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Strategies for Empirical Research in Writing. Mary Sue MacNealy. Boston: Allyn
Reviewed by Ellen Barton
Wayne State University
The field of composition has not seen the publication of a manual for empirical research since Janice Lauer and William Asher's Composition Research: Empirical Designs appeared in 1988. Mary Sue MacNealy's Strategies for Empirical Research in Writing is therefore a welcome addition, a useful text for introductory courses in research methods as well as survey courses in composition research generally and technical/professional writing specifically.
The contrasts between Lauer and Asher's earlier text and MacNealy's current one are reflected by the similar and different terms in their titles--composition/ writing and designs/strategies. Both volumes are centrally concerned with empirical research on writing in the field of composition. The audiences for the volumes are somewhat different, though. For an advanced graduate student/experienced researcher audience, Lauer and Asher selected model studies in composition and then provided technical descriptions of their empirical designs. Their discussion of nine empirical methods is drawn straightforwardly from work in social science and educational research, including technical detail and statistical analyses. In contrast, MacNealy addresses her text to an audience with absolutely no prior experience in empirical research, so her term strategies previews a more broadly based approach. She does not oversimplify technical details, but she consistently emphasizes the basics in her descriptions of experimental research, metaanalysis, discourse/text analysis, surveys, focus groups, case study research, and ethnography. These two sources on empirical research methods in the field form a particularly useful tandem for, say, a dissertation student planning a project or an instructor choosing texts for methods classes, with MacNealy providing an introduction to empirical methods and Lauer and Asher providing more technical descriptions of their designs and analyses.
MacNealy's text includes two introductory chapters that are quite useful for the novice reader, although it is possible to criticize her way of establishing empirical research as distinct from other kinds of research in the humanities. In chapter 1, MacNealy situates empirical research in the humanities and compares it to what she calls library research. Her description, in chapter 2, of routine library search techniques and note card summaries in preparation of a traditional literature review hardly does justice to the variety and sophistication of methodological approaches...