Implications: Research and Beyond

Since I've been walking (in grad school anyway) I've always been affronted with the same question: "ok but what are you arguing?" My work never has seemed to be quite certain as to what it was trying to say, what it was supporting, what it was trying to put down. This inability to effectively describe, in a succinct way, what I was specifically arguing, has always made me a bit self-conscious about my scholarly work. I never knew what to make of it. I felt like I was saying something. I felt like there was a logical progression. I felt like there was a payoff at the end. But no. Time and time again I received the same feedback.
Reading the piece by Kastley makes me less anxious about my writing.
To me, the idea of inquiry is an inherent one. I've always been curious (to the annoyance of my parents to be sure) and I've always wanted to know more about how others make sense of things. These characteristics helped shape my writing style, and led me to producing pieces of work that elicited that familiar comment. All along I felt like my education had done me a disservice. How could it be that my expensive, private, liberal arts college could have let me down so badly? How could it be that the type of writing I was most comfortable with and most adept at, didn't mesh with what was expected of me in graduate school. Curses on you Gustavus!!!
Slowly, my mind is being (re)changed. I'm starting to see how my education ( a good one to be sure) has led my mind to work the way it does, and that it's not a bad thing that it works the way it does. My scholarship (if you don't mind me calling it that) asks more questions than it answers. My 'argument' is often lost because it never looks like the kind of argument that some academic types are used to seeing. I usually employ a strong narrative in my academic writing, something that can help my readers (and my potential arguers) recognize the difference in me. For the past few years I was starting to wonder if I would ever figure out how to write good academically.
My challenge now is how to understand and push the limits of those power structures that govern academic discourse. I agree wholeheartedly with Haleysrundown, when she talks about the conservatism of academic discourse. It's expected that a 'good' article will rely heavily on research, an act that reaffirms the ideas, the methods, and the arguments of those before us. This act is itself a conservative act. For me (and Hayley and others) testing the limits of what we can do with our academic prose, while still playing by those conservative rules, is the greatest implication for an inquiry-based construct of argumentation.