This week we talked about the basics of academic theory and more specifically the academic writing style that dominates English as a discipline. The crux of the week, for me at least, was the Dobie and Garrett-Petts readings and their attempts at describing the idiosyncrasies of the literary scholarship. While Dobie was exclusively about English scholarship, Garrett-Petts seems as though it can be applied to academic literature as a whole.

Dobie gives an in depth survey of what has made up literary analysis for the past few hundred years, with the bullet points being Genre analysis, Biographical analysis, and looking at it in the context of a writer’s body of work. This article is helpful in giving the class a point of reference and vocabulary for what many of us more than likely already knew. We can now talk about these types of scholarship in the way that Garrett-Petts suggests we do. Petts’ article focused on what it means to write in an academic setting; seemingly focusing on the idea that one must learn the academic jargon for whatever field you are interested in. In order to be taken seriously in the scholar system, you must be able to understand the conventions. While it might seem at first that these conventions have no purpose other than to box out those who aren’t part of the system, it is-at least according to Garret-Petts- something that allows for a sustainable discourse. Every field has its own lexicon and conventions: from sports analysis, to microeconomics, to the explication of a poem; each draws on the wealth of scholarship done before it, and the technical jargon which provides its members a toolbox of handy shortcut terms, in order to trying and understand.