If you were writing an in-class essay, would you take the time to put together a bibliography? Of course not. But you would prepare a bibliography for a formal research paper because that writing has a different purpose and the audience has different expectations. A writer must analyze the rhetorical situation in order to determine what is appropriate, even when it comes to sources and documentation. (See the rhetorical triangle, p. 4.)
Now let’s consider a topic and examine how sources were used and identified for three different audiences. The following excerpts are from three pieces about indirect speech by the linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker.
The first example is from an article in Time magazine written for a general audience of readers interested primarily in understanding the basics of Pinker’s ideas. (The rest of this article appears on pp. 745–8.)
from Words Don’t Mean What They Mean
Why don’t people just say what they mean? The reason is that conversational partners are not modems downloading information into each other’s brains. People are very, very touchy about their relationships. Whenever you speak to someone, you are presuming the two of you have a certain degree of familiarity—which your words might alter. So every sentence has to do two things at once: convey a message and continue to negotiate that relationship.
The clearest example is ordinary politeness. When you are at a dinner party and want the salt, you don’t blurt out, “Gimme the salt.” Rather, you use what linguists call a whimperative, as in “Do you think you could pass the salt?” or “If you could pass the salt, that would be awesome.”
Taken literally, these sentences are inane. The second is an overstatement, and the answer to the first is obvious. Fortunately, the hearer assumes that the speaker is rational and listens between the lines. Yes, your point is to request the salt, but you’re doing it in such a way that first takes care to establish what linguists call “felicity conditions,” or the prerequisites to making a sensible request. The underlying rationale is that the hearer not be given a command but simply be asked or advised about one of the necessary conditions for passing the salt. Your goal is to have your need satisfied without treating the listener as a flunky who can be bossed around at will.
Note that there are no formal sources cited. The technical terms that are introduced—whimperative and felicity conditions—are more playful than technical, and Pinker makes no attempt to cite the academic origin of these terms or the other ideas in this article. He does not go into the research that led to these conclusions. His goal in this brief article for the general reader is to inform and keep moving.
The audience for Pinker’s book The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature is interested in exploring his subject more deeply, and his use and citation of sources becomes correspondingly more extensive and formal.
from The Stuff of Thought
The double message conveyed with an implicature is nowhere put to greater use than in the commonest kind of indirect speech of all, politeness. Politeness in linguistics does not refer to social etiquette, like eating your peas without using your knife, but to the countless adjustments that speakers make to avoid the equally countless ways that their listeners might be put off. People are very, very touchy, and speakers go to great lengths not to step on their toes. In their magisterial work Politeness: Some Universals in Language Use, the anthropologists Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson . . . extended Grice’s theory by showing how people all over the world use politeness to lubricate their social interactions.1
Politeness Theory begins with Erving Goffman’s observation that when people interact they constantly worry about maintaining a nebulous yet vital commodity called “face” (from the idiom “to save face”).2 Goffman defined face as a positive social value that a person claims for himself. Brown and Levinson divide it into positive face, the desire to be approved (specifically, that other people want for you what you want for yourself), and negative face, the desire to be unimpeded or autonomous. The terminology, though clumsy, points to a fundamental duality in social life, which has been discovered in many guises and goes by many names: solidarity and status, connection and autonomy, communion and agency, intimacy and power, communal sharing and authority ranking.3
While this is not a scientific study, it is also not a brief and breezy article in a magazine with a very wide readership. The audience of a book of this sort has some interest in this topic—they have chosen to read a whole book on linguistics and cognition—and because of that, Pinker feels comfortable not just summarizing the latest thinking in the field, but introducing terminology common to research in linguistics and tracing the origins of concepts back to their academic origins. He also formally (and fully) cites his sources using extensive endnotes that appear at the back of the book.
Finally, take a look at this selection from a scholarly article by Pinker in the academic journal Intercultural Pragmatics.
from The Evolutionary Social Psychology of Off-Record Indirect Speech Acts
The double message conveyed with an implicature is nowhere put to greater use than in the commonest kind of indirect speech, politeness. In their seminal work Politeness: Some Universals in Language Use, Brown and Levinson (1987b) extended Grice’s theory by showing how people in many (perhaps all) cultures use politeness to lubricate their social interactions.
Politeness Theory begins with Goffman’s (1967) observation that when people interact they constantly worry about maintaining a commodity called ‘’face’’ (from the idiom ‘’to save face’’). Goffman defined face as a positive social value that a person claims for himself. Brown and Levinson divide it into positive face, the desire to be approved (specifically, that other people want for you what you want for yourself ), and negative face, the desire to be unimpeded or autonomous. The terminology points to a fundamental duality in social life which goes by many names: solidarity and status, connection and autonomy, communion and agency, intimacy and power, communal sharing and authority ranking (Fiske 1992, 2004; Haslam 2004; Holtgraves 2002). Later we will see how these wants come from two of the three major social relations in human life.
Brown and Levinson argue that Grice’s Cooperative Principle applies to the maintenance of face as well as to the communication of data. Conversationalists work together, each trying to maintain his own face and the face of his partner. The challenge is that most kinds of speech pose at least some threat to the face of the hearer. The mere act of initiating a conversation imposes a demand on the hearer’s time and attention. Issuing an imperative challenges her status and autonomy. Making a request puts her in the position where she might have to refuse, earning her a reputation as stingy or selfish. Telling something to someone implies that she was ignorant of the fact in the first place. And then there are criticisms, boasts, interruptions, outbursts, the telling of bad news, and the broaching of divisive topics, all of which can injure the hearer’s face directly.
At the same time, people have to get on with the business of life, and in doing so they have to convey requests and news and complaints. The solution is to make amends with politeness: the speaker sugarcoats his utterances with niceties that reaffirm his concern for the hearer or that acknowledge her autonomy. Brown and Levinson call the stratagems positive and negative politeness, though better terms are sympathy and deference.
References
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson. 1987a. Introduction to the reissue: A review of recent work. In Politeness: Some universals in language use. New York: Cambridge University Press.
—. 1987b. Politeness: Some universals in language usage. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Fiske, Alan P. 1992. The four elementary forms of sociality: Framework for a unified theory of social relations. Psychological Review, 99: 689–723.
—. 2004. Four modes of constituting relationships: Consubstantial assimilation; space, magnitude, time, and force; Concrete procedures; Abstract symbolism. In N. Haslam (ed.), Relational models theory: A contemporary overview. Mahwah: Erlbaum Associates.
Goffman, Erving. 1959. The presentation of self in everyday life. New York: Doubleday.
—. 1967. On face-work: An analysis of ritual elements in social interaction. In Interaction ritual: Essays on face-to-face behavior. New York: Random House.
Grice, Herbert P. 1975. Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. L. Morgan (eds.), Syntax & Semantics Vol. 3: Speech acts. New York: Academic Press.
Haslam, Nick. (ed.). 2004. Relational models theory: A contemporary overview. Mahwah: Erlbaum Associates.
Holtgraves, Tom M. 2002. Language as social action. Mahwah: Erlbaum Associates.
Notice that for this academic audience of researchers and scholars who bring a good deal of prior knowledge to the text, Pinker chooses other scholarly works as his sources and documents them thoroughly in a style that gives those sources more emphasis. Rather than just putting the citations at the back of the book, he embeds the source names throughout for direct reference and then includes a detailed Works Cited list at the end of the article. Many readers, likely familiar with these sources, will find Pinker’s text more authoritative because he has included them.
As you can see, the type of evidence and the way it is documented depends on audience and situation. But what does all of this have to do with the writing you will be doing? The texts we have examined in this chapter were written by journalists, professors, and scholars; the sources they use and the ways they document them are appropriate for their audiences. In school, you have probably written essays for which you were required to use outside sources, sources that were assigned to you, or sources that were part of your classroom readings. Keep in mind that your goal in a synthesis essay is the same as that of professional writers: to use sources to support and illustrate your own ideas and to establish your credibility as a reasonable and informed writer. Whether your teacher wants you to make informal in-text citations or use formal in-text parenthetical documentation and an end-of-paper Works Cited list, as prescribed by the Modern Language Association (MLA), you must document sources to give credit where credit is due.