> It's a _rite de passage_. It's a sociopolitical filter in the
> pipeline to power and influence. It's a rehearsal. It's an obstacle
> that makes the goal seem more wonderful ... from the other side,
> looking back.
But let me add something, now that the mood's broken. I've been
troubled most of the last couple of decades of my professional life
by the fact that school language -- mainly written school language,
but to some extent an awful lot of oral school language as well --
exists in the sort of world Jay paints for dissertationese. Language
which doesn't have (authentic) readers or listeners. Language which
is generated as if the only way to have readers is to hire pretend
ones, who _act as if_ they were reading for real meanings and real
purposes.
I'm not troubled so much because this is dishonest as I am because
it tends to be self-masking: academics regularly stop thinking of
this situation as weird. Some time ago, Lee Odell and Dixie Goswami
wrote a (wonderful) book called something like _Writing in
Non-Academic Situations_, as though the academic situations were the
norm. But they're not: the real difference was that in the "Non-
Academic" situations, writers actually _had_ readers to whom their
writing made a difference. This made them much more able to bring to
focal awareness what difference their rhetorical choices might make.
> How many people _read_ a dissertation? Not many. But you may not
> want to know how few people read the average journal article
> either!
The only publication that came directly out of my graduate work was
in _American Literature_. I published it in order to have the
publication. Ten years later, when I discovered the existence of
citation indices, I suddenly realized that I didn't care -- and had
_never_ cared -- whether anyone beyond the editor and referees had
read the article.
> I never asked how many people read the article, or checked Citation
> Index for references to it.
This discovery was important to me because it was part of the process
whereby I began seriously thinking about writing as potentially
dialogic (or not). I _did_ care whether people were reading the
stuff I'd started writing about written language, and therefore wrote
it _quite_ differently. I write _this_ differently again.
-- Russ
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