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

Composition Studies, Spring 2001 by McNabb, Richard

During this period, rhetoric and composition journals began calling for more research-oriented articles, both empirical and theoretical. The practical and pedagogical, rooted in specific courses and at local programs, lost out to more theoretical and historical practices. More and more members of the field began to adopt Maxine Hairston's view that writing teachers who are not "doing controlled and directed research on writing... [are] doing more harm than good" (Hairston 79). As this view became a commonly held belief, those submitting articles exploring the field's content and methods based solely on their own experiences and knowledge became less respected, and their body of knowledge was reduced to lore. Even though the subject matter of testimonial articles shifted to more abstract notions of discourse, this rhetorical mode continued to find limited access to publication. As Goggin has illustrated, long-running journals such as College Composition and Communication, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, College English, and JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory have throughout their history published a combined average of three percent testimonial articles as compared to fifty-two percent theoretical articles and sixteen percent historical ones ("Shaping" 159).

In my tenure at RR, this notion of gesturing to a particular rhetorical mode was first made evident to me in the spring of 1994 by a then current graduate student colleague of mine who submitted for consideration a manuscript on the Gorgias. In the article, the writer used her reaction to the Gorgias as a framework for a personal argument privileging rhetorical discourse (what she appropriated as autobiographical) over philosophical discourse (what she labeled as academic) in the pursuit of "truth"-a debate similar to the one that takes place between Gorgias and Socrates in the dialogue. She began by critiquing academic prose, followed by the need to move away from the limiting aspects of such discourse by authorizing another kind, namely the autobiographical. Given the personal nature of the article, the writer used her own experiences in the field as evidence and support. Furthermore, the author employed the kind of discourse she was advocating to present her argument; she used autobiographical discourse, discourse otherwise considered inappropriate for a "scholarly" article, to argue for the authorization of it.

When the reviews of the article came back, the referees had rejected the manuscript, objecting to both the line of reasoning and the conversational, i.e., autobiographical, style in which the piece was written. All three reviewers wanted the author to take a more scholarly approach and style. One reviewer, a well-known feminist scholar, focused more on the nature of autobiographical discourse, asking the author to incorporate more feminist research on this subject into her argument. The second reviewer, a well-known male classical historian, wanted more explication of the Gorgias. Furthermore, he was overt in his objection to the personal narrative style of writing, claiming that it was not "appropriate as an article." The third reviewer, another male classical historian, praised "the nontraditional aspects of the essay and the selfreflexive mode of writing" but nonetheless asked for a more scholarly approach.