lecture five

1. MAJOR ASSIGNMENT 3:
RHETORICAL ANALYSIS
OF A SCHOLARLY ARTICLE
Lecture Five: Historicizing the Text

2. CONTENTS
• In this lecture, I’m going to take you through the steps I took to historicize
the text I chose for this assignment. We’ll talk about:
• Why it’s important to ask these kinds of questions when analyzing a
text
• How to go about answering each question
• How answering these questions will help you write the upcoming essay
• A doggo (or maybe a catto—you’ll have to wait and see!)

3. WHY DO THIS KIND OF ANALYSIS?
• As we’ve talked about before, it’s important to understand the context in which a
piece was written so that you can understand the wider conversation, or the context,
surrounding that piece of writing.
• That helps you be a more effective rhetorical reader. How, you ask?
• Have you ever heard someone criticize a historical text? Huckleberry Finn is racist;
The Taming of the Shrew is sexist, that kind of thing?
• If you’ve ever replied to that criticism, “Those texts are a product of their time,” then
you understand the importance of situating a text within a wider context in order to
make sense of it.

4. HOW DOES THIS APPLY TO SCHOLARLY
ARTICLES?
• Because, like art and literature, scholarship goes through movements, too. A physics
text before Einstein couldn’t mention Special Relativity; a psychology textbook today
wouldn’t spend a lot of time talking about Freud.
• Therefore, being able to situate a text within the wider conversation that was going
on in the field at the time will help you understand that text and how it tries to
enter the scholarly conversation.

5. STEPS TO HISTORICIZING YOUR OWN TEXT
FOR MAJOR ASSIGNMENT 3
• Here are the questions the assignment instructions want you to answer about the
text you chose for this assignment:
• Who wrote it? Note: just telling me the writer’s name isn’t going to cut it here. I
need to know their credentials—that is, what degree(s) they hold—as well as a little
bit of background on their scholarship, where they’re currently working/researching,
and whether they have authority to speak on the topic
• Who published it? What journal or book did it originally appear in, and who
publishes that journal or book? What can you learn about the publisher? What kinds
of work do they usually publish, and what is the purpose of the journal or book it
appeared in?

6. STEPS TO HISTORICIZING YOUR OWN TEXT
FOR MAJOR ASSIGNMENT 3 (CONT’D)
• Who reads this? Most journals or publishers have an “About” page that will describe
their intended readership. You could also use Google Scholar and look at citations
for this book or journal to find out who is citing it.
• When was the text written? This information tells you two things: 1) What the
writer could and could not have known at that point in time, and 2) where on a
historical “timeline” the text fits—whether it was written before, during, or after a
particular conversation that field or a society was having, for example.

7. SO LET’S TAKE THIS ONE QUESTION AT A
TIME
• First of all, remember that the text I chose for this article is “Response of a
Laboratory Rat—Or, Being Protocoled” by Donald M. Murray (p. 137-141 in your
textbook.
• So: who is Donald M. Murray? Because this article is a response to another text,
Carol Berkenkotter’s “Decisions and Revisions: The Planning Strategies of a
Publishing Writer,” I’ll need to do some research on Berkenkotter as well.
• Here’s how I’m going to go about figuring this out:

8. WHO WROTE IT: GOOGLE SEARCH
I’m going to take a look at these
first two entries: Wikipedia,
because that’s always a good
place to start research, and
Heinemann, because they’re the
publisher that published several
of Donald Murray’s books.

9. WHO WROTE IT: WIKIPEDIA
From this article, I learned that Donald Murray was amply qualified to talk about the writing process.
He was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a writing coach for national newspapers, and he taught at
the University of New Hampshire for 26 years. That’s a dude who knew about writing.

10. WHO WROTE IT: HEINEMANN
Notice that Heinemann
confirms what Wikipedia said
about the Pulitzer, teaching at
UNH, and being a writing
coach for newspapers. I
underlined the info that was
corroborated in red. I
highlighted in black a quote
from Donald Murray that I
might include for context: “We
are coaches, encouragers,
developers, creators of
environments in which our
students can experience the
writing process for
themselves.”

11. WHO WROTE IT
• I’m comfortable, at this point, that I have enough information about Donald Murray.
I know what he wrote, who he wrote for, where he worked, and I’ve got a good quote
(you don’t have to have a quote from your authors, but I’m including it because I
think it’s important in establishing his authority and it was easy to find).
• So what of Carol Berkenkotter? I’m not going to take you through the process for
her, since we already went through the process for Murray; I’m just going to tell you
what I found out about her.

12. WHO WROTE IT: CAROL BERKENKOTTER
• From our textbook, I learned that Carol Berkenkotter taught for many years, most
recently in the University of Minnesota’s Department of Writing Studies (Wardle
and Downs 122). I also learned that, at the time this article was written (1983),
Berkenkotter was studying the writing process, as were many researchers. Later in
her career, she shifted her research focus to genre theory (discussed at length in
chapter 2 of our textbook). Further internet research revealed that Berkenkotter
was a prolific writer, having written several textbooks on writing and literary
theory. She, too, knew about writing.

13. CATTO BREAK!
This is Monkey, the cat I had to
leave behind with my parents
when I moved from Oregon to
Idaho. Here he is at peak floof,
giving impeccable side-eye.

14. WHO PUBLISHED IT?
• The next question we have to answer is: who published the text you chose? This is
easily discoverable, in my case, because the textbook tells me that Murray’s and
Berkenkotter’s articles were published in the same place—College Composition and
Communication. If that sounds familiar, it’s because this is the same journal that
published Haas and Flower’s “Rhetorical Reading Strategies and the Construction of
Meaning.” But what do we know about this journal? According to the prompt, we
need to answer the following questions: What can you learn about the publisher?
What kinds of work do they usually publish, and what is the purpose of the journal
or book [the text] appeared in?

15. WHO PUBLISHED IT?
How do you find where an article was published if it doesn’t happen to appear in our
textbook? One easy hack is to search for the article in Google Scholar, like so:
Notice that, right beneath the title, you’ll see the publishing information.

16. WHO PUBLISHED IT: COLLEGE
COMPOSITION AND COMMUNICATION
Googling your journal (or
book publisher) will easily
get you to their homepage.
Good places to go from
here: the “About” page,
and the “Mission
Statement.” That will tell
you a lot about their
purpose and the kinds of
things they usually
publish.

17. WHO PUBLISHED IT: COLLEGE
COMPOSITION AND COMMUNICATION
College Composition and Communication (also known as The Cs) is published by the Conference on
College Composition and Communication. Their mission statement is sort of extensive, but this
bulleted list from their website sums it up:
“To this end, CCCC and its members:
• sponsor and conduct research that produces knowledge about language, literacy,
communication, rhetoric, and the teaching, assessment, and technologies of writing;
• create collaborative spaces (such as conferences, publications, and online spaces) that enable the
production and exchange of research, knowledge, and pedagogical practices;
• develop evidence- and practice-based resources for those invested in language, literacy,
communication, rhetoric, and writing at the postsecondary level;
• advocate for students, teachers, programs, and policies that support ethical and effective
teaching and learning.”

18. WHO PUBLISHED IT: COLLEGE
COMPOSITION AND COMMUNICATION
• Because CCC is in my field, I happen to know that it’s one of the most widely-read
and widely-respected journals in the field of writing studies. If you’re curious about
whether you’ve found a journal that’s super important in your field, you can just
Google “best [insert field] journals,” and you should be able to find that out.

19. WHO READS THIS?
• Now that I know about the mission statement for CCC, the question becomes: who
reads this journal? Since I know that CCC is dedicated to research about language
and literacy, the kinds of people who read it—their intended readership, in other
words—are probably teachers of writing/reading, as well as researchers in that field.
In other words: experts write these articles, and experts read these articles.

20. WHEN WAS THE TEXT WRITTEN?
• Per the textbook, as well as the Google Scholar search I did (see slide 14), this article
was written in 1983. Also per the textbook, the techniques employed by
Berkenkotter and Murray “used a ‘think-aloud’ or ‘talk-aloud’ protocol, a technique
that at the time was very popular among psychology researchers” (Wardle and
Downs 121). In other words, though Berkenkotter and Murray’s protocol may have
been flawed (more recent research suggests it was, per Wardle and Downs), that was
the protocol they had access to, and the article should therefore be read in light of
those possible flaws.

21. WHEN WAS THE TEXT WRITTEN?
• It’ll be easy for you to find out when your text was written, but the wider
conversation might be a little more difficult to access. If you haven’t studied much in
your field yet (since many of you are freshmen, this is pretty likely), try googling
your chosen topic (say, “ayahuasca in religious practices,” “elementary music
education,” “virtual reality”) plus the word “timeline,” and you should be able to
piece together what kinds of conversations the field was having at the time your
article was published.

22. WHY THIS IS ALL USEFUL
• Knowing when the text was published will help you figure out what information the writer
of your text likely did and did not have access to. This will help in your analysis because
you’ll know whether the theories or practices expressed have since been disproven,
whether they were (or remain) controversial, etc. It will also help you identify the text’s
exigence (see Lecture One), or what the writer was responding to when they wrote the
text.
• Knowing who reads this kind of article (as well as who publishes these kinds of articles)
will help you understand the text’s aims (see Lecture One), or the writer’s intended effect
on their reader(s).
• Knowing who wrote the text can help you get at the writer’s motivations (see Lecture One),
or the reason they responded to the text’s exigence. Were they a teacher at the time, and
they wanted to answer a question for students? Were they a researcher at the time?

23. PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
• As you’re gathering this information, keep it in a Word document, so that you can
either copy and paste or refer to it as you’re formatting your essay (we’ll cover the
format of the essay in Lecture Eight)
• You can also jot down notes about your thoughts/feelings as you’re doing this
research (“Oh my God, how is this this difficult,” “why is this my life,” “what even
am I doing right now,” etc.).

24. WHAT’S NEXT?
• In the next lecture, I’ll give you some tips on how to summarize your text, as well as
how I go about summarizing.