I-BEAM: Instance Source Use and Research Writing Pedagogy

Abstract

Joseph Bizup’s BEAM schema establishes a rhetorical approach to research writing pedagogy, articulating four distinct ways writers use sources: for background, exhibit, argument, and method. This article rechristens the framework I-BEAM, identifying a fifth category: instance source use, a constitutive function that establishes the need for the writer’s argument. Instance source moves appear in numerous locations––introductions, textual asides, footnotes/endnotes, and epigraphs––and can situate the writing in both academic and popular contexts. Attention to this exigency move highlights the problem of authenticity in school-based writing and raises questions about sources formative to the writer but invisible to the reader.

Notes

¹ We are grateful to our many colleagues in GW’s University Writing Program who read bits and pieces of the article and proceeded to road-test our ideas along with Bizup’s. We also want to thank Joseph Bizup, Cary Moskovitz, Rhetoric Review readers Hugh Burns and Mark Gellis, and our students for reading and commenting on various drafts of this manuscript.

² The term instance has a rich history in computer programming, particularly in the use of instances to build robust code structures. We highlight MMOGs because they emphasize two additional features informing our research pedagogy: the role of play and the importance of collaboration.

³ Instance has other composition precedents. Bitzer’s 1968 model of “the rhetorical situation” included exigence, but he cast it as external to and overly determinative of the rhetor (Smith and Lybarger; Larson) and too restricted to accommodate the variety of academic writing (Walzer). Moreoever, like kairos, exigence is a broader category of analysis: Instance source use is one means of indicating or creating exigence. More narrowly, Anson identifies a preparatory function of citation (206–07), but his concern is with issues of when and whether to cite at all.

⁴ As a measure of its ongoing relevance, Slavery and the Numbers Game was republished in 2003. We use the 1975 edition.

⁵ Founded under this title in 1915, it is now titled the Journal of African American History.

⁶ Despite the general demise of the humanities footnote, many literary journals continue to resist the MLA’s attempts to codify this shift (Connors).

⁷ It is also significant that the University of Illinois Press issued Slavery and the Numbers Game immediately in trade paperback, indicating its wide intended audience beyond the academy.

⁸ In the spirit of making visible the normally unseen, we want to highlight sources that served as instance moments in our development of this essay, still present to our eyes but invisible to readers. Our absent friends include several specific MMOGs, a couple of philosophy articles defining instantiation, and a magazine article about Southwestern coyotes invading the DC suburbs. Most interestingly, and to our surprise, our most important instance source moments––a different section of Gutman’s book and Aristotle’s On Rhetoric––those that drove us each to write in response to Bizup in the first place, were cut mid-way through the drafting process. In some sense we each remain within those key instance source moments, however invisible and irrelevant they may be for our readers.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Phillip Troutman

Phillip Troutman is Assistant Professor at The George Washington University in Washington, DC. He has published articles on disciplinary discourse, writing pedagogy, and literate culture under slavery; he is currently researching antislavery visual rhetoric.

Mark Mullen

Mark Mullen is Associate Professor Writing at The George Washington University in Washington, DC. He has published articles on theatre, educational uses of information technology, and the connections between games and the writing classroom.