JAC Volume 11 Issue 2

Writing across the curriculum is one of the more worthy causes in academe nowadays--the conviction that writing helps thinking in all disciplines and that even students in math and hard sciences such as physics and chemistry may learn them better by writing about them. But we spend little time explaining to students the requirements of academic prose. What do academics do when they write? What makes an essay "academic"? How do we teach the form of the academic essay to young academicians learning to write articles for professional journals? John M. Swales, Director of the English Language Institute and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Michigan, has addressed these questions in a book that is, alas, all but unreadable.

His book illustrates perhaps the most important issue in the wearing conflict between English departments and writing programs: writing teachers regard professors of literature in much the same spirit that young Hotspur described the "certain lord" who showed up after battle "perfumed like a milliner" and, holding his perfume box to his nose against the stench of battle, declared that "but for these vile guns/He would himself have been a soldier." "If they want to write well," the literature professor seems to say, "let them read Shakespeare while I perfume myself with my next article." The overworked and underpaid writing teacher, in daily hand-to-hand combat with the student mind, can only regard these aloof and erudite scholars with scorn and even anger.

But literature profs believe with equal conviction that today's crop of writing teachers are not humanists at all. Rather, they look like technicians, absorbed like engineers in the mechanics of language but attuned to none of its pleasures. I shudder to imagine the effect that Swales's book might have on anyone who loves English, for his graceless jargon can serve only to make the discipline of rhetoric look ridiculous to those who already lack faith in its practitioners.

As though anticipating criticism like this, Swales makes the quite valid comment that the complexity of some ideas may require a writer to make heavy demands on readers. James Joyce, he recalls, said it took him eighteen years to write Finnegan's Wake; why should it not take readers the same time to work through it? But does Swales give us any insights or pleasures, Joycean or otherwise, worth the toil he imposes on us to read his text?

In hacking my way through this jungle of obfuscation, I find pools of wisdom. A "genre" is a class of communication that shares modes and purposes. Several genres exist within academe; one of the most important is the research article. Writers try to guess what readers already know and their problems with that knowledge; readers try to make sense of a writer's position and strive to discern where it leads. Writing and reading, therefore, involve a contract between author and audience that assumes action and reaction.

In commenting on this notion, Swales says, "Investigations into various genres would, however, suggest that this supposed sociocognitive activity is over-generalized since a producer's contract with a receiver is not general, but subject to quite sharp genre fluctuations." I am at a loss to decode what this sentence means, unless it says only that different genres make different assumptions about what binds writer and reader together. We know, for example, that a cancer specialist in a professional journal makes different assumptions about the audience from those of a science writer for the New York Times. And the report in USA Today, the newspaper for those who cannot understand television, would be different still. Is that all Swales means?

In his chapter called "Genres, Schemata, and Acquisition," Swales seems to argue that we should be aware of the forms of academic essays and of the modes of discourse they contain. He points to the increasing use of English as the language of international scholarly discourse but shows that a great many journals still publish in other languages.

In constructing research articles, Swales notes, we ought to know that "the higher the level of claim, the more likely that it will involve contradicting large bodies of the relevant literature and will challenge assumptions embodied in important ongoing research programs. On the other hand, the lowest level claims may contradict nothing, but may also add very little to what is accepted and established within the given research field. Thus, high-level claims are likely to be important but risky, whilst low-level claims are likely to be trivial but safe." Issues like these, he says, influence the way scholarly articles are written, and often one may find a gap between "what happened" in the laboratory or elsewhere and what gets written on the page. Articles are not, in short, clear panes of glass through which one sees phenomena.

Introductions, Swales thinks, are difficult. They serve both to define the discourse community to which a research article may be addressed, to grant the writer authority with that community, and to shape the problem that the writer will consider in the article itself.

None of this seems novel, and all of it might have been set down in clear prose with perhaps some entertaining anecdotal illustrations.

The key to Swales's motivation lies, I think, in his epilogue. He expresses his laudable desire to become a "more alert, if not better, teacher of the English language to university students." And he says his book "reflects a deep concern to upgrade the status of that teaching so that it can rightfully enjoy a settled and respected place in academic affairs." Most of Swales's examples come out of scientific or quasi-scientific disciplines; he neglects literary criticism and other humanistic endeavors. He has convinced himself that only a jargon-riddled, obscure prose like that of the American Sociological Review can be taken seriously by other scholars. His book is therefore a Trojan horse, brought within the city of rhetoric. Deans and college presidents perusing it, imagining that this is the kind of prose we seek to teach students, might well decide to save a lot of money by torching their writing programs.