Making our research dialogue with the broader scholarly literature in our academic writing

I have been thinking about multiple ways to help my PhD students as their completion timelines approach. Three of them are about to submit their final dissertations, and I am reading drafts All The Time. One of the key pieces of feedback I’ve provided lately has been “write more analytically, and less descriptively”. Another very important aspect of academic writing that I have been emphasizing to my thesis advisees has been “make your research dialogue with the broader scholarly literature”.

Making our own work dialogue with a wider range of scholarly literature in our academic writing is key because it demonstrates that we are able to contribute to broader debates and conversations that are being held in journals, articles, book chapters and books.

In many ways, I find teaching this skill (how to make our own work dialogue with the broader literature) a bit challenging, because my experience as a graduate student marked how I write. I always thought I was supposed to show how my work converses with others’ research, there was no question about this. I can’t really recall if anybody taught me this as a specific skill, but I knew it was a requirement of scholarly writing, simply because we don’t publish in a vacuum, but we are part of a conversation. Our writing contributes to conversations, debates and discussions.

Two elements I also want to bring into conversation about this skill of making our research dialogue with others’ scholarship include, first, the idea of writing more argumentatively, which is related to, but not exclusively associated with, writing more analytically. Making our own scholarly work converse with others’ research requires us to put them in conversation through an argumentative/dialogical model, where we put our empirical evidence, theories, and arguments forth, and then we argue about the value and validity of these, contrasting them with others’ findings, theoretical expectations, and results.

When I teach how to write more argumentatively, I use Graf & Birkenstein’s book: They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing book, as well as their templates. Graf & Birkenstein are amazing at developing templates that learners can quickly and, in a rather straightfoward manner, use to better craft arguments. The They Say/I Say model is extremely helpful because it allows writers to develop a repertoire of rhetorical moves that enables them to improve their argumentative writing through repetition and practice. The They Say/I Say model

My points above regarding the importance of writing more argumentatively (and writing better arguments) also connect with the second element that I think is extremely important when discussing the issue of bringing our own research into dialogue: the importance of the theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions. Regardless of whether you like teaching research design and thesis writing in a way that seeks that the learner establishes a gap in the literature or (as I’ve lately come to posit), craft a space in the field, making our research dialogue with others is an important and valuable approach to establishing the importance and relevance of our own work.

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I am someone who likes templates, tables, and typologies. Thinking about how to teach the conversation-based approach to making learners’ research outputs better dialogue with the scholarly literature has led me to consider developing a few examples, inspired by and using the Graf & Birkenstein model. I still haven’t worked out the entire typology, but here are a few examples:

Confirmation:
This mode of engagement with the literature enables the writer to confirm what others have said or found out. An example:

“My findings on informal waste picking in Aguascalientes confirm Medina’s (2007) claim that informal recyclers operate as unofficial extensions of municipal waste management systems.”

Extension
This approach to dialogue with other researchers’ work centers their scholarship but also provides us with an opportunity to extend what they have contributed to the literature and provide an innovative or simply different view.

“Building on Mehta’s (2018) concept of ‘manufactured scarcity,’ I examine how bottled water markets in Mexico City reflect similar dynamics in urban contexts of infrastructural neglect.”

Critique/Challenge:
This rhetorical move contradicts, challenges or critiques other scholars’ work. However, this critique is not done in a vacuum. It usually is accompanied by an argument on how the work of others can be disproved or confronted through our research.

Contrary to McGarry’s (2023) argument that familial elder care functions as a voluntary safety net, my findings suggest that in Mexican low-income households, permanent care emerges as an adaptive measure to institutional abandonment rather than as a product of caring culture.”

Personally, I try to write Critiques/Challenges in a way that sounds less confrontational, not “X is wrong”, but instead, I would write: “Contrary to what X finds, my own research indicates that W is happening”. Another way to write a Challenge/Critique is as follows: “In contrast to Y’s work, I find that Z is happening”.

Hopefully this blog post will help learners find ways to write better and make their research dialogue with others’ scholarship. I am still working on a typology of strategies to find gaps in the literature, and a typology of rhetorical moves to write more argumentatively when making our research converse with others’ works.

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