and right answers. They see themselves as empty buckets being filled with data by their professors. To dualists, the only academic use of writing is to demonstrate one's knowledge of the correct facts—a concept of writing as information rather than as argument or analysis. Students in Perry's middle stages of multiplicity are beginning to accept the notion of opposing views, but they see these simply as “opinions”; because “everyone has a right to his or her own opinion,” they see little purpose in defending any particular view and thus are not compelled through the process of rigorous thinking that intellectually mature writing demands. It is not until they reach Perry's highest stages of development that a real need for reasoned argument begins to emerge.
A limitation of Perry's study is that he only traced the cognitive growth of male students. In their classic book Women's Ways of Knowing, Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule (1986) add additional dimensions to Perry's scheme that account for women's experiences and ways of knowing. Belenky et al. describe early stages of female students feeling “silenced” by “received knowledge” presented as absolute truths from infallible authorities. Whereas Perry's students aligned themselves with authority in the dualistic stage, women in Belenky et al.'s study felt silenced and alienated by received knowledge. In later stages, Belenky et al. emphasize forms of thinking that rely not just on adversarial, critical analysis but on “connected knowing,” which involves understanding and empathizing with multiple perspectives in ongoing conversations.
What our beginning college students do not understand, therefore, is the dialogic view of academic life implied by writing across the curriculum. Within this view writing means joining a conversation of persons who are jointly seeking answers to shared questions—a discourse community. These readers and writers are interested in each other's ideas but also, in important ways, skeptical of them. Readers need to be persuaded by appropriate disciplinary uses of reasons and evidence. This view of academic writing implies an uncomfortable view of knowledge as dialogic, contingent, ambiguous, and tentative.
It follows that teaching academic writing means teaching students an unfamiliar way of looking at their courses and at knowledge itself. For a brief glimpse of a student being initiated into this uncomfortable world, consider for a moment the following transcript of a writing center conference in which the student had been asked to argue whether U.S. involvement in Central America in the last part of the twentieth century constituted imperialism.
Tutor: If I said, “Tell me whether or not this is imperialism,” what's your first gut reaction?
Writer: There are very strong arguments for both. It's all in how you define it.
Tutor: Okay, who's doing the defining?
Writer: Anybody. That's just it—there's no real clear definition. Over time, it's been distorted. I mean, before, imperialism used to be like the British who go in and take Hong Kong, set up their own little thing that's their own British government. That's true imperialism. But the definition's been expanded to include indirect control by other means, and what exactly that is I guess you have to decide. So I don't know. I don't think we really have control in Central America, so that part of me says no, that's not imperialism. But other parts of me say we really do control a lot of what is going on in Central America by the amount of dollars and where we put them. So in that sense, we do have imperialism … So the other big question on that, and why I brought in the balance of power, is, where are we allowed to cross the line and where are we not?
Tutor: Okay then, if you're going to ask that question—where are we allowed to cross the line?—it implies that a line is drawn. So what I guess I'm trying to get you to say is [pause]
Writer: Whether I'm for or against.
Tutor: Yes!
Writer: The reason why I'm undecided is because I couldn't create a strong enough argument for either side. There are too many holes in each side. If I were to pick one side, somebody could blow me out of the water.
The student writer, obviously engaged with the assignment, is keenly aware of the tentativeness of different positions, each of which can be “blown out of the water” by an alternative view. Both the facts of the case and, more troublingly, the definition of imperialism are open‐ended problems. The student longs for a “right answer,” resisting the frightening prospect of having to make meanings and defend them. Good writing assignments often produce this kind of discomfort: the need to join, in a reasoned way, a conversation of differing voices.
We thus need to help our students see that academic writing involves intellectual and often emotional struggle. The struggle is rooted in the writer's awareness that a problem exists—often dimly felt, unclarified, and blurry—and that the writer must offer a tentative, risky proposition in response to that problem, a proposition that competes for readers' allegiance with other differing propositions.
Teaching Multiple Drafts as a Thinking Process
Fortunately, the writing process itself provides one of the best ways to help students learn the active, dialogic thinking skills valued in academic life. Students need to understand that even for the most skilled writers, composing an essay is a tortuous process because, as writing theorist Peter Elbow (1973) has argued, “meaning is not what you start out with but what you end up with… Think of writing then not as a way to transmit a message but as a way to grow and cook a message” (15). Thus, the elegance and structure of thesis‐governed writing—as a finished product—evolves from a lengthy and messy process of drafting and redrafting. An across‐the‐curriculum emphasis on multiple drafts encourages the messy process whereby writers become engaged with a problem and, once engaged, formulate, develop, complicate, and clarify their own ideas. The habit of problem posing and thesis making does not come naturally to beginning college students, who write more clearly (but dully) when given easier assignments that do not challenge them as thinkers. The next sections explore this phenomenon in more detail.
Avoiding a Thesis: Three Cognitively Immature Essay Structures
To see more clearly the relationship between a dialogic view of knowledge and the approach to writing instruction advocated here, let's examine several cognitively immature organizational structures that students often resort to when unable to produce thesis‐governed prose.
“And Then” Writing, or Chronological Structure
By “and then” writing we mean a chronological narrative in which the writer tells what happens between time point A and time point B without focus, selection, pacing, or tension. Students produce “and then” writing when they resort inappropriately to chronological organization. Typical examples are students' writing a plot summary of a film or short story instead of an analysis. Another example, commonly encountered in the sciences, is students' writing a literature review that simply summarizes articles in chronological order by date of publication rather than analyzing what's known and unknown.
“And then” writing can be illustrated by the following student's difficulty in producing an interpretive argument about Shakespeare's The Tempest. This excerpt is from the introduction of the student's first draft:
Prospero cares deeply for his daughter. In the middle of the play Prospero acts like a gruff father and makes Ferdinand carry logs in order to test his love for Miranda and Miranda's love for him. He is also very cruel to the servant Caliban. In the end, though, Prospero is a loving father who rejoices in his daughter's marriage to a good man.
Here the student seems to be summarizing the plot of The Tempest without forecasting an argument or proposing a thesis. The body of this draft contained similar passages of lengthy plot summary. However,
