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.
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Thursday, October 20, 2011
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.
Thursday, October 13, 2011
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.
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.
Thursday, October 6, 2011
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
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
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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.
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.
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.
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