How does this text work?
This is the crucial question I'd like all of you to be considering as you continue to work with the course readings, and with each other's essays. Many of you have been very concerned about a different question:"What does this text mean?"
While this question is important, its not the most important issue for us.
When we ask "How does this text work?" we are positioning ourselves very differently than the person who asks "what does it mean?" We focus on different things:
• How is this text organized?
• How does this text use sources?
• How does this text generate ideas using those sources?
• How does this text shape meaning in how it is constructed?
• How does this text engage in and enact academic inquiry in the way it is constructed?
This is a very different process of reading and writing than many of you are used to. For example, many of you learned to construct papers in high school something like this:
• Your idea (thesis)
• Other people's ideas which are the same as yours(support)
• People who "disagree" with you (so you can tear apart their argument and prove them wrong). Conclusion which asserts that your idea or position is the best one.
And yet in these texts (Rickert, Goleman, Jacobs--and many of your scholarly research sources) something else is going on. Instead of starting with "the author's idea or point" they are, instead, starting with a problem. Their writing seems more to go like this:
• A problem or question
• Statement of purpose ("In this essay I will examine. . . ")
• Other people's ideas
• Interpretation, critique, critical questioning, analysis, and expansion of other people's ideas
• resulting in new ideas, understandings, insights Conclusion which calls for further consideration of the issues and ideas being discussed.
You'll notice that these two models that I've sketched out for you are very different from one another. I noted that many of you complained that you had a hard time figuring out what the "point" was (of Rickert), and it seems to me that this might be because many of you were reading these texts assuming that they followed the first model (where the author is arguing for a specific idea or point of view), when in reality they are written following something closer to the purpose model.
So, again, I ask: How do these texts work?
And what about how they work is part of this thing we call "academic inquiry?"
This idea of "work" can be broken down in two different ways.
• What "work," as in intellectual labor, is this essay doing?
• And how does it "work," as in how is it put together and how to those parts *function* to accomplish the purpose of the essay?
