Describe what an academic argument is not about.

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Academic Arguments 17

Much of the writing you will do in college (and some of what you will no doubt do later in your professional work) is generally referred to as aca- demic discourse or academic argument. Although this kind of writing has many distinctive features, in general it shares these characteristics:

● It is based on research and uses evidence that can be documented.

● It is written for a professional, academic, or school audience likely to know something about its topic.

● It makes a clear and compelling point in a fairly formal, clear, and sometimes technical style.

● It follows agreed-upon conventions of format, usage, and punctuation.

● It is documented, using some professional citation style.

Academic writing is serious work, the kind you are expected to do when- ever you are assigned a term essay, research paper, or capstone project. Manasi Deshpande’s proposal “A Call to Improve Campus Accessibility”

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in Chapter 12 is an example of an academic argument of the kind you may write in college. You will find other examples of such work through- out this book.

Understanding What Academic Argument Is

Academic argument covers a wide range of writing, but its hallmarks are an appeal to reason and a faith in research. As a consequence, such arguments cannot be composed quickly, casually, or off the top of one’s head. They require careful reading, accurate reporting, and a conscien- tious commitment to truth. But academic pieces do not tune out all appeals to ethos or emotion: today, we know that these arguments often convey power and authority through their impressive lists of sources and their immediacy. But an academic argument crumbles if its facts are skewed or its content proves to be unreliable.

Look, for example, how systematically Susannah Fox and Lee Rainie, director and codirector of the Pew Internet Project, present facts and evi- dence in arguing that the Internet has been, overall, a big plus for society and individuals alike.

[Today,] 87% of American adults now use the Internet, with near- saturation usage among those living in households earning $75,000 or more (99%), young adults ages 18–29 (97%), and those with college degrees (97%). Fully 68% of adults connect to the Internet with mobile devices like smartphones or tablet computers.

The adoption of related technologies has also been extraordinary: Over the course of Pew Research Center polling, adult ownership of cell phones has risen from 53% in our first survey in 2000 to 90% now. Ownership of smartphones has grown from 35% when we first asked in 2011 to 58% now.

Impact: Asked for their overall judgment about the impact of the Internet, toting up all the pluses and minuses of connected life, the public’s verdict is overwhelmingly positive: 90% of Internet users say the Internet has been a good thing for them personally and only 6% say it has been a bad thing, while 3% volunteer that it has been some of both. 76% of Internet users say the Internet has been a good thing for society, while 15% say it has been a bad thing and 8% say it has been equally good and bad.

— Susannah Fox and Lee Rainie, “The Web at 25 in the U.S.”

Note, too, that these writers draw their material from research and polls conducted by the Pew Research Center, a well-known and respected

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organization. Chances are you immediately recognize that this para- graph is an example of a researched academic argument.

You can also identify academic argument by the way it addresses its audiences. Some academic writing is clearly aimed at specialists in a field who are familiar with both the subject and the terminology that surrounds it. As a result, the researchers make few concessions to general readers unlikely to encounter or appreciate their work. You see that single-mindedness in this abstract of an article about migraine headaches in a scientific journal: it quickly becomes unreadable to nonspecialists.

Abstract

Migraine is a complex, disabling disorder of the brain that manifests itself as attacks of often severe, throbbing head pain with sensory sen- sitivity to light, sound and head movement. There is a clear familial tendency to migraine, which has been well defined in a rare autoso- mal dominant form of familial hemiplegic migraine (FHM). FHM muta- tions so far identified include those in CACNA1A (P/Q voltage-gated Ca(2+) channel), ATP1A2 (N(+)-K(+)-ATPase) and SCN1A (Na(+) chan- nel) genes. Physiological studies in humans and studies of the experi- mental correlate — cortical spreading depression (CSD) — provide understanding of aura, and have explored in recent years the effect of migraine preventives in CSD. . . .

— Peter J. Goadsby, “Recent Advances in Understanding Migraine Mechanisms, Molecules, and Therapeutics,”

Trends in Molecular Medicine (January 2007)

Yet this very article might later provide data for a more accessible argu- ment in a magazine such as Scientific American, which addresses a broader (though no less serious) readership. Here’s a selection from an article on migraine headaches from that more widely read journal (see also the infographic on p. 382):

At the moment, only a few drugs can prevent migraine. All of them were developed for other diseases, including hypertension, depression and epilepsy. Because they are not specific to migraine, it will come as no surprise that they work in only 50 percent of patients — and, in them, only 50 percent of the time — and induce a range of side effects, some potentially serious.

Recent research on the mechanism of these antihypertensive, anti- epileptic and antidepressant drugs has demonstrated that one of their effects is to inhibit cortical spreading depression. The drugs’ ability to prevent migraine with and without aura therefore supports the school

Nicholas Ostler’s conference paper

“Is It Globalization That Endangers

Languages?” meets the criteria listed

here for academic argument and

provides a potential model for your

own writing.

LINK TO P. 589

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of thought that cortical spreading depression contributes to both kinds of attacks. Using this observation as a starting point, investiga- tors have come up with novel drugs that specifically inhibit cortical spreading depression. Those drugs are now being tested in migraine sufferers with and without aura. They work by preventing gap junc- tions, a form of ion channel, from opening, thereby halting the flow of calcium between brain cells.

— David W. Dodick and J. Jay Gargus, “Why Migraines Strike,” Scientific American (August 2008)

Such writing still requires attention, but it delivers important and com- prehensible information to any reader seriously interested in the subject and the latest research on it.

Infographic: The Root of Migraine Pain © Tolpa Studios, Inc.

Even when academic writing is less technical and demanding, its style will retain a degree of formality. In academic arguments, the focus is on the subject or topic rather than the authors, the tone is straightfor- ward, the language is largely unadorned, and all the i’s are dotted and t’s crossed. Here’s an abstract for an academic paper written by a scholar of communications on the Burning Man phenomenon, demonstrating those qualities:

Every August for more than a decade, thousands of information tech- nologists and other knowledge workers have trekked out into a barren

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stretch of alkali desert and built a temporary city devoted to art, tech- nology, and communal living: Burning Man. Drawing on extensive archival research, participant observation, and interviews, this paper explores the ways that Burning Man’s bohemian ethos supports new forms of production emerging in Silicon Valley and especially at Google. It shows how elements of the Burning Man world — including the build- ing of a socio-technical commons, participation in project-based artistic labor, and the fusion of social and professional interaction — help shape and legitimate the collaborative manufacturing processes driving the growth of Google and other firms. The paper thus develops the notion that Burning Man serves as a key cultural infrastructure for the Bay Area’s new media industries.

— Fred Turner, “Burning Man at Google: A Cultural Infrastructure for New Media Production”

You might imagine a different and far livelier way to tell a story about the annual Burning Man gathering in Nevada, but this piece respects the conventions of its academic field.

Another way you likely identify academic writing — especially in term papers or research projects — is by the way it draws upon sources and builds arguments from research done by experts and reported in journal articles and books. Using an evenhanded tone and dealing with all points of view fairly, such writing brings together multiple voices and

A scene from Burning Man Mike Nelson/AFP/Getty Images

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intriguing ideas. You can see these moves in just one paragraph from a heavily documented student essay examining the comedy of Chris Rock:

The breadth of passionate debate that [Chris] Rock’s comedy elicits from intellectuals is evidence enough that he is advancing discussion of the foibles of black America, but Rock continually insists that he has no political aims: “Really, really at the end of the day, the only important thing is being funny. I don’t go out of my way to be politi- cal” (qtd. in Bogosian 58). His unwillingness to view himself as a black leader triggers Justin Driver to say, “[Rock] wants to be caustic and he wants to be loved” (32). Even supporters wistfully sigh, “One wishes Rock would own up to the fact that he’s a damned astute social critic” (Kamp 7).

— Jack Chung, “The Burden of Laughter: Chris Rock Fights Ignorance His Way”

Readers can quickly tell that author Jack Chung has read widely and thought carefully about how to support his argument.

As you can see even from these brief examples, academic arguments cover a broad range of topics and appear in a variety of media — as a brief note in a journal like Nature, for example, a poster session at a con- ference on linguistics, a short paper in Physical Review Letters, a full research report in microbiology, or an undergraduate honors thesis in history. What do all these projects have in common? One professor we know defines academic argument as “carefully structured research,” and that seems to us to be a pretty good definition.

Conventions in Academic Argument Are Not Static.

Far from it. In fact, the rise of new technologies and the role that blogs, wikis, social media sites, and other digital discourses play in all our lives are affecting academic writing as well. Thus, scholars today are pushing the envelope of traditional academic writing in some fields. Physicians, for example, are using narrative (rather than charts) more often in medi- cine to communicate effectively with other medical personnel. Profes- sional journals now sometimes feature serious scholarly work in new formats — such as comics (as in legal scholar Jamie Boyle’s work on intel- lectual property, or Nick Sousanis’s Columbia University PhD disserta- tion, which is entirely in comic form). And student writers are increasingly producing serious academic arguments using a wide vari- ety of modalities, including sound, still and moving images, and more.

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Developing an Academic Argument

In your first years of college, the academic arguments you make will probably include the features and qualities we’ve discussed above — and which you see demonstrated in the sample academic arguments at the end of this chapter. In addition, you can make a strong academic argu- ment by following some time-tested techniques.

Choose a topic you want to explore in depth. Unless you are assigned a topic (and remember that even assigned topics can be tweaked to match your interests), look for a subject that intrigues you — one you want to learn more about. One of the hardest parts of producing an academic argument is finding a topic narrow enough to be manageable in the time you have to work on it but also rich enough to sustain your interest over the same period. Talk with friends about possible topics and explain to them why you’d like to pursue research on this issue. Look through your Twitter feeds and social network postings to identify themes or topics that leap out as compelling. Browse through books and articles that interest you, make a list of potential subjects, and then zero in on one or two top choices.

Get to know the conversation surrounding your topic. Once you’ve chosen a topic, expect to do even more reading and browsing — a lot more. Familiarize yourself with what’s been said about your subject and espe- cially with the controversies that currently surround it. Where do schol- ars agree, and where do they disagree? What key issues seem to be at stake? You can start by exploring the Internet, using key terms that are associated with your topic. But you may be better off searching the more specialized databases at your library with the assistance of a librarian who can help you narrow your search and make it more efficient. Library databases will also give you access to materials not available via Google or other online search engines — including, for example, full-text ver- sions of journal articles. For much more on identifying appropriate sources, see Chapter 18, “Finding Evidence.”