The video is available here, along with various other UT Writing Center videos.
Difference between undergrad and grad (if oriented toward academia)
• Undergrad: smart insight (“At first it might look like this, but if you look more closely you see…”), good close analysis, good organization
• Scholarly: insight that changes a scholarly conversation
• Grad: insight that extends a (possibly very specific) scholarly conversation in some specific way
Some things that make scholarly writing hard for graduate students (and junior scholars)
• We think of “the scholarly conversation” in terms that are too broad (“rhetoric,” “teaching writing,” “Victorian Literature,” “history of slavery”)
• We are accustomed to starting the writing process by coming up with our thesis
• Asking a graduate student to make a significant contribution to “the field” is like asking a guest to give you advice on redecorating your home when they’re still standing in the front door and haven’t seen the rest of your house
• The metaphor of finding a “gap” is advice that made more sense many years ago when it was possible to read “everything” written about a subject
• We’re accustomed to letting panic drive the bus (partially in order to manage imposter syndrome)
• You read things that write in a way that might be rhetorically unavailable to you (unsupported generalizations about a field, neologisms, swipes at major scholars) and don’t read the genres you’re writing (so you don’t have the templates)
Some potentially useful strategies
• Write to learn, to think through things, to imitate others, get some ideas on paper—in other words, be willing to write crap
• Get a first draft by imagining a friendly audience (e.g., another student in class, an undergraduate teacher), writing inductively (start with the close analysis), and generally not feeling that you have to write the paper in the order it will eventually have
• Start with a question: a puzzle, apparent contradiction, confusion (existing scholarship suggests we should see this here, but we don’t—we see something else; why?)
• Write an introduction that works for you (why are you writing about this, what’s the best way to formulate the question, what makes this an interesting question, how did you come to this question) and then write a new introduction as your last step in the writing process
• Instead of thinking about a gap, try to formulate a question that might put you in a different posture in regard to existing “literature” on the topic
o Additive
o Definitional (redefining the question—the “prior question” move)
o Methodological (proof of concept)
o Refutative
o Synthesizing
o Taxonomic