[Teaching_Composition] Academic Discourse

[Russ Hunt]

I want to pose a question about what Matthew Parfitt says:

> I think our students at Boston U need to become 
> able to recognize and reproduce academic discourse conventions, but 
> I think they are better able to do so when they can see these 
> conventions in relation to other discourse conventions.  So I try to 
> expose them to periodical essays, personal essays, academic essays, 
> experimental essays, etc., in order to illustrate how genres (or 
> subgenres, if you prefer) express purpose and audience.  

Agreed, but I wonder about what we all mean by "expose them to." 
There's a temptation here to think of those genres as fixed entities 
and assume that somehow we could introduce them to them, like learning 
various kinds of joinery (rabbeting, dovetailing, etc.) -- when really 
what we need to be doing is helping them learn how to join in the 
_invention_ of genres and become sensitive to disjunctions between 
their discourse and the genres they're living in. I think they do that 
by dwelling in authentic generic situations (which might be included 
under "expose them to," but might not, too).

So I agreen entirely with this:

> I think 
> they  produce better academic writing better when they understand the 
> conventions not as rules they must follow in their school writing, 
> but as malleable practices that serve the particular purposes of the 
> academy.  Other subgenres serve other purposes. 

But that "understanding" is hard come by.

-- Russ

Russell Hunt
Department of English
St. Thomas University
http://www.stu.ca/~hunt/