Heather Kaley
Dr. Albert Rouzie
ENG 5890
8/29/30
Kleine Dialectical
Journal
1)
“ I knew they were writing research papers because they were
not writing at all—merely copying” (23).
Here Kleine is opening with the example of the
“night library,” where students blindly plug research into their papers without
closely reading or thinking about their sources.
2)
“Do college level academics… really live in the night library?
Or do they participate in a rich process of discovery and communication, a
process that might have both private and public value?” (24)
Kleine asks if advanced writers are guilty of the
same manipulation of resources as those students found in the night library. He
sets up the research question for his article.
3)
“Academic and professional writing is a complex, recursive
process that includes both research, or data gathering, and reading from start
to finish” (24).
Kleine shows how the academic reading/writing
process is different from the process utilized by students in the night
library. Scholars engage the texts with close readings; they don’t just hunt
for phrases to plug into their papers that will help to support their
preconceived ideas, they read closely and consider how new ideas found in
research might reshape their own work.
4)
“A hunter finds what he is looking for; a gatherer discovers
what might be of use” (25).
Here Kleine explains the
difference between two research methods. Sometimes scholars search for specific
information, other times they look around and see what information might be useful.
5)
“Collecting data and seeking pattern in it seemed to us to be
more intrinsically epistemic, while sifting the data and translating
knowledge into text seemed more intrinsically rhetorical” (25).
Kleine sets up the difference between epistemic and
rhetorical writing, terms that he will use later to compare writing across the
disciplines. His idea is that finding the data and patterns within it is an
epistemic endeavor, whilst modeling that data in a way that the audience will
understand is a rhetorical endeavor.
6)
“Although our model… seems static and linear, we knew, when
contriving it, that it was at best a good fiction, an effort to segment and
schematize our own intuitive sense of a recursive process that is, at bottom,
cognitive and invisible” (25).
Kleine knows that his hunting/gathering model cannot
display all the complexities of the academic writing process, but in his
mission to bring students into the academic fold, he wants to be able to show
them something concrete that they can then emulate in their own writing
processes.
7)
“Quite simply, my procedure was incapable of uncovering what
the subjects actually did during the process; instead, it helped me, and
them, understand their own sense, and memory, of what it was they did when they
wrote academically” (26).
Kleine’s coding of the
academics’ writing processes fails on another level. Because the academics are
recalling a their writing processes for a past writing process, Kleine does not
know for certain what happened exactly during those processes, he just gets a
report after the fact. So the academics tell him what they think they
did during their processes, but memory is sometimes flawed or warped, and
Kleine has no way of knowing the absolute truth.
8)
“In all eight cases, then, the coding form was incapable of
capturing the complexity of what the subjects did, their ability to recall
their experiences, or their enthusiasm about their work” (27).
Once again Kleine expresses the limitations of his
experiment. However, he brings up a new point: enthusiasm. Kleine is taken
aback by the amount of enthusiasm and willingness the academics showed for
their work. He laments the fact that his coding form is incapable of capturing
that emotion.
9)
“…always, the subjects gestured at a concerned community of peers
and found starting points within the ongoing discourse of such a community”
(27).
Like Greene, Kleine recognizes the importance of the
social aspect of academic writing, and that writing is, in effect, an ongoing
conversation. One needs to listen to the conversation for a bit before jumping
in with something new to say.
10)
“In terms of “hunting”
and “gathering,” they remembered moving freely and flexibly between strategic
hunting and heuristic gathering, and described moments of purposeful control
mixed with moments of dissonance, discovery, and revision of both plan and
material” (27).
Kleine says that across the disciplines, the
academics utilized both the “hunting” and “gathering” methods of research. This
is interesting, because one might assume a scientist would do a lot of
“hunting,” whereas an academic in the humanities would be more comfortable
“gathering,” but Kleine’s findings show that is not the case.
11)
“Another way of saying
this is: the subjects who were located in the sciences and social sciences
recalled an epistemic orientation, and methods of inquiring relatively divorced
from rhetorical implications; the subjects in the humanities recalled a
rhetorical orientation, where the knowledge, the attitudes, beliefs, and values
of the audience seriously affected their own inquiry and writing” (28).
Going back to his “epistemic” v. “rhetorical” modes
of writing, Kleine says that he found scientists and social scientists to be
more concerned with empirical data-gathering itself than how that data might be
perceived by his audience, and that the opposite was true for those in the
humanities.
12)
“The scientists and
social scientists tended to regard research as a process of observing and
quantifying that is prior to writing” (28).
Now Kleine talks about the order of the
writing/research process, and says that the scientists and social scientists
tend to get their facts straight—by collecting their own data and looking at
the scholarship of others—before they attempt to write.
13)
“The subjects in the
humanities tended to view writing and reading as activities inseparable from
the research process: in a sense, writing and reading are the research”
(28).
Alternatively, those on the humanities viewed the
writing and research processes as intertwined.
14)
“For instance, when I
told the scientists that I found their work more epistemic…than rhetorical,
they strongly asserted that underlying their research was a sense of the
general knowledge of their own research community” (29).
To combat Kleine’s earlier claim that the work of
the scientists was more epistemic, the scientists affirm that they in fact
consider their academic audience whilst researching and writing; their writing
is both epistemic and rhetorical.
15)
“Moreover, the actual
writing that academics do may well be both expressive and transactional, a form
of effective communication and a mode of learning” (29).
Kleine expresses that writing is both a way of
teaching and learning. Not only do we transmit our own ideas to others, through
the writing process we learn new things and help to solidify what it is exactly
that we want to say. This phenomenon also occurs across the disciplines.
16)
“In short, then, the
postnarrative discussion led me, at last, to a relatively simple truth: among
academics, the research/writing process is recursive, too complicated to code,
and incredibly rich; although there might be some trends in different
disciplines, an individual academic writer needs to be characterized
independently, and probably characterized differently during different research
and writing occasions” (30).
Kleine states here what might be considered obvious,
but that is nevertheless something we need to hear; the academic writing
process is very complex, and that the writing process varies over people and
projects.
17)
“…if we can better
understand what it is we do when we inquire and write, then we might be capable
of leading our students away from the night library” (30).
The point for Kleine’s whole article is for
academics to treat students as equals, bringing them in on the rich discussion
in which they take part. In order to bring students in on the conversation,
academic must first teach the students how to write like an academic. Yet, in
order to do that, the academic must first understand how he or she writes in
the first place. Hence Kleine’s attempt at coding the academic writing process,
which, though not completely successful, showed that the academic writing
process is recursive, epistemic, rhetorical, expressive, and transactional
across the board.
18)
“Students would be
researching and writing to broaden their own knowledge and the knowledge of
their own community rather than to transcribe the knowledge already generated
by academicians (and teachers) in external communities” (30).
Kleine wants to translate the excitement he found in
the academics in relation to their writings to the student population. He
thinks that by engaging in real academic conversations, students will willingly
research in order to better their own knowledge on a certain subject, rather
than half-heartedly search for quotes to plug into their paper.
19)
“We need to help them
see that academic research, reading, and writing is a constructive, personal
process—one worth sharing with others” (31).
Again bringing to the forefront the aspect of the
social, Kleine says that writing is a personal process that students should
feel comfortable sharing with their teachers, and vice versa—we all have valid
things to say about it.
20)
“ ‘Research is
writing,’ he said, meaning, I think, that there is no such thing as knowledge
that is dissociated from discourse” (31).
A subject of Kleine’s offers him this quote. Kleine
takes it to mean that knowledge does not exist in a vacuum, that the spark of
an idea was learned from somewhere outside the academic and that once the idea
is fully formed the academic will pass it on to others.
21)
“What we do when we
write academically can be enriched by learning what others do, by expanding our
discourse. I believe, now, that the next step for me, and for my colleagues, is
to invite our students to join in what we really do when we write articles like
this one” (32).
Kleine’s take home message is
that everyone can learn by communicating with others, whether across
disciplines or an academic hierarchy. He wants academics to show students how
to do real academic research and writing away from the night library.
