Genre Trouble: Composing the Personal in Academic and Public Writing

• Author / Creator

  Bray, Nancy

• Traditionally, personal knowledge and experience have been excluded from academic writing. This exclusion is motivated by epistemological assumptions within our disciplines and in the broader academy that help to determine how we represent the relationship between researchers and their research. To give the impression of objectivity, researchers have historically limited reference to themselves in their academic writing. However, several social science and humanities disciplines, particularly those with robust qualitative methodologies, have increasingly challenged these traditions. Scholars in these disciplines argue that personal academic writing—writing that explicitly references the author’s knowledge and experience— helps to address the difficulties of representing the lives of others in our traditional genres and to innovate in our own intellectual work. I build on this research, focusing particularly on how personal knowledge and experience are composed on the boundaries of the university where academic and public discourses come together. Using rhetorical genre theory and the narrative paradigm as a framework, I ask the following questions in this dissertation: How do academic genres open or close spaces for personal writing and shape who may access and experiment in these spaces? How do public genres such as online news reports and editorials recontextualize the personal when taking up a research article on climate change? How might personal writing facilitate communication on controversial issues such as climate change? I explore these research questions in four distinct research articles that have been prepared for publication in scholarly peer-reviewed journals. In Chapter 2, I describe how I have experienced difficulties when writing in particular academic genres. Finding spaces to play in these genres has helped me to ease these difficulties and to negotiate the conflicts and contradictions of the academy. To explore and explain innovative spaces within genres, I extend Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of smooth and striated spaces and tie it to work in rhetorical genre studies. Opening smooth spaces in striated academic genres, I conclude, is not only important for students like me but may also help us better respond to the changing realities of graduate studies and academic work in Canada. In Chapter 3, I explore how an online news genre system takes up knowledge claims from a research article on climate change over a period of one year. Using insights from rhetorical genre studies, the results show that online news writers predominantly use the news report genre to cover the research findings for 48 hours, after which they predominantly use the news editorial genre to engage these findings. The news report genre uses the press release and the article abstract as intermediary genres, but the news editorial only uses the abstract. In news editorials, the knowledge claims are less qualified and are less personal than in news reports. The switch between genres repositions the scientist, the journalist, and the public epistemologically, a reorientation which favours uptake in news media supporting action against climate change. In Chapter 4, I use a personal narrative to explore how my Canadian identity has shaped my academic research questions. I begin with a story from my childhood, describing how the stories that I was told and read as a child were never connected to the place where I grew up. These childhood experiences taught me to be both wary and curious about linguistic representation, and these themes have shaped my academic journey, leading ultimately to my interest in using personal narrative to explore the meaning of climate change in the Canadian context.In Chapter 5, I use personal stories about climate change to explore how we might talk about climate change differently. Due to their local and specific nature, personal stories, I argue, might help us to communicate more successfully about climate change. These characteristics of personal stories complement our mostly scientific understanding of climate change, and composing and sharing personal climate change stories might provide us with a way to meaningfully rethink our relationship with the world.The dissertation concludes with some suggestions for further research. I also explore the implications of my analysis for writing and research pedagogy.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • academic writing
  • narrative paradigm
  • climate change
  • rhetorical genre theory
  • news writing
  • writing studies
  • personal writing

• Graduation date

  Spring 2018

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Doctor of Philosophy

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3PV6BP02

• License

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