BEAM: A Rhetorical Vocabulary for Teaching Research-Based Writing

Abstract

This article argues that writing teachers can encourage students to adopt a rhetorical perspective toward research-based writing by characterizing products of research in terms of how writers use them in their texts. It maintains that the standard nomenclature for treating sources (primary, secondary, tertiary) is antirhetorical and proposes an alternative: Background for materials a writer relies on for general information or for factual evidence; Exhibit for materials a writer analyzes or interprets; Argument for materials whose claims a writer engages; and Method for materials from which a writer takes a governing concept or derives a manner of working.

Notes

¹I thank Joseph Janangelo, Benjamin Miller, Cary Moskovitz, Catherine Savini, and Nicole Wallack for their comments on drafts of this article and Richard Fulkerson and Anne-Marie Hall, the readers for this journal, for their helpful reports. I also thank the many instructors in Columbia's Undergraduate Writing Program who, since 2003, have used the terminology I present here in their own classes.

In this article I use the term research-based writing to refer broadly to writing that draws on outside materials of any sort, whether or not these materials are the direct products of the writer's own research. For example, I regard papers on assigned texts as a form of research-based writing, even though such papers may require no research from the student writers themselves.

²I follow Davis and Shadle in naming Booth, Colomb, and Williams; Macrorie; and Ballenger as representative figures. Davis and Shadle perceive an explicit historical and logical progression in this succession of forms, which they view as enacting “a movement away from the templated discourse of the research paper and into an increasingly complex world of rhetorical choices” (427).

³Russell states emphatically, “One genre has defined extended student writing in mass secondary and higher education: the documented essay (or research paper or term paper)” (78). For his account of the genre's development, see 78–92. See also Davis and Shadle 423–27.

⁴This asymmetry reflects the fact that primary sources vary far more widely across disciplines than do secondary sources. Secondary sources are usually prose arguments of some kind, but any artifact or representation can potentially be a primary source. I make a similar observation with respect to my terminology below.

⁵In making this statement, I am not ignoring the rich recursive relationship between writing and research, nor am I denying that research itself can be a kind of “intellectual work,” a phrase I take from James F. Slevin. I am noting that the priorities informing the standard nomenclature are not those of most writing teachers.

⁶My goal in this article is thus similar to Joseph Harris's in his recent book Rewriting: How to Do Things With Texts. Like Harris, I want students to regard writing as a process of (to borrow Harris's borrowing of J. L. Austin) “doing things” with their materials. But despite this affinity, our specific focuses differ. Harris identifies and explains four interpretive “moves” academic writers often make with sources: coming to terms, forwarding, countering, and taking an approach (4). I offer a vocabulary for describing writers' materials in terms of their functions in texts.

⁷In literary criticism, passages offered for interpretation are exhibits, competing interpretations of other critics are argument sources, and texts that establish context or the critic's approach are background sources and method sources respectively. In scientific work that follows the IMRAD format, the introduction provides background and perhaps introduces competing arguments, the methods section describes the researchers' methods and procedures, the results section presents the researchers' data or exhibits, and the discussion section explains the significance of the exhibits and perhaps engages other arguments. John C. Bean reports in personal correspondence that he has used a version of BEAM in several writing-across-the-curriculum workshops at Seattle University and that it can be applied to almost any field.

⁸This view is generally associated with the “Pittsburgh” school of composition theory, in which reading is understood as a “hermeneutical conversation” between reader and text (Salvatori 182). But it is also held by rhetorically minded scholars such as Brent, who treats reading as a mode of “rhetorical invention,” and Jeanne Fahnestock and Marie Secor, who remark that “[s]tudents clearly need more exposure to argumentative texts, need to learn how to read and evaluate them, and need to learn how to write them” (99).

⁹Larson notes that “even an ordered, interpretive reporting of altogether personal experiences and responses can … be a reporting of research” (813). Rodriguez's essay is a case in point.

¹⁰For Bartholomae's own reflections on teaching Rodriguez's essay, see his article “Wanderings: Misreadings, Miswritings, Misunderstandings.”

¹¹One such handbook asserts, “As a research writer, you should attempt to obtain as many primary sources as possible so that you can come to your own conclusions about your issue” (Palmquist 118). Another states, “You should always review more than one source … and usually more than one kind of source” (Maimon, Peritz, and Yancey 215). In a short article for students, Fulkerson puts this standard advice more pithily: “How many sources do you need? All of them” (23).

¹²Brent, for example, tells the story of a student in an undergraduate history class who cited over twenty sources in a paper but received a comment from her professor suggesting that she needed a “more extensive bibliography.” The professor had misdiagnosed her inability to deploy her sources effectively as a lack of reading (110–12).

Bartholomae, David. “Wanderings: Misreadings, Miswritings, Misunderstandings.” Only Connect: Uniting Reading and Writing. Ed. Thomas Newkirk. Upper Montclair, NJ: Boynton/Cook. 89–118. Rpt. in David Bartholomae, Writing on the Margins: Essays on Composition and Teaching. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2005. 86–110.