Live Discourse Analysis

Ian: /readwise-quote-dialogue

Ian: I want to write a paper.

Claude:

Before actually beginning to write, do two things. First, ensure that you have a strong, tightly focused thesis. There’s a good way to tell if you have one, but it takes courage. Write on some note paper, “I shall argue that— ,” and complete the sentence” (Trimble, 1975, p. 35).

Claude: I hear a tension in “I want to write a paper.” The wanting is real, but the paper doesn’t exist yet. It might be a thesis waiting to be found, or only an itch toward a genre. Trimble comes down hard on one side: he says to have a tightly focused argument before you begin, and that checking for one takes courage. That cuts against the view that writing is where thinking happens, which a lot of your library holds. So the real question isn’t which camp is right. It’s whether you already have something you could complete that sentence with, even badly, or whether the sentence breaks and the breaking tells you something.

Ian:

You are wrong for that one, Claude. I was going to give you a theme or topic to start. But we cannot turn back now. We are in motion. I guess we will talk about writing today.

Ian:

“I shall argue that” starting a paper when you do not have a full thesis in mind is fine. Because writing is thinking. And sometimes I need to think to test the tightness, strength, and focus of my thesis. This practice of writing and reformulating is often the norm in qualitative research, where research questions remain provisional and high-quality projects often change their questions several times. The more I write, the more I think — the more my thoughts crystallize, condense, move from an unruly gaseous state into a heavier, weighty liquid state.

I am reminded of a quote from a book that I read yesterday called The Obsessed (Buehler, 2026). It was a text exchange between the main character, Comparative Literature PhD student Astrid, and a short-term love interest Oceanography student. She called him MIT Boy. Astrid sends MIT Boy a primordial piece of writing she was working on, full of caveats:

ASTRID: The piece is a bit of a mess, and I’m afraid to look at it again since I wrote it frantically in a week, but the ideas have been percolating for a few years now. Hopefully it’s not terrible…

MIT BOY: Sometimes, when you look back at what you’ve written, spontaneous writing ends up being better than stories that are meticulously planned. I think the haste brings about a kind of honest continuity.

ASTRID: The end is really rough, but here you go! (Buehler, 2026, p. 156).

When I listen to that passage again, I think about the cohesion that Live Discourse Analysis brings without tightly entwining around a final thesis — writing in a way that is more immediate, more committed to a journey, more committed to experience than information. How can we, therefore, bring time into the equation of writing, giving writers reflexive latitude to admit uncertainty, make predictions, take a short tangent that may prove meaningful later, or otherwise show thinking as a movement? When I imagine movement, in other words, I imagine a bouy bobbing up and down on a sea of condensing thought – a paper sitting in liquid experience rather than a paper of polished, finished, tight, static, crystallized, prismatic, and ultimately brittle formation free of “fluff,” slack, or margin.

Claude:

“Elements by themselves probably never cause anything. They become origins of events if and when they crystallize into fixed and definite forms. Then, and only then, can we trace their history backwards. The event illuminates its own past, but it can never be deduced from it” (Bennett, 2010).

Ian:

Your point is well-taken. There is naivete in thinking that one can create a piece of writing immanent to the point of creation. Yet my biggest quarrel with academic writing in my field is that such writing seems disinterested in tracing that history from its formation of elements. There remains burgeoning conversation about reflexivity and transparency in qualitative methodologies – a need to bring the researcher’s story into the reporting of qualitative research.

But I start to worry that reflexivity remains only acceptable when according to rigid terms and conditions. When I read many traditional or conventional qualitative analyses, I sense post-positivist creep that wants to, in many ways, erase methodographic history, presenting analysis as if it were fully formed. It elides the missteps, confusions, ambiguities, and opacities that contributed to its final transparent from. Everyone’s papers appear so perfect, so flawless. I wonder: what is wrong with me? Maybe I am not cut out for this process. The question is, how can we bring that which happens behind the opaque velvet curtain into research reports as sedimented geological records within the final form of our crystallized research reports?

Claude:

“We argue here for a reconceptualization of the research report as a dynamic vehicle that mediates between researcher/writer and reviewer/reader, rather than as a factual account of events after the fact. More specifically, we propose that the research report is more usefully treated as a “literary technology” (Shapin, 1984, p. 490) designed to persuade readers of the merits of a study than as a mirror reflection of that study” (Sandelowski & Barroso 2002, p. 75).

Ian:

Yes. One hundred percent. At least the first part. The research report, in our current discursice landscape, is designed to carry a performance of factuality. And the only way to carry that performance of factuality is to abide by conventions of an academic discipline that attempts to denude the research report of a writer’s voice to simulate a report as a collection of bare facts arranged in a logical order.

I wonder, however, about Shapin’s use of “technology.” I am becoming more and more skeptical of the term “technology,” particularly as it relates to language or creativity. Because I am getting old. Ha! In the age of AI, we see a growing divide between those who can appreciate language for its poetic opacity and those mold, contort, and police language for technological transparency.

So, when we “aim to persuade readers of the merits of a study,” we cannot escape the question of whose merits count. Whose merits matter? Whose ideals do we defend when we judge a piece of writing as (not) research? So such merits include a transparent, technological writing style antagonistic to creativity and poetic opacity? Or are there other merits that go unexpressed? Like aesthetic merits? Storytelling merits? Creativity merits? In my experience, the merit of technological transparency to communicate some kind of objective novelty often takes precedence over the other three. Or, put otherwise, even qualitative researchers seem caught up in a limited repertoire of how to tell a story – not a limited repertoire of storytelling in data analysis proper, but the storytelling of the whole research report.

I therefore take umbrage with the idea of a research report as technology — Or at the very least, I take umbrage with adopting the frame of technology exclusively. What would happen instead if we adopted the frame of experience? Or encounter? Is the goal of the research report merely to inform? To share new knowledge? If so, as applied linguists, why are our sharing practices so monochromatic and boring?

When did we disregard reading and writing as an aesthetic experience within the research process? I argue this happened long before AI came into the picture. But AI has accelerated and exacerbated this movement against the aesthetic experience of reading and writing. AI successfully smooths out the creative divots that make research reports aesthetically unique to a research report writer. We commend AI for making our writing clearer and more transparent. But that is not a neutral objective. It is a valorization of technological language – the type of language AI “loves” because it comes ready-made for consumption, compositional language ripe for indexing, organizing, categorizing.

Why do we play this game willingly? Because researchers do not exist in a vacuum. They exist within a social epistemological ecosystem that prizes productivity and credit over all else. Productivity have squeezed academics to the breaking point to where the experience of reading and writing no longer feels meaningful or profitable. The aeesmbly-line production of transparent research reports, in contrast, remains both easier to do and more attuned to the incentive structure of academia.

Claude:

“Writing for this readership means making the argument clear. It means explaining what is at stake. It means avoiding the kind of specialized performance where readers have to excavate the contribution. We value complexity, while also valuing precision, accessibility, and a clear sense of why the article deserves the reader’s time…” (McKinley & Zhou 2026, p. 8).

This quote is addressed to the readership of TESOL Quarterly. I realize that taking a stance for creativity in academic writing necessarily closes off potential avenues of publication. Some journals are too deep into the technological language machine. I do not blame them. They are succeeding amid the status quo. It is in their interests not to change – and to convince all of us that their approach to writing is good for everyone.

I would also argue, however, that McKinley and Zhou’s (2026) point is not inconsistent with a call for more creativity. First, because a call for poetic capacity need not require one to incorporate creativity in toto. One can include small poetic details, several wisps and wrinkles within an otherwise transparent writing style. I write about this in an in-press article with English Today.

I am really drawn, however, to the final clause – giving a clear sense of why a piece of writing worth a reader’s time. It raises an interesting question: What does it mean for something to be “worth one’s time?” Does writing that is “worth a reader’s time” mean something that is transparent, linear, and easy to digest — the academic junk food that GenAI adores? Or is writing to the worth of a reader’s time align fiction writers’ imperative to write in a way that compels a reader to invest in the practice of reading? Is the reader’s time simply another variable in the accumulation of information? Or is the reader’s time part of a sensorial experience rooted in aesthetics just as much as logic and reason?

Claude:

“The accumulation of what appears as technical detail is not meaningless; it is just that it makes the opponent harder to beat. The author protects his or her text against the reader’s strength. A scientific article becomes more difficult to read, just as a fortress is shielded and buttressed; not for fun, but to avoid being sacked…” (Latour 1987, p. 46).

Ian:

Once again, we will finish at a Latour quote. And damn. McKinley and Zhou (2026) position a writer as a servant to the reader’s time. Latour declares all-out war between readers and writers. The impression I get from this quote is not that we need more technical detail, but rather it signposts a trend towards writing academic articles loaded down with technical detail to render oneself critique-proof. This is not possible in qualitative scholarship. Telling the story of our participants means we cannot account for all possible alternative experiences or positions. Critique is inevitable, essential, and healthy. Technical detail is an armor that slows critique.

But I also think this is where vulnerability becomes important. I know that Sal Consoli and Sara Ganassin (2025) have written about researcher vulnerability. But fewer write about writer vulnerability – a core nested piece of researcher vulnerability. In this era of AI-assisted writing and peer review, where social epistemologies of science force-fit vulnerable researchers into boxes of productivity nodes, I sense both readers and writers substituting AI in the place of vulnerability. If peer review leans too heavily on AI, a peer reviewer can produce an invulnerable review that does not give any weight, merit, or triage to different comments. Yes, you wrote me a 30-page comprehensive report. But based on your experience of reading the paper, what is the most glaring weakness? What is the 20% of the paper I can fix for 80% improvement? This would be possible to answer, of course, if you actually read the paper. AI often misses the forest by identifying every single tree. It is indifferent to reading as an experience and often does not engage with a manuscript as a piece of writing, but as a conduit of information.

Writers, on the other hand, also use AI to produce supplementary table after supplementary table, which often drowns out the music and the novelty of one’s argument within a sea of near relevance — not irrelevance, near relevance. In this way, a deluge of near-relevant facts, tables, literature, or arguments becomes more corrosive to the quality of the paper. At least irrelevant ideas are easy to cull. A sea of near-relevance feels like a world populated NPC arguments.

And when all sides, authors, peer reviewers, and readers, turn further turn towards AI, we continue to descend into a realm of research that no longer values language. Or, put otherwise, a realm that only respects a form of language paradoxically transparent enough to valorize one-to-one form-meaning mappings of words, yet opaque in the sense that no one argument or fact stands out as salient or meaningful. This is why emotions in writing matters – emotions are the furnace driving our decision-making. Logic is the finishing glaze.

This is the end of my paper.

References:

Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press.

Buehler, L. (2026). The obsessed. Penguin Random House.

Consoli, S., & Ganassin, S. (2025). Reflexivity as a means to address researcher vulnerabilities. Applied Linguistics Review, 16(6), 2521–2544.

Latour, B. (1987). Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. Harvard University Press.

McKinley, J., & Zhou, S. (2026). From relevant to publishable in TESOL research: Contribution, access, and accountability: An editorial statement from the incoming editors of TESOL Quarterly. TESOL Quarterly. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.70212

Sandelowski, M., & Barroso, J. (2002). Reading qualitative studies. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 1(1), 74–108.

Schneider, I. (in press). “Too close for academic comfort”: Poetic warmth in an AI-accented winter. English Today.

Shapin, S. (1984). Pump and circumstance: Robert Boyle’s literary technology. Social Studies of Science, 14(4), 481–520.

Trimble, J. R. (1975). Writing with style: Conversations on the art of writing. Prentice-Hall