Theories of Pedagogy

Hillocks, George. "What Works in Teaching Composition: A Meta-Analysis of Experimental Treatment Studies." American Journal of Education 93 (1985): 133-70.

Berlin, James. "Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories." College English 44.8 (1982): 765-77.

Breuch, Lee-Ann M. Kastman. "Post-Process 'Pedagogy': A Philosophical Exercise." Villanueva 97-126.

Fulkerson, Richard. "Composition at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century." CCC 56 (2005): 654-87.

Downs, Douglas, and Elizabeth Wardle. "Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)Envisioning 'First-Year Composition' as 'Inroduction to Writing Studies.'" College Composition and Communication 58 (2007): 552-584.

This week's readings, of all the readings we've completed, spoke to me and my concerns regarding composition most directly. I saw myself and my teaching struggles in each article. Every few lines, especially in the Downs and Wardle article, I snatched after my pen to scribble down ideas or mark a passage that inspired me to do something new or better in my teaching of ENG101 and 102.

Much of what Breuch writes her 2002 article makes the assumptions underlying post-process pedagogy sound awfully like Berlin's description of the New Rhetoric from 1982. Breuch quotes Kent's characterization of these assumptions: "'(1) writing is public; (2) writing is interpretive; and (3) writing is situated'" (110). This quotation immediately reminded of Berlin's claim that "for the New Rhetoric, knowledge is not simply a static entity available for retrieval...The elements of the communication process thus do not simply provide a convenient way of talking about rhetoric. They form the elements that go into the very shaping of rhetoric" (774). Certainly, post-process seems to highlight the public and situated nature of writing more than does the New Rhetoric, but Berlin's reference to the elements of the communication process suggest that these aspects are not completely absent from that older pedagogy. It would depend in part, I suppose, on what Kent specifically means by "public." As soon as writing is shared with another person--an audience--it becomes public, albeit with a limited scope. If that idea is what Kent has in mind (which Breuch's following section titled "Writing Is Public" suggests), then his version of post-process and Berlin's version of New Rhetoric certainly share a similar conception of the role of the audience in writing as a key part of the interpretive act, which recursively shapes the writing act. As for the situated nature of writing, I see Berlin referring to it in a highly implicit fashion when he writes that "[truth] can only represent a tentative point of rest in a continuing conversation" (777). While the reference to conversation can more easily be linked to the rhetorical element of audience, it also suggests that the New Rhetoric shares post-process theory's contention that writers should "respond to specific situations rather than rely on foundational principles or rules" (115). Breuch even cites Berlin as adopting postmodern thought in her section on the situatedness of writing. Sure enough, shortly thereafter, Breuch affirms the connection I explore here, writing that "post-process scholarship is not advocating new directions, but rather endorsing anti-foundationalist and postmodern approaches that have already been articulated" (116). As she sees it, that connection is based on a how-centered, rather than a what-centered, approach to pedagogical theory.

The support mustered by Breuch for avoiding what-centered pedagogies seems to conflict with the pedagogical approach to FYC offered by Downs and Wardle. They argue that an FYC course based on writing studies would solve the tricky issues of what content to include in FYC, as well as be a first step towards breaking down public misunderstandings of writing. Allowing FYC students to read and write about content in which the FYC instructor is not an expert "accepts and perpetuates the myth that content is separable from writing" (577). Their case is compelling, particularly when they discuss the results from their students and when they raise the issue of who actually teaches most FYC courses. Although they don't specifically name graduate students (as PTIs and other degreed instructors also teach FYC), my immediate thought was, "Definitely!" Graduate students with no background in writing theory or pedagogy teach at least 99% of FYC courses here at UNLV. This situation leads to a number of issues, including a lack of consistency across courses, perpetuation of misconceptions about writing, and a lack of theoretical underpinning for assignments and pedagogical activities. Because of what I see at UNLV, I absolutely believe that Downs and Wardle's proposal would make composition more visible and respect as a field. If nothing else, teaching research from the field would introduce new generations of students to that most basic fact: that the field even exists. I certainly would have appreciated such an introduction earlier in my academic career than after having already begun graduate school for literary studies. Currently, I can say with almost complete certainty, that my life would be a lot easier if I had known this path of study was a choice before Fall 2009.

Although I'm not entirely sure how much Downs and Wardle's course conflicts with Breuch's resistance to what-centered, content-based writing courses, I'm even less sure how she would respond to the critical/cultural studies approach to writing so thoroughly critiqued by Fulkerson. On the one hand, this pedagogy seems to be very content-based, as it calls for course activities that focus exclusively on cultural and social injustices. As such, CCS demonstrates a concern for what is being taught. Yet, CCS pedagogy also seems to be concerned with the how of teaching, since "it would be inappropriate in a course about cultural hegemony for the teacher to be an oppressor, so most discussions of such courses invoke a democratic, often Freirean, classroom" (661). One compelling reason to believe that post-process theory would embrace CCS pedagogy is Breuch's similar invocation of Freire as an exemplar of how-centered teaching practice. Despite this attention paid by CCS writing instructors to their classrooms' environments, I can't get past the idea that the kind of one-sided cultural criticism I imagine them teaching creates content as foundationalist as any process instructor's exhortation that prewriting comes before writing. If analyzing an ad is always about how the man is trying to get you, does such criticism really allow for the always-in-flux situatedness that Breuch advocates? For me personally, I find CCS pedagogy as off-putting as does Fulkerson apparently. I am drawn to the idea of creating classroom and writing situations that encourage students to question their (or others') assumptions, but I draw the line at assessing my students' political ideas. Luckily, I have yet to be confronted by someone writing about politics in a way I disagree with; we'll see in what material that line is drawn--sand or stone--once I do have that experience, I suppose. Anyhow, the major idea I take away from Fulkerson's article is that the composition field is more fractured than ever before, in a way that I'm not aware of other widespread academic fields being. There is so little upon which we agree that isn't highly general and usually nebulous. This idea just bolsters my support for teaching FYC as intro to writing studies, as it would, if nothing else, provide impetus for the field to agree on some basic tenets and to present the nuanced understanding of writing to the public that we debate so vociferously among ourselves.

Which leaves us with just Hillocks' article to cover. I have to admit that much of it read like Greek to me, as I've never taken a statistics course (but now want to! It bugs the heck out of me not to understand things!). Perhaps because of its distance in time from the other articles, it also seems distant in content. Far fewer connections immediately leapt to the fore as I read this one. Certainly, its methodology is quite different; this is an empirical statistical analysis, as opposed to the theoretical approaches (and mini-case studies in Downs and Wardle) of the other articles. It's almost ironic that Hillocks is using a highly quantitative approach to build a defense of another kind of quantitative research method: experimental studies. His conclusions in many ways reinforce the pedagogical approaches and no-no's I've seen in other places: grammar instruction does not improve writing; having students talk rather than passively accept information does improve writing; setting lesson and course objectives helps students achieve certain outcomes; etc. One thing I particularly appreciate about Hillocks is that he does mention assessment unlike most of the other article authors from this week. It's all fine and well to theorize about various pedagogical approaches, but at the end of the day, institutional systems require that I give students a grade. Trust me; I'm smack in the middle of this slog right now. Hillocks' mention of assessment comes in his description of his study's design, which called for inclusion only of experimental methods that assessed student writing along a finite scale, rather than relationally. Although this is a passing mention and is not a focus of Hillocks', it does show that he recognizes the importance of being able to pass judgment on writing in order to determine student achievement. Downs and Wardle make a similar passing mention when they explain that a challenge of their course lies in accepting imperfect student work. Since I feel like I do that all the time (they wouldn't be students if their work wasn't imperfect), I'm not entirely sure what Downs and Wardle mean. I would have liked a more specific definition or description of what they mean by "imperfect."

All in all, this unit was a good note for me to end the semester on. I was able to reflect back on my own classroom experiences as I read these articles and thereby assess where my practice fits into the pedagogical theories laid out here. I think I'm pretty solidly New Rhetoric (which I think is what we've ended up calling social constructionist?), with the occasional dose of teacher-centered content delivery. My classroom tends to be democratic, sometimes to a fault when certain students dominate the discussion. My most frequent complaint is that "they didn't talk enough today!" I might give CCS a rethink as a possible way of engaging students more, but I think my inclination right now is more towards making writing studies the center of both 101 and 102 and hoping that they get as excited as I do about this stuff.

Revised CCCC Proposal

Where Have We Come From and Where Will We Go?: Twenty-Five Years of Engineering Communication Research

In 1984, IEEE Transactions on Education published a special issue on “developing the ability to communicate” with a focus on engineering students. In 1999, Language and Learning Across the Disciplines (LLAD) published a similarly themed special issue in anticipation of the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology’s (ABET) revision in 2000 of required student learning outcomes to put more emphasis on soft skills, including effective communication. In 2008, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication published a special issue on communication in engineering curricula. These 1984 and 2008 special issues bookend a timeline along which the conversation about engineering communication has developed among both composition and engineering education scholars, and provide a framework for investigating that conversation. This timeline mirrors the growth of WAC programs and the concomitant growth of research on writing in the disciplines. Outside of these special issues, scholars in technical communication, such as Dorothy Winsor, have investigated the topic of engineering communication. Her 1996 Writing Like an Engineer: A Rhetorical Education falls within the timeline set by the special issues, and also fits into the WID paradigm by answering its call for more studies of writing in the workplace.

Given this much attention to and scholarship on engineering communication from both pedagogical and workplace perspectives, it’s surprising that there is as yet no longitudinal analysis of approaches to teaching engineering writing and communication. A longitudinal analysis can serve a number of purposes, not least of which is to provide a basis for other researchers in need of historical perspectives for their work. In my paper I will provide just such a historical perspective on the development of research on engineering communication by completing a topic analysis. The analysis will survey not only the contents of these three special issues, but also related works such as Winsor’s. In my analysis, I will focus on the main emphases of each article studied in order to identify trends in research. Which emphases are introduced, which endure, and which lose currency will suggest what roles general composition studies and other fields, such as engineering education, play in defining engineering communication and directing its teaching. My analysis will also suggest further research areas, such as:

• changing conceptions of what defines competency in engineering communication
• changing views of the rationale for and goals of teaching engineering communication
• if the field of composition’s definition of rhetoric has influenced modern engineers
• whether Carolyn Miller’s case for technical communication as a humanistic pursuit has gained traction outside the TC and composition fields
• differences in how compositionists and non-compositionists discuss engineering communication

My longitudinal study will primarily be of interest to scholars studying technical communication and WAC/WID programs. They will learn how discussions of engineering communication in particular have developed over the past 25 years. Additionally, they will see which topics have been most researched and which remain to be thoroughly investigated.

Feminist Rhetorics and Other Voices

I don't have much to say this week, perhaps ironically, given the emphasis in the readings on developing voice and pushing for that voice to be heard. To start, I feel silenced by the two readings on race and racism (Royster and Villanueva). I don't interpret that silencing as oppressive, however. Rather, it's a matter of those readings forcing me to reflect on what I'm actually qualified to speak about, and concomitantly, what conversations I should just keep my trap shut for and listen instead. Royster's "Scene One" makes that point with emotional force. Although I have not, like Royster, "been compelled on too many occasions to count to sit as a well-mannered Other, silently, in a state of tolerance that requires me to be as expressionless as I can manage, while colleagues who occupy a place of entitlement different from my own talk about the history and achievements of people from my ethnic group, or even about their perceptions of our struggles" (612), that description hurts. I have listened to people discuss what's best for me, or been forced into silence because my experiences or my knowledge are not enough to make others listen. But then, as soon as I write these last words, I question the validity of mapping any of my own experiences onto Royster's. If her point is that others who haven't been there don't get it, then I am trivializing or essentializing or just plain not listening when I immediately react with a comparison to my own experience, which comes out of a much different subject position. Similarly, I hesitate as soon as I try to squirm my way into Villanueva's article. I could write about its rhetorical strategies, or the interesting juxtapositions of transactional and imaginative writings, or his use of Spanish titles. But, without the experience that leads him to choose these strategies, these writings, this multilingualism, what qualifies me to say anything about them?

Here I run into an overlapping issue between attempts to write about racism and attempts to write about ESL/WE. I enjoy the privilege of being white in America; this subject position (I agree with Royster here) has to inform any move I might make in the conversation about racism. When it comes to ESL, I can lay more claim to a right to speak.I grew up bilingual in a Western European country; my sister and I spoke English at home and German at school. On the first day of Kindergarten, I knew how to say "ja," "nein," and "Toilette." Years later, now, I am a supposedly fluent German speaker. Yet, I don't feel like one and I think that's largely because I am not a fluent writer of German. Boo hoo for me. This experience hardly justifies a comparison between me and the ESL students discussed by Zamel and Canagarajah, who take on the unthinkable challenge of pursuing a college degree in a foreign language. Unlike in the discussion of racism, though, I do think that my experience allows me to recognize the enormity of that challenge though, in a way that people who haven't undertaken academic work in an L2 can't. Just the thought of trying to accomplish in German any of the work I currently do (even the reading, but especially the writing, and to some extent the oral communication) just now made me literally shudder. How to translate that empathy to my own teaching? I'm not sure. Certainly, Lu's "can able to" example of a deliberate grammatical choice made by an ESL student (cited in Canagarajah) makes me wonder how many such deliberate choices I've overlooked in student papers. Huzzah. One more worry in the quiver of things-I-should-be-doing-as-a-teacher. [Sidebar: I did read the Zamel. It doesn't fit into the larger point I'm making here about my own voice and right to speak. Perhaps one connection is for a future use to which I would like to put my voice: Carrying out Zamel's belief that "our role in our institutions ought not to be defined solely by the service we perform for other faculty...but in helping faculty understand the role they need to begin to play in working with all students" (511).]

So on to the feminist writings. Flynn's 1988 "Composing as a Woman" got me hot and bothered for reasons which Ritchie and Boardman nicely summarized in their 1999 "Feminism in Composition." They quote Eileen Schell arguing that "femininist pedagogy, although compelling, may reinforce rather than critique or transform patriarchal structures by reinscribing what Magda Lewis call the 'woman as caretaker ideology'" (598). This issue lies at the heart of my own intellectual and emotional grappling with feminist theory, its history, and its applications. I worry about spending too much time and effort on gender. I worry that the process may reify gendered categories. At the same time, we all know that ignoring existing gender categories, or sexism, or heterosexism, or the many other forms of discrimination and oppression that feminist theory calls attention doesn't make them go away. Because of this concern, I very much appreciated Ritchie and Boardman's take on the state of feminism in the field. I think they handle the potentially divisive and destructive aspects of feminism very well. Interestingly, I should note also, this is the one arena that I feel have a leg to stand on and a voice worth listening to, since I am a woman. Yet, when I think about my experiences thus far in the field, I have little to say on the topic of gender. The main area that my gender ever becomes an issue is in interactions with students. Perhaps that's all the more reason why I should adopt a feminist pedagogy. I don't know. I'll be quiet now.

Working Annotated Bibliography

Just this morning, I realized that there have been three special issues on communication in engineering curricula, published by three separate journals, over the last three decades. I couldn't pass up this framework for doing a longitudinal review of views on/approaches to/epistemologies associated with teaching engineering communication. So I scrapped my big ol' list and a few other annotations and started from scratch. The following bibliography lists all the contents of the three issues, as well as two other articles, which provide a starting point and midpoint view of the issue unassociated with the special issues themselves. The Miller article in particular, I believe, will inform the way that I survey these issues; I can trace the influence of her idea of TC as humanistic through these issues to see how it develops, changes, and/or is influenced by other views or fields.

IEEE Transactions on Education 27.3 (1984).
Special Issue on Developing the Ability to Communicate (Focus: Engineering Students)

Bostian, Frieda F. "Technical Writing-‘Very Useful Stuff.’" Education, IEEE Transactions on 27.3 (1984): 120-4. Web.

Casari, Laura E. "Required: Three Hours in Technical Communications-Paradigm for a Paradox." Education, IEEE Transactions on 27.3 (1984): 115-19. Web.

Coney, Mary B., and Judith A. Ramey. "A Communication Curriculum in Engineering Education: An Alternative Model." Education, IEEE Transactions on 27.3 (1984): 137-42. Web.
Coney and Ramey claim that the traditional engineering education treats writing as a skill. As such, it can be learned and mastered early in the curriculum. Their program at the University of Washington models a different approach, in which students develop their knowledge of communication in concert with their changing, and increasingly sophisticated, engineering projects. While the authors do not specifically refer to rhetoric as a concern in their model curriculum, their focus on the ability to communicate with various audiences suggests rhetorical concerns. I can use this article to outline what, at the time, was a fairly innovative approach to engineering communication education, which feels very similar to the burgeoning WAC movement of the 80s.

Georgopoulos, Chris J., and Voula C. Georgopoulos. "From University Term Papers to Industry Technical Reports an Attempt to Bridge the Existing Gap." Education, IEEE Transactions on 27.3 (1984): 143-7. Web.

Gwiasda, Karl E. "Of Classrooms and Contexts: Teaching Engineers to Write Wrong." Education, IEEE Transactions on 27.3 (1984): 148-50. Web.

Joenk, R. J. and Jones, Edwin C. "Scanning the Issue." Education, IEEE Transactions on 27.3 (1984): 113-4. Web.
In their introduction to this special issue, Joenk and Jones (editors of IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication and IEEE Transactions on Education, respectively) describe the issue’s origin in the “frequency” of anecdotal commentary about engineers who can design and build, but not communicate. This “evidence” undercuts ABET’s accreditation standards, which required students to be competent communicators. They conclude that engineering education does not adequately prepare graduates for the communication tasks of the workplace, thus bringing the two publications’ interests into alignment. The editors also summarize the issue’s contents, dividing it into articles that deal with specific tech-comm courses and articles with applications to broader tech-comm training. This introduction allows me to establish what impetus pushed professional societies in the 1980s to turn their attention specifically to engineering communication. I can also use it to highlight the ubiquitous link between pedagogy and professionalization which appears throughout the tech-comm field.

Keyser, George F., and Eugene M. De Loatch. "Learning through Writing in an Engineering Course." Education, IEEE Transactions on 27.3 (1984): 125-8. Web.

Potvin, Janet H. "Using Team Reporting Projects to Teach Concepts of Audience and Written, Oral, and Interpersonal Communication Skills." Education, IEEE Transactions on 27.3 (1984): 129-36. Web.

Language and Learning Across the Disciplines3.2 (1999) Special Issue – Communication Across the Engineering Curriculum

Dowell, E.H. “Introduction: Four Carrots and A Stick.” Language and Learning Across the Disciplines 3.2 (1999): 13-18. Web.
Fifteen years after the IEEE Transactions on Education’s special issue on engineering communication, Dowell bemoans the lack of communication training in engineering curricula. This training is vital, he argues, because of the proliferation of technology, the rise of globalism, and the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of most engineering projects. Moreover, Dowell predicts that upcoming changes to ABET criteria will force engineering programs to more narrowly define and demonstrate students’ effective communication skills. I can use Dowell’s introduction to provide an overview of why engineers valued communication skills in 1999, and what broader contexts they used to justify those skills. It also provides a comparison to the more professionally-oriented call for communication skills in 1984, by focusing more on non-engineering audiences and the role of technology in teaching and facilitating communication.

Youra, S. “Letter from the Guest Editor.” Language and Learning Across the Disciplines 3.2 (1999): 1-12. Web.

Theory and Practice Section

Broadhead, G. J. “Addressing Multiple Goals for Engineering Writing: The Role of Course-Specific Websites.” Language and Learning Across the Disciplines 3.2 (1999): 19-43. Web.

Irish, R. “Engineering Thinking: Using Benjamin Bloom and William Perry to Design Assignments.” Language and Learning Across the Disciplines 3.2 (1999): 83-102. Web.

Norgaard, R. “Negotiating Expertise in Disciplinary ‘Contact Zones.’” Language and Learning Across the Disciplines 3.2 (1999): 44-63. Web.

Perelman, L. C. “The Two Rhetorics: Design and Interpretation in Engineering and Humanistic Discourse.” Language and Learning Across the Disciplines 3.2 (1999): 64-82. Web.
Following in the footsteps of Carolyn Millers’ 1979 “A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing,” Perelman traces two different rhetorical traditions which give rise to the differences between writing for the humanities and writing for engineering, illustrated by contrasting undergraduate humanities and engineering writing assignments. She traces both traditions to classical rhetoric and posits that WAC programs provide a way to reintegrate these two traditions and their epistemological bases. This article provides a theoretical framework with which I can compare views about what role writing should play in engineering—or other technical—curricula. I can also use it to show the increasing use of theory, as opposed to appeals for professionalization, to justify attention to engineering communication.

Programs and Projects Section

Donnell, Jeffrey A., Joseph Petraglia-Babri, and Amanda C. Gable. “Writing vs. Content, Skills vs. Rhetoric: More and Less False Dichotomies.” Language and Learning Across the Disciplines 3.2 (1999): 113-117. Web.

McQueeney, Pat. “Cementing Writing: A Writing Partnership with Civil Engineering.” Language and Learning Across the Disciplines 3.2 (1999): 118-122. Web.

Olds, Barbara M., Jon A. Leydens, and Ronald L. Miller. “A Flexible Model for Assessing WAC Programs.” Language and Learning Across the Disciplines 3.2 (1999): 123-129. Web.

Shwom, B., Penny Hirsch, Charles Yarnoff, and John Anderson. “Engineering Design and Communication: A Foundational Course for Freshmen.” Language and Learning Across the Disciplines 3.2 (1999): 107-112. Web.

Williamson, W. J. and Philip H. Sweany. “Linking Communication and Software Design Courses for Professional Development in Computer Science.” Language and Learning Across the Disciplines 3.2 (1999): 103-106. Web.

IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication51.3 (2008).
Special Issue on Communication in Engineering Curricula

Ballentine, B. D. "Professional Communication and a 'Whole New Mind': Engaging with Ethics, Intellectual Property, Design, and Globalization." Professional Communication, IEEE Transactions on 51.3 (2008): 328-40. Web.

Carlson, P. A., and F. C. Berry. "Using Computer-Mediated Peer Review in an Engineering Design Course." Professional Communication, IEEE Transactions on 51.3 (2008): 264-79. Web.

Craig, J. L., N. Lerner, and M. Poe. "Innovation Across the Curriculum: Three Case Studies in Teaching Science and Engineering Communication." Professional Communication, IEEE Transactions on 51.3 (2008): 280-301. Web.

Leydens, J. A. "Novice and Insider Perspectives on Academic and Workplace Writing: Toward a Continuum of Rhetorical Awareness." Professional Communication, IEEE Transactions on 51.3 (2008): 242-63. Web.

Paretti, M. C., and L. D. McNair. "Introduction to the Special Issue on Communication in Engineering Curricula: Mapping the Landscape." Professional Communication, IEEE Transactions on 51.3 (2008): 238-41. Web.
Paretti and McNair describe an engineering field which undisputedly values communication and which has worked for several decades to integrate development of communication skills into curricula. They note two major challenges—one persisting, one new—which justify a special issue on the topic: how to bring together expertise in disparate fields (engineering and writing pedagogy); and how to account for changing definitions of effective communication in an increasingly digital world. The introduction also includes a description of common themes taken up by researchers in the field of engineering communication. In mapping the development of the conversation about engineering communication, I can use this introduction to bring us up to date (or almost). The challenges and themes addressed in the issue give the best indication of where we can go from here, as they bring up contemporary concerns that the previous special issues literally couldn’t.

Patton, M. D. "Beyond WI: Building an Integrated Communication." Professional Communication, IEEE Transactions on 51.3 (2008): 313-27. Web.

Rutkowski, A. -F, et al. "Communication in Virtual Teams: Ten Years of Experience in Education." Professional Communication, IEEE Transactions on 51.3 (2008): 302-12. Web.

Other

Miller, Carolyn R. "A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing." College English. 40 (1979), 610-17. Web.

Williams, Julia M. "Technical Communication, Engineering, and ABET's Engineering Criteria 2000: What Lies Ahead?" Technical Communication 49.1 (2002): 89. Web.
Williams calls on the technical communication field to actively participate in changes to engineering curricula designed to meet ABET’s revised accreditation standards. In 2000, ABET revised its Engineering Criteria to focus on student learning outcomes, rather than number of courses offered; six out of eleven learning outcomes focus on non-technical skills. In particular, Williams points out, the learning outcome of “an ability to communicate effectively” presents an opportunity for technical communicators, both academic and professional, to reevaluate and shape engineering education. Using the case of Rose-Hulman’s preparation for ABET accreditation, Williams argues that communication can and should play a greater role in traditional engineering courses, and that technical communications faculty have a responsibility to help prepare students for the non-technical demands of 21^st century engineering by partnering with engineering faculty, in-house projects, and industry. Following on the heels of Across the Disciplines’ special issues on engineering communication, which preceded ABET’s call for communication as a student learning outcome, this article provides a snapshot of the response to that call. As Williams notes, ABET does not define precisely the methods by which these skills should be assessed, which implies a certain amount of latitude in how they should be defined. The case of Rose-Hulman gives specific curricular description that I can examine for evidence of how they as a program have chosen to define “effective communication.”

Social Theories

Ong, Walter S. J. "The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction." Villanueva 55-76.
Ede, Lisa, and Andrea Lunsford. "Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy." CCC 35.2 (1984): 155-71.
Porter, James. "Intertextuality and the Discourse Community." Rhetoric Review 5 (1986): 34-47.
Bruffee, Kenneth. "Collaborative Learning and the 'Conversation of Mankind.'" Villanueva 415-36.
Trimbur, John. "Consensus and Difference in Collaborative Learning." Villanueva 461-78.
Johnson-Eilola, Johndan, and Stuart A. SElber. "Plagiarism, Originality, Assemblage." Computers and Composition 24 (2007) 375-403.

This is officially (because I say so) one of those weeks when I have so much to say, I feel stifled in the attempt to say anything. By way of kickstarting myself, I'll arbitrarily begin with the Ong reading, guided only by the fact that I ended with him last week. Isabel's comment on my post really brought home my main feeling about Ong; he's just so damn persuasive. I find myself lulled by his attention to definite determiners and pronouns. Of course, I'm the obvious audience for this discussion, given the brainspace I dedicate to grammar these days.

I did manage to push past the impulse to bang the drum for more histories of readers as constructed by their texts by noticing the same issue brought to light by Ede and Lunsford: Ong's "major emphasis is on fictional narrative rather than expository writing" (Ede & Lunsford 160). I, too, felt a bit pushed around by Ong's claim that "what has been said about fictional narrative applies ceteris paribus to all writing" (69). Without the analysis of "Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked," however, I think I would have been adrift when trying to define precisely what was problematic with that glib claim. My initial response was mainly to consider the many occasions on which the drastic differences between literary and non-literary texts have made themselves abundantly clear to me. The experience of reading and understanding Huck Finn is a very different experience from reading and understanding a transcript of the latest presidential speech. Perhaps the interpreter will draw on similar skills for these two texts, but the concerns are vastly different. If nothing else, the very purposes for reading Huck Finn or a presidential speech are most likely highly disparate. To bring it back to Ede and Lunsford, when I read the presidential speech, I straddle the line between an invoked and an addressed audience. Certainly, the politicians and the speechwriters don't know me or my particular concerns. They have, however, received letters from constituents like me, so they can attempt to address people like me. At the same time, they must invoke the audience they wish to address, as Ede and Lunsford's example shows President Carter doing. As an interested voter, my purpose for reading the speech in question determines what kind of audience I am. In contrast, my purpose for reading Huck Finn (I'm required to for a college class; I'm bored of facebook), could barely have even occurred to Twain. He could not address me. Thinking through this contrast brings home to me how appealing I find Ede and Lunsford's take on audience. How to put those complications into effect pedagogically? Well, now, that's a whole different issue, and one which these authors don't provide much guidance with.

Luckily, several other authors this week provided much more pedagogical guidance, giving me plenty of fodder for complaining that there's never enough time in the semester to cover everything, and also that I've been doing it all wrong. Johnson-Eilola and Selber's, and Bruffee's articles both hold great promise for practical applications. They address two of the major questions teachers ask: 1) What do I assign my students?; and 2) What do we do with all our classtime? Of course, the unspoken clause in both of those question is "in order to teach them the thing I want to teach them." To varying extents, these articles then skirt around the question of what that "thing" is and why it's valuable. I see the remaining two articles from this week's reading (Porter and Trimbur, respectively) as poking at that exact question, and--certainly in Trimbur's case--critiquing the answers provided by the original texts.

"Plagiarism, originality, assemblage" expose the hypocrisy inherent in (relatively) current composition theory: We tell students that texts are social constructs, but then ask the students to embody the Romantic notion of the individual genius when creating texts. The article purports to have found a way around the hypocrisy by providing students with "assemblage," or pastiche, assignments. Problem is, the authors never describe what such an assignment could look like in a composition class that only deals with the creation of all-text works. While the samples of web design are telling and can remove many doubts about the creativity entailed in "re-mixing" another's "original" work, they don't do much for the comp teacher constrained by programmatic requirements. So, fail on the practical pedagogy here. In conjunction with Porter's article, however, the practicality gets revived a bit, as Porter's discussion of intertextuality could be interpreted as a discussion of "remixing." As such, intertextuality and its working then become the things that we should be teaching our students through assemblage assignments. It's not just a matter of modeling the real world (which, of course, gets us back to the audience question), but also a matter of enabling students to discover for themselves the traces of intertextuality.

Bruffee's and Trimbur's articles similarly illuminate each other, although even more directly, since Trimbur writes in response to Bruffee. His critique that Bruffee's account of collaborative learning is too simplistic definitely rings true. Certainly, even in the realm of academics, no knowledge creation is ever fully disinterested or divorced from practical forces like funding and publication requirements for tenure (the latter of which Trimbur gestures to on p. 472). Complicating the notion with the idea of collaboration as not only an establishment of consensus but also as a defining of difference makes sense; I know that I am a qualified English grad student because I write like this and not like that. Again, also, the Trimbur article provides a more concrete pedagogic strategy, with his suggestion for beginning an intro lit class by discussing what defines literature and not-literature. In contrast, while Bruffee's piece gives me a sense of the dynamic he wants to foster, he gives no direction for how to accomplish that fostering. Trimbur for the win on both complexity and practicality.

Cognitive Theories

Ong, Walter S.J. "Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought." Literacy: A Critical Sourcebook. Eds. Ellen Cushman, Eugene R. Kintgen, Barry M. Kroll, and Mike Rose. new York: Bedford/St. Martins, 2001. 19-32.

Flower, Linda, and John R. Hayes. "A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing." Villanueva 273-88.

Bizzell, Patricia. "Cognition, Convention, and Certainty: What We Need to Know about Writing." Villanueva 387-412.

Kellogg, Ronald T. "Training Writing Skills: A Cognitive Developmental Perspective." Journal of Writing Research. 1.1 (2008): 1-26.

Dias, Patrick, Aviva Freedman, Peter Medway, and Anthony Pare. "Chapter 7: Distributed Cognition at Work." Worlds Apart: Acting and Writing in Academic and Workplace Contexts. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 135-150.

The notion that writers can struggle with more complex tasks because their attention is subsumed by lower-order concerns resonates with me. When Flowers and Hayes write that “the task of translating can interfere with the more global process of planning what one wants to say,” they restate simply much of what Kellogg devotes 21 pages to in “Training Writing Skills” (282). They have translated the idea better for me, a reader unfamiliar with cognitive theory. Each of the two articles does bring something different to the table, however. Kellogg spends much more time mapping his argument onto the established domain of cognitive research, and thereby enables himself to make bigger connections between the cognitive process of writing and other cognitive processes such as doing math and playing chess. In contrast, Flowers and Hayes stay more focused on the act of writing itself.

These disparate approaches reveal themselves in the articles’ organizations. Kellogg begins with long descriptions of the three stages of writers’ cognitive development before explaining what is necessary to progress through these stages and how education can catalyze that progress. In contrast, Flowers and Hayes split their article into sections that explore processes shared by all writers and pay attention to disparate skill levels among writers only within those discussions of specific processes. This organization demonstrates what I see as the fundamental difference between the two articles, which was originally obscured for me by the hefty overlap between their subjects: One is concerned with developmental processes across a writer’s lifespan, while the other is concerned with developmental processes across a single act of writing (which may be carried out over multiple periods of time). Process, for Flowers and Hayes, refers to the process made popular by the writing process movement, and is no direct concern of Kellogg’s. Indirectly, Kellogg’s recommendations for writing education do connect to the process model, insofar as he recommends that teachers model their own processes for students. The recommendations also shed an alternative light on process by arguing that based and experienced writers’ different ideas of revision are as much a product of knowledge-retrieval and task-balancing limitations as a simple misapprehension of what revision should be, at best. These observations about the links between Kellogg and Flowers and Hayes seem somewhat unnecessary to spell out, now that I’ve spelled them out. My first impression upon reading these two pieces back-to-back, however, was that they were saying very much the same thing. It took writing out the source of that impression to determine (generate the knowledge that?) that it’s generally true, but overly general.

The obvious next place to go is Bizzell’s “Cognition, Convention, and Certainty,” since it is a review of Flowers and Hayes. In her critique of the cognitive process model, Bizzell remaps some familiar territory, such as when she write that “educational problems associated with language use should be understood as difficulties with joining an unfamiliar discourse community” (397). Because of its focus on how language usage plays a gatekeeping function for students struggling to become academic writers, that statement smacks of Bartholomae’s argument in “Inventing the University.” As Bizzell continues with her critique, it becomes clear that what she sees as missing from Flowers and Hayes’ model is not just the concept of social construction of both writer and writing, but specifically the way that discourse communities shape writing. Although she does not privilege the term herself (she prefers “discourse conventions”), Bizzell seems at points to be referring to genres. Perhaps she avoids “genre” because of the need to avoid creating “universal rules for context-bound activities” (405). Nonetheless, she does seem to be discussing the very same concept of genre that Russell takes up in “Rethinking Genre in School and Society.”

Side note: Bizzell’s discussion also put me in mind of the grammar course I’m teaching right now. When we’re down in the trenches, discussing sentence constituents or participles or passive transformations, it’s hard to remember why we’re discussing these things. What help is it to be able to name and define various grammatical elements or moves? Of course, I thought of this very issue last week as well, while reading Hartwell’s article on the various grammars available to us. His point that descriptive grammar often bears little relation to the internal grammar that we use everyday to make ourselves understood to other people definitely jibed with my students’ questioning why they should learn this stuff. Bizzell makes the same point, but about descriptions of composing behavior as opposed to the act of composition itself itself: “Collins and Gentner can only define ‘good writing’ as writing that conforms to a set of rules set by some authority…’Delete extraneous material,’ ‘Shorten long paragraphs,’ and so on. Such advice is unhelpful to students without other knowledge that enables them to identify the extraneous and over-lengthy…The fundamental problem with this approach is that it assumes that the rules we can formulate to describe behavior are the same rules that produce the behavior…” (404). I may now have an answer for my students. Knowing how to describe grammatical structures will not automatically make them better language users or writers. It will, however, in specific rhetorical and social situations, provide them with a vocabulary that enables them to describe in retrospect what happened grammatically and perhaps make them more conscious of the grammatical choices they make as they’re speaking or composing. The descriptions themselves are not always helpful during the act of language usage (Kellogg would probably say that they take away precious attention from other concerns.) but knowing that a description can be created at the tail end creates awareness that wasn’t there before. You know, this made sense as I started to write it. I’m not so sure now, but I think I’m at least on the brink of something helpful to me as an instructor.)

Back to our regular programming: To frame his discussion of genre, Russell clears the connotative brush by claiming that “we must go beyond the conventional notion of genre as a set of formally definable text features that certain texts have in common across various contexts, however defined, and consider genre in relation to social action and social motives” (513). Sounds an awful lot like Bizzell’s discourse conventions. I don’t have much to say at this point on Russell, largely because I’m still digesting his argument. Of all the readings we’ve had thus far, this is the one that’s given me the most brain food and with which I feel the least comfortable. The individual pieces of his argument made sense as I went through them (although I need to Wikipedia Vygotsky), but the whole shape of it still eludes me. I’m not surprised, given its far-reaching and consequential nature. He’s attempting to tie together several major strands of composition theory in an attempt to make them all more productive and truer to the reality of the ways in which classroom writing relates to writing in broader social contexts. Frankly, I’m impressed by the effort, but haven’t taken the time to reread it and consider whether it’s a successful one or not. I will say, without the obvious connection to Bizzell, I would be very uncertain about how this article fit into the cognitive theory week.

Actually, I felt very much the same about the “Distributed Cognition at Work” chapter; it fits only because of its connections to Russell’s discussion of activity theory and how various activity systems overlap and transform each other’s inscriptions. Unlike the articles that directly engaged cognitive theory, this chapter seemed far more interested in how the results of cognition are disseminated and modified than how cognition leads to those results. My hunch is that that difference arises from the fact that this is a chapter and not an article. Right in the intro paragraph, Dias, et al. make the assumption that you’ve read the rest of the book and already know what the term “distributed cognition” means. I’m assuming they’ve also somewhere in this book discussed what “cognition” itself means. Without that background, though, it was difficult to make connections between this piece and the others we read this week. Moreover, it was difficult to even read this piece in depth. To a large extent, it felt like a poor man’s version of Laboratory Life (which, as you, Jeff, know, is on my radar lately; please excuse the comparison if it’s unfair.). The only section that engaged me thoroughly was the penultimate one entitled “Distributed Cognition at University and at Work Compared.” The authors’ comparisons provided for me a whole new dimension of the concept of power-imbalances in the classroom and how those affect writing instruction. Dismaying as it is, I think it can also be a usefully painful truth to recognize that in many way, students within the university play the same role as automobile sales at the BOC.

As for Ong. Oh, Ong. As always, a delight to read. This time, though, my delight was somewhat tempered by having recently read Mike Roses’ “Narrowing the Mind and Page.” I find Ong so persuasive and intriguing that I didn’t want to read him with a grain of salt, yet I kept returning to the anthropological anecdote about the tribesmen who, when asked how a fool would group objects, grouped them according to the abstract type the anthropologists considered preferably abstract (Rose 372). Even as I found myself nodding along to Ong’s reasoning, I couldn’t let go of the doubt that his evidence truly supported his conclusions. Certainly, for example, we probably wouldn’t have dictionaries without print. Does that necessarily mean, however, that, without print, we wouldn’t have thought of words as having definitions? Does English truly have such a huge vocabulary because we have dictionaries, or has it just been around long enough and been influenced enough by other languages? Not to mention, what does having a huge vocabulary have to do with cognition? In the end, I walked away from the Ong reading still a huge admirer of his and of his far-reaching ideas, but less willing to put weight on his conclusions.

Product Theory

Connors, Robert J. “Mechanical Correctness as a Focus in Composition Instruction.” College Composition and communication 36.1 (1985): 61-72.
Hartwell, Patrick. “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar.” Villanueva 205-34.
Elbow, Peter. “Reflections on Academic Discourse: How it Relates to Freshjman and Colleagues.” College English 53 (1991): 135-55.
Butler, Paul. “Style in the Diaspora of Composition Studies.” Rhetoric Review 26.1 (2007): 5-24.
Sommers, Nancy. “Responding to Student Writing.” CCC 33 (1982): 148-56.
Connors, Robert. “Teachers’ Rhetorical Comments on Student Papers.” Selected Essays of Robert J. Connors. Eds. Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford. New York: Bedford/St. Martins, 2003: 236-58.

In the spirit of Peter Elbow’s “Reflections on Academic Discourse,” I will try in this blog post to be aware of when I’m trying to write like an academic. Just this week, I talked with my mother about how much she dislikes academic writing. She has a master’s in English and teaches at a 4-year college, so she’s very much within the audience for academic writing. Her dislike makes sense given her background, however. She was a services officer in the Air Force for 20+ years before getting that master’s, so she has a lot of business and military writing experience. In those fields, the point was always to get the point across quickly and clearly, she told me. Academic writing doesn’t do that. Instead, it obfuscates its claims by couching them in esoteric terminology intended, according to Elbow, to relate a certain exclusionary version of reality and concomitantly obscure insecurity even as it jockeys for position within a certain field of power. Or, in other words, academic writing complicates things so that academics feel better about themselves, their jobs, and their reputations as scholars.

I mostly agreed with my mother’s points about how unnecessarily complicated academic writing is (even compared to business writing, which tends to get a bad rap for wordiness, passive constructions, and other writing no-no’s). I protested, though, that sometimes complicated ideas require complicated expression. Don’t we, by simplifying our language, risk simplifying the thing our language refers to? Elbow has made me revisit this question. His mentions of technical terminology point directly to it. For example, when he says that Berlin doesn’t really need the word “epistemic” to make his point, Elbow is saying that simpler—or more common—language could make the same point. I respectively disagree, but I recognize that my disagreement only applies to this particular example. I think that using the word “epistemic” is a tidy way for Berlin to center his point on one word. Not having read the whole essay recently, I can’t argue my own point very forcefully. I suspect, however, that replacing “epistemic” with a number of other words could make it more difficult for Berlin to get across that he’s writing about a single concept. On top of that, now that he’s used the word so repeatedly in such a specific context, it’s easy for other writers to use the word themselves, along with a reference to Berlin, to bring all of his ideas to bear. There’s no need to rehash everything he said; instead, future writers can just write “Berlin’s idea of epistemic."

Of course, that brings us square up against a huge issue Elbow has with academic writing: it’s exclusive. It often assumes that the reader has already read a bunch of other things and that they’re “in the club.” I agree that academic writing could stand to be more accessible but it’s hopelessly idealistic to think that writers can start from square one with every piece of writing. Even if the language is accessible, the context may not be to an “uninitiated” audience. Sports-writing proves just that point; the language is usually not difficult, but you have to already know a lot (including technical terms!) to understand the content..

Using the phrase “in the club” makes me think of a connection among many of this week’s readings: the issue of teachers commenting on student papers. Nancy Sommers’ and Robert Connors’ articles focus explicitly on this issue. Hartwell’s and Butler’s connect more indirectly. In Sommers’ critique of teachers’ responses to student writing, the vagueness of those comments takes much of the heat. Additionally, Sommers points out that teachers’ comments as a whole don’t do a good job of helping their students understand revision or how to actually complete that revision. When I examine the photocopied samples in the article of comments on student work, they mostly make perfect sense to me. I completely agree that comments asking for both editing and development are confusing and don’t help the student recognize that there even is a scale of concerns for revision, let alone what that scale looks like. At the same time, I can skim the editing comments, put them out of mind, turn to the development comments and interpret what they’re asking for. The sentence “The United States is in great need of its own source of power” definitely needs elaboration. Why is it in need? Are the reasons economic, political, demographic, some combination? But the only reason I can translate the one-word comment, “elaborate” into these two more specific questions is that I, like the teacher who write that comment, am in the club..

I tell my students all the time that they need to put in the time to develop their writing, to be able to get some distance from it, to read it like a reader, to shift out of writer-oriented mode. The key to that advice, though, is time. It takes time to create truly reader-oriented prose, and time, as Connors points out in “Rhetorical Comments” is exactly what composition teachers don’t have. When a teacher writes “elaborate” on a student draft, she is falling back on terminology that’s exclusive to her field at least in part because it saves her time, which she has precious little of. I argued above that Berlin’s use of “epistemic” saves both him and future writers in his field time and space, which I see as a good thing. When the rhetorical situation presupposes that the audience has not been inducted into the writer’s field, however, saving time is not a good thing. Unfortunately, it’s a practical thing. Because of its practicality, I would guess that a lot of teachers do see it as a good thing. If students don’t understand what comments mean, it’s their job to ask and thereby begin their induction into the field..

Practicality, as Connors points out in “Mechanical Correctness,” has shaped composition teaching for decades. Editing student papers may not help students become better writers but, man, it’s quick. In his discussion of different grammars, Hartwell doesn’t explicitly focus on this question of practicality. I’d argue that much of his piece is about practicality, however, in that he spends much of the article explaining how the various grammars that people teach don’t teach much of anything at all. Teaching grammar because it suits your theory of language and literacy without checking to see if students are learning anything useful is a pie-in-the-sky endeavor. There’s nothing practical about wheel-spinning in the classroom: lots of time, money, and effort goes to waste. So now we’re dealing with practicality in two places—what we teach and what we evaluate. What I take away from Connors and Hartwell is that while teaching and evaluating grammar may seem practical, they’re really not..

That leaves us with Butler, the most theoretical piece. I think my mother would not enjoy it. I’m not entirely convinced that a renewed study of style would be the bee’s knees, but I think that has to do with my lack of exposure to the “full range of stylistic—and thus analytical—options that would allow a more complete understanding of textual objects” (Butler 22). When I think of style-focused rhetorics, I think of Ramus and the general move in the Middle Ages to reduce rhetoric to questions of style. The examples of stylistic analysis that Butler provides don’t clarify much for me. I see the analysis happening, but I don’t see how it’s contributing so greatly to my understanding of the piece of writing being analyzed. My mind is still open though. As a writer, I find myself yoking together invention and style in my process every time I turn to wordplay as motivation to just get the next sentence down on paper. Much of that wordplay gets cut out by a final draft, however, so I’m not sure how much of it is left to analyze.

Research Resources

Journals Available at UNLV Lied Library or open access

Across the Disciplines
Assessing Writing
Business Communication Quarterly
College Composition and Communication (CCC)
College English
Community Literacy Journal
Composition Forum
Composition Studies
Computers and Composition
Currents in Electronic Literacy
Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture
IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication
Issues in Writing
JAC (Journal of Advanced Composition)
Journal of Basic Writing
Journal of Business Communication
Journal of Business and Technical Communication
Journal of Second Language Writing
Journal of Teaching English with Technology
Journal of Technical Writing and Communication
Journal of Writing Research
Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy
Pedagogy (Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Culture and Composition)
Practical Assessment, Research, and Evaluation
Praxis: A Writing Center Journal
Research in the Teaching of English
Teaching English in the Two-Year College
Technical Communication Quarterly
TESOL Quarterly
WAC Journal
Writing Center Journal
Writing Program Administration

Research Resources

Rhetoric e-server: Rhetoric and Composition portal
Rebecca Moore-Howard's Bibliographies for Rhetoric and Composition
Journals in Rhetoric and Composition
NCSCU Rhetoric and Composition Research Guide
Colorado State Writing Guide: Case Studies

Dissonance Blog

In March of 2003, while studying systems engineering at the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, I read Mark Doty’s poem “A Green Crab’s Shell” in Bill Moyer’s book Fooling With Words In his interview prefacing the poem, Doty attributes one of its lines to Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The Archaic Torso of Apollo.” I read that poem next. Its final line, “You must change your life,” seemed so overdramatic, so very unnecessary in light of the thirteen lines that came before. Yet, I kept reading Rilke’s poetry, and Doty’s poetry, and other poetry that their work led me to. By June, I had withdrawn from Olin College and was searching for an undergraduate creative writing program to start at the following year.

I graduated with a B.A. in English with an emphasis on poetry writing in May 2007. By that point in my academic career, I had written lab reports, plays, business proposals, poems, literary analysis, short stories, reader responses, sociological analyses and any number of other kinds of writing. Ironically, given my degree, I knew that the only genres I felt uncomfortable writing in were the creative: prose and poetry. Cue several years of floundering, and here I am now, working towards a Ph.D. in English and soaking up rhetoric and composition scholarship.

Although the creative side of writing drew me away from engineering, I’m starting to realize that it was really just the power of the language to influence me at all that got me hooked. When I teach composition, one of my main goals is to share this sense of language’s extraordinary capabilities with students. No, wait, that sounds far too much like an inspirational movie about a teacher. What I really aim for is to have conversations with students that help them recognize what a complicated business writing really is. That starts with breaking down monolithic ideas about language and writing, especially the idea that there can ever be such a thing as “good writing” in a context-less vacuum. Context, the way in which all the things around the writing that aren’t written influence the things that are written, is a touchstone in my comp classes. At least, I try to make it one. My hunch is that this makes life a little more difficult, as context seems to be a concept with which many students struggle.

This struggle makes me wish I knew how I had come to my own understanding of context and its relationship to texts. I do know that as an undergraduate, I spent a lot of time writing things I thought were “good” that, when I read them now, feel stilted and even inappropriate. Reading old papers from English lit classes is a particularly humbling experience. So often, those old papers reveal exactly the kind of trying on process Bartholomae describes in “Inventing the University.” I tried on being a literary critic, a scientist, an engineer, a sociologist. No one ever told me to try these roles on. It just seemed like the thing to do, to please the teacher and make the grade. But without an understanding of the context that gives rise to certain voices and conventions, my trying on of those voices and conventions couldn’t rise above the level of playacting.

When my students now ask me what I want them to write, I hear them asking me the question I never asked: How do you want me to write? The how encompasses the voice and conventions appropriate to any given writing situation. “What,” they are asking, “is this finished piece supposed to look like? How impressive should my vocabulary be? How technical? Can I use headings? Where should my thesis go? Do I even need a thesis?” These questions, largely, are questions about genre, which to my mind is a shorthand way of talking about voice, conventions, interpretive schemes, topoi, and audience, among other rhetorical elements. Every which way I look at it, genre seems to be a nexus to which all rhetorical conversations can be traced.

I know I’m on thin ice when I say that. Reading broadly in rhetorical studies has convinced me that just about everything connects to everything else: ethos to audience, audience to occasion, occasion to context, context to audience, and so on, ad infinitum. Discussions of genre necessarily lend themselves to discussions of these other elements, however, even if only to describe the genre. I’m polishing up a paper for CCCC that muses on a bit about how to adapt Bakhtin’s concept of speech genres to writing pedagogy, with particular attention paid to how people become familiar and comfortable with genres in the first place. Plain old exposure is a big part of the process (I argue), which carries the implication that we need to make more considered choices (here at UNLV in particular) about the kinds of reading we assign 101 students.

That paper and study got me started on this interest in genre, which has been spreading well beyond pedagogy. I now think about genre every time I read an Onion article or watch the Daily Show, and consider questions like what basic amount of knowledge is necessary to “get” a parody. Genre pops up any time I discuss new technologies with old engineering friends. It’s the way in which I explain why I can do Facebook, but can’t do Twitter. It has become the lens through which I’m considering all texts these days, particularly those I produced and ask to be produced in my comp classroom.

Given all of this lead-up, I’m sure it’s clear that I plan to focus my research and final paper on genre theory. The questions I keep coming up with though don’t lend themselves to answering through secondary research or on a short timeline. I want to get started investigating this potential engineering WAC topic, but the sorts of questions I want answered now are things like “What have other people done?” and “What sort of research questions would I ask about that program?” These are not suitable research questions for conference papers (although they might be for a public airing on a blog). When I failed to come up with a research question that suited that interest, I considered turning back to genre and more general comp pedagogy. There, my thoughts kept turning back to the CCCC paper that I’ve already written, so that’s largely a non-starter.

At this point, I’m still feeling very unsure about research questions. The direction (genre theory) is a sure thing, but where to aim beyond that? My concern is spending time researching and writing something that doesn’t serve my larger, long-term goals. I’m reaching a point in the graduate school process at which I no longer want to wallow about in all the interesting things literature and writing have to offer. I’m ready to get down to business. The business is genre and some kind of related dissertation, but what that realization means for this paper, I have yet to figure out.

Process Theory

Elbow, Peter. "A Method for Teaching Writing." College English 30:2 (1968): 115-25. 
Murray, Donald M. "Teaching Writing as a Process Not a Product." Villanueva 3-6. 1972. 
Emig, Janet. "Writing as a Mode of Learning." Villanueva 7-16. 1977
Perl, Sandra. "Composing Processes of Unskilled College Writers." Villanueva 17-42. 1979.
Sommers, Nancy. "Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers." Villanueva 43-54. (1980)
Lowe, Charles, and Terra Williams. "Moving to the Public: Weblogs in the Writing Classroom" Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs. Ed. Laura J. Gurak, Smiljana Antonijevic, Laurie Johnson, Clancy Ratliff, and Jessica Reyman. June 2004. Web.

Although Elbow’s article comes first in the chronology, I’ll be working my way back to him once I get to the most recent article, Lowe’s and William’s on weblogs. I have two reasons for this approach: 1) Lowe and William specifically refer to Elbow, unsurprisingly, since their defense of blogs reframes many of his own ideas; and 2) Murray’s 1972 article sets the stage for any discussion of process.

Having read many more recent composition theorists who take the concept of process for granted, reading Murray feels surreal. I imagine reading Copernicus’ or Galileo’s defenses of heliocentrism would be analogous experiences. Not all of Murray’s claims do I take for granted though, especially because I read Perl and Sommers so immediately after reading Murray. Murray claims three stages for the writing process: prewriting, writing, and rewriting. Despite his caveat that “the amount of time a writer spends in each stage depends on his personality, his work habits, his maturity as a craftsman, and the challenge of what he is trying to say,” Murray goes on to provide restrictive descriptions of these three stages and their claims on a writer’s time (4). Prewriting accounts for 85% of a writer’s time. By the time this stage is complete, the writer, according to Murray, has a clear sense of audience, form, and subject. Then, in a rush of glory, the first draft appears. This overwhelming and “frightening” experience takes 1% of the total time. Finally, rewriting accounts for the remaining 14%, and constitutes the period during which the writer may reconsider decisions made in the prewriting stage (Murray 4). What a neat description, as tidy as showroom in a furniture store. Unfortunately, at least in my experience, writing is more family-living-room-on-a-busy-weekday than pristine showroom.

It’s not just my experience, neither! Perl’s and Sommers’ studies of both unskilled and experienced writers reveal processes far more similar to my own and those I’ve observed in students. Murray’s description of process is ideal; I wish I worked that way. It would certainly be easier to plan my writing time. But Sommers’ description of experienced writers in particular rings far more true to my less-than-ideal self. To be fair, Sommers focuses solely on revision—rewriting in Murray’s schema—so I shouldn’t use her article to critique his account of prewriting. (Interestingly, although Sommers uses revision in the article title, the experienced writers she quotes use the term rewriting.) What I will take issue with, though, is the idea that the first draft in fact comes first, and the rewriting follows. This contention derives solely from my firsthand writing experiences, which closely echo those of an experienced writer quoted in Sommers: “I rewrite as I write. It is hard to tell what is a first draft because it is not determined by time. In one draft, I might cross out three pages, write two, cross out a fourth, rewrite it, and call it a draft. I am constantly writing and rewriting…” (49). What this writer, and Sommers in turn, hit on that Murray lacks is the concept of reflexivity. Neatly packaging and separating stages of writing blinds the theorist to points at which these stages bleed into each other.

Perl particularly turns her attention to reflexivity in her study and analysis of unskilled college writers. Her concluding paragraph even begins with the claim that “a final implication derives from the preponderance of recursive behaviors in the composing process studied here, and from the theoretical notion derived from these observations: retrospective structuring, or the going back to the sense of one’s meaning in order to go forward and discover more of what one has to say” (Perl 39). This “final implication” helps keep the notion of recursivity from being scuttled by its association with unskilled writers. Originally, recursivity makes an appearance in Perl as a behavior of students unable to move forward in writing without turning back to edit, thereby hanging themselves up on relatively minor concerns even as the major concerns go unaddressed. Peer review sessions in my own classroom have tuned me in to how unskilled writers often do edit long before it is of great use, so I’m inclined to believe the validity of Perl’s observations. (Not to mention that her methodology seems well-justified, consistent, and replicable.) But just because recursivity is misused in this instance does not mean we should throw it out with the bathwater. Instead, as Sommers did, it makes sense to find the uses of it that do work and work well for experienced writers.

On a last note on Villanueva, before I get on with BLOGS!, I originally had little to say about the Emig article. It was churning in my head, but little was coming from it. However, the process of writing this blog post prompted me to realize that, in fact, Emig’s idea of writing as learning could support my iffy-ness about Murray’s emphasis on the 85%-er prewriting stage. As I mentioned last week, this sort of realization is hardly unusual. I almost always only figure out what I think after writing for a while about what I think I think. If nothing else, this trait gives me the chops to tell students they need to get comfortable deleting huge chunks of writing—I do it all the time, because most of my initial writings turn out to just be a warm up, or brush-clearing, or whatever metaphor you please. Murray’s prewriting as merely “research and daydreaming, note-making and outlining” bears little resemblance to my process (4). These things happen, but the draft they lead to does not appear as a final thing that I can then merely rewrite. Emig’s concept of writing as a mode of learning comes much closer to describing the way in which getting stuff onto paper helps me create new connections, ideas, and conclusions. Granted, there's always the question of how much I can rely on my own experiences as criteria of validity for theories of composition, but that's a post for another day.

So now, let’s turn our attention instead to the funfunfun topic of the week, the blogosphere! Please excuse my irreverent and fun-focused tone. I’m awfully self-aware of both after having read Lowe’s and William’s article about how awesome blogging is for students and then having to turn around and write a blog post. The fun, perhaps, is a good place to start though. It struck me throughout the article how invested the authors are in tapping into some sense of fun that they associate with online writing activities like emailing and MMORPGs. I agree that students learn best when they are in some way connected, and enjoyment can create a sense of connection that coursework could otherwise lack. There’s a smacking of fun-for-fun’s sake here, however, which I’m not completely sold on. How important is it really for students to commiserate with each other when they have sprained ankles? Does enjoyment necessarily lead to learning? Please don’t misunderstand. I do hope you’re enjoying reading this blog post. But the enjoyment of it is probably a different kind of enjoyment than that of checking facebook or blasting away the Alliance on WoW. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I think it would behoove us to question what kind of fun we want our students to have and whether all kinds serve pedagogical goals.

Speaking of pedagogical goals, hey expressivism! What’s up with you these days? I see you making an appearance in arguments in favor of blogging: “Peter Elbow (1998), himself, arrived at freewriting as a means of escape from the anxieties created by a history of writing instruction. Private writing created a comfortable place where he could find himself as a writer; public writing through weblogging can do the same” (Lowe and Williams). Fancy seeing you round here. Honestly, I kind of thought that the public, collaborative, social nature of blogs would just give you a straight-up cold shoulder. But I suppose you and public writing share that real drive to "deemphasiz[e] teacher authority" (Lowe and Williams). Careful, though. Those blog-happy authors might pull the rug out from under you: "We still suspect that our field’s expressivist heritage may lead many writing teachers to put the private unnecessarily in front of the public, partially because writing teachers are themselves more comfortable with the private" (Lowe and Williams). I wouldn’t worry overmuch, though, if I were you. I think they’re still pretty interested in a lot of the same things you are: the true voice thing, you know, “writing as revealing the author’s self in his words” (Elbow 119), and creating writing situations in which “student writing [can] be designed to produce a specific piece of overt behavior in a reader” (Elbow 116). How funny. I think I just figured out that expressivism knows how to dress up as social constructionism. Neat trick!

The thing is, a claim like "our student bloggers regularly confront “real” rhetorical situations in a very social, supportive setting" parses as an overly idealistic and utterly unrealistic view of blogs. Isn’t there something a bit disingenuous about putting “real” in those handy quotation marks? What is the difference anyway between real and “real”? My sense is that blogs make the classroom dynamic simply less apparent. I buy that blogs can deauthorize the instructor, thereby empowering students to make rhetorical decisions at least removed from, even if not completely outside of, the evaluative classroom framework. They can even make the built-in classroom “community” feel more like an actual community, which gets it closer to being an actual audience. But as for students engaging in “real” rhetorical situations? Frankly, Elbow hits that nail a bit more squarely, with his suggestion of bringing outsiders into the classroom. That’s real, real in a way that the minute chance of a stranger reading your blog and entering a conversation with you is not.

But we’re not talking about writing communities or audiences this week. We’re talking about the writing process. So just to bring it back, here’s where Lowe and Williams themselves make the connection between blogs and process: "Some would point to other student web texts—zines and student websites—and suggest that they, too, can accomplish the same goals without the need to share drafts and other exploratory writing, that students can wait until a finished product is ready to share publicly. Yet, we feel that such texts diminish the process of drafting and do not create discourse about the drafting process in the same way that making the entire process public does. In only publishing the final draft—such as in the case of many zine projects and student websites that we have seen—isn’t this practice overly valuing the final product and, in doing so, also undercutting writing process pedagogy?"

Dear public, wouldn’t you like to engage in my process and leave me a comment about this unfinished work?

Other Unfinished Thoughts: 
 The web is crawling with trolls ready to personally attack any speaker. Granted, they tend to congregate in more public settings (Youtube, online papers), so perhaps students are safe. Who then is finding these texts?

"And even though this speculation about the positive aspects of public writing may disrupt established thoughts on what should be public and private, it is not out of line with collaborative process views." Well that's dismissive.

Different take on invention. Dan Cohen (of digital humanities fame) has a crowdsourced book.

"Below, we show that using weblogs in our classrooms has been more effective for at least some of our students because it has increased participation:  our quieter students who typically don’t participate in face-to-face discussions are participating in weblog discussions." Drew's project: Tin Can Classroom.

Basic Writing

Shaughnessy, Mina P.  “Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing.” CCC 27 (1976): 234-39. Villanueva 311-18.

Bartholomae, David. “Inventing the University.” Villanueva 623-54.

Goen-Salter, Sugie. “Critiquing the Need to Eliminate Remediation: Lessons from San Francisco State.” Journal of Basic Writing 27.2 (2008): 81-105.  

Glau, Gregory R. “Stretch at 10: A Progress Report on Arizona State University's Stretch Program.” Journal of Basic Writing 26.2 (2007): 30-48.

Rose, Mike. “The Language of Exclusion: Writing Instruction at the University.” Villanueva 547-70.

Rose, Mike. “Narrowing the Mind and Page: Remedial Writers and Cognitive Reductionism.” Villanueva 345-86.

Zwagerman, Sean. “The Scarlet P: Plagiarism, Panopticism, and the Rhetoric of Academic Integrity.” CCC 59.4 (2008): 676-710.

I found the reading for this week very slow going, as every few paragraphs, I found myself staring off into space, considering my own pedagogical practices. The more theoretical reading selection, particularly Bartholomae's, Rose's, and Zwagerman's, especially prompted this interrupted attention. This introspection came with baggage: there's nothing like guilt about all the things I may be doing wrong, or not doing, or haven't considered to distract me from the many things I should be doing, like reading the assigned articles.

Finally, I found a quote to quash that guilt, but unfortunately didn't find it until the penultimate article I read: Glau's "Stretch at 10." He cites Shaughnessy's comforting observation about basic writers that "they are beginners and must, like all beginners, learn by making mistakes" (qtd in Glau 32). Though in my classroom, I am an instructor and not a student, the lesson holds true. I will learn by making mistakes. That thought brings with it a different flavor of guilt though, predicated on the idea that my mistakes can have major consequences for the students who expect to learn from me. My knee-jerk reaction to this guilt is to remember that I am not responsible for a student's education; students are responsible for their own educations. I am however responsible for creating a space in which that education can happen, for pointing in particular directions, for encouraging critical thought, for making them comfortable enough to make their own mistakes. In a student-centered classroom, I don't have to worry about always having the "right" thing to say. I do have to worry, though, about not making the kinds of assumptions that Rose, Bartholomae, Shaughnessy, Zwagerman, and Goen-Salter critique.

But then, in the midst of this worry, I worry that I am not being as critical as I ask my students to be. On the one hand, I aim to be a receptive reader, willing to entertain new, unfamiliar, or even unpalatable ideas. On the other hand, I can't just sponge up everything every composition scholar has to say. That just leads to, well, leaking, likely in a confusing and unattractive manner. How then to make sense of so much information? How to wade through it and come out with a clear sense of what rings true, what is useful, what overextends or undertheorizes or oversimplifies?

In considering this question of missing criteria, I found Rose's survey of cognitive theories highly elucidating. I have a passing familiarity with three of the four cognitive theories and approaches he critiques (the exception being field dependence-independence), although not entirely from their connections to comp theory. Thinking back over my various encounters with cognitive theories, I realized that I tended to accept them, often uncritically and wholly admiringly. Ong's work in orality-literacy in particular stood out as a theory that I found mind-bending and persuasive and explanatory and shockingly predictive. (In contrast, hemisphericity always seemed a little too neat for me but perhaps that arises from my distaste for labels that include the term "brained.") Despite my prior positive assessment of Ong and Piaget, Rose's detailed critique swayed me. To some extent, my sense of being but a barometer of whatever I'm currently reading was mollified by Rose's major argument that it is not necessarily these theories that are problematic, but rather their applications to comp theory. I love the idea of unifying fields through transdisciplinary research, but completely accept the need to exercise great caution when borrowing terminology or generalizing conclusions.

Given this perhaps overwrought background, I chose to use this response space to track attempts at being critical of what I was tempted to merely accept from others of this week's readings. I'll start with Bartholomae. The concept of "inventing the university" holds great appeal for me, as it jibes with my own experiences as student and writer. Certainly, arriving at grad school and delving far more deeply into academic discourse than ever before has been as much an education in topoi as in anything else. The role of commonplaces and the idea of students having to learn particular discourses also fits with my own conviction that genres are an indispensable way to talk about, teach, and learn writing. The very term "writing" is so broad as to be pedagogically useless without reference to particular disciplines or genres. My efforts at critically considering Bartholomae did lead me to one concern, though, based on the way in which he recommends embracing the act of inventing the university. This recommendation would have us recodify certain ways of thinking and talking that are traditional and insular. Such reification of modes of writing precludes critical pedagogies that aim to shake at the foundations of "how it's meant to be done." (I'm thinking especially of Anzaldua here.)

On to Zwagerman's discussion of plagiarism, in which he questions the current discourse about plagiarism that constantly reinstitutes a system that encourages plagiarism even as it laments the plagiarism's apparently rampant increase. His attention to the language used to discuss plagiarism is incisive and revealing. Since when are students infectious disease carriers? Similarly, his connection of policies meant to discourage academic dishonesty to policies commonly found in punitive institutional spaces gives life to a tiny embryo of discontent I've been carrying around for a while about sites like turnitin.com. In short, I agree that the ever-escalating measures to detect and combat plagiarism don't create the trusting learning environments we all yearn for. However, Zwagerman's own analysis of the antagonistic evaluation-obsessed system that makes dishonesty a good bet leaves me wondering how to make change from the ground up. Certainly, the suggestions to get students invested and to create process-focused assignments make clear, practical sense. What about the bigger picture though? What does a world without grades or grade obsession even look like? Certainly, this isn't meant to be a critique of Zwagerman's article; he does a phenomenal job of exposing the current system's flaws and finding little cracks between those flaws where things can be done differently, and hopefully better. I'm still left unsettled by the article, however, as it so deftly underscores the seemingly irreconcilable tension between the university as a place of learning and education and the university as the bestower of credentials for success in a capitalistic society.

As a whole, these readings draw attention to large-scale, systemic issues rooted in the discrepancies between different visions of the goals of the university and of composition instruction. While discord is often the currency of public life, these discrepancies have huge consequences for the thousands of students passing through composition courses, often without any awareness that these courses are anything but universally supported and consistent in content and form. That's all--I have no take-home message about this observation, other than, maybe where we are right now is not in fact the best place to be.

Comp Studies Origins

Readings
Hill, Adam Sherman. "An Answer to the Cry for More English." 1896
Phelps, Louis Whetherbee. "The Domain of Composition." 1986
Nystrand, Martin, Stuart Greene, and Jefrey Wiemelt. "Where did Composition Studies Come from?: An Intellectual History." 1993
Brereton, John C. "Introduction." The Origins of Composition Studies in the American College. 1995
Yancey, Kathleen Blake. "Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key." 2004
Juzwik, Mary M., Svjetlana Curcic, Kimberly Wolbers, et al. "Writing Into the 21st Century: An Overview of Research on Writing, 1999-2004." 2006

Response(s)
I arranged the above references in chronological order to get a better sense of how the conversation about composition has shifted over time. This organization seemed particularly appropriate for a batch of readings largely concerned with providing historical, social, and intellectual contexts for composition, or some aspect of it, at any given moment in time.

Hill's "An Answer to the Cry for More English" is both the most historical and the least historically inclined of the readings. While he does begin by looking to past deficits in writing and elocution instruction, Hill focuses far more on current efforts to address current deficits, specifically Harvard's use of a written entrance exam. required sophomore writing course, and other strategies for elevating the role of writing in higher education. Because Harvard is trying so hard, Hill argues, students' inability to write clearly and correctly must be the fault of their previous schooling. I expected to be off-put by Hill's prescriptivist tendencies, and so was surprised at how convincing I found his description of correct and stylistic writing as "that without which knowledge is but sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal" (46). The question for me then becomes, what knowledge can writing instructors use to show students how to make a symphony rather than cacophony?

In the introduction to The Origins of Composition Studies in the American College, John Brereton mentions, almost in passing, that students were frightened of Hill's curriculum and bored by alternatives such as theme writing. In a lengthy overview of the historical changes undergone by composition between 1870 and 1945, perhaps its not surprising that this point about student reactions gets but a few lines. However, the brevity of that description--and its contrast to Hill's glowing praise of his own program--did draw my attention to the fact that not only Origins, but also the majority of the other readings, fail completely to tell us anything about student involvement with or reactions to the various theories and views of composition.

For a few of the readings, the elision of student response makes sense. Phelps' concerns are highly theoretical and take the classroom as the starting point, rather than the ultimate goal. In mapping out the conceptual center and boundaries of composition, Phelps makes sense of how people studying everything from scientific journal articles to Kindergarten games to laptop case decorations can all claim to be working within the same field. Although I get this general drift of Phelps' argument, it is the reading I had the most trouble making sense of and connecting to previous knowledge and other readings. To some extent, I think the reading dates itself by its heavily theoretical bent and casual use of complex ideas, such as "written discourse as interaction" (184). In the end, I'm not sure what to walk away with from this reading, other than a sense that it's ok as a comp researcher to stray into other fields. Ultimately, how does or should this discussion of composition inform my understanding of how people write and how we talk about how people write? Ironically, though, I do get the sense that this reading could be the most fruitful ground for considering potential dissertation topics, which makes me want to discuss it the most out of the Comp Studies Origins readings.

Then again, the Nystrand, et al. reading is peppered with stars noting points that relate to my interest in genre theory and the use of genre to teach writing. This semi-revisionist history of composition actually felt very not-new. To a large extent, I felt like many of the connections they draw between composition and broader intellectual movements were already intimated or explicitly discussed by Berlin in Rhetoric and Reality. Then again, perhaps their view of intellectual history simply maps so naturally onto the familiar history of 20th century rhet-comp's division into epistemological camps that I just thought I had read it before. At any rate, the article provides one of the most succinct and clear explanations of dialogism that I've ever read. I thought I understood the concept, but now I understand it better. I think. In particular, also, the contrasting of formalism and structuralism, along with the tracing of unspoken similarities between various versions of them, was quite helpful for understanding how we have moved so far from current-traditional writing instruction (at least in theoretical discussions).

Although Juzwik, et al's study came chronologically after Yancey's CCCC address, I'll save Yancey for last. I'm very glad to have read this study because it mirrors to some extent a project I'm working on in rhetoric of science with Denise. For that project, we've been scouring journals to find articles on rhetoric of science and have been coding them (somewhat haphazardly) as we go. Next comes the paring down stage and refinement of categories, a more formalized coding process, and then the writing of a literature review. While I've read tons of lit reviews in my time as a grad student, none previously has taken the form of the research report. While I'm not sure we'll be writing a traditional research article with all the methodology bells and whistles, I do appreciate reading a lit review that also surveys a broad and amorphous field and doesn't have the word literature in the title. I'm also feeling inspired by their methodology coding categories and might borrow some of them that map well onto the rhetoric of science research.

So. That brings us to Yancey. With whom I take issue. And then feel guilty for taking issue. And then get mad about feeling guilty. If I don't follow her into the realms of multimedia and circulation, I am old-school and unable to let go of unfashionable and intenable views of what it means to be a writer. If I don't follow, I risk becoming outmoded. If I don't follow, I'm out of touch and will never truly connect with my students. Yancey seems to have a built-in defense against anything I might say. Yet, it's not that simple. Why should I rush into the new and shiny plaything of multimedia? If I do, I have to forget what I know and start from scratch. If I do, how do my students learn about printed text and making those work? What's wrong with taking things slowly? Also, on a final note, isn't it a bit presumptuous to say that all of our students are so savvy with multimedia that we can just tell them "go"?