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

Composition Studies, Spring 2001 by McNabb, Richard

These two manuscripts illustrate a trend that exists among the new initiates of the field to submit testimonial articles. In "Toward a Sociocognitive Model of Literacy," Cheryl Geisler found similar conclusions in the social sciences, discovering that "instead of an argument structure that eliminates other authors' approaches on the way to validating [their] own, novices simply present other approaches, structuring their argument as `here is what others believe: here is what I believe."' (181). This approach resonates with the rest of the reviewer comments in the RR archives: The majority of graduate student authors were required to strengthen their appropriation of the discourse in question. Each author was prompted by a reviewer to revise an argument based on a convention that the author had overlooked or underdeveloped. With the Gorgias manuscript, it was a more scholarly tone and a more detailed review of the literature. With others it was the methodology-the way of selecting and evaluating the subject matter. Whatever the case, referees and the editors who uphold their decisions require authors to reinvent the conventions of the field, conventions that give an article a more theoretical or historical structure.

Steve Nimis makes a similar case, arguing that within disciplines "relatively greater attention tends to be focussed on the form of scholarly practice, on establishing and reproducing a certain kind of discourse on one's subject matter, and the reproduction of a certain kind of discourse demands, among other things, the situation of one's argument in an authorized tradition of inquiry" (106). As Nimis suggests, the validity of an idea is not determined solely by its pertinence within a given disciplinary conceptual framework but rather by the success of its appropriation of the right conventions. What this means for us authors is that one of the merits by which our arguments are judged is on our ability to appropriate the conventions that allow us to authorize our arguments. As the two writers learned all too well, authorization seems to come at a price, namely at the loss of control over their argument and discourse.

Gestures to a Problem Presentation

Whereas the first gesture focuses on general patterns of discourse, the second gesture characteristic of graduate student manuscripts centers on the way an argument is introduced in a published source. In Professional Academic Writing in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Susan Peck MacDonald identified certain epistemic and nonepistemic variations in the way writers present their arguments in introductory paragraphs. Using her taxonomy to identify gestures in rhetoric and composition, I found that regardless of the rhetorical mode-history, theory, rhetorical analysis, or testimony-most of the articles published in the field reflect epistemic presentations. As MacDonald defines it, "In epistemic presentations, academic articles draw attention explicitly and immediately to the epistemology involved in the [argument's] genesis-- to some of the premises, processes, warrants, or methods involved in research and to the community of researchers" (121). By epistemic MacDonald is not referring to a writer's attempt to generate new knowledge in the field, but rather a writer's attempt to show the knowledge-making processes of the field. This is opposed to non-- epistemic presentations where writers do not define their claims immediately but start with historical or narrative anecdotes, immersing the reader "in particulars and defer point making.... [T]hey include little or no representation of current professional thinking on their problems-- only including citations to current critics late in their articles-there is nothing like the introductory review of criticism" (126). Although their locus of authority may come from a disciplinary matrix, they fail to gesture to this matrix in the introduction.