How To Talk About Other People
Why academics cite sources in a particular way
First, a quick introduction
Every year, the two of us—Paul and Nick—work with undergraduate students on their honors theses. We think these projects are important and valuable. By engaging in the thesis process, students become active learners—not just note-takers in a lecture hall but participants in scholarly conversations.
Yet the process of writing a thesis can be intimidating to students. And why shouldn’t it be? A thesis is a long, independent piece of work—it is intimidating! Adding to the intimidation is the fact that completing a thesis isn’t just like writing a longer version of a course essay. Theses require learning many different discrete skills, from finding academic resources to crafting theories to carrying out and reporting tests of hypotheses. Each section of the document is almost distinctive enough to count as its own sub-document.
After working with dozens of students to complete this journey, however, we’re confident that the skills that students need can be taught. Nobody can just write a thesis, but just about everyone can learn how to perform better at each of the component parts. In this newsletter, we’ll share our tips and research about how to level up with each of these skills—and how to put them all together to produce theses that really matter.
So let’s start with our first tip: how to talk about other people in a thesis.
Swarthmore history professor Timothy Burke once compared academic training to “mastering a rhetorical and discursive etiquette as mind-blowingly arcane as table manners at a state dinner in 19th century Western Europe.” One of our goals for Thesis Statement is to help students and their instructors identify and master enough of those rules so that they can quickly master what they need to know to get to work. We can’t guarantee that you’ll never confuse the metaphorical fish fork with the pastry fork, but we can make sure you know enough to tell forks from spoons.
One of these arcane rules concerns how academic writing refers to the experts being cited. Writing involves a lot of cues–signals that help tell you, the reader, why a point matters. Even something seemingly as straightforward as how we talk about a source gives savvy readers cues about how well versed someone is in the process of academic research. The way academics talk about other experts, in particular, is different than how other writers do. It’s a good skill to learn early.
Consider the reference we began with above. To introduce the quotation, we referred to “Swarthmore history professor Timothy Burke.” That’s a natural way to begin. It situates Burke as an expert (he’s a history professor!), gives him credibility (he’s at a good school!), and uses a title that ensures his expertise is relevant to the topic (he’s talking about 19th century Western Europe, which is history, and about academic training, a pursuit that he’s presumably long since mastered). Using his formal first name (“Timothy”) rounds out the package. It’s a polite, and subtly rhetorically powerful, set of choices to help showcase the point we’re making about how even experts think this stuff is really complex. It looks like it gives a lot of signals, too: “Tim Burke, local plumber who watches National Geographic specials sometimes” just wouldn’t have the same oomph.
In academic writing, however, you may have noticed that scholarly journals don’t introduce experts this way. Here’s a few different ways we could write this in a journal:
Academic training has been compared to “mastering a rhetorical and discursive etiquette as mind-blowingly arcane as table manners at a state dinner in 19th century Western Europe (Burke, 2003)”
Academic training can seem like “a rhetorical and discursive etiquette as mind-blowingly arcane as table manners at a state dinner”1
Academic etiquette proves arcane, even for experts.[1]
These examples differ in many ways. These differences aren’t just technical: each highlights different facets of the comparison. What we want to focus on right now, though, is specifically that none of these different citation methods does anything to reinforce the claims about Burke’s status that we detailed above. You don’t know that he’s a professor, or where, or of what–the citation is a bare reference to where you can look up that someone wrote that passage.
Mixing up the rules of genres can be costly
Why is that? It’s not because academics are rude or uninterested in displaying expertise (in fact, they love to look like experts!). Instead, it is because different genres of writing talk about expertise differently. And mixing up how one genre displays expertise with how another one does it comes at real costs.
If you’re writing for normal people in an expository setting, as we’re doing now, then you need to introduce and reinforce claims of authority. That’s not just good practice, it’s also good salesmanship: the more tokens of authority you can claim, the more convincing your argument will seem. (Whether your argument is plausible or even correct is entirely different.)
Even within non-academic writing, there’s variations about how to introduce sources. An informal writer on the Internet might call him “the prolific academic blogger Tim Burke”, with a link to the article to directly satisfy anyone’s curiosity about who that guy is. Alternatively, writers can embellish a description even more. If we were writing for The New Yorker, we might go for the descriptive, even florid: “Timothy Burke, who steals time from his day job as a Swarthmore professor of African history to write on his weblog Easily Distracted, once observed from that gilded perch in the Ivory Tower that academic training is like ‘mastering a rhetorical and discursive etiquette….” Okay, that’s probably laying it on a little thick, but you’ve likely encountered descriptions like that.
Why don’t academic writers employ those sorts of devices? There are two reasons: focus and purpose.
Focus means that academic writing is focused on establishing the validity of an argumentative or descriptive claim. Details that distract from that purpose undermine the purpose because they draw the reader’s attention away from the claim. They can be included, if necessary, in footnotes, but they often are not because academic writing is often conducted under extreme pressure from length requirements. (Ten thousand words may sound like a lot for a journal article, but we assure you that by the time an article is published a good academic writer will have left thousands of words on the cutting-room floor to squeeze in at just under 9,999 words.)
Purpose is the other big reason. All of the details–title, institution, profession, and so on–that we included in the non-academic examples simply do not (or, at least, should not matter) to the evaluation of the claim. Alternatively, if as scholars we are including a reference to someone, the default assumption is that we’ve already vetted the claim for reliability and plausibility, and so readers do not need to have the author’s resume included. If readers doubt this, they can look the source up–and if the source has been misrepresented or is inappropriate, they can and will call out this abuse of sources. In academic prose, it would be a waste of the reader’s time to include any details beyond the citation.
(To a degree that non-academics may not recognize, by the way, it’s also possible that an academic reader will have already recognized the citation without any elaboration. A lot of academic discussion, even in real life, takes place in impenetrable shorthand–”Mayhew 1974! Waltz 1979! Tsebelis 2003! Converse 1964!”--that is as familiar to the intended audience as mentioning The Phantom Menace or Infinity War would be to a crowd of geeks.)
There’s a third reason why you, as a student, ought to avoid referring to sources in a non-academic way. Even though it’s natural and reasonable in many other contexts, it gives away that you’re not yet aware of this part of the hidden curriculum. It’s not a huge faux pas, but it is one of those pastry fork/fish fork mixups that signals that you’re not yet writing as efficiently as possible nor thinking of yourself as an expert in a subject who can communicate effectively to other experts. (Even if you’re not an expert, you can at least write like one.) At worst, instructors in upper-division courses may think you’re just adding words to pad your word count, when you could be focusing on developing your argument instead.
The takeaway: When you’re writing a research paper, just cite the author as appropriate for your citation style. Adding details about the expert is nice in some contexts, but academic writing leans toward the spare and the plain for important reasons.
The practical: There are different ways of referencing sources in academic writing that can be broken down into “narrative” or “parenthetical” forms:
Narrative citation: Colon (2021) investigated how the intestines filter poop.
Parenthetical citation: The intestines filter poop via several ways (Colon 2021).
Is one method technically preferable over the other? Not really. Pay attention to the standards set by your professor, instructor, or teacher, but, in everything, be consistent.