{"id":23,"date":"2012-08-28T14:42:32","date_gmt":"2012-08-28T18:42:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/intrdisc\/?page_id=23"},"modified":"2012-08-29T13:29:26","modified_gmt":"2012-08-29T17:29:26","slug":"what-is-spn","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/intrdisc\/?page_id=23","title":{"rendered":"What is SPN?"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>First and foremost, it is not everyone\u2019s preference to write or to read, nor should it be. It is a commonplace in the humanities but a stranger in professional schools as well as in the social sciences and sciences.<\/li>\n<li>It is but one tool in the scholar\u2019s toolbox, functional for some, dysfunctional or nonfunctional for others.<\/li>\n<li>It tells a good story and\/or many good stories.<\/li>\n<li>It features a clear point of view, an organizing theme, and\/or a coherent argument.<\/li>\n<li>It starts with the \u201cI\u201d and proceeds outward to the \u201cyou\u201d and the \u201cthey.\u201d The author\u2019s distinct and honest voice is key. The author\u2019s ideas are only as strong as the voice that delivers them. By the same token, absent the ideas, the personal voice can sometimes be seen as self-indulgent or overly confessional.<\/li>\n<li>It uses personal stories to deliver the message.<\/li>\n<li>It strives for an ideal mix of particularity and generalizability, concreteness and abstractness, practice and theory. SPN writing has four major components: it starts with the identification of key <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">themes<\/span>; then it connects these themes to the writer\u2019s personal stories in order to exemplify and explicate the points being made; then it draws on relevant, pre-existing <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">research and scholarship<\/span> in order to ground and enrich the personal narrative; and, finally, it ends up with <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">universalizable ideas and applications<\/span> that connect with all readers in some way. Sha and Robert calls these four SPN components in order <em><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">pre-search, me-search, re-search, and we-search<\/span><\/em>.<\/li>\n<li>It does not present the author as some omniscient, 3rd \u00a0person authority. The author\u2019s voice is personal, clear, fallible, and honest. It is also humble and open-ended.<\/li>\n<li>It generously cites other authors\u2019 works and ideas. We call these references \u201cproof-texts.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>It shows some passion. It is not a detached, \u201cobjective\u201d examination of a topic. It is a thoughtful, first-person attempt to make a point or teach a lesson by drawing on the author\u2019s own life experiences to provide context.<\/li>\n<li>It tries to help the reader to see the world a little differently, from the author\u2019s personal point of view.<\/li>\n<li>It is editorially and technically meticulous.<\/li>\n<li>It is more an exercise in creative writing than it is writing to fit a particular research formula, rubric, or template.<\/li>\n<li>It takes personal risks.<\/li>\n<li>It begins with the self-confidence that the author has a personal story worth telling and a point worth making.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><a rel=\"license\" href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-nd\/3.0\/deed.en_US\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Creative Commons License\" style=\"border-width:0\" src=\"http:\/\/i.creativecommons.org\/l\/by-nc-nd\/3.0\/88x31.png\" \/><\/a><br \/>This work is licensed under a <a rel=\"license\" href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-nd\/3.0\/deed.en_US\">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>First and foremost, it is not everyone\u2019s preference to write or to read, nor should it be. It is a commonplace in the humanities but a stranger in professional schools as well as in the social sciences and sciences. It is but one tool in the scholar\u2019s toolbox, functional for some, dysfunctional or nonfunctional for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1106,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-23","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/intrdisc\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/23","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/intrdisc\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/intrdisc\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/intrdisc\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/intrdisc\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/intrdisc\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/23\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/intrdisc\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/23\/revisions\/50"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/intrdisc\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}