Kleine Dialectical Journal

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.