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.