Inscribing the World into Knowledge: Data and Evidence in Disciplinary Academic Writing

Abstract

The production of data, their proper analysis, and appropriate use as evidence are at the heart of academic writing; further, students’ enculturation into disciplinary-appropriate practices of evidence use is central to the development of disciplinary competence. Writing Studies research, however, has much still to learn about the process of inscription of data (that is, how data is produced and recorded so as to be available for analysis and calculation), the way the data then becomes evidence deployed in academic writing, and the form the evidence takes in the written products of different disciplines. This chapter examines the challenges faced by three university students majoring in political science as they work on their senior honors theses. Overall the student interviews suggest that the prior training and experience in the gathering and manipulation of data affected numerous parts of the thesis writing process. The prior experience has an effect on the final thesis, including the formation of the research question, the flexibility, and variety of data gathering methods conceived and deployed, the precision of implementation, the kind and nature of discovery made in the project, and the understanding of the complexity of phenomena investigated. Further, in this instance, the prior learning of methods and development of methodological sophistication was not primarily the result of an organized curriculum but was based on idiosyncratic individual experiences. The idiosyncrasy of experience in this * Distinguished Professor of Education, Gevirtz Graduate School of Education, University of California Santa Barbara. E-mail: bazerman@education.ucsb.edu 278 | Charles Bazerman study heightened the differences among the three students, thereby making more visible the relationship between previously learned methodological skills and writing practices, processes, and results.