3 ms·

Pity Writing Studies, the Field That Hates Itself

• barry-cotter 4y ago
  > You’ve probably already guessed the turn here, given all this windup: what I found as a doctoral student, and should have grasped while getting my MA, was that writing studies had become just as disdainful of writing as English had been. The field had replicated the very conditions its founders had lamented. The tale I had been told of an academic field where writing was honored and respected was, by this point, a fantasy. Correspondingly, the empirical research I had discussed with my MA advisor was once common but had all but disappeared; when you’ve given up on the actual writing of students in favor of abstract theory, politics, and pop culture sermonizing, what was there left to study empirically? And anyway empirical study, particularly that which utilized quantitative methods, was constantly assailed as racist heteronormative patriarchy. Over a depressingly short timespan I signed up for a field that (I thought) centered student writing and studied it empirically and then found myself in one that had no interest in the subjects I cared about and which essentially forbade using the methods I wanted to use to study them.