| This dissertation examines the development of expert discourse in writing across the disciplines and specifically the transition from novice to expert in student writers. The novice writing examined is a sample of honors theses from three distinct disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. The honors theses represents a high level of academic writing in the undergraduate university setting and as a genre seeks to approximate expert disciplinary prose. To facilitate comparison between novice, honors theses prose and expert prose, the study applies Susan Peck MacDonald"s Method for Analyzing Sentence-Level Differences in Disciplinary Knowledge Making (1992) and MacDonald"s 1994 data based on expert prose for comparison. Each sentence subject of three honors theses each from Literature, History, and Anthropology respectively were coded as either epistemic or phenomenal and compared to MacDonald"s expert results as comprehensively as possible. Findings indicate that the literature students were like the experts phenomenlogically, with an emphasis on particulars; history students were remarkably similar to their expert counterparts epistemically, and the anthropology results were incoherent. An exceptional phenomenological "I" code had to be added to account for novice forms of academic agency. The implications of this project include some institution specific trends in honors education and the need to rethink academic agency for novices. A reformulation of the subject/object assumption used in MacDonald"s coding scheme is suggested. The reformulation of the subject/object dichotomy s theorized using Pearce"s notion of abduction. |
