Citation:

Fraser, Gordon. “Finding a Voice: Reconciling Discourses in Student Work.” The WAC Journal, vol. 20, Nov. 2009, pp. 63-74. Web.

Summary:

In his essay “Finding a Voice: Reconciling Discourses in Student Work,” Gordon Fraser explores the struggles instructors face when introducing first year students to “academic writing” and the complexities that such a “skill” encompasses. Fraser defines the problem through the context of mimicry and states that students, instead of learning to write successfully within the academic, adopt the expectations and the register they believe academic discourse demands and attempt to implement those identifiers into their work. This not only denies students the opportunity to learn to write well, it removes them from their own personal narratives and denies them the opportunity to write “profoundly.”

Fraser defends that the successful academic writer is able to compound, recognize, and unite competing discourses within an argument. To define this concept of “competing discourse,” he references Bakhtin’s “Discourse in the Novel” and his definition of what constitutes “double-voiced narration.” This concept suggests that every fact, claim, or utterance on the page is brought forth by a myriad of meanings, it exists within the duality of competitive understandings. The historical, the critical, the It is the unification of these double-voiced narratives that, in Fraser’s opinion, make the academic paper profound, and it is this unification with which students struggle most.

To articulate the difficulties students face with the reconciliation between the multiple discourses that are present within the creation of the academic, Fraser compares the writings of a first year student who attempts to mimic the language she has been introduced to throughout her literary experiences, and fails to acknowledge or fuse the influences acting upon her analyses. Throughout her first two essays, the student writes in a multitude of unacknowledged “meta-texts.” She transitions between claims that are clearly based in personal experience, to the pop-psychological, to the psychological-historical, and instead of attempting to connect these “lenses” and utilize each of them to interanimate the others, she ends the paper in an academic/critical voice that endeavors to form a new concept out of the unification of the others. The end result is a hollow, unconvincing essay.

The one essay of said student that did succeed for Fraser was the academic paper of which the student was allowed to select a topic that most interested her, and the paper in which the student solved “problems of substance,” not “problems of finish.” These concepts are what Fraser argues as the ultimate issue with the way instructors are teaching writing to students. Essentially, those who choose to address “problems of finish” mimicked what is considered competent prose and ultimately presents a piece that is formatted and “polished” with the language and structures that are associated with typical academic discourse. This focus neglects the substance of the piece, and thus, when the student was able to address the “problems of substance” she was more successful. Teaching “problems of substance” asks the student to examine the arguments they incorporate into a text, what influences their perceptions, and how to relate each discourse within the other. Ultimately, Fraser concludes that this is how the teacher should instruct: instead of teaching the student how to write in a way that includes mimicked aspects academic writing, teach them to write in “ways that are academic.”

Quotations:

“The debate forces us to ask whether students should begin to mimic discipline-specific ways of writing and thinking in an effort to one day fully embody those methods, or if instead they should appropriate a set of practices universal to good writing, regardless of discipline. The trouble with this dichotomy is that it glosses the ways of thinking, speaking, and writing that students already bring to the first day of a first-year writing seminar” (63).

“…the boundaries between different disciplines, from psychology to literary criticism, are not absolute. Despite this, students who are unaware that the boundaries exist at all might struggle to sort out the ways in which these disciplines compete” (65-66).

“…students have a great deal of difficulty recognizing the conflicting, though potentially enriching, claims made on them by the modes of discourse they bring with them into the classroom and by new modes of discourse they encounter there” (66).

“…the goal of composition instruction is to get students to adopt an internally consistent, internally persuasive voice that reconciles the competing discourses they bring to their work” (69).

“And this, I would argue, should be the goal of a writing instructor—to help students reconcile ideas in internally consistent ways and differentiate between problems of finish and problems of substance” (74).

“Each student arrives at her introductory writing class with a complex history of interactions with language. It is only by bringing these ideas into conversation with the material at hand that students will be able to embody and take control of an “academic” voice. This might mean allowing students to write about what they are “interested” in, or it might mean spending more time exploring the conflicts between different perspectives and less time worrying about thesis statements and topic sentences. It might mean spending less time trying to help students write in ways that look academic, and more time trying to help them write in ways that are academic” (74).

Reflection:

I believe this article provides a very interesting take on literacy and what we are working towards in English 101. I’ve been working towards assisting students in the creation of a foundational understanding of what “successful writing” is and how they can write well throughout their time at WWU. Literacy has been, to me, how students can adapt the skills they learn in my class and apply them to their other areas of study, and vice versa. However, I think that Fraser has a point—adapting suggests that I’m merely demonstrating how students can trim down a skill they’ve learned to work within a new scenario. Instead, the idea of acknowledging and synthesizing these skills, personal experiences, academic knowledge, and all other influences into one discourse presents a new avenue to consider who to help students navigate the challenge of academic writing.

At the end of his article, Fraser states that instructors should be “…spending less time trying to help students write in ways that look academic, and more time trying to help them write in ways that are academic” (74). The previous article I read for my first annotated bibliography was adamant in this same approach to teaching literacy to students, and while I firmly believe that personal experience should always be incorporated into the academic, I sometimes struggle to see how these principles will, overall, help students to be successful academic writers. Unfortunately, what is considered to be “high, academic discourse” still embodies the pretentious, unattainable expectations we are attempting to redefine or deconstruct. Students might learn to appreciate writing more, or find skills within the course that they can apply outside of the classroom (which is so very, very important) but how do we validate these fundamental developmental skills when they are asked to remove the “I” from their papers, or when that hollow academic reasoning is praised? How does one preach a (in my opinion) better approach and understanding of literacy when the canon and the expectations for the academic remain so firmly rooted within lofty form and privileged language?

Despite all of those doubts that sometimes arise when I contemplate questions like the aforementioned, I think that it would be interesting to ask students to contemplate what types of competing discourses are present within their research prompts or their theoretical arguments. I believe that introspection like this permits the student to understand their work further and present a passionate and academic argument.