Gee-ze, Louise! or How to Make Unicorn Stew

Ok, alright. I wanted to play nice with Gee's How to Do Discourse Analysis, but the book is trying to turn DA work into a cookbook. But it's not a fancy cookbook that tells me how to make a gourmet meal from a radish, a can of tuna, noddles, and orange juice. Nope, it's one of those crappy cookbooks that tells us how to do the obvious. (Now, don't jump the gun on me because this sounds contradictory to my undying love for Shklovsky's defamiliarization that I discussed last week.) For example, Pippa Middleton wrote an awful party planning book that included tidbits akin to, "breakfast is good in the morning" and "a chicken can be cut into a thigh, drumstick, breast, and wing." And yes, that information is right, and I'm even sure that there are some people who don't know these things. But the Middleton's have gained business savvy for their party planning business--even I know this! They should, in fact, be bringing their A-game, a la Martha Stewart style--not reinventing the basics for us.

This long-drawn out, extended metaphor is exactly my problem I have with Gee: he is known for handling language and communication issues; he has established a recognizable scholarly name in English studies; he has drive more novice English scholars to think critically; but he is talking to readers of this text as if they have never thought to uncover issues of language analysis. And I don't like that this entire book is built upon an assumption of a reader who is completely unaware of close readings. No one is above learning new tools for analysis, but the fact that he can't identify his tools all in unique ways bothers me. The overlapping of his analytical tools seems to imply that we readers aren't going to be bothered by that repetitiveness in writing. I'm all for sign-posting in writing, but don't waste my time recycling partial correlation for other causation. And much like Middleton's cookbook, he really needed a better editor to keep him on the straight on narrow to report the varieties of analysis that can bloom from a certain type of analytical gazing on the data.

So I've been thinking a lot about pedagogical books to support teachers' introducing qual studies to their students. And now more than ever, I realize that my focus has been put on the wrong target audience. Rather than trying to create a book on qual-pedagogy, a book needs to be framed for students that scaffolds from their knowledge. I read B. Johnstone's Qualitative Research for Sociolinguists, and I remember being annoyed with how she doesn't explain what types of questions sociolinguists should ask. If the research question is weak, the project is going to have a difficult development. I've always described the research question for a qual project as the paper's thesis statement. So it's important that they are well articulated. So my new question is "how do I break down the report sections (lit review, methods, analysis, etc) for English majors?".

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How to Make Unicorn Stew
Ingredients:
3 carrots
1 onion
a pot of water
some spices
a box of arzo
1 lbs. unicorn chunks

Wait--unicorn stew?!?

How do you make unicorn stew?
You don't.