history, theory, rhetorical analysis, and research reports.3 What separates these classifications from one another is their locus of authority and their methodology-the way of selecting and evaluating the subject matter under discussion. Although these modes are not mutually exclusive, the majority of articles published in RR and other journals in rhetoric and composition during this period were recognizable in one of these modes.

Despite all the theory and history graduate students digest in their seminar classes, the most common rhetorical mode of articles that they submit-sixty-two percent-is what Goggin labels as testimony. A testimonial article is one that is based "solely on the author's own experiences and generally takes the form of a `what I did and how I did it' article" ("Shaping" 45). In this rhetorical mode, writers authorize their arguments on the basis of their personal professional practices and experiences. In the epistemological orientation of the author, knowledge emerges from experience as opposed to disciplined inquiry. Consistent with Robert Merton's depiction of emerging disciplines, graduate students seem to first explore the field's domain of knowledge through descriptive means. Before they engage in theoretical or historical arguments about the field, they first explore and define its content, aims, and methods (see Goggin, "Shaping"). One of the outcomes of this approach to studying the field is that they tend to see the source of their authority as stemming from their knowledge of the classroom. As Thomas Newkirk points out, new composition teachers tend to recognize the source of authority as coming from "intimate knowledge of the classroom and students, from ... making thousands of judgements and observations of student work" (133). This accounts for the high percentage of testimonial articles submitted to RR for publication. This rhetorical mode, however, is generally excluded from publication, the submissions often stigmatized as graduate student papers by reviewers. Although Newkirk argues that the authority of writers is derived ultimately from experience as writing teachers, the top journals in the field limit their space to those articles that are more theoretical or historical in nature, that is, articles in which the writer shifts personal authority to an established disciplinary matrix.

The dominance of theoretical and historical articles can be traced back to the field's attempt to assert itself as a discipline in the academy. As has been well documented, between the mid-1960s and early 1980s, rhetoric and composition was struggling to define itself as a discipline (see Goggin, "Shaping"; Berlin; Miller). In the move to solidify its position in the academy, composition studies began to organize itself according to the criteria of the hard sciences. Dating back to the influence of the German system of education on American institutions in the nineteenth century, the new goal of the academy became one of knowledge production. In order to gain equal footing with scholars of other disciplines within English studies, particularly literary studies, scholars of composition needed to shed their traditional image as "the disseminators of 'practical' knowledge rather than the creators of theory" (Vandenberg 55). The field, therefore, began "to shift (its] attention away from practical and pedagogical issues in writing instruction toward . . . a more rigorous understanding of ... the ways writers and readers construct texts and the ways these processes are learned" (Goggin, "Shaping" 96-97).