theory – academicswrite

Constructing Writing Practices: A writing model for all disciplines

Posted on July 4, 2018 by academicswrite

I woke up yesterday morning to an email from an unfamiliar name in my inbox titled, “article you just published.” It was a nurse scholar from Georgetown requesting a copy of a publication I knew was coming soon, but I didn’t know had hit the presses yet. Hot off the press at the Journal of Nursing Education.

constructing-writing-practices-in-nursing (ooh I hope this PDF works — it may be linked here, and it probably isn’t copyright appropriate but we’ll see how long it lasts)

This is the first time I’ve been emailed directly for an article of mine. But it is also the first time my current work has been published in a journal with a > 2.0 impact factor (high for nursing education journals). And then the ivy league comes calling. Also a first.

I tell the story of the birth of this paper in the article itself and my engagement with the literature to produce it. Believe it or not, this section was requested by reviewers. I think they expected a couple of sentences and I gave them about two pages instead — oh well — be careful what you ask for.

The paper started as a philosophy of nursing science assignment where I was asked to address a controversy in my research area. What immediately came to mind was the deep sense of devaluing of writing in nursing and nursing’s anti academic discourse — both of which contribute to the much talked about theory-practice gap that pervades practice disciplines such as nursing (and most health professions, but also other practice disciplines like education and business).

In combination with the anti academic discourse, I had just spent the fall revising a paper exploring all the writing self-efficacy measurements developed for post-secondary populations through a template analysis of the items on these questionnaires. I was looking to find out the constructs psychometricians were identifying as having influence on writing self-efficacy of students. The largest category of items in the template focused on surface writing elements like punctuation, and putting together a paragraph, or writing sentences with subjects, verbs, and nouns, or can you write clearly, with focus. Those were not the elements of writing that I saw my students agonize over when writing for me. They agonized over topic choices and ideas and understanding what they were reading and how frustrating writing could be. The model that developed from this template analysis was a combination of Bandura’s self-efficacy theory and Flower and Hayes’s cognitive processing model of writing and a reviewer asked me if this was it…. was this template enough to describe writing — and more specifically, writing in nursing? I wanted to address this question. I had also been simultaneously immersed in the literature talking about writing as a socially constructed process so I also knew the model I would eventually develop would be situated in a socially constructed epistemology.

The components of the model can be defined liked this:

Identity: Incorporates writing voice, the self as it appears within a written text, past experiences with writing and their influence on present writing, and levels of writing self-efficacy. Reflexivity facilitates the metacognition and intertwining required to activate the other components of the model as they relate to writing and nursing identity.

Creativity:Novelty and originality as defined by a discipline inform creativity. Idea generation, synthesis, and interpretive abilities all require creativity. Creativity fuels passions and develops identity.

Emotions:Writing emotions can be positive or negative, are subject to roller-coaster extremes, and will drive or inhibit the writing act. Emotions are present at all phases of writing from planning to feedback.

Relational Aspects: Writers form relationships with the sources they incorporate through citation, inspiration, or interpretation. Writers write for an imagined audience and that audience connects with their writing when a writer reveals themselves in their work. Students also form relationships with their teachers during pedagogical processes and feedback interactions.

Context:The writing context includes perceived difficulty of the writing task and writing evaluators, the stakes involved in producing a well-received product, and the values and demands inherent in a disciplinary discourse.

The paper emerged in four phases:

A two page proposal which focused on the theory practice gap and anti academic discourse. I didn’t know at this phase I would be building a model.
A seminar on my topic where I presented the first drawing of the model based on the layers of a globe. I even had a visual image of that globe which when I shared it with my classmates and asked them to reflect on it and discuss it, really fell flat. They didn’t get it — although I have to say that one of my classmates recently, after writing her candidacy papers said to me, “I totally get this now.” It just takes the right kind of writing experience. I don’t remember combining creative and emotional knowing at this stage. I wonder when that changed? Probably where everything changes: in the act of writing.
The final draft of the paper where I removed the visual drawing from the paper because it hadn’t worked when I presented it to a test audience. The paper just described the model as an intertwined process, with identity at the core, where each one of the any the five factors could be the focus at any point of the writing process or they may be simultaneously influencing one another and merged through reflection.
The post submission review process the article changed again mostly in my discussion of nursing’s relationship to writing. Virtually nothing of the text of the model changed other than the reviewers asked me to attempt to draw the model again. So I did… I drew some rough sketches of the model on my own and then I called in an artist pro (my 17 year old daughter Emma) and asked her to draw me a better version. She was a real pro. She drew me four versions on her digital drawing tablet using my version as inspiration and we ended up combining two together. I liked the angular look she had given one version — the twisted strands of the model that you see with the labels on them. They reminded me of how you wrap a tensor bandage. But I liked the the round twist she put on her rounder version of the model so we combined the two into what you see as the header to this blog. My very rough trial drawing of my vision for my model. I saw the intertwining as a braid. As you can see, Emma’s final version at the top of the blog is just so much more effective.

The model is black and white in the article but for poster presentations I had upcoming I asked for a coloured version. I let her pick the colours. Then with the help of some text templates from @academicbatgirl I decided to make a mug of it.

NSFW — but it will comfort me at home.

I wrote the paper for nursing, prepared the poster for a nursing education conference, but I decided with a bit of an elbowing from my advisor to enter the poster in the faculty of health sciences poster competition. I had no chance of winning in this biomedical positivist world where most of the work is physiological or microbial or population health so I was curious how the judging sessions went. I ended up with two judges one from microbiology and the other from molecular genetics (hilarious — I don’t even know what this is) and I spend my 10 minutes just talking about academic writing and its genres and I managed to get one of them to say, hey … this isn’t just for nursing, this could work for all disciplines. Getting that statement out of a judges who were very unlikely to share my worldview, was winning enough for me.

This model is what I will use to develop the items to assess writing self-efficacy on a new questionnaire designed from a constructivist perspective of writing. I’ve already developed the items but you know how the PhD process goes — several hurdles to jump over before I can get started on testing the questionnaire.

The paper appears here:

Mitchell, K. M. (2018). Constructing writing practices in nursing. Journal of Nursing Education, 27(7), 399-407. doi:10.3928/01484834-20180618-04

If your library doesn’t subscribe to it and you would like a copy of the article please feel free to email me at academicswrite@gmail.com or contact me on twitter @academicswrite

Reader and Writer Relationships in Academic Writing

Posted on January 15, 2017February 25, 2017 by academicswrite

I’ve been re-reading one of my favourite novels while on break between the end of one PhD course and the start of the next. It’s been glorious. I’ve been neglecting my fiction reading as of late in favour of academic articles, partially out of necessity and time but partially because I’ve been finding it harder and harder to connect with novels and get into them — it is hit or miss if I’ll find the writing compelling. I have also found it to be more of a regular occurrence to read a novel and have most of it be good and then the author ruins it with a cheap plot cheat that comes out of nowhere, like an act of God, and solves all the protagonist’s problems. I walk away from books like that feeling ripped off. Once upon a time, I used to insist on reading books from start to finish, even if I didn’t like them. My time is too valuable for that now.

And yes, I am a literature snob. I like a strong voice and strong voices are hard to find.

I also like strong voices in academic writing, and those are even harder to find.

But my Twitter feed keeps filling up with reminders of how important creative writing is to the mind and soul. They say that voracious readers are also good writers. Whether this is scientifically backed up is debatable, but reading, at the very least, gives you the skills to recognize good writing. What you read, says a lot about you as a person. Your ability to articulate your passion for what you’re reading also says a lot too. Because reading is relationship building, and having a passion for what you’ve read means that the relationship was successful. Here’s an untested hypothesis for you: It is possible that writers who are voracious readers, are best able to understand the needs of readers when they write.

In my academic reading, I’ve been examining the social construction of writing and one of the components of writing as a social construction is the relationship that a writer forms with a reader. This is a complicated relationship because intertwined within it is the identities of both characters, and they never (or rarely) come face to face. The writer has to envision a reader as they write which means they have to guess what that reader knows and understands already, and what they will need to know to understand the argument. They have to guess what emotions that reader may be having. They have to accept the consequences that the reader may interpret what is written in a way that was never intended.

Having an intimate knowledge of your reader is one of the greatest challenges of writing. We see our undergraduate students fail at this time and time again. I’m convinced this is one aspect of student writing that we mistakenly identify as poor grammar. Undergraduate students believe they have no knowledge or authority and, thus, that everything they do know must be common knowledge. This leads to them writing statements out of their head without citation. This issue also contributes to a lot of lack of clarity in their writing and the giant holes present in their description of their arguments. Their teachers, to them, are all knowing beings. Why should they have to define that term or make that connection overtly for the teacher when the teacher is already the expert? I have had students come back to question a grade and when they provide their explanation as to why they deserve more marks, they fill in those holes they failed to explain in their original paper. Explaining what you meant after the fact doesn’t change the lack of clarity in the orignal.

Stephen King in On Writing talks about having an ideal reader in your head as you write. For him, it is his wife Tabatha. For an academic writer, it may be a teacher, or a editor, or anonymous reviewers. For a PhD student it may be an advisor or other opinionated committee member. When you are an undergraduate student only writing one paper for a particular teacher, sensing what a teacher defines as good writing can seem a daunting and impossible task. What pleased one teacher in the past may be lambasted by another. When writing for peer reviewed journals, it isn’t much different. What pleases one reviewer, another reviewer will tell you to cut as being a waste of space, or too editorial in nature. These issues can prey on your writing self-efficacy. And influencing writing self-efficacy runs as deep as preying on your identity (or lack thereof) as a writer.

On the side of the reader, you are continually trying to imagine the person behind the writing. I have read academic papers that have sent me to google to search more about the author and their work or sent me back into the library databases to find other articles they’ve written. This is extremely rare. Yet, in the creative field, we all have favourite authors where we devour everything they’ve written. If a writer has done their job, you will demand to know more about what drove the work. When I was a teenager and in transition from Sweet Valley High to Stephen King novels, one of the things I liked best was his afterwords to his books which told the stories behind the stories of writing his novels. It was his way of inserting himself into his work and connecting with readers — until he got to the end of The Gunslinger series and he LITERALLY inserted himself in his novel, which really didn’t work for me…… but I digress.

The other component of relationship building on the side of the reader is the act of reading and interpreting what is being said. This is the risk that a writer faces when they send their work out into the world to be devoured, critiqued, or even ignored. Good writing will inspire the next idea. It should instil critical thinking. The reader will be making constant connections between what they have read and their own identities, and things going on in their lives.

In academic writing this means that when a writer cites another author, it could mean many things. It could be a direct paraphrase, a misinterpretation, it could be an inspiration, or it could be a leap in thinking to the next great discovery. All of us who have published, have experienced seeing our work cited and thought, “that’s not what I said.” And this is OK, in my opinion. It just means the writer as reader was inspired in some way by what you wrote. Argument building depends upon that inspiration. I’ve often said that citation in academic writing is like a sophisticated game of telephone — a game I remember playing as a kid, sitting in a circle and whispering a sentence from one to the next and seeing how it changes by the time it reaches the last person in the loop. The game itself is a lesson against gossip, but in academic writing, the cycle of reading, writing, and interpreting, and coming to the end of the loop with a new idea, is how knowledge is made. We don’t learn what we know prior to sitting down to write, we learn what we know as we write, and this is where the magic happens.

When I say, all writing is creative writing, I, in part, am talking about this reader/writer relationship building and the writing-reading interpretation loop. Connecting with a reader requires imagination and ideas that inspire, so that a reader takes those words into their world, imbeds them into their own identity and makes meaning.

Idea Generation: A Philosophical Conundrum

Posted on September 21, 2016September 21, 2016 by academicswrite

I’m watching my students wrestle with their ideas for their academic paper right now. It is always a fascinating process. I once did an informal survey about how often their topics changed before they actually wrote and submitted their assignments. Very few people wrote on the first topic they picked. A larger number (maybe a quarter of the class) wrote on their second topic choice and an even larger proportion hit the jackpot on their third topic. A handful of students had filtered through 4 or more topic possibilities before finally settling on one they could work with. Sometimes topics were abandoned because an appropriate media source couldn’t be located. This outcome happened for students who were doing exactly what I suggested they don’t do — self-identifying a topic and then retrospectively searching for a media source that stated their thinking. The assignment always works better if you let the media feed you the topic and you come across it organically, through a social media feed, or flipping through the newspaper Saturday morning. (Does anyone read paper news anymore?) More often, it was in the literature search phase where topics were discarded. Search terms weren’t working to find studies, or there weren’t enough appropriate studies to find 5 primary sources on their topic.

I find that period of time where you need to settle on an idea and focus to write about to be the most anxiety provoking phase of academic writing. What if I never get a handle on how to write this paper? I have at least one student a term who emails me shortly before, or just after the due date, when it is waaaay too late, relating this nightmare to me. It is my personal nightmare. It keeps me awake at night when I am playing the student role.

I’m struggling with the same process right now. I have a philosophy of nursing science paper to write in the next couple of weeks. There are two of them due for the term and I instantly had a better idea as to how to handle the second paper, than the first. My students have three pages worth of assignment guidelines to help them structure and get a handle on what they need to write about. My assignment guidelines are one sentence: Identify a concept in your research area and then critically discuss that concept from two theoretical perspectives.

My research area is writing self-efficacy. The concepts inherent within are numerous. My gut told me to look at writing voice. My advisor (who is also the course instructor) thought that was interesting. Other possibles that came up included pinning down writing self-efficacy itself, but I wrote another paper which helped with that process already. Authorial identity (which is linked to voice) also came up as a possibility. Self-regulation in writing also seemed workable because while most scholars think self-regulation is a part of self-efficacy (as does the chief self-efficacy scholar, Bandura), there are some who believe it is a separate concept.

The bigger problem turned out to be the theoretical perspectives. I finished my Masters in 2002, and it was two years before that since I last took a theories course. I thought about looking at self-efficacy or self-regulation from the perspectives of Bandura, and the oft-cited theory of writing by Flower and Hayes. But I had my doubts that they were different theoretical perspectives. A quick flip through my article stacks told me my assumptions were correct. They are both social cognitive theories and thereby constructivist in thinking — where the learner constructs an understanding of knowledge through experience and reflection. Even if Hayes himself has written that he’s “a psychologist and not a sociologist or cultural historian,” the social aspect is present in both the original model and the revised version. Scratch that idea.

Other theories interested me including Vygotsky (nope, social cognitive), and situated learning. Nope, in situated learning, learning takes place through social relationships situated within a specific environmental context…. sounds pretty social cognitive/constructivist to me.

I then stumbled upon behaviourism. While constructivists believe that internal thinking is important to understanding the world, behaviourists believe in stimulus-response and that external encounters influence behaviour (e.g. If your phone beeps, you’re going to pick it up and look even if you are writing). Self-regulation can be assessed through behaviour as much as through internal reflection. It could work!

But I hated it. It wasn’t exciting. And the topic wasn’t clicking for me. And as a true attest to the power of Bandura (and others) and his work, virtually no one discusses self-regulation from a behaviourist perspective. My gut told me that my head was never going to be able to grasp this paper or this concept from that perspective. I went home and put my feet up but still had that feeling of having an empty hole in my gut. That feeling always tells me I’m not done searching.

But something told me to return to this Ryan et al. paper (mentioned in this blog) on voice in academic writing. Academic writing and its objectified voice was developed out of the positivist tradition. But movements abound everywhere to eliminate obtuse writing. Suddenly the hole in my gut was gone. And I was excited.

What is the opposing view? The movement to make academic writing more accessible must come from some philosophical standpoint. Maybe it is interpretivism? Maybe it is constructivist? Post-positivist? Or maybe it is pragmatic — the value in it is found in the success of its implementation. I haven’t completely got a handle on that yet and I have a lot to learn about these epistemological standpoints but if you have any thoughts on the matter or any sources that might help me better grasp the philosophical underpinnings of this topic, let me know.