I would apologize about always talking about creative writing, but apparently it's all I think about.
As I read Anonymous's lovely notes on originality and not borrowing from another to prove your own point, I kept remembering the past discussion of poetry as meaningless entertainment in the world of rhetoric. Research papers today need citations to prove the author's ethos. Anonymous claims "borrowed examples simply cannot be so well adapted to the rules of the art" (247). So, borrowed examples (or today's cited quotes) were less useful than if the author were to make it up himself. And tell me, what is "make it up himself?" It's creative writing. The original point, here, was to say that Aristotle and Plato's rhetoric was creative writing. Technically, back then, everything was because everything was fresh and made up.
I particularly like the analogy on 247, "It is as if a merchant selling purple or some other commodity should say: 'Buy of me, but I shall borrow from some one else a sample of this to show you.'" THIS is how research papers should be done.
That's mostly a joke. Because the problem today, that was not as nagging as it was then, is that most of our research topics have been discussed to death. If we're arguing a new claim - or a new strain of an existing claim - it is necessary now to introduce and accommodate the existing discussion. That is, unfortunately, why we have to cite other people. In order for anyone to listen these days, they have to know you're not the only one who agrees.
How does this lesson (Rhetorica Ad Herennium) pertain to today's modes of writing? Can we take these lessons and apply them to research papers? Philosophy, essay, teaching, and creative writing, sure. But what about research papers? Maybe I'm obsessed by my detestation of them, but I don't believe today's standard "research paper" is at all connected to Aristotle's beautiful rhetoric. It's writing and it's creative and it's art, but it's not the old definition of true rhetoric.
If you put a "transplacement" (254) in a scientific paper, are you going to be taken seriously?
(See Sadie's post on puns).
I think that the whole reason it is hard to get away from other's thoughts and words in a research paper is delineated within the title. Research in itself implies the act of using the thoughts and discoveries of others as a sort of spring board to bound into a subject.
ReplyDeleteThe only way you would be able to write a research paper without an example from any other source is to not write a research paper at all, but to ascertain for yourself any facts, figures, examples etc. that you may want to use. But why would you drop an apple and a grape off of a rooftop in order to ascertain for yourself that they will both hit the ground at the same time, when you already know that they will, because someone has already done it and written about it? It is when you stop at the same place that the person before you stopped that your research ceases to be original. If you do all the research and put it to the page without drawing to a new conclusion based on your research, you have done nothing but copy others.
As someone whose greatest interest is research writing, I feel that writers are creative as soon as they stop copying verbatim from a single source. To illustrate, let's take a look at the written form that, in my opinion, is the epitome of borrowing from others: the literature review. It seeks to illustrate what is already thought about a subject, but the writer of a literature review makes conscious choices about how to frame the argument, what sources to include, which to ignore, and in what order the information is presented. What's not creative about that? The writer of Rhetorica ad Herennium claims that borrowed examples are often ill-fitting (247). The creative literature review writer can make it appear otherwise.
ReplyDelete