“Persuasion Beyond Logic: The Importance of Rhetorical Training for Military Officers”

by Danielle Roach | Xchanges 7.2

Writing: The “Right Way” versus the “Wrong Way”

Writing instructors, and indeed the academy at large, have often taught that there is inherently a “right way” to write in the discourse of the academy and a “wrong way.” Examples of the narrative surrounding the “right way” can be found in just about any textbook designed for a writing course, but are most prominently highlighted in the titles of such books. Diana Hacker, for example, published dozens of variations of her Writer’s Reference handbook over the years, marketed by the publisher as the most widely adopted handbook of its kind in the country (Bedford-St. Martin’s). Even since her death in 2004, Hacker’s publications continue to lead the field, having been reworked and retitled with names like Rules for Writers and the forthcoming e-book Writer’s Help (Bedford-St. Martin’s). Though certainly widely respected and used in writing classrooms, the titles suggest to students that writing is a specific “thing,” and that there is, consequently, a codifiable set of “rules” that will “help” them. Writing the right way is not knowable without the necessary intercession of these books to tell students how to “do writing.”

Books with titles like John Charles Goshert’s Entering the Academic Conversation take that narrative a step further. This title and others like it suggest to the student that the conversation that is going on within the academy is something to which you must gain admittance, suggesting even perhaps that there is some secret to entering the discourse. Even the forthcoming second edition of From Inquiry to Academic Writing seems to frame itself in terms of conversion of students to the “right way” of writing — its publisher’s promotional copy describes academic writing as a collegial, collaborative conversation pursued in service of new knowledge, and frames the textbook’s purpose as demystifying that conversation by breaking it into learnable habits and skills students can use to join in (Bedford-St. Martin’s).

Of course the “right way” includes a set of standards, as most handbooks contain sections on punctuation, spelling, mechanics, sentence structure, and the like, but alongside those “rules” for form are often an equally rigid set of prescriptions for things like style, citation, research, and argument.

The “wrong way” to write, then, is constructed not only through chastisement of non-standard mechanical and grammatical practices, non-linear organization, and informal diction, but also through the condemnation of transgressions of content, none of which are so despised as the generations-old scourge of writing itself: plagiarism. Composition handbooks like The Little, Brown Handbook (a consistent bestseller among writing handbooks, now in its 11th edition) frame the issue of plagiarism as being of two distinct varieties, differentiating between what the handbook calls “deliberate” and “accidental” plagiarism. Throughout these textbooks, however, there is a sense that the authors seem to be assuming that any plagiarism by students reading their texts would be of the accidental variety, and so much of the discussion has to do with when to cite and when not to, the difference between paraphrase, summary, and quotation, and notes about the various citation systems (MLA, APA, Chicago, etc.). Fascinatingly scarce is the discussion of forms of deliberate plagiarism; The Little, Brown Handbook sets forth only a brief list of examples, naming the copying or downloading of passages without attribution, the unacknowledged paraphrasing of others’ ideas, and the submission of a purchased, copied, or borrowed paper as one’s own (424).

Interestingly, the only other mention of these “deliberate” forms of plagiarism comes in a brief section on detecting and committing plagiarism on the Internet. Far from seeking to engage students in any thoughtful consideration of the role that the Internet may play in how they understand authorship, the section reads as a stern and foreboding warning. In just a few sentences, the handbook frames stealing and purchasing papers as the work of “the dishonest student” and insists in bold-face type that paying for a paper does not make it the buyer’s work (425). The brief section also cautions that the same Internet that allows students to steal or purchase someone else’s words has also made plagiarism considerably easier to catch (425). Again, however, The Little, Brown Handbook seems to dismiss the practice as a form of extreme deviance, and it wastes little time considering (or asking students to consider) just how OEMs function and why they work the way they do. Thus, the conversations in textbooks seem to imply a standard of good writing practice that summarily excludes the undocumented voices of anyone but the student writer. These perspectives will become crucial when we examine how the OEMs frame their own ideas about writing and authorship.