An Introduction to Scholarly Conversations

This course may be your first—or most recent—experience reading scholarly texts. This type of text can be especially challenging to read because as students you are not part of or familiar with the specific academic subject or field for which the text is written (e.g. nursing, management, real estate, biology, law, etc.)—these academic discourse communities. Scholarly texts are also challenging for you to read as you are not the intended audience, which is other scholars or experts in that field. Furthermore, you’re not familiar with the type of text it is—it’s genre—or the specific subject matter and arguments about the topic.

Yet, because of all these not’s reading and analyzing scholarly texts is especially helpful for you as a student to begin understanding knowledge domains of writing (discussed in Chapter 2) at work in such academic writing. Furthermore, as a student you will be reading a lot of scholarly texts in your college career, especially as you take courses in your academic major. After all, you are in college, for example, to major in a specific academic discipline or subject and potentially to work in a related profession after you graduate—and along the way you will take college classes in a range of subjects. Therefore, here is a brief overview or orientation to scholarly texts.

Scholarly texts, like all other texts, are actually conversations, interactions between writers and readers as shown in the following passages adapted from the eBook Methods of Discovery – Online Writing Guide.

Texts are created to be read by others, and in creating those texts, writers should be aware of not only their personal assumptions, biases, and tastes, but also those of their readers. Writing, therefore, is an interactive process. It is a conversation, a meeting of minds, during which ideas are exchanged, debates and discussions take place and, sometimes, but not always, consensus is reached. You may be familiar with the famous quote by the 20th century rhetorician Kenneth Burke who compared writing to a conversation at a social event. In his 1941 book The Philosophy of Literary Form Burke writes,

Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him, another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress. (110-111)

This passage by Burke is extremely popular among writers because it captures the interactive nature of writing so precisely. Reading Burke’s words carefully, we will notice that the interaction between readers and writers is continuous. A writer always enters a conversation in progress. In order to participate in the discussion, just like in real life, you need to know what your interlocutors have been talking about. So you listen (read). Once you feel you have got the drift of the conversation, you say (write) something. Your text is read by others who respond to your ideas, stories, and arguments with their own. This interaction never ends!

In scholarly texts, evidence of that never-ending conversation can be found throughout. Recall from Chapter 2 the structure and moves in the introductory sections of many genres of scholarly research reports that John Swales found in his research. Generally, early in scholarly texts, writers will enter the conversation already in progress about the topic they are studying and writing about by summarizing and citing (discussed in Chapter 4) the relevant research that others have already published; this is usually called a literature review. Furthermore, scholarly texts often conclude with ideas for other researchers to keep the conversation about the topic going by naming suggestions for future research, for example. See this tour of the first page of a typical scholarly text, an article in an academic journal.