One of the challenges I have experienced on previous graduate courses and in previous essays is the art of mastering rhetorical style. By this I mean the balancing of the imperative towards neutrality against the unavoidable necessity for the art of persuasion. Explaining further, in academic writing as with all forms of writing an element of persuasion is involved. This is not necessarily the persuasion of the reader to form a particular opinion this way or that way or to make a specific value judgement one way or another (as would be the aim of an essay or a polemic), as this would compromise scholarly neutrality. Rather, the act of persuasion often lies within the more subtle task of convincing the reader that the research was in fact conceived and conducted fairly and without bias. This can be achieved not only through the presentation of sound methods, results and conclusions, but also in part through the skillful organization, writing style and employment of persuasive rhetoric.

In the particular areas of research in which I am interested, namely critical theory relating to psychological frameworks of cognition in certain areas of enculturated belief and behaviour, there is often a need to provide a balanced and fair consideration of irrational behaviours and responses. This can, all too often, prove to be a fine balance between giving due serious attention to such responses — especially when they are exhibited by a large minority or even a majority of the population — and ascribing undue weight and validity to such responses. To illustrate this point, a colleague of Richard Dawkins is anonymously quoted as retorting upon being challenged to debate by a creationist, “That would look great on your CV, not so good on mine” (Dawkins, 2006, p. 281). (Incidentally I believe that this quote can be attributed to former UK government Chief Scientific Advisor and ex-president of the Royal Society, Robert May, but don’t quote me on it.)

Critical theory formation involves a normative imperative that requires worth-value judgements to be proposed and this itself requires a form of bias to be introduced. Of course the scholarly injunction is always to demonstrate convincingly, to even the most sceptical and critical of readers, that this bias was not present at the outset but rather was generated by the analysis and synthesis of the research results themselves. The presentation of such a initial neutrality involves a rhetorical skill set for the following reason: no researcher embarks on a work of research without some form of motivation. Financially remunerated industrial and commercial research aims to produce a finding that is profitable or that perhaps can accommodate some regulatory framework for the paymasters of the project. Pure academic research is, by contrast, and especially in the normative social sciences — but also in the arts and natural sciences, often driven by a passion for social change, or breakthroughs in understanding. Rarely is the work paid and the motivation of the researcher is, or at least one would hope would be, to make and present findings that contribute to the existing body of knowledge and understanding in that field. As such it is fair to say that every researcher is biased in some way at the outset and thus the presentation of any research project as one that develops a conclusion from neutral beginnings involves a degree of rhetorical skill.

References

Dawkins, R. (2006). The God Delusion. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company