Art of Persuasion

Paper 1 - Draft 1

The Dangers of the Division of Discourses (Working Title)

            In my third year of undergraduate study, I was required to take a course titled “Research Methods in Psychology.” I had been waiting for about 4 years to take this class. I had notebooks full of personality tests on defense mechanisms, double blind experiments testing the effects of caffeine on academic performance, and several other research inquiries that I had designed. I was enthralled with the idea that I would get to test some of my ideas on freshman guinea pigs taking intro psychology that were required to participate in a few research studies as part of their grade. I had aced my AP Statistics exam in high school, and got an easy ‘A’ in the “Psychological Statistics and Design” course I took the year before. I love statistics and I love psychology and I was ready to finally channel all of this accumulated knowledge into some practical purpose.

            Unfortunately for me, the psychology department changed the curriculum of the course the year I was required to take it. Instead of doing real research, I was required to do “observational studies” of people on reality television shows. I brought up the fact that watching scripted television was not real research; I described the ways that the statistics we were using could be manipulated to provide misleading conclusions; I mentioned that experimenters tend to find results that are favorable to whoever is funding the research; and I suggested that neglecting to look at explanations about human behavior from other disciplines is a disservice to the study of human nature. My professor never debated any of these points with me. She was so engulfed in her own field that she never questioned anything that fell outside the realm of her particular discourse.

            I am a writer because I am a reader, learner, and thinker. Language is the foundation of human thought. To understand behavior, you must understand language. The composition classroom is sacred to education because it teaches students to think across the divisions of the academy. To understand literature, the reader must understand the author and his/her historical, political, and social situation when he/she wrote the work. This holds true with anything that you read, be it a newspaper story or an article from a research journal.

            Our society has evolved into a giant bureaucracy. It seems that there is a specific academic discipline, government agency, special interest community, magazine, and television program for just about every single topic that exists. Every organ of knowledge is so detached all the others that the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing. It is the responsibility of the composition instructor to create a generation of scholars that can piece this world of information back together.

            People are alienated from each other because society teaches them to shove themselves into little boxes into which they cannot fit. Today’s worker is expected to know how to perform one specific task without questioning how the whole system works. I have known many people that have had manufacturing jobs that have no idea what the part they are making actually does. This inability to see the big picture is equally as rampant in academia. A psychologist will tell you that people are racist because of fundamental cognitive biases. The sociologist says that racism is caused by being exposed to racist ideology from social institutions and an individual’s social environment. Anthropologists study ethnographies on everything from Americans to indigenous people who live in the tropical rainforest of Peninsular Malaysia in order to describe how racism is present among different cultures. None of these explanations have found “the truth,” The way we are wired to think shapes the way we look at the world, the institutions we have been indoctrinated into effect the way we act, and how we understand other cultures helps us explain our own. Even after looking at the topic of racism through three separate academic lenses we cannot account for every facet of racism. Nonetheless, the academic can contribute much more to humanity’s understanding of our existence if he/she approaches every inquiry from multiple disciplinary viewpoints.

            Rhetoric scholars advocate teaching multiple discourses within composition studies. I agree with this approach, however, I believe that discourse in general should be taught as interdisciplinary. Even simple mechanics such as citations should be integrated. Does it really make a difference if a citation has the author then comma then page number rather than the author then colon then year? Just because a piece of writing is a scholarly journal article, does that mean that it doesn’t have to be interesting to read or be quality writing?

            How far can specialized knowledge take humanity? Just because you are a chemist doesn’t mean you don’t need to know how to interact with people. Simply because you are a writer doesn’t mean that there is no value in understanding calculus. Poetry class can teach the law student how to analyze legal jargon. In both poetry and law, every little word can make a big difference in the actual meaning of the text. The ancient philosophers didn’t limit their inquisitions to any specific branch of knowledge.   The division of discourse creates walls among all areas of human understanding. Educating the masses to transcend these barriers can only be accomplished with an interdisciplinary perspective of discourse analysis. The composition professor must teach students to write from a holistic perspective. The academy—or society as a whole, for that matter—may think that breaking discourse into a million specific pieces benefits the scholarly community, I concur with Isaac Newton: “Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.”

*********Notes:

I haven’t brought in any ideas from the texts we have read in class yet because I felt that I needed to get my thoughts on the matter out first with out their meddling. Now that I have my ramble on paper, I need suggestions on how to make it flow better before I bring in the rhetoric scholars. I tend to write really long drawn out sentences. I am also a master of digression as I take many things personally when I start to write about them.

Also, I think my title sucks. Any thoughts?