[Teaching_Composition] information versatility revisited

[Elizabeth Vander Lei]

Hi Rich,

Where does Ahmad make this argument most clearly?

Curiously yours,

Elizabeth Vander Lei
Associate Professor of English
Calvin College
1795 Knollcrest Circle SE
Grand Rapids, MI 49546-4404
616.526.6434

>>> rhaswell@grandecom.net 4/30/2006 5:58 PM >>>
Cynthia: "A scientist contesting the conclusions might pick apart the data
and results to show how they might yield a different interpretation, while a
scientist writing a lit review might summarize the discussion and
recommendations to lay the groundwork for his/her own work."

Cynthia, 

You leave out the most heinous crime in scientific research: fabrication of
data, cooking up the "facts" that bear upon the results.

It's OK to argue that, hey, the bogus, cooked-up scientific report is
persuasive in its own right and even with a certain audience might be more
persuasive than a report in which the data had not been fabricated.

It's OK to deconstruct scientific reports and say that they are all built
out of arbitrary language codes and ultimately their only message is the
absence of presence, or say that all discourse is socially constructed so
facts really don't exist or at least are as rare as hen's teeth.

I suppose it's also OK for writing teachers to say that when we teach the
research paper we're only interested in the way students manipulate their
sources. It may be then OK for students to invent the "facts" and "data"
they use in their research papers (and writing research has shown that some
students, indeed, do this). The student "research paper," after all, is
usually not a research report but a construction of other writer's "facts,"
"data," "results," and "conclusions."

Well, I for one don't think this is enough, and that if this is all there is
to the student research paper and the way it is taught then it's not OK with
me. I think it is unethical.

Aijaz Ahmad argues that deconstruction and social constructivism are
bourgeois efforts to maintain the status quo. If everything down to "facts"
are questionable, then there are no grounds to act, and we all can spend our
time not inquiring into the issues but enjoying a dialogic conversation
about them. Acts of discourse are no more than material goods from which, in
good bourgeois fashion, we just pick and choose what we want. There is no
such thing as good and bad engineering reports, just persuasive or
unpersuasive. Engineering reports are all equal, all equally constructed, so
all Halliburton's subsidiary KBR need do is disregard which ones they don't
want and all we can do is watch them walk off with $75 million of our money.

There are days when I think Ahamd is right.

Rich Haswell






On 4/30/06 12:23 PM, "Cynthia R. Haller" <haller@york.cuny.edu> wrote:

> 


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