Students in Dr. Nicole Pfannenstiel’s summer Games and Writing class crafted blog posts exploring play theory. Over the next several weeks, we will share their theory posts in this space to offer a variety of perspectives on play, games, and writing, written by current graduate students in the MA and M.Ed. English programs.
What is Graduate Writing?
By George Botelho
Most graduate areas of study are going to require some sort of writing at some point in some sort of format. So that begs the question, what is graduate writing. For that matter, what is writing itself? At its core writing is communication. Effective writing persuades, communicates, and entertains with a sort of efficiency or artistry to it.
Graduate writing takes and pushes this further in a sense. Think of your time as an undergraduate student. Depending on your topic area you wrote to communicate or explore a topic in a little more depth. Graduate writing bridges the gap between understanding and application. It allows for theory to be applied, it explores the application of theory to content and exploration in a space where we generally communicate.
Regardless of where you are in your graduate journey or the topic of your graduate studies there are some good themes that can help understand writing and how it transfers to your area of study, whether it is astrophysics or, well, writing. I believe that understanding these themes of knowledge transfer can help graduate learners understand the writing process more, understand how it applies to their field of study, and at its core, what graduate writing is.
If you want to read up on some of this yourself you can look in Writing Knowledge Transfer: Theory, Research, Pedagogy by Nowacek, Leonard, and Rounsaville. The five transfer themes are as follows:
- Individuality- This lets us express ourselves and our knowledge and life experiences through our writing and how we “do” writing. This is what you bring to the table as a person to your writing process. You will always bring some baggage with you of past life experiences or the message you intend to write.
- Intentionality- This is where you must find out who you are writing for and how you should say what you want to say. This is where you apply your rhetorical situation and theory. Why are you doing this in a particular way? Understanding your intention helps you understand your process.
- Fidelity-How sound is your process? Are you collaborating with others to help yourself scaffold and learn knowledge piece by piece? Are there good role models you can turn to when you write? Is your writing applicable to where and how you are doing it? Understanding fidelity is important to furthering knowledge of writing and content area mastery.
- Directionality-Outside influence and knowledge can interfere with your writing and what you think you should do and what you should actually be doing. This is where you need to be careful and see how you are framing your writing and what your goals are.
- Simultaneity-Are you studying theory while applying it? How do other areas you may be an expert in effecting your idea of writing?
These are some complex themes that I’ve tried to break down for quick understanding. They all interact and interplay with each other, especially in the writing process. Once we can understand the themes of knowledge transfer we can understand how to be better writers at a graduate level and how our writing can be applied across disciplines.