The CEA Forum

Summer/Fall 2007: 36.2

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Book Review:

Thaiss, Chris and Terry Myers Zawacki. Engaged Writers, Dynamic Disciplines: Research on the Academic Writing Life. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook, 2006.

by Bryna Siegel, University of Rhode Island

In their contribution to the 2002 collection, Alt/Dis: Alternative Discourses and the Academy, Chris Thaiss and Terry Myers Zawacki present an account of part of a five-year research project they conducted at George Mason University. In this study, they sought to investigate how professional writers and teachers in various disciplines understand and negotiate generic and disciplinary boundaries in their own writing, and how they translate those boundaries into assignments for their students. In their most recent book, Engaged Writers, Dynamic Disciplines: Research on the Academic Writing Life, Thaiss and Zawacki offer an expanded version of their research. While in their Alt/Dis essay they present findings based on faculty interviews, Engaged Writers, Dynamic Disciplines offers the perspectives of both faculty and students, providing a well-rounded and multi-faceted view of writing standards in the disciplines.

Organized into five chapters with several headings and subheadings, the book focuses on three lines of inquiry. The first is the negotiation between academic standards in writing and alternatives to those standards. The second is among faculty, first discussing how they approach writing tasks in their disciplines, and then how they approach teaching disciplinary and generic standards to their students. The third discussion presents the views of the students themselves, offering a glimpse at the complex and often contradictory experience of navigating rules, boundaries, and expectations in their academic writing.

In Chapter 1, Thaiss and Zawacki use their research and observations to define commonly accepted standards for academic writing. Seeming to stem from the Aristotelian rhetorical triangle although making no explicit reference to it, they explain that standard academic writing evidences a persistent and disciplined study in a content area, demonstrates reason over emotion, and assumes a rational and responsive audience (4-8). Later in the same chapter, they define alternatives to those standards. They acknowledge exceptions to all of these characteristics; nevertheless, their list serves as a productive starting point for understanding academic writing that might deviate from these characteristics. Thus, alternative writing broadly conceived can be explained in the following taxonomy of overlapping characteristics: alternative formats, ways of conceptualizing and arranging arguments, syntaxes, methodologies, and media (12). They provide a thorough and well-theorized discussion of standard and alternative characteristics of academic writing using several frameworks: WAC/WID, genre theory, research on alternative discourses, feminist and cultural theory, and contrastive rhetoric.

The second productive conversation comes in Chapters 2 and 3, in which faculty reveal how they approach their own writing within their disciplines, and how they teach writing to students in courses within their disciplines. Thaiss and Zawacki interview 14 George Mason faculty members from various disciplines, all widely published in their disciplines and known to be successful teachers committed to student writers. Chapter 2 provides several stories of faculty attempting to navigate multiple boundaries in their scholarly work, usually overlapping across disciplines, negotiating rules and assumptions about writing in their disciplines, and constantly making decisions about how, when, and why to deviate from standards. In conversation with Chapter 2, Chapter 3 then provides glimpses of how these same faculty present disciplinary boundaries and academic writing standards to their students. Thaiss and Zawacki group their findings into three categories, explaining that faculty usually act in one of these three ways: they teach specific disciplinary-based writing, they teach generic academic essays based in disciplinary traditions, or they teach students to react to course content with an ambiguously-defined, yet engaged and critical response.

Engaged Writers also provides a third important line of inquiry: the students' experiences with writing in the disciplines. Chapter 4 is rich with data, coming from student surveys, focus group interviews, and writing samples. The authors divide their findings into four “clusters” including: expectations, passion and the disciplines, learning disciplinary writing, and students and alternatives (96). Teachers and scholars alike will read this section with great interest, as it provides a wealth of information regarding students' attitudes and perceptions about writing assignments, their subject-positions as writers and students, and how they negotiate teachers' expectations across disciplines. Student voices paired with statistical information provide the reader with a diverse and insightful picture of a student world that is sometimes difficult to gain access to.

Chapter 5 is a summary of findings and conclusions. The writers offer reflections on their study, as well as materials for teachers and administrators of WAC programs. They provide sample writing assignments, practices for teachers, models for WAC program development, and directions for future research. They encourage other researchers to use their methods to conduct studies in other programs and provide citations of other researchers who have conducted similar projects (168). They also suggest frames for further analysis, including new media and workplace writing.

The findings and perspectives presented in this book are fascinating and important, although the somewhat over-developed organization sometimes makes it difficult for the reader to make connections among them. While the multiple taxonomies, clusters, categories, headings and subheadings are useful in navigation, they sometimes detract from the fluidity of the otherwise smooth writing; often ideas seem stopped in their tracks, and it is difficult to recognize trends and links among them or to trace them back to their original root. However, Thaiss and Zawacki's explicit attention to terminology early on helps to solidly ground the book, and the theoretical discussion in the first chapter frames the text well. Additionally, their own voices permeate the text–their personal investment in and experience with the students and faculty in the WAC program on which they based their research (a program they've both directed for many years) provides a strong and trustworthy ethos that is evident throughout the text.

Those who teach writing in any discipline will find this book useful in interrogating their own pedagogy, as well as their own writing. And, like many books and collections in Rhetoric and Composition, a field whose epistemology requires practitioners to ask questions that are not always answered, this book asks many questions that open avenues for further inquiry. Thaiss and Zawacki are to be commended for presenting these questions to us, and for prodding us to ask them of ourselves in our own practice as teachers and professional writers.

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