Come talk to me*: Written text and dialogue

People normally equate dialogue to spoken interaction. In conversation, we reply instantly to what we are told, and our interlocutors expect us to respond in return. Turns bounce back and forth for as long as the conversatrion goes on. Cues are inserted here and there to let us know how well the chat progresses. Eventually, a few signposts will lead us to an end. The whole exchange occurs like a ping-pong ballet, live, in real time. Odd as it may seem, though, we seldom think of written interaction as another form of dialogue, one that is embodied in a different medium, more permanent than the immanently immediate spoken word.

In the realm of academic writing, the dialogic property of written texts is more significant than in most other genres. Think of your own research reports. Their foundations lie on grounds set by other scientists who came before you and who wrote about their findings. In many ways, your research comes as a response to what your scientific community has written along its history. When you publish your paper, you will take the floor to reply and, hopefully, to impel others to take their turn in the future. This sort of historical dialog is a seemingly never-ending chain of replies that permanently transforms knowledge within a given discipline.

Let’s now reduce the spectrum of our analysis. You are now preparing a text in which you expect to make your own claims about the state of affairs in your field. The text that you will soon publish will open a new line of discussion. You will not notice the impact of the message immediately, but after some time, your name and the title of your paper will be cited in someone else’s paper. Later, your research will be replicated by other scientists. Some years will go by and another researcher could easily expand on the work you already advanced, and so on. In a few years time, a fully-fledged dialogue will have taken place between you and your readers. Hopefully, you will also take turns in this conversation by commenting the texts other scholars produce in relation to your own, you will also cite them or maybe even collaborate with them in other pieces of writing.

The pertinence of our message, its relevance within its context, its structure and the questions it arises can make it more interactive. Dialogue, in the form of further research, is stimulated by the recommendations we formulate at the end of our research, for example. In fact, the composition of the text itself can lead to better and more enduring dialogues, but that is a complex notion that we may explore later on.

For the moment, remember that the signposts that you embed in the text indicate the direction of your argument (namely linking expressions, relative pronouns, and, in general, words that trace the topics being dealt with in the text) and thus help readers follow the path of your thoughts. The general organization of the text also contributes to guide your readers and enhance their understanding of the piece. If the readership can follow your message, it is more likely they acknowledge the need to provide adequate responses to it.

*Gabriel, P. (2003). Come talk to me. On Secret world live[DVD]. UK: Interscope Records.

Structure & harmony: Outlining (II)

Once brainstorming processes are done with, we are left with scattered blocks of ideas that we need to structure and harmonize (take a look at this curious example). Before the text is shaped, it is advisable to plan the flow of ideas as they will be presented in the composition. It is at this stage that outlines come to play an essential role.
Outlines present the structure of the text we are to write, but, most importantly, they reflect the relations we have decided to establish among out thoughts. Thus, as mentioned above, outlines purport both structure and harmony. Be means of simple visual organizers, outlines rank the sets of ideas that will be conflated into paragraphs once we compose the text. It also allows us to visually identify which ideas will control discourse blocks ad how they relate to each other.
An efficient outline should be flexible and stable, organic. It should allow us to read it through and understand where the text is headed. It is a laborious and complex task; however, once it is done, it simplifies the passage to text.
Outlines must comply with certain rules to be efficient:
1.    They must be based and developed around a thesis statement that links, transversally, all the ideas that constitute them.
2.    They consist only of affirmative propositions whose structures must be, if possible, always parallel (i.e. nominal structures, verbal structures, etc.; find an explanation and examples here).
3.    A set of number-alphabetic markers is needed to rank ideas.
Basically, outlines are prototexts that only include the raw logical expression of our thoughts organized exactly as they will appear in the first drafts. Nonetheless, some authors include cue notes between ideas to indicate how they are related, thus articulating some sort of harmony among the propositions that may be useful when producing the final text. They look like powerful promises of what is to come.