Nineteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Understanding academic writing as strictly argumentation poses a serious threat to incoming college students. It hampers their ability to transition to academic styles of writing. This problem begins in secondary education and often persists through much of a student’s academic career. The thesis driven paper is a major suspect to seeing writing as an argument or debate, and this formulaic approach overemphasizes a single sentence, a superstructure with no surprises, and curtails a paper’s ability to advance ideas or to be question driven. Yet, as a First-Year Writing instructor at Boston College, I offer students new ways of perceiving writing, and my research focuses around the methods, techniques, assignments, and metaphors that help move students past the restricted argumentative ideology. I reveal to students the explorative nature of writing, reinvigorating the prospects of writing and research. Further, I explore the background, rhetoric, and semiotics of the argumentative paper, finding it largely steeped in persuasion. My work engages with researchers such as Michele Eodice, Joseph Harris, Barry Kroll, and James Porter who all see the strictly argumentative paper as inimical to student learning practices and processes. In short, writing is communal, constructive, and deliberative, but too many students view it as a debate. Whereas debates and argumentative papers often deal with superlative positions and dogmatic speech, writing provides opportunities for qualifications, degrees, prolonged analysis, opinions, and advancements.