There is a recurrent joke among teachers of writing about what we tell people next to us on planes concerning what we do. As Wayne Booth said a long time ago (so long that he used the example of sitting next to someone on a train), it is rare that the conversation turns into a lively conversation about good writing. The interlocutor often expresses anxiety that we will correct their “grammar” or goes on to share what they assume we will consider horror stories of terrible “writing.” Ironically, neither interlocutor usually uses the central terms precisely (it’s ironic since their embarrassment or rant is often about lack of precision or misuse of words). What they mean by “grammar” or “writing” is something more accurately called “sentence-level correctness,” with a disturbing number of them inflected by sheer prejudice. People who pronounce Wednesday “Wendsday” probably shouldn’t try to mount any high horses about “nucular” or “aks.” A linguist friend pointed out to me that my snickering at people who pronounce pin/pen/pan indistinguishably was probably unwise, given my tendency to pronounce merry/Mary/marry identically.
People have a very difficult time understanding that “correctness” is a rhetorical issue—it’s about context—rather than a set of rules handed down on Moses’ third tablet. Americans say “garage” with the emphasis on the second syllable, and British say it with an emphasis on the first. Using “ain’t” when someone else might use “aren’t” is not an indication of stupidity any more than is using “visit” when someone from a different region might use “talk.” In a perfect world, people would be skilled in code-switching; that is, in moving among levels of formality and dialect. Similarly, in scholarly writing, there is considerably more variation in what is considered “correct” than scholars within a specific discipline might realize. Instead of framing many concerns about style as discipline-specific (which they are), college instructors have a troubling tendency to put rules in “always” or “never” form, such as telling students they should “never” say “I,” use passive voice, use “impact” as a verb, use a long phrase that is mostly nouns, end a sentence with a preposition, and so on. Each of those moves is considered valid in some disciplines; just as there is nothing wrong with explaining to someone that one should avoid saying “totally” in some situations, there is nothing wrong with telling students that they shouldn’t use “I” in writing for the sciences and social sciences.
It isn’t clear to me why people get so attached to our disciplinary conventions. When I have pointed out to fellow faculty that passive voice is required in some disciplines, and so on, I have more than once been told, “Well, those disciplines are wrong.” In point of fact, disciplinary preferences regarding style are not written into the fabric of the universe, and I don’t claim to know whether the angels use passive voice. I do know, however, that passive voice is useful under many circumstances.
Hence, writers need to infer the discipline-specific rules from writing textbooks written specifically for disciplines (of which there are many), or from the published materials in one’s field.[1] The three areas in which disciplines vary more than one might guess are: diction; passive voice/agency; and hedging.
The extent to which scholarly writing must be formal varies not only from one discipline to another, but from one journal to another. While this variation manifests itself in style choices—such as the use of “I,” slang, personal experience, humor—it signifies deeper differences about the nature of evidence and observation.
Passive voice/agency is partially related to issues of evidence and epistemology—saying “I observed X” emphasizes the particularity of my perception whereas “X was observed” implies that anyone present could or would have seen X. But the use of passive voice/agency also correlates to the kinds of topics—there are some topics in which the agent can’t be identified, or the nature of agency is precisely what is in dispute. Passive voice is a grammatical construction (a form of “to be” and a past participle) but passive agency has to do with the logic of the sentence. “Chester bit Hubert” is active voice; it is also active agency, in that the agent of the action is the grammatical subject. “Hubert was bitten by Chester” is passive voice—the verbal is a form of “to be” and a past participle. It is also passive agency, in that the agent (Chester) of the action (biting) is not the subject, but the object of a preposition. The grammatical subject (Hubert) is the object of the action (biting). So, the logical subject is an object and the logical object is the subject. One can drop Chester out of the sentence entirely—“Hubert was bitten” (how Chester’s advocate would probably phrase it.) But, one can have active voice and passive agency. “Biting happened between Chester and Hubert” is grammatically active voice; it does not have a “to be” and past participle. It is, however, passive agency, in that the agent of action is suppressed. Thus, the various options are:
· Active Voice/Active Agency: Chester bit Hubert.
· Passive Voice/Passive Agency: Hubert was bitten by Chester. Hubert was bitten. Hubert was involved in a biting incident.
· Active Voice/Passive Agency: Biting happened between Chester and Hubert. Biting happened to Hubert. There was biting between Chester and Hubert. An incident of biting occurred toward Hubert.
While passive agency obscures agency, that move is not necessarily intentional or nefarious. Instead of telling my son, “Get your socks off the coffee table,” I will often say something like, “What are your socks doing on the table?” Writing teachers often use passive voice or agency in paper comments, as it is rhetorically more effective to say, “This paper begins well, but seems to get confusing on the second page” than “You start the paper well, but you confuse your reader beginning on the second page.” Using “you” tends to make authors defensive, and reinforces the unproductive sense that one’s self, rather than one’s writing, is being criticized. Passive voice/agency sometimes, but not always, reduces the drama of the situation; sometimes it heightens drama by reshifting the focus. So, for instance, “Hubert was victimized by Chester’s biting” emphasizes Hubert’s victimization better than does “Chester bit Hubert.”
It seems to me that scholars in the social sciences and sciences often rely heavily on passive agency because they are writing about situations in which agency is unclear—economists say, “The market went up” because the argument is about the agent of economic change; it isn’t clear what caused the market to go up. In such fields, or at least in such arguments, insisting on active agency is unhelpful at best (notice the passive agency in this sentence). I’m not saying that concern about agency is always trivial. While the use of passive agency sometimes results in sentences that hurt the grammar pedant in me (“Hello, this is your doctor’s office calling with your lab results”), and I know that the answer is to tell the inner grammar pedant to shut up, passive voice and agency do have ethical dimensions. People tend to use passive agency for members of the outgroup, especially when describing good behavior, and passive voice/agency for themselves and members of the ingroup when describing inappropriate, harmful, or unethical behavior. As Elliot Aronson says, the most common form that the looks-like-an-admission-of-responsibility-but-isn’t statement takes is “mistakes were made.” And Richard Lanham is right to argue that nominalization—turning verbs into nouns—does make appalling actions more palatable (because agency-free and abstract), and is a crucial process in political euphemisms. To call for the “pacification” of a village seems to be an abstract process, with no actions by humans, and is far more attractive than saying that American troops “bomb” or “eradicate” villages. Passive voice/agency is not just a stylistic choice, but it is neither inherently right nor wrong.
Ken Hyland argues for dividing “metadiscourse” into two functions: interactive and interactional. Loosely, “metadiscourse” is the term that linguists and rhetoricians use for the parts of discourse that signal to the reader how they are to understand the propositions being conveyed. It is talk about the talk. Interactive metadiscourse helps the reader understand the text better through giving explicit cues about the text. Transitions, for instance, help a reader understand where in the text one is, and how the currect text relates to material previous or subsequent. Words and phrases such as “In addition,” “next,” and “another” indicate to the reader that this information is what Hyland calls “additive.”
Metadiscourse isn’t necessarily deliberate, and hence can be useful for the author as well as the reader. For instance, when an additive transition marker is in the topic sentence, that is often a sign that this section of the text has a list structure. Readers have a tendency to get irritated by lists with too many elements, so an entire article or chapter that is a list will tend to be hard work for a reader. Similarly, contrastive transition markers (but, however) that occur throughout a paragraph signify a logical structure that is either continually correcting, or bouncing between both sides of an antithesis. Either structure is difficult for a reader to follow.
Other interactive resources include “frame markers,” “endorphic markers,” and “evidentials,” and “code glosses” (Hyland 50-51). Frame markers signal to the reader the boundaries of sections within a text (“in conclusion”), and endorphic markers tell the reader how this material relates to material elsewhere in the text (“as will be discussed later,” “see below”). People in rhetoric often refer to both these kinds of metadiscourse as “signposts,” as they function in the same way that “you are entering” and “you are leaving” signs function for travelers. They’re rarely necessary in short pieces of writing, and that kind of work is often done visually (extra space between paragraphs, sub-headings, roman numerals), but they become increasingly necessary for the reader and writer as an argument gets longer and more complicated. Some people call that kind of metadiscourse “scaffolding,” as it can hold up an argument the same way that scaffolding holds up a building while it’s being built. Once the building is complete, the scaffolding is no longer necessary, and is an active distraction. Writers who are resistant to a highly recursive writing process often resist using scaffolding, even in the beginning, as they don’t like it in final products. But that’s like a builder refusing to put up scaffolding while building because it won’t be part of the final design.
Hyland uses the term “code glosses” for words and phrases that mark moments when an author is engaged in explanation (or analysis)—the rephrasing or amplifying of what another author has said. A recurrent problem in dissertations (at least in my field) is that the evidence doesn’t quite earn the conclusions the student is drawing. Sometimes that weakness is simply the consequence of the short amount of time that a student has to write a dissertation—two years for research and writing—and thus will be resolved when s/he has more time to gather additional evidence (or refine the conclusions). But it often seems to me that the student has trouble with providing adequate analysis of the evidence. One way to check to see if there is adequate analysis is to look for “code glosses.”
Evidentials, “guide the readers’ interpretation and establish an authorial command of the subject” (Hyland 51). Hyland distinguishes them from “stance” metadiscourse, which may be too fine a distinction for some, but it seems to me useful because evidentials are precisely what is crucially important in (and often missing from) summaries of dissertations, grant applications, book proposals, and literature reviews. An ineffective literature review is little more than an annotated bibliography in a different format. An effective literature review has both “stance” (discussed below) and “evidential” metadiscourse, describing the existing literature in a way that persuade the reader the author has reviewed it accurately and critically, and can place his/her contributions in relation to what exists.
An author’s authority is also strengthened by several of the “interactional” metadiscursive moves an author can make. “Boosters” (choosing a word like “proves” rather than “suggests” or using an adverb like “clearly”) and “hedges” (choosing a word like “suggests” rather than “proves” or modifiers like “possibly” or “perhaps”) both function to enhance the author’s credibility, unless overused or in the wrong discipline. I have noticed that it makes some readers uncomfortable, as they see any hedging as unnecessary, whereas other readers describe it as something that shows an appropriate degree of self-reflection on the part of the author. In some disciplines, the hedging is part of the “implications” section, especially in calls for future research. Saying that a topic needs to be studied in a certain way, or that other studies need to be conducted on this aspect, or other moves along those lines, imply that one’s own research is limited. If an author uses boosters when they aren’t merited, or too often, then readers can become skeptical; excessive use of hedges will make an author what credibility the piece does have.
“Engagement markers” (explicitly addressing the reader, often with “you”) and “self mention” (using first person pronouns or referring to “the author”) are, as Hyland says, useful for meeting “readers’ expectations of inclusion and disciplinary solidarity” (Hyland 54, essentially ensuring that the reader and author are members of the same ingroup) and “pulling readers into the discourse at crucial points” (Hyland 54). “Attitude markers” (words and phrases that communicate the author’s evaluation of the material s/he is discussing) engage a reader; Hyland distinguishes epistemic evaluations from affective ones (“This example clearly demonstrates” versus “This example unfortunately demonstrates”), a distinction that matters more in some disciplines than others—in some, it seems to me (hedging and self mention), epistemic evaluations are permitted, but affective ones are not.
I’ve relied heavily on Hyland’s taxonomy not because it’s the only one, and not even because I think he has precisely divided the phrases correctly, but simply because, as he says, students are not generally explicitly taught metadiscursive practices. They (we) are expected to infer them. Hyland argues for explicitly teaching those practices to students, and I have seen very effective “writing for publication” courses that used such assignments to good effect. But, the point is not to go through and label moves. As indicated in the hedging/self mention above, they aren’t necessarily discrete, and I could easily imagine someone arguing that Hyland has either too few or too many distinctions. While Hyland emphasizes their importance in reading (and I think it’s true that students who misread texts often do so because they fail to pay attention to metadiscoursive cues about how the author wants the material to be read), I have found the concept most useful for looking helping writers look more critically at our own writing. Identifying whatever our recurrent markers are can tell us something about how we imagine our rhetorical situation. And noting that some of the cues are rarely or extremely commonly used can indicate problems readers are likely to have—a complete absence of frame and endorphic markers can suggest that the overall organization may be unclear even to the author, too many boosters may imply that it is argument by assertion.
[1] The two texts that I have found helpful for writers across disciplines are Joseph Williams’ Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace and George Gopen’s A Sense of Structure. Both put emphasis on reader expectation, rather than rigid rules, and on how style functions in particular circumstances. Williams’ explanation of agency, and his exercises for practicing how and when to shift between active and passive, is excellent.
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