Aristotle Rhetoric

Aristotle. Aristotle on Rhetoric. Trans. George Kennedy. New York: Oxford UP. 2007.

George Kennedy Introduction
“3. Forms of persuasion are either:
a. Non-artistic: direct evidence (facts, withnesses, documents, etc.) that the speaker uses but does not—or should not—invent; or
b. Artistic: logical arguments constructed by the speak, of two types;
i. Inductive argument, called paradigm, or example, drawing a particular conclusion from one or more parallels
ii. Deductive argument, called enthymeme, or rhetorical syllogism, drawing a conclusion from stated or implied premises.

4. In rhetoric the speaker or writer almost always deals with probabilities—what would have happened or can happen based on what happens for the most part in such situations.
This relates both to background and method. The background being just the basic forms of persuasion. The method referring to “or can happen based on w hat happens for the most part in such situations” which, I believe, is what O’keefe is doing with anticipatory guilt. Interesting.
“And further, it is clear that the opponents have no function except to show that something is or is not true or has happened or has not happened; whether it is important or trivial or just or unjust in so far as the lawmaker has not provided a definition, the juror should somehow decide himself and not learn from the opponents” (32). =Background & Method
Pistis=proof
“That rhetoric, therefore, does not belong to a single defined genus of subject but is like dialectic and that it is useful is clear—and that its function [ergon] is not to persuade but to see the available means of persuasion in each case, as is true also in all the other arts;” (36).
Which means it makes sense that it shows up in Communications and English, and that it is important across the board in the academy because all studies appear to use rhetoric of one sort or another for varying reasons. =Background
“As stated here, the actuality produced by the pontentiality of rhetoric is not the written or oral text of a speech, or even persuasion, but the art of “seeing” how persuasion may be affected” (37).
The art of rhetoric is in perception as much as in the acting of it.
Persuasion through proofs, character/credibility, through emotion, through logos. (39).
Enthymeme—a rhetorical syllogism
Syllogism—a deductive argument in dialectic consisting of major premise, minor premise, and conclusion.
Paradigm—introduction
“I call a rhetorical syllogism an enthymeme, a rhetorical induction a paradigm” (40). =B
“But there are “specifics” that come from the premises of each species and genus [of knowledge]; for example, in physics there are premises from which there is neither an enthymeme nor a syllogism applicable to ethics; and in ethics [there are] others not useful in physics” (45). =B
Every field can beneifit from rhetorical procedure, but rhetorical procedures do not benefit from every field.
“9.justice, courage, temperance, magnaminity, magnificence, and similar dispositions (for they are virtues of the soul) (62). =A
These are listed as what one needs for happiness. However; many of the men in his time and later were perfectly happy without being magnanimous or displaying justice. The treatment of different races, the female gender, etc. prove this. How come they never noticed? One is not magnanimous when one tells the other gender over and over what their shortcomings are as was done in the conduct books.
“30.And most of all, each category of people [values as a good]that to which their character is disposed; for example, those fond of victory [value something] if it will be a victory, those fond of honor if it will be an honor, those fond of money if there will be money, and others similarly” (64). =A
Do we value what our characters are disposed toward, or what we are told our characters are disposed toward? Men value pride, women value modesty, etc. because that is the way it was SUPPOSED to be, or because it was true?
“38. [In epideictic] one should also use many kinds of amplification for example, if the subject [of praise] is the only one or the first or one of a few who most has done something; for all these things are honorable” (81). =M (to define the methods of others).
So if not many people act in a manner, and you do, you should be praised?
“In this chapter Aristotle adopts the definition of pleasure as kinesin tina tes psyches, ‘a certain movement of the soul’” (87). =E
Affective rhetoric is a movement of the soul. Is this what Aristotle is referring to? Is this where the definition begins to find its place?
“Aristotle identified three artistic modes of persuasion, derived from presenting the character (ethos) of the speaker in a favorable light, awakening emotion (pathos) in the audience so as to induce them to make the judgment desired, and showing the probability of what is said by logical argument (logos) (111). =B
8.The emotions [pathe]are those things through which, by undergoing change, people come to differ in their judgments and which are accompanied by pain and pleasure, for example, anger, pity, fear and other such things as their opposites” (113). =B
Never any mention of guilt.
“3. Belittling [oligoria] is an actualization of opinion about what seems worthless (we think both good and bad things worth serious attention, also things that contributed to them, but whatever amounts to little or nothing we suppose worthless), and there are three species of belittling: contempts. . ., spite. . ., and insult. . .; =M & A
Aristotle is using these as ways to insight anger, but I’ve seen them used in conduct books, so does the anger come from belittling or from the guilt thrown at the person?
“Let the matters just discussed be regarded as understood, and let the virtue of style [lexeos aerie]be defined as “to be clear” [saphe](speech is a kind of sighn so if it does not make clear it will not perform its function)—and neither flat nor above the dignity of the subject, but appropriate [prepon] (197). =M
Composition in its infancy?
One thing becomes apparent after having read this. Aristotle had a huge hand in helping to develop and further rhetoric, composition, law, and philosophy.

Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Rhetoric

Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Rehtoric. Balckwell: Malden, MA. (2004).

"Since we are all flooded daily with rhetoric, admirable and contemptible, we are in desparate need of serious rhetorical study, everywhere" (Preface ix).

If we are unable to recognize the "designing rhetorics" which surround and encompass us (interppelate us) then we are unable to avoid the consequences of such rhetoric. He is so right.

"To study the rhetoric of rhetoric is one thing; to work as a rhetor, as I am doing most of the time here--arguing for sometimes even preaching about, the importance of that kind of study -- is quite different. Yet we all often travel under the same term: "My field is rhetoric."

That being said, what if one studies composition and rhetoric. I mean it becomes even more convoluted as we try to explain what we study. I've finally gotten down to, my field is composition and rhetoric, emphasis rhetoric, emphasis affective rhetoric. However, this doesn't mean I have no interest otherwise.


"In short, rhetoric does not make Reality One, Unchangeable Truths. It aids us in discovering them, as it makes and remakes our circumstances and beliefs -- our temporary realities -- along the way" (14).

From Aristotle and Cicerto to Edbauer and Booth, everyone talks about how rhetoric "creates" reality and/or truth, and all come up with different ways of looking at it. Basically, I think, that the point is that reality helps to create the individual's truth for that moment. Women as individuals interpellating ideologies in the 1700's were living the truth, the truth as it stood for them.


"Augustine in the end decided that, since the devil has in his hands the resources of rhetoric, we on God's side must feel free to use it in defense" (26).

"One of the saddest forms of LR-d comes when it is obviously impossible to fight back: either surrender and engage in self-censorship or die. 'I must say what those with power over me want me to say'" (49).

LRD is what Booth calls "surrender-rhetoric" rhetoric which persuades the listener that there is no other alternative other than to follow the dictates of the writer/author/authority. Designing rehtorics share this feature in that somehow they insinuate themselves so deeply there seems to be little alternative. I think this must be done through something like Burke's consubstantiation or through interpellation. We are absorbed into our belief systems.


"No rhetorical effort can succeed if it fails to join in the beliefs and passions of the audience addressed, and that almost always requires some 'accomodation,' 'adjustment', or 'adaptation' to the audience's needs and expectations" (51).

Aristotle's idea that one should find an emotional key into the audience.


"Any nation is in trouble if its citizenhs are not trained for critical response to the flood of misinformation poured over them daily" (89).

"Such practice of 'situation ethics'--what T.S. Eliot called a 'balance of contrarities' -- is required of us daily, quite aside from politics" (120).

If we are unable to disclose rhetoric as individuals, that "situational ethics" question becomes even more important. Transnational rhetoric and things such as "Save the Children" being one that comes to mind. That situation draws people in through their desire to be able to see themselves as caring and giving, and yet at the same time gives them misconceived notions about people in certain geographies.

Althusser, Louis. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses”. The Norton Anthology of Theory and
Criticism. Norton & Company: New York. (2001).
“I shall then suggest that ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey you there!’” (1504).
An ideology “speaks” to certain individuals within its particular circle. The ideology we now recognize as “Repulican” or “Democrat” would not have been spoken to a woman of the 1700’s. Although it may have ‘spoken’ to a few, for the most part that kind of political ideology would not have been picked up by women. However; the ideology of being a woman, of being a lady, spoke to women strongly, and thereby conduct books used interpellation (according to Althusser) to draw them into the ideology or the rhetoric which they were handing out.
Drawing on Burke’s theory of identity, if we identify ourselves as subjects (even without knowing we are doing so) then ideology “recruits” us. This recruitment could be even stronger through Burke’s theory of consubstantiality. He states, ‘a way of life is an acting together; and in acting together men have common sensations, concepts, images, ideas attitudes that make them consubstantial.” (21) Rhetoric of Motives.
We are subjects through ideologies—ideologies also contribute to consubstantiality. Does consubstantiality create interpellation? If we recognize one another in order to hail the other fellow then we have a commonality—that hailing is interpellation and that hailing creates the consubstantiality or at least solidifies it.

Biesecker, Barbara A. Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation

Biesecker, Barbara A. “Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation from Within the Thematic of Difference”
Philosophy and Rhetoric 22.2 (1989).
“if we posit the audience of any rhetorical event as no more than a conglomeration of subjects whose identity is fixed prior to the rhetorical event itself, then we must also admit that those subjects have an essence that cannot be affected by the discourse. Thus, the power of rhetoric is circumscribed: it has the potency to influence an audience, to realign their allegiances, but not to form new identities” (111).
But it does have the ability to form new identities. Have allegiances swayed creates a new personal outlook, and thus, a new person.
"That is to say, the “rhetorical dimension” names both the means by which an idea or argument is expressed and the initial formative intervention that, in centering a differential situation makes possible the production of meaning” (112).
“If both situation and speaker can stand in for cause, “if either cause of effect can occupy the position of origin, then origin is no longer originary; it loses its metaphysical privilege (115).
“there is invariably a moment in the text ‘which harbors the unbalancing of the equation, the sleight of hand at the limit of a text which cannot be dismissed simply as a contradiction.’ This textual knot or inadvertent ‘sleight of hand’ marks the rhetoricity of the text and, in so doing, enables us to locate the unwitting and interested gesture that finessed differance in such a way that the writing could proceed” (121).
"Yet, even in essays explicitly seeking to develop a theory of the rhetorical situation (with audience invariably identified as one of its constituent elements), the concept of audience itself receives little critical attention: in most cases, audience is simply named, identified as the target of discursive practice, and then dropped (122).
“Derrida deconstructs the subject by showing us how the identity of any subject, what I earlier called the core of the human being, like the value of any element in any system is structured by differance. This forces us to think of subjectivity not an essence but as an effect of the subject’s place in an economy of difference” (124).

Neel, Jasper Rhet & Comp Intellectual Work

Neel, Jasper. “Reclaiming our Theoretical Heritage” Rhetoric and composition as intellectual work. Olson, Gary A., ed. Carbondale:
Southern. Illinois UP, 2002.
Praxis
1 : action, practice: as a : exercise or practice of an art, science, or skill b : customary practice or conduct
2 : practical application of a theory
“It is an intractable conundrum, the theory versus praxis split—more intractable and more confusing in rhetoric and composition than in most other disciplines because contemporary rhet/comp grew from the classroom” (3).
“Composition becomes mature, however, able to sustain itself, when it constantly scrutinizes its theoretical underpinnings” (9).
“Rhetoric and composition as a field exists in the North American university. The North American university is perhaps the most theory driven, theory conscious situation in human history. It would be naïve to retreat from theory, and it would be exceedingly selfish, because the only faculty who truly have the option of doing so already have tenure and have already passed through the process of find a voice with which to speak” (10).
“By 1950, we had lost our theory of being. . . .we can continue to abandon theory, and wait for the composition equivalent of cable television, McDonald’s, and interstatate highways across the tundra. Or . . . we can try to reclaim our theoretical heritage, remaking it for a new time” (11).

“rhetoric and composition can sacrifice itself on the alter of the Romantic ego. But before we do, we had better read Wordsworth and Coleridge carefully to make sure we are willing to sit in the center of the pedagogical ego supported only by those theories that we intentionally blind ourselves to” (11).
“Theory forces one to interrogate one’s position. Ignorance of theory blinds one to the knowledge that changing one’s position changes what one sees and how one sees it” (11).

Edbauer, Jenny Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation

Edbauer, Jenny “Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to
Rhetorical Ecologies” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 25.4 (2005).

“Vatz argues that exigencies are created for audiences through the rhetor’s work” (6).
“Phelps’ critique seeks to recontextualize these elements in a wider sphere of active, historical, and lived processes. That is the elements of a rhetorical situation can be re-read against the historical fluxes in which they move” (8).
By placing the rhetoric in the time in which it was written, under the circumstances for which it was written, and the situation of those to whom it was directed, allows us, then, to view it far more effectively.
“The exigence is more like a complex of various audience/speaker perceptions and institutional material constraints” (8).
Perception is the key. Perception of the rhetor of the audience, audience of rhetor, and audience of the issue.
“That is, the elements of a rhetorical situation can be re-read against the historical fluxes in which they move” (8).
Fluid. Rhetoric. Situations. It’s all fluid, which is why it is always the same and different.
“The exigence is more like a complex of various audience/speaker perceptions and institutional or material constraints” (8).
“Consequently, the concept of “rhetorical situation” is appropriately named insofar as the models of rhetorical situation describe the scene of rhetorical action as “located” around the exigence that generates a response. We thus find a connection between certain models of rhetorical situation and a sense of place” (9).
In the case of conduct books the “exigence” would be keeping women in their place while at the same time not letting them know that this is what is really going on.
“To say that we are connected is another way of saying that we are never outside the networked interconnection of forces, energies, rhetorics, moods, and experiences” (10).
I wonder why it isn’t “a networked”?
“By extension, we might say that a rhetorical situation is better conceptualized as a mixture of processes and encounters” (13).
“The intensity, force, and circulatory range of a rhetoric are always expanding through the mutations and new exposures attached to that given rhetoric, much like a virus” (13).
“A given rhetoric is not contained by the elements that comprise its rhetorical situation (exigence, rhetor, audience, constraints). Rather, a rhetoric emerges already infected by the viral intensities that are circulating in the social field” (14).
Our rhetoric is infused with the ideas that are prominent at that time, and perhaps, from the past.
“Rhetorical situations involve the amalgamation and mixture of many different events and happenings that are not properly segmented into audience, text, or rhetorician. We must, therefore consider whether our popular models reflect the fullness of rhetoric’s operation in public” (20).
Consequently, though rhetorical situation models are undeniably helpful for thinking of rhetoric’s contextual character, they fall somewhat short when accounting for the amalgamations and transformations—the spread—of a given rhetoric within its wider ecology” (20).

Horner, Bruce. Terms of Work for Composition

Horner, Bruce. Terms of Work for Composition: A Materialist Critique. New York UP: Albany, NY.
2000.
“In the academy, intellectual labor, in the form of “scholarship” is deemed to be one’s own work, treated as divorced from material social conditions, a product of the autonomous scholar” (2).
“One common criticism of this way of representing academic work, especially within Composition, highlights the relative emphasis given scholarship in comparison to teaching. Lists of publications and other presentations of research, for example, are often given more prominence in CVs than the lists of courses taught or services rendered” (4).
“Composition, of course, occupies a marginal position in relation to English studies, the “humanities, “ and the academy generally. As a consequence, its experience of and responses to the torsion between capitalization and proletariaanization differ from that of faculty more comfortably ensconced within these other realms” (14).
“often framed in terms of “what works” or “worked,” we isolate specific pedagogical techniques from the immediate material circumstances of their use, locating our work (and that of our students) not in the social, historical material process but in the commodifications of that work” (19).
“I have argued above that Composition has enjoyed less intellectual and work autonomy than others in the humanities and the academy generally because of its perceived greater organic significance to socioeconomic production, a significance it shares with primary and secondary school education” (23).
“The alternative challenge Composition faces is how teachers and students can confront the ways in which each material act of writing and reading mediates, in the sense of actively re-forming and transforming, and is mediated by social identification, difference and power, both responding to and reconstructing or revising these” (37). Identification
“That is to say, we need to place all our work in the material social-historical process, resisting dominant definitions of our work, our students, and ourselves” (72).
“Like their students composition faculty seem to have no more than a slippery place in the academy and return the ambivalence with which the academy treats them with ambivalence of their own” (105).
Not necessarily true.

Bitzer, Lloyd. The Rhetorical Situation

Bitzer, Lloyd F. “The Rhetorical Situation” Philosophy and Rheortic, Supplementary Issue.
(1992).
“it does not follow that a situation exists only when the discourse exists” (1).
“Nor should we assume that a rhetorical address gives existence to the situation; on the contrary, it is the situation which calls the discourse into existence.
This makes me wonder what rhetorical situation I’m looking into. I think that the situation changes with each occurrence of guilt rhetoric. In the instance of the conduct book the situation was keeping women in their place. In the instance of ads asking us for monetary help for children is making money?
“It seems clear that rhetoric is situational” (2).
It appears rhetoric is a type of call and response. A situation calls out for recognition or “fixing” and the rhetorician answers with his response to the call.
“Nor would I equate rhetorical situation with persuasive situation, which exists whenever an audience can be changed in belief or action by means of speech” (2).
I don’t understand how this could be. Rhetoric and persuasion work hand in hand, so how do we separate the two, an audience is moved to act, change, become aware, whatever. It is rhetoric.
“I shall argue [that rhetoric] does obtain its character-as-rhetorical from the situation which generates it” (3).
“An act is moral because it is an act performed in a situation of a certain kind; similarly, a work is rhetorical because it is a response to a situation of a certain kind” (3).
“The rhetor alters reality by bringing into existence a discourse of such character that the audience, its thought and action, is so engaged that it becomes mediator of change. In this sense rhetoric is always persuasive” (3-4).
If the audience is women then the change was to become more “ladylike”. If the audience were those who were caught up with the “feed the children” campaigns then the change is to send money to relieve suffering. However, what Bitzer does not address is “fallout” from this type of encouragement to change.
“Rhetorical situation may be defined as a complex of persons, events, objects, and relations presenting an actual or potential exigence which can be completely or partially removed if discourse, introduced into the situation, can so constrain human decision or action as to bring about the significant modification of the exigence (6).
“An exigence which cannot be modified is not rhetorical” (death winter, etc.) (6).
“Further, an exigence which can be modified only by means other than discourse is not rhetorical: thus, an exigence is not rhetorical when its modification requires merely one’s own action or the application of a tool, but neither requires nor invites the assistance of discourse” (6).
“In any rhetorical situation there will be at least one controlling exigence which functions as the organizing principle: it specifies the audience to be addressed and the change to be effected. The exigence may or may not be perceieved clearly by the rhetor or other persons in the situation; it may be strong or weak depending upon the clarity of their perception and the degree of their interest in it; . . .” (7).
The audience is an active party to rhetoric, it isn’t placed upon them, but served to them for them to partake in.
“But the rhetorical audience must be capable of serving as mediator of the change which the discourse functions to produce” (8).
“Besides exigence and audience, every rhetorical situation contains a set of constraints made up of persons, events objects, and relations which are parts of the situation because they have the power to constrain decision and action needed to modify the exigence (8).
Huh?
“There are two main classes of constraints: (1) those originated or managed by the rhetor and his method (Aristotle called these “artistic proofs”), and (2) those other constraints in the situation, which may be operative (Aristotle’s “inartistic proofs)” (8).
So, perhaps guilt played on by the rhetor as apposed to photos that produce guilt?
“Rhetorical discourse is called into existence by situation; the situation which the rhetor perceives amounts to an invitation to create and present discourse” (8).
“Thus the second characteristic of rhetorical situations is that it invites a fitting response, a response that fits the situation”
“To say that a rhetorical response fits a situation is to say it meets the requirements established by the situation” (10).
“The exigence and the complex of persons, objects, events and relations which generate rhetorical discourse are located in reality, are objective and publicly observable historical facts in the world we experience, are therefore available for scrutiny by an observer or critic who attends to them” (11).
“rhetorical situations come into existence, then either mature or decay or mature and persist—conceivably some persist indefinitely” (12).

Crosstalk in Composition (various authors/articles)

Villanueva, Victor, ed. Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader. Urbana, Il 2003. National Council of
Teachers of English.
Murray, Donald M. “Teach Writing as a Process Not Product” 1-3
After reading the first page I begin to wonder if this article does not “assume” the reader teaches writing using literature.
“Year after year the student shudders under a barrage of criticism, much of it brilliant, some of it stupid, and all of it irrelevant. No matter how careful our criticisms, they do not help the student since when we teach composition we are not teaching a product, we are teaching a process” (3).
“writing is a demanding, intellectual process; but sooner than you think, for the process can be put to work to produce a product which may be worth your reading” (3-4).
“It is the process of discovery through language. It is the process of exploration of what we know and what we feel about what we know through language. It is the process of using language to learn about our world, to evaluate what we learn about our world, to communicate what we learn about our world” (4).
“The process itself can be divided into three stages: prewriting, writing, and rewriting” (4).

What about thinking and rethinking—mulling it over—I presume these are part of the above?
“We are coaches, encourages, developers, creators of environments in which our students can experience the writing process for themselves” (5).
Emig, Janet. “Writing as a Mode of Learning”—7-16
“Writing serves learning uniquely because writing as a process-and-product possesses a cluster of attributes that correspond uniquely to certain powerful learning strategies” (7).
YES!
“Here I have a prior purpose: to describe as tellingly as possible how writing uniquely corresponds to certain powerful learning strategies. Making such a case for the uniqueness of writing should logically and theoretically involve establishing many contrasts, distinctions between (1) writing and all other verbal languaging processes—listening, reading, and especially talking; (2) writing and all other forms of composing, such as composing a painting, a symphony, a dance, a film, a building; and (3) composing in words and composing in the two other major graphic symbol systems of mathematical equations and scientific formulae” (7).
“The less useful distinction is that between listening and reading as receptive functions and talking and writing as productive functions” (8).
“Writing is originating and creating a unique verbal construct that is graphically recorded. Reading is creating or re-creating but not originating a verbal construct that is graphically recorded. . . Note that a distinction is being made between creating and originating, separable processes” (8).
“But to say that talking is a valuable form of pre-writing is not to say that writing is talk recorded, an inaccuracy appearing in far too many composition texts” (9).
Differences between talking and writing on page 9—important.
“Jerome Bruner, like Jean Piaget, through a comparable set of categories, posits three major ways in which we represent and deal with actuality: (1) enactive—we learn “by doing”; (2) iconic—we learn “by depiction in an image”; and (3) representational or symbolic—we learn “by restatement in words.”8 “ (10).
“What is striking about writing as a process is that, by its very nature, all three ways of dealing with actuality are simultaneously or almost simultaneously deployed. That is, the symbolic transformation of experience through the specific symbol system of verbal language is shaped into an icon (the graphic product) by the enactive hand” (10).
“Writing involves the fullest possible functioning of the brain, which entails the active participation in the process of both the left and right hemispheres” (11).
When we learn through writing the learned material becomes more thoroughly understood and more deeply rooted in the mind. We are more able to synthesize that material with other knowledge and recreate or originate new ideas.
“Third, the right hemisphere seems to be the source of intuition, of sudden gestalts, of flashes of images, of abstractions occurring as visual or spatial wholes, as the initiating metaphors in the creative process” (11).
I’m very intuitive, much of what I do is based on “gut”. I wonder if this gives me an advantage in the writing process?
“Also, a unique form of feedback, as well as reinforcement, exists with writing, because information from the process is immediately and visibly available as that portion of the product already written” (11).
“The medium then of written verbal language requires the establishment of systematic connections and relationships” (12).
Why is this, the most basic aspect of what we teach, not a part of the “definition” of composition? Or is it? This seems to be so utterly important that I do not understand how we can simply “argue” with being less important that lit, rather than “knowing” for a fact how important composition is to the student as well as the academy.
“Writing is connective as a process in a more subtle and perhaps more significant way, as Luria points out in what may be the most powerful paragraph of rationale ever supplied for writing as heuristic:
Written speech is bound up with the inhibition of immediate synparactical connections. It assumes a much slower, repeated mediating process of analysis and synthesis, which makes it possible not only to develop the required thought, but even to revert to its earlier stages, thus transforming the sequential chain of connections in a simultaneous, self-reviewing structure. Written speech thus represents a new and powerful instrument of though. 21 (13).
But first to explicate: writing inhibits “immediate synpractical connections.” Luria defines synpraxis as “concrete-active” situations in which language does not exist independently but as a “fragment” of an ongoing action ‘outside of which it is incomprehensible’ 22” (13).
“Finally, writing is epigenetic, with the complex evolutionary development of thought steadily and graphically visible and available throughout as a record of the journey, from jottings and notes to full discursive formulation” (14).
This woman rocks!
Sommers, Nancy. “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers” 43-55
“What is impossible in speech is revision: like the example Barthes gives revision in speech is an afterthought” (44).
“One reason, Barthes suggests, is that “there is a fundamental tie between teaching and speech.” While “writing begins at the point where speech becomes impossible.”6” The spoken word cannot be revised. The possibility of revision distinguishes the written text from speech” (45).
“Four revision operations were identified: deletion, substitution, addition, and reordering” (45).
“Lexical changes are the major revision activities of the students because economy is their goal. They are governed, like the linear model itself, by the Law of Occam’s razor that prohibits Logically needless repetition; redundancy and superfluity” (47).
“For the students, writing is translating: the thought to the page, the language of speech to the more formal language of prose, the word to its synonym” (47).
“By rewording their sentences to avoid the lexical repetition, the students solve the immediate problem, but blind themselves to problems on a textual level; although they are using different words, they are sometimes merely restating the same idea with different words” (48).
“Because students do not see revision as an activity in which they modify and develop perspectives and ideas they feel that if they know what they want to say, then there is little reason for making revisions” (48).
That’s true, but how do I explain to them that revising further is important? Why would it be?
“What they lack, however, is a set of strategies to help them identify the “something larger” that they sensed was wrong and work from there” (48).
“The students decide to stop revising when they decide that they have not violated any of the rules for revising. These rules, such as “Never begin a sentence with a conjunction” or Never end a sentence with a preposition,” are lexically cued and rigidly applied”(49).
“The experienced writers describe their primary objective when revising as finding the form or shape of their argument” (50).
“Thus experienced writers say their drafts are “not determined by time,” that rewriting is a “constant process,” that they feel as if (they) “can go on forever” (50).
“But these revision strategies are a process of more than communication: they are part of the process of discovering meaning altogether” (51).
“The musical composition—a ‘composition’ of parts—creates its ‘key’ as in an over-all structure which determines the value (meaning) of its parts. The analogy with music is readily seen in the compositions of experienced writers: both sorts of composition are based precisely on those structures experienced writers seek in their writing. It is this complicated relationship between the parts and the whole in the work of experienced writers which destroys the linear model; writing cannot develop ‘like a line’ because each addition or deletion is a reordering of the whole” (51).
“But student writers constantly struggle to bring their essays into congruence with a predefined meaning. The experienced writers to the opposite: they seek to discover (to create) meaning in the engagement with their writing, in revision. They seek to emphasize and exploit the lack of clarity, the difference of meaning, the dissonance, that writing as opposed to speech allows in the possibility of revision (52).
“The writers ask: what does my essay as a whole need for form, balance, rhythm, or communication” (52).
“It is a sense of writing as discovery—a repeated process of beginning over again, starting out new—that the students failed to have” (53).
Ong, Walter J. S. J. “The Writer’s Audience is Always Fiction”—55-76
“Over two millennia, rhetoric has been gradually extended to include writing more and more, until today, in highly technological cultures, this is its principal concern” (55).
On studies about reading. “But most of these studies, except perhaps literary criticism and linguistic studies, treat only perfunctorily, if at all, the roles imposed on the reader by a written or printed text not imposed by spoken utterance” (56).
“mock reader,” as does Henry James, whom Booth also cites, in his discussion of the way an author makes “his reader very much as he makes his character’2”(56) last para on page
Audiences whether for academia or for literary writers are imagined in the head of the writer.
“For the speaker, the audience is in front of him. For the writer, the audience is simply further away, in time or space or both” (57).
“Writing normally calls for some kind of withdrawl” (58).
Yes.
“More properly, a writer addresses readers—only, he does not quite “address” them either: he writes to or for them. The orator has before him an audience which is a true audience, a collectivity” (58).
“But ‘readership’ is not a collective noun. It is an abstraction in a way that ‘audience’ is not” (58).
“If the student kne4w what he was up against better than the teacher giving the assignment seemingly does, he might ask, ‘Who wants to know?’ (59).
If we could get a student to create his reader of someone who was passionate about whatever he was saying, someone who really wanted to know, would that make his writing better? Imagine an audience, a readership if you will, of only those who are intimately acquainted with the topic and who strive to learn every subtle nuance about the topic. I think that is something like what I do. How can I convey this audience representation to students?
“The subject [of a student’s writing] may be in-close; the use it is to be put to remains unfamiliar, strained, bizarre” (59).
On Jame Austen’s work, “The reader had to be reminded (and the narrator too) that the recipient of the story was indeed a reader—not a listener, not one of the crowd, but an individual isolated with a text” (69).
Readers do not become a “collective”. They remain individual and isolated AS THEY READ. The work of reading is isolated in the mind of the reader.
“Today the academic reader’s role is hardest to describe. Some of its complexities can be hinted at by attending to certain fictions which writers of learned articles and books generally observe and which have to do with reader status” (72).
Is this, in part, because each academic approaches the ‘learned article’ from a place which includes his own curiousity, his own knowledge, his own ability to synthesize the information, and ultimately his own reason for having chosen to read that ‘learned article’?
“No matter what pitch of frankness, directness, or authenticity he may strive for, the writer’s mask and the reader’s are less removable than those of the oral communicator and his hearer. For writing is itself an indirection. Direct communication by script is impossible. This makes writing not less but more interesting, although perhaps less noble than speech” (74).
Yes, to all of the above, with the exception of the ‘less noble’ aspect. Writers have more to contend with as far as audience is concerned. There is no automatic feedback, no subtle nuance of the voice he can use to insinuate meaning, no body language or facial expression which can be used to emphasize a point.
Kinneavy, James L. “The Basic Aims of Discourse”—129-140
“’Discourse’ here means the full text, oral or written, delivered at a specific time and place or delivered at several instances. A discourse may be a single sentence, ‘Fire,’ screamed from a hotel window, or a joke, or a sonnet, or a three-hour talk, or a tragedy, or Toynbee’s twelve volumes of A Study of History” (129).
“By aim of discourse is meant the effect that the discourse is oriented to achieve in the average listener or reader for whom it is intended” (129).
I find this all very confusing.
“The determination of the basic aims of discourse and some working agreement in this area among rhetoricians would be a landmark in the field of composition. For it is to the achievement of these aims that all our efforts as teachers of composition are directed” (130).
“It is dangerous in literature (and even more in persuasion) to assume that what the author says he is trying to do is actually what the work really accomplishes” (130).
“Discourses exist in a continuum with decreasing referential and increasing emotive affirmations. Pure reference discourse is scientific, pure emotive discourse is poetic. Any appreciable mixture of the two is rhetoric” (134).
This makes lots of sense, but I’m not sure I totally agree. There seems to be something lacking.
“Discourse dominated by subject matter (reality talked about) is called referential discourse. There are three kinds of referential discourse: exploratory, informative and scientific” (134).
“And it is equally important to distinguish a kind of discourse which asks a question (exploratory, dialectic, interrogative in some formulations) from discourse which answers it (informative) and proves the answer (scientific). Yet all three of these kinds of discourse are subject-matter or reference dominated” (134).
“as Buhler, Jakobson and Aristotle point out, discourse which focuses on eliciting a specific reation from the decoder and is dominated by this request for reaction emerges as persuasion or rhetoric” (136).
“when the language product is dominated by the clear design of the writer or speaker to discharge his emotions or achieve his own individuality or embody his personal or group aspirations in a discourse, then the discourse tends to be expressive” (136).
“the product or text or work itself may be the focus of the process as an object worthy of be appreciated in its own right. Such appreciation gives pleasure to the beholder” (136).
“At the college level, in English departments during the period immediately preceeding the present, the restriction of composition to expository writing and the reading of literary texts has had two equally dangerous consequences. First, the neglect of expressionism, as a reaction to progressive education, has stifled self-expression in the student and partially, at least, is a cause of the unorthodox and extreme forms of deviant self-expression now indulged in by college students on many campuses today” (137).
Berthoff, Ann E. “Is Teaching Still Possible? Writing, Meaning, and Higher Order Reasoning”—329-343
“(No writer ever puts in words which he or she thinks are unnecessary; learning to discover that some are is one of the chief challenges in learning to write.)” (330).
“unless and until the mind of the learner is engaged, no meaning will be made, no knowledge can be won” (330).
“linguistic structures or texts or speech acts can only be studied by interpreting the interdependencies of meanings—and by interpreting our interpretations” (331).
Researcher who does not know how to respect the language according to I.A. Richards “He thinks of it as a code and has not yet learned that it is an organ—the supreme organ of the mind’s self-ordering growth” (331).
“The failure to understand the interdependence of language and thought is consonant with the misconception of the role of instruction which, like test design, is considered by Peiaget in mechanistic terms” (335).
“if we let our practice be guided by whatever we are told has been validated by empricial research, we will get what we have got: a conception of learning as contingent on development in astraightforward, linear fashion; of development as pre-self program which is autonomous and does not require instruction; of language as words used as labels, of meanings as a one-directional, one-dimensional attribute; of the human mind as an adaptive mechanism” (336).
“Abstraction is natural, normal; it is the way we make sense of the world in perception, in dreaming, in all expressive acts, in works of art, in all imagining. Abstraction is the work of the active mind: it is what the mind does as it forms” (337).
“What we have to do is show students how to reclaim their imaginations so that “the prime agent of all human perception” can be for them a living model of what they do when they write” (337).
Triadicity is an idea whose time has come. It can help us take charge of the criticism of our assumptions about teaching because in the triadic conception of the sign, the symbol –user, the knower, the learner is integral to the process of making meaning. The curious triangle, but thus representing the mediating function of interpretation, can serve as an emblem for the pedagogy of knowing (338—339).
“Looking and looking again helps students learn to transform things into questions; they learn to see names as “titles for situations,’ as Kenneth Burke puts it. In looking and naming, looking again and re-naming, they develop perspectives and contexts, discovering how each controls the other. They are composing; they are forming; they are abstracting” (339-340).
“The ‘natural environment’ necessary to the growth and development of the discursive power of language requires dialogue” (340).
“The first step of the analysis should be to look at the character of the assignments, at the sequence of ‘tasks.’ In an interesting variation on this theme of ‘narrative good, exposition terrible,’ one researcher contrasts how well students do with persuasion and how poorly they do with argument’ (341).
“They will thus be able to ‘think abstractly’ because they will be learning how means make further meanings possible, how form finds further form. And we will, in our pedagogy of knowing, be giving our students back their language so that they can reclaim it as an instrument for controlling their becoming” (342).
Ede, Lisa and Lunsford, Andrea “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy.
“the fluid, dynamic character of rhetorical situations; and (2) the integrated, indterdependent nature of reading and writing” (78).
“The ‘addressed’ audience refers to those actual or real-life people who read a discourse, while the ‘invoked’ audience refers to the audience called up or imagined by the writer” (78).
In audience theory that focuses on the writer: “The ‘writer’ model is limited because it defines writing as either self expression or ‘fideltity to fact’ (p. 255) –epistemologically naïve assumptions which result in troubling pedagogical inconsistencies. And the ‘written product’ model, which is characterized by an emphasis on ‘certain intrinsic features[such as a] lack of comma splices and fragments’ (p.258), is challenged by the continued inability of teachers of writing (not to mention those in other professions) to agree upon the precise intrinsic features which characterize ‘good’ writing” (79).
“Neither the writer model nor the written product model pays serious attention to invention, the term used to describe those methods designed to aid in retrieving information, forming concepts, analyzing complex events, and solving certain kinds of problems’ (79).
Invention should be a major part of any writing model, shouldn’t it? It is the imagination which leads to invention and invention which leads to cutting edge ideas put into words clearly enough and passionately enough to incite others.
“Mitchell and Taylor argue that a major limitation of the ‘writer’ model is its emphasis on the self, the person writing, as the only potential judge of effective discourse” (80).
“emphasizing the creative role of readers who, they observe, ‘actively contribute to the meaning of what they read and will respond according to a complex set of expectations, preconceptions, and provocations’ (p. 251), but wrong in failing to recognize the equally essential role writers play throughout the composing process not only as creators but also as readers of their own writing” (81).
A game of weaving intellectual abilities in creating, observing, using language to communicate.
“Anthony Petrosky cautions us that ‘reading, responding, and composing are aspects of understanding, and theories that attempt to account for them outside of their interaction with each other run the serious risk of building reductive models of human understanding’5” (82).
Herbert Simons “He goes on to note that: “Between these two extremes are such groups as the following: (1) the pedestrian audience, persons who happen to pass a soap box orator. . . ; (2) the passive, occasional audience, persons who come to hear a noted lecturer in a large auditorium . . . ; (3) the active, occasional audience, persons who meet only on specific occasions but actively interact when they do meet’ (pp. 97-98)” (84).
So, a question for students might be, what KIND of audience will you have?
“Another weakness of research based on the concept of audience as invoked is that it distorts the processes of writing and reading by overemphasizing the power of the writer and undervaluing that of the reader” (88).
“It is the writer who, as writer and reader of his or her own text, one guided by a sense of purpose and by the particularities of a specific rhetorical situation, establishes the range of potential roles an audience may play. (Readers may, of course, accept or reject the role or roles the writer wishes them to adopt in responding to a text.)” (89).
“The addressed audience, the actual or intended readers of a discourse, exists outside of the text” (90).
Is it just me or are these articles becoming more boring?
Hartwell, Patrick. “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar” 205—234
“what does experimental research tell us about the value of teaching formal grammar? But seventy-five years of experimental research has for all practical purposes told us nothing” (206).
“Thus we might suspect that the grammar issue is itself embedded in larger models of the transmission of literacy, part of quite different assumptions about the teaching of composition” (208).
What is meant by grammar W. Nelson Francis, quoted by author:
‘the set of formal patterns in which the words of a language are arranged in order to convey larger meanings’ (209).
“In fact, all speakers of a language above the age of five or six know how to use its complex forms of organization with considerable skill; in this sense of the word—call it ‘Grammar 1’—they are thoroughly familiar with its grammar” (209).
‘Grammar 2”—is ‘the branch of linguistic science which is concerned with the description, analysis, and formulization of formal language patterns’ (210).
‘linguistic etiquette. This we may call ‘Grammar 3.’ The word in this sense is often coupled with a derogatory adjective: we say that the expression ‘he ain’t here’ is ‘bad grammar.’
“Criticism of this sort is based on the wholly unproven assumption that teaching Grammar 2 will improve the student’s proficiency in Grammar 1 or improve his manners in Grammar 3” (210).
Grammar 4 the grammar used in schools (211).
“Grammar 5, ‘stylistic grammar,’ defined as ‘grammatical terms used in the interest of teaching prose style’ (211).
“So Grammar 1 is eminently usable knowledge—the way we make our life through language—but it is not accessible knowledge in a profound sense, we do not know that we have it” (212).
Quoting Mark Lester, ‘there simply appears to be no correlation between a writer’s study of language and his ability to write’ (216).
Does this (the fact that we don’t learn to write through learning the mechanics) have something to do with the constant idea that using literature is the way to teach writing? We assume that canonical literature is good in style and grammatically correct—it would make sense. Could we accomplish the same thing by having students read well-written student papers, essays published and unpublished, or any number of other materials?
“Arthur S. Reber, in a classic 1967 experiment, demonstrated that mere exposure to grammatical sentences produced tacit learning: subjects who copied several grammatical sentences performed far above chance in judging the grammaticality of other letter strings” (218).
“R. Scott Baldwin and James M. Coady, studying how readers respond to punctuation signals (“psycholinguistic Approaches to a Theory of Punctuation,” Journal of Reading Behavior, 10 [1978], 363-83), conclude that conventional rules of punctuation are ‘a complete sham’ (p. 375).
“It may simply be that as hyperliterate adults we are conscious of “using rules” when we are in fact doing something else, something far more complex, accessing tacit heuristics honed by print literacy itself. We can clarify this notion by reaching for an acronym coined by technical writers to explain the readability of complex prose—COIK: “clear only if known.” The rules of Grammar 4—no, we can at this point be more honest—the incantations of Grammar 4 are COIK” (221).
We need to. . .”shuck off our hyperliterate perception of the value of formal rules, and to regain the confidence in the tacit power of unconscious knowledge that our theory of language gives us” (223).
“More general research findings suggest a clear relationship between measures of metalinguistic awareness and measures of literacy level (224).
“The analysis here suggests that the causal relationship works the other way, that it is the mastery of written language that increases one’s awareness of language as language” (224).
“Print is a complex cultural code—or better yet, a system of codes—and my bet is that regardless of instruction, one masters those codes from the top down, from pragmatic questions of voice, tone, audience, register, and rhetorical strategy, not from the bottom up, from grammar to usage to fixed forms of organization” (224).
“We might put the matter in the following terms. Writers need to develop skills at two levels. One, broadly rhetorical, involves communication in meaningful contexts (the strategies, registers, and procedures of discourse across a range of modes, audiences, contexts, and purposes). The other, broadly metalinguistic rather than linguistic, involves active manipulation of language with conscious attention to surface form” (225).
Witte, Stephen P. and Faigley, Lester “Coherence, Cohesion, and Writing Quality”
This article was extremely confusing, leaving it difficult to haul out aspects which are worth remembering, and holding onto. Should be discussed with someone. Geeze. Below, four important definitions.
Syntax: 1 a: the way in which linguistic elements (as words) are put together to form constituents (as phrases or clauses) b: the part of grammar dealing with this
Lexical: 1 : of or relating to words or the vocabulary of a language as distinguished from its grammar and construction
Taxonomy: 1: the study of the general principles of scientific classification
Semantics : the study of meanings: a: the historical and psychological study and the classification of changes in the signification of words or forms viewed as factors in linguistic development
“Cohesion defines those mechanisms that hold a text together, while coherence defines those underlying semantic relations that allow a text to be understood and used” (251).

“Cohesion, therefore, defines a text as a text. A cohesive tie ‘is a semantic relation between an element in a text and some other element that is crucial to the interpretation of it” (236).
“Halliday and Hasan call within-text cohesive ties endorphic and references to items outside the text exophoric” (236).
“For Halliday and Hasan, cohesion depends upon lexical and grammatical relationships that allow sentence sequences to be understood as connected discourse rather than as autonomous sentences” (236).
“Lexical cohesion is the predominant means of connecting sentences in discourse” (240).
“Collocation refers to lexical cohesion ‘that is achieved through the association of lexical items that regularly co-occur (p. 284)” (240).
“At the most general level of analysis, the high rated essays are much more dense in cohesion than the low-rated essays” (243).
“better writers tend to establish stronger cohesive bonds between individual T-units than do the writers of the low-rated essays” (243).
“The better writers seem to have a better command of invention skills that allow them to elaborate and extend the concepts they introduce” (244).
“Analyses of cohesion thus measure some aspects of invention skills. The low-rated essays stall frequently, repeating ideas instead of elaborating them” (246).
“One implication of the present study is that if cohesion is better understood, it can be better taught” (249).
“A great portion of the advice in composition textbooks stops at sentence boundaries. Numerous exercises teach clause and sentence structure in isolation, ignoring the textual, and the situational, considerations for using that structure” (250).
“Cohesion defines those mechanisms that hold a text together, while coherence defines those underlying semantic relations that allow a text to be understood and used” (251).
Berlin, James A. “Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories”255-270
“From this point of view the composing process is always and everywhere the same because writer, reality, reader, and language are always and everywhere the same. Differences in teaching theories, then, are mere cavils about which of these features to emphasize in the classroom” (255).
Cavil--to raise trivial and frivolous objection
“I do, however, strongly disagree with the contention that the differences in approaches to teaching writing can be explained by attending to the degree of emphasis given to universally defined elements of a universally defined writing process. The differences in these teaching approaches should instead be located in diverging definitions of the composing process itself—that is, in the way the elements that make up the process—writer, reality, audience, and language—are envisioned” (256).
“Rhetorical theories differ from each other in the way writer, reality, audience, and language are conceived—both, as separate units and in the way units relate to each other” (256).
“To teach writing is to argue for a version of reality, and the best way of knowing and communicating it--. . .in the metarhetorical realm of epistemology and linguistics” (256).
“The dismay students display about writing is, I am convinced, at least occasionally the result of teachers unconsciously offering contradictory advice about composing—guidance grounded in assumptions that simply do not square with each other” (256-7).
“Thus rhetoric is primarily concerned with the provision of inventional devices whereby the speaker may discover his or her argument, with these devices naturally falling into three categories: the rational, the emotional, and the ethical” (258).
“The aim of rhetoric is to teach how to adapt the discourse to its hearers—and here the uncomplicated correspondence of the faculties and the world is emphasized” (260).
“In the Platonic scheme, truth is not based on sensory experience since the material world is always in flux and thus unreliable. Truth is instead discovered through an internal apprehension, a private vision of a world that transcends the physical”(261).
(Platonic) “The purpose of rhetoric then becomes not the transmission of truth, but the correction of error, the removal of that which obstructs the personal apprehension of the truth” (261).
“The major tenets of theis Platonic rhetoric form the center of what are commonly called “Expressionist” textbooks. Truth is conceived as the result of a private vision that must be constantly consulted in writing” (263).
“Classical Rhetoric considers truth to be located in the rational operation of the mind, Positivist Rhetoric in the correct perception of sense impressions, and Neo-Platonic Rhetoric within the individual, attainable only through an internal apprehension. In each case knowledge is a commodity situated in a permanent location, a repository to which the individual goes to be enlightened” (264).
The problem is that “knowledge is a commodity situated in a permanent location”. I find that to be untrue as well, knowledge is a living growing thing that moves within and without the mind.
“For the New Rhetoric, knowledge is not cimply a static entity available for retrieval. Truth is dynamic and dialectical, the result of a process involving the interaction of opposing elements” (264).
True, and great way to think of it, but why do we associate these things as to developing into the “truth”?
“Young, Becker and Pike state the same notion:
‘Constantly changing, bafflingly complex, the external world is not a neat, well-ordered
Place replete with meaning, but an enigma requiring interpretation” (265).
“For the New Rhetoric truth is impossible without language since it is language that embodies and gnerates truth” (265).
“Berthoff agrees: ‘The relationship between thought and language is dialectical: ideas are conceived by language; language is generated by thought’ (p. 47)” (265).
“In the New Rhetoric the message arises out of the interaction of the writer, language, reality, and the audience. Truths are operative only within a given universe of discourse, and this universe is shaped by all of these elements, including audience” (266).
“The way we make sense of the world is to see something with respect to, in terms of, in relation to something else” (266).
“The New Rhetoric sees the writer as a creator of meaning, a shaper of reality, rather than a passive receptor of the immutably given” (267).
“Structure and language are a part of the formation of meaning, are at the center of the discovery of truth, not simply the dress of thought” (267).
“In teaching writing we are not simply offering training in a useful technical skill that is meant as a simple complement to the more important studies of other areas. We are teaching a way of experiencing the world, a way of ordering and making sense of it” (268).
Everyone teaches the process of writing, but everyone does not teach the same process. The test of one’s competence as a composition instructor, it seems to me, resides in being able to recognize and justify the version of the process being taught, complete with all of its significance for the student” (269).
It is in the fact that we all teach writing differently that we in turn get progressively differing theories of the pedagogy.
Flower, Linda and Hayes, John. “A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing” 273.
I found this article extremely difficult to focus on. The ideas behind it, I think, are quite good, but the language of the article itself, the charts, and the length were a pain. Trying to break writing down into a scientifically styled process does not work for me. Writing, like language itself, is a living breathing thing that changes in geographical, academic, and personal arenas. It grows and develops within the person applying the written language to an idea. We can try all we want to make it a “scientific process”, but in the end it will be what it is.
What drives a writer? (275-76).
“In a process model, the major units of analysis are elementary mental processes, such as the process of generating ideas” (276).
More than a process, this is a fluid mental evolution of a writer’s ideas.
“The act of writing involves three major elements which are reflected in the three units of the model: the task environment, the writer’s long-term memory, and the writing process” (277).
“The third element in our model contains writing processes themselves, specifically the basic processes of Planning, Translating, and Reviewing, which are under the control of a Monitor” (277).
“Just as a title constrains the content of a paper and a topic sentence shapes the options of a paragraph, each word in the growing text determines and limits the choices of what can come next” (279).
“In the planning process writers form an internal representation of the knowledge that will be used in writing” (280).
“Planning or the act of building this internal representation, involves a number of sub-processes. The most obvious is the act of generating ideas which includes retrieving relevant information from long-term memory.
“the sub-process of organizing takes on the job of helping the writer make meaning,” (281).
“Goal-setting is indeed a third, little-studied but major, aspect of the planning process” (281).
“The most important thing about writing goals is the fact that they are created by the writer” (281).
Yes, but then this also means that the goals are constantly changing and being recreated. The goals are also influenced by multiple sources—the writers REASON for writing (i.e., for a course); the writer’s desired outcome of the writing (i.e., money or a good grade or self-satisfaction) and multiple others. This makes “goals” a rather tenuous thing to try to study.
Moment to moment process of composing.
[Translating] “This is essentially the process of putting ideas into visible language. We have chosen the term translate for this process over other terms such as “transcribe” or “write” in order to emphasize the peculiar qualities of the task” (282).
Taking visual representations and other items from the mind and placing them into words.
[Reviewing] “Reviewing itself, may be a conscious process in which writers choose to read what they have written either as a springboard to further translating or with an eye to systematically evaluating and or/revising the text” (283).
[The Monitor] “As writers compose, they also monitor their current process and progress. The monitor functions as a writing strategist which determines when the writer moves from one process to the next” (283).
“In order to understand a writer’s goals, then, we must be sensitive to the broad range of plans, goals, and criteria that grow out of goal-directed thinking” (287).
“4. Writers create their own goals in two key ways: by generating goals and supporting sub-goals which embody a purpose; and, at times, by changing or regenerating their own top-level goals in light of what they have learned by writing” (290).
“Explore and Consolidate”
“State and Develop”
“Write and Regenerate” (291).
Rose, Mike. “Narrowing the Mind and Page: Remedial Writers and Cognitive Reduction” (345).
Whoa! Lots of psychobabble! A lesson in Piaget and other cognitivists.
“Cognitive style, broadly defined, is an “individual’s characteristic and consistent manner of processing and organizing what he [or she] sees and thinks about’ (Harre and Lamb 98)” (347).
“it is not a measure of how much people know or how well they mentally perform a task, but the manner in which they perform, their way of going about solving a problem, their style” (347).
Witkin articulated (or anylitic) vs. global perception:
“At one extreme there is a consistent tendency for experience to be global and diffuse;
The organization of the field as a whole dictates the manner in which its parts are experienced. At the other extreme there is a tendency for experience to be delineated and structured; parts of a field are experienced as discrete and the field as a whole organized” (348).
“field-dependent people are more socially oriented, more responsive to a myriad of information, etc. while field-independent people tend to be individualistic, interested in abstract subject matter and so on” (352).
“We in the West are drawn to the idea of consistency in personality (from Renaissance humors to Jungian types0, and that attraction, I think, compels us to seek out similar, interrelated consistencies in cognition” (552).
“All current theories of cognition that I’m familiar with posit that human beings bring coherence to behavior by abstracting general principles from experiences, by interpreting and structuring what they see and do” (353).
“But attempts to comprehend or generate writing—what is perceived or produced as logical or metaphoric or coherent or textured—involve a stunning range of competencies: from letter recognition to syntactic fluency to an understanding of discourse structure and genre (see, e.g. Gardner and Winner 376-80). And such a range, according toeverything we know, involves the whole brain in ways that defy the broad claims of the hemisphericity theorists (360).
“suffice it to say that a large number of studies has demonstrated that brief training sessions can have dramatic results on performance” (364).
“Much problem-solving and, I suspect, the reasoning involved in the production of most kinds of writing rely not only on abstract logical operations, but, as well, on the rich interplay of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic associations, feelings, metaphor, social perception, the matching of mental representations of past experience with new experience, and so on. And writing as the whole span of rhetorical theory makes clear, is deeply embedded in the particulars of the human situation” (367).
“The operative verb here is “transformed.” Writing transforms human cognition” (367).
“But it appears to be historically, culturally, and economically reductive—and politically naïve—to view literacy as embodying an automatic transformational power” (371).
“theories end up leveling rather than elaborating individual differences in cognition. At best, people are placed along slots on a single continuum; at worst they are split into mutually exclusive camps—with one camp clearly having cognitive and social privilege over the other” (276).
“the theories inadvertently reflect cultural stereotypes that should themselves, be the subject of our investigation. At least since Plato, we in the West have separated heart from head, and in one powerful manifestation of that split we contrast rational thought with emotional sensibility, intellectual acuity with social awareness—and we often link the analytical vs. holistic opposition to the polarities” (377).
I wish I had someone to discuss this with!!!!!!
Bizell, Patricia. “Cognition, Convention, and Certainty: What We Need to Know about Writing” (387).
Of the articles relating to cognitive writing, I find Bizzell’s the most useful, and the most thoughtful. “Science-a-tizing” writing may answer some questions, but it leaves much to be desired. Writing is a synthesis of many things.
“This profound effect on students is themore to be expected because of the terms in which the ‘writing problem’ has appeared to us—terms that suggest that students’ thinking needs remediation as much as their writing. Seeing the problem this way makes it very clear that our teaching task is not only to convey information but also to transform students’ whole world view” (387).
“We now see the ‘writing problem’ as a thinking problem primarily because we used to take our students’ thinking for granted” (387).
“Composition specialists generally agree about some fundamental elements in the development of language and thought. We agree that the normal human individual posses innate mental capacities to learn a language and to assemble complex conceptual structures” (388).
“One theoretical camp sees writing as primarily inner-directed, and so is more interested in the structure of language-learning and thinking processes in their earliest state, prior to social influence. The other main theoretical camp sees writing as primarily outer-directed, and so is more interested in the social processes whereby language-learning and thinking capacities are shaped and used in particular communities” (388).
“Inner-directed theorists further claim, in a similar paradox, that the universal, fundamental structures of thought and language can be taught” (390).
“In contrast, outer-directed theorists believe that universal, fundamental structures can’t be taught: thinking and language use can never occur free of social context that conditions them “(390).
“Outer directed theorists would argue that we have no reason to believe, and no convincing way to determine, that our students can’t think or use language in complex ways. It’s just that they can’t think or use language in the ways we want them to” (392).
Discourse analysis goes beyond audience analysis because what is most significant about members of a discourse community is not their personal preferences, prejudices, and so on, but rather the expectations they share by virtue of belonging to that particular community” (392).
“We need to explain the cognitive and the social factors in writing development, and even more important the relationship between them” (392).
“On the other hand, we find out eventually [referring to Flower] that ‘monitor’ means simply ‘the writer’s mind making decisions.’ Borrowing a term from programming masks the question of why the writer makes certain decisions” (395).
“’Putting meaning into words,’ then, cannot be seen as a mechanical process of finding the right size containers. Instead, with a form of discourse we take on a whole range of possibilities for making meaning” (397).
“Finding words is not a separate process from setting goals. It is setting goals, because finding words is always a matter of aligning onself with a particular discourse community” (398).
“Producing text within a discourse community then, cannot take place unless the writer can define her goals in terms of the community’s interpretive conventions” (398).
“Hence, although Flower and Hayes acknowledge the existence of discourse conventions, they fail to see conventions’ generative power, which is to say that their notion of conventions does not include the interpretive function for which I have been arguing” (400).
“I think these students’ difficulties with goal-setting are better understood in terms of their unfamiliarity with the academic discourse community, combined perhaps, with such limited experience outside their native discourse communities that they are unaware that there is such a thing as a discourse community with conventions to be mastered” (401).
“To help poor writers, then, we need to explain that their writing takes place within a community, and to explain what the community’s conventions are” (402).
Been doing that.
“The cognitive psychology approach cuts of writing-as-problem-solving from the context of a discourse community precisely because one model is sought (Steinberg’s caveat notwithstanding)” (403).
“As I have been arguing, then, both the inner-directed and the outer-directed theoretical schools will have to contribute to a synthesis capable of providing a comprehensive new agenda for composition studies” (405).
“Invocation of certainty, then, performs the rhetorical function of invocation of the Deity” (407).
Writing is an uncertain process no matter how hard we try to make it one that can be spoken to by rules of teaching.
“We are better off, then, with a disciplinary theory that encourages examination of consequences” (407).
“we should see our answers to the question of what we need to know about writing in the light of a new humanistic synthesis” (409).
“Composition studies should focus upon practice within interpretive communities—exactly how conventions work in the world and how they are transmitted. If the work of these disciplines continues to converge, a new synthesis will emerge that revivifies rhetoric as the central discipline of human intellectual endeavor. In view of such a synthesis, the project to make composition studies merely scientific looks obsolete” (409).
“let us emphasize not only discourse but also community” (409).
Bruffee, Kenneth A. “Collaborative Learning and the ‘Conversation of Mankind’”
Too much talk for too little info.
“collaborative learning is discussed sometimes as a process that constitutes fields or disciplines of study and sometimes as a pedagogical tool that “works” in teaching composition and literature” (416).
Collaborate learning began to interest American college folk in the 1980’s, but term coined in the 50’s and 60’s (416).
“The help colleges offered, in the main, were tutoring and counseling programs staffed by graduate students and other professionals. These programs failed because undergraduates refused to use them” (417).
“one type of collaborative learning, peer criticism (also called peer evaluation), students learn to describe the organizational structure of a peer’s paper, paraphrase it, and comment both on what seems well done and what the author might do to improve the work” (418).
“human conversation takes place within us as well as among us” (419).
“any effort to understand how we think requires us to understand the nature of conversation, and any effort to understand conversation requires us to understand the nature of community life that generates and maintains conversations” (421). Huh? I don’t think I agree.
“Richard Rorty argues . . .that to understand any kind of knowledge we must understand what he calls the social justification of belief. That is, we must understand how knowledge is established and maintained in the ‘normal discourse’ of communities of knowledgeable peers” (421).
“our task must involve engaging students in conversation among themselves at as many points in both the writing and the reading process as possible, and that we should contrive to ensure that students conversation about what they read and write is similar in as many ways as possible to the way we would like them eventually to read and write” (422).
“A community of knowledgeable peers is a group of people who accept, and whose work is guided by, the same paradigms and the same code of values and assumptions” (423).
“What students do when working collaboratively on their writing is not write or edit or, least of all, read proof. What they do is converse. They talk about the subject and about the assignment” (425).
“To learn is to work collaboratively to establish and maintain knowledge among a community of knowledgeable peers through the process that Richard Rorty calls ‘socially justifying belief’”(427).
I LOVE ABNORMAL DISCOURSE!!!!!!!!!
“Abnormal discourse, Rorty says, ‘is what happens when someone joins in the discourse who is ignorant of the conventions governing that discourse ‘ or who sets them aside’” (429).
“’the product of abnormal discourse can be anything from nonsense to intellectual revolution’”(429).
“Thus collaborative learning can help students joint the established knowledge communities of academic studies, business, and the professions. But it should also help students learn something else. They should learn, Trimbur says, ‘something about how this social transition takes place, how it involves crises of identity and authority, how students can begin to generate a transitional language to bridge the gap between communities’ (private correspondence)” (430).
[Teachers are] “Responsible to both sets of values, therefore, we must perform as conservators and agents of change, as custodians of prevailing community values and as agents of social transition and reacculturation” (432).
Myers, Greg. “Reality, Consensus, and Reform in the Rhetoric of Composition Teaching”
“Schools not only teach academic knowledge, they teach work according to schedule, acceptance of authority, and competition among individuals and between groups” (439).
[about Leonard] “But the most important influence on him and an important influence still on composition theory, was the work of John Dewey. It was from Dewey that Leonard took his central theme—and the theme of most importance to us in trying to criticize his work—the idea of the school as an image of society” (441).
“The danger is that the teacher has merely embodied his or her authority in the more effective guise of class consensus. This guided consensus has a power of individual students that a teacher can not have alone” (442).
So, we take authoritative “pressure” off the students, authority in the guise of instructor, and place them under peer pressure. Geeze.
“By treating the ‘real world’ as the bedrock of our teaching we perpetuate the idea that reality is something outside us and beyond our efforts to change it” (445).
“If what we think of as facts are determined by our ideological framework, the facts cannot themselves get us beyond that framework” (445).
“His demand that development in school lead to the world of work and community responsibility, while it frees the school from the empty formalism of lectures, drills, and theme topics, ironically makes it more subservient to ideology” (446).
“For Leonard, as for Dewey, to criticize the subordination of education to the needs of business and government is to fail to face reality” (446).
“All these associations, whatever the pedagogical value of the materials they propose, beg the question of just how we come to define a real world, and accept that world as something given” (447).
“I have questions about the way these reformers define themselves against the dubious practices of traditional teachers, who are often at a lower level of the hierarchy of educational prestige” (447).
“Thus in each generation it is the reformers who chair committees, write articles, and edit the journals; by these standards it is the reformers who are the establishment and the opponents they label traditionalists are the outsiders” (448).
“What is needed to break this circle is more understanding of the conditions under which people teach, and the ideological frameworks within which they think” (448).
“For Elbow, as for Leonard, power over real audiences comes from an immediate connection with reality gained through a breaking down of stifling conventions” (449).
“The problem with this call for direct experience of reality is that, as with Leonard, one must ask to which reality is one admitted” (449).
EXCELLENT QUESTION!!!!!!!!
“analysis of the social conditions of our writing” (450). Good idea.
“He refers often to his own internal struggles in writing the book. I would argue, though, that its rhetorical power comes not from these struggles, but from its place in a group of texts” (450).
“My point is that both Elbow and I write within discourses developed in social processes, and that his account ignores these processes” (450).
“If we turn a blind eye to social factors we are likely merely to perpetuate the provision of different kinds of knowledge for the rich and the poor” (452).
“This stance requires a sort of doubleness: an awareness that one’s course is part of an ideological structure that keeps people from thinking about their situation, but also a belief that one can resist this structure and help students to criticize it” (454).
I like the way this guy thinks, but boy is he a boring writer.
Truimbur, John. “Consensus and Difference in Collaborative Learning” (461).
“The aim of collaborative learning its advocates hold, is to reach consensus through an expanding conversations” (461).
“These critics of collaborative learning want to rescue the sovereignty and autonomy of the individual from what Johnson calls collaborative learning’s “peer indoctrination classes.’” (462).
“Consensus, I will argue, can be a powerful instrument for students to generate differences, to identify the systems of authority that organize these differences, and to transform the relations of power that determine who may speak and what counts as a meaningful statement” (462).
[about Bruffee] “Their effort to save the individual from the group is based on an unhelpful and unnecessary polarization of the individual and society” (463).
“What Bruffee takes from Dewey is a strong appreciation of the generativity of group life and its promise for classroom teaching” (463).
“If anything, it is through the social interaction of shared activity that individuals realize their own power to take control of their situation by collaborating with others” (463).
“Dewey’s educational pragmatism recasts the fear that consensus will ineveitably lead to conformity as a fear of group life itself” (463).
“Consensus does not necessarily violate the individual but instead can enable individuals to empower each other through social activity” (464).
“Knowledge, in this account, is not the result of the confrontation of the individual mind with reality but of the conversation that organizes the available means we have at any given time to talk about reality” (465).
“Rorty acknowledges, for example, the tendency of discourse to normalize itself and to block the flow of conversation by posing a “canonical vocabulary” (467).
This makes a lot of sense to me, those participating in the conversation can be deterred by that same “canonical vocabulary” by means of not having access to that vocabulary. We limit participation in our conversations when we “over jargon” them with terms that are not readily available to all.
“The ‘power of strangeness’ in abnormal discourse ‘to take us out of our old selves’ and ‘to make us into new beings’ . . .simply reaffirms our solidarity with the conversation” (468).
“Instead, abnormal discourse represents the result at any given time of the set of power relations that organizes normal discourse: the acts of permission and prohibition, of incorporation and exclusion that institute the structure and practices of discourse communities” (469).
“In the account I’m suggesting, it also refers to the relations of power that determine what falls within the current consensus and what is assigned the status of dissent. Abnormal discourse, from this perspective is neither as romantic or as pragmatic as Rorty makes it out to be. Rather it offers a way to analyze the strategic moves by which discourse communities legitimize their own conversation by marginalizing others. It becomes a critical term to describe the conflict among discourses and collective wills in the heterogeneous conversation in contemporary public life” (469).
“Bruffee uses the term vernacular to call attention to the plurality of voices that constitute our verbal thought. The intersecting vernaculars that we experience contending for our attention and social allegiance, however, are not just plural. They are also organized in hierarchical relations of power” (469).
“Myers argues, correctly I think, that Bruffee’s use of consensus risks accepting the current production and distribution of knowledge and discourse as unproblematical and given” (470).
[Wells says] “They can learn, that is, not how consensus is achieved through collaborative negotiation but rather how differences in interest produce conflicts that may in fact block communication and prohibit the development of consensus” (471).
“If one of the goals of collaborative learning is to replace the traditional hierarchical relations of teaching and learning with the practices of participatory democracy, we must acknowledge that one of the functions of the professions and the modern university has been to specialize and to remove knowledge from public discourse and decision-making, to reduce it to a matter of expertise and technique” (472).
Rather than opening communications with the outside world, we are closing off by continuing to narrowly define ourselves so that one must have an especial knowledge of the field in order to discuss it!
“Collaborative learning, that is, seeks to locate authority in neither the text nor the reader but in what Stanley fish calls interpretive communities” (474).
“In contrast, I think we need to begin collaborative classes by asking why interpretation has become the unquestioned goal of literary studies and what other kinds of readings thereby have been excluded and devalued” (474).
“One of the benefits of emphasizing the dissensus that surrounds the act of reading is that it poses consensus not as the goal of the conversation but rather as a critical measure to help students identify the structures of power that inhibit communication among readers (and between teachers and students) by authorizing certain styles of reading while excluding others” (475).
“We need to see consensus, I think, not as an agreement that reconciles differences through an ideal conversation but rather as the desire of humans to live and work together with differences” (476).
This was good, thought provoking.
Bizzell, Patricia. “’Contact Zones’ and English Studies” (481).
“I suggest that we address this problem by employing Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of the ‘contact zone’:
I use this term to refer to social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today” (34)” (482).
F”Focusing on a contact zone as a way of organizing literary study would mean attempting to include all material relevant to the struggles on on there” (482).
[New England 1600—1800 as contact zone] “We would be working with categories that treated multiculturalism as a defining feature, that assumed the richest literary treasures could be found in situations in which different histories, lifeways, and languages are trying to communicate and deal with the unequal power distribution among them” (484).
“this approach fully integrates composition and rhetoric into literary studies. Studying texts as they respond to contact zone conditions is studying them rhetorically, studying them as efforts of rhetoric” (484).
I’m not sure I agree with this! One could approach this rhetorically, but it would certainly not be necessary or a given.
“It would also mean reorganizing graduate study and professional scholarly work in ways I hardly dare to suggest. I suppose that one would no longer become a specialist in American literature, a “Shakespeare man,” or a “compositionist.” Rather,people’s areas of focus would be determined by the kinds of rhetorical problems in which they were interested” (485).
Lu, Min-Zahn. “Professing Multiculturalism: The Politics of Style in the Contact Zone”
Would someone please tell me what are we teaching? I feel as though I’m caught in an argument that consists of people arguing for the total education of the student in anything even slightly related to the humanities in a composition course. I want my students to write. I want them to write well, and to recognize that “style” of writing changes as does “style” of dress. We put forth a different image for different occasions. Tuxes at a formal party, academic talk for academic papers. Jeans and a T-shirt for hanging out and IMing for chatting with friends. My students should, at those opportunities which arise, be introduced to acceptance of our multi-cultural world, but I would rather teach writing. Why isn’t writing—the kind of writing students learn in comp I, important to anyone? Exploration of creative writing, exploration of blogging, etc., could be taken in other places!
“My second concern has to do with a division many of us feel between our role as composition teachers and the role we play as students, teachers, or scholars in other, supposedly more central areas of English Studies” (488).
OF COURSE THERE IS A DIVISION!!!!!! Geeze!
“This exchange between an indignant Stein and an embarrassed “young man” reveals some of the criteria used by “educated America” when dealing with an idiosyncratic style” (489).
“Most of the readings I assign for these classes call attention to writers’ need and right to contest the unifying force of hegemonic discourses, and thus make Dreiser’s submission to the authority of the “better educated” appear dated and passive” (490).
“Why is it that in spite of our developing ability to acknowledge the political need and right of “real” writers to experiment with “style,” we continue to cling to the belief that such a need and right does not belong to student writers”?” (491).
It isn’t a matter of what “belongs” to student writers, it is a matter of time! How do you expect me to teach a student to a) write in a way his biology teacher can understand, b) master the art of clarity, c) explore different styles, d)use his own language. CRAP! One Person, One TERM!
Where does style belong? What is style? Aren’t we teaching one of many, even sometimes two?
“I do so by asking students to explore the full range of choices and options, including those excluded by the conventions of academic discourses” (492).
Could we please decide WHAT it is we are ATTEMPTING to teach?
“At this point, a “contact zone” would begin to take shape with three conflicting positions on the meanings of “can” and “able to”; the position of a speaker of idiomatic English, the position of the dictionary and the position of a “foreign” student writer” (496).
This is good, I like the idea of a “contact zone” being the difference between writers and their ways of writing. I want to do something with it, but I’m not sure what.
“Therefore, learning to become comfortable in making blunders is central to this type of teaching. In fact, there is no better way to teach students the importance of negotiation than by allowing them the opportunity to watch a teacher work her way through a chancy and volatile dialogue” (501).


Rose, Mike “The Language of Exclusion: Writing Instruction at the University” (547).
“Writing is a skill or a tool rather than a discipline.” [conclusions drawn from snippets of conversation about writing by writing instructors.]
“I realize how caught up we all are in a political-semantic web that restricts the way we think about the place of writing in the academy” (548).
Aren’t we though! Instead of talking about the act of writing, we talk about where writing stands in the university, the levels of our students, and other things that have no direct impact on the teaching of writing.
“And the movements of the last four decades that have most influenced the teaching of writing—life adjustment, liberal studies, and writing as process—have each, in their very different ways, placed writing pedagogy in the context of broad concerns: personal development and adjustment, a rhetorical-literary tradition, the psychology of composing” (549).
“they found a Latin and Greed-influenced school grammar that was primarily a set of prescriptions for conducting socially acceptable discourse, a list of the arcane do’s and don’ts of usage for the ever-increasing numbers of children—many from lower classes and immigrant groups—entering the educational system” (550).
So, today it seems we fight strongly against that “prescription” and want to work toward a writing that does not use “rules”. However, those rules are still necessary, to some extent, in order to create some kind of order out of chaos. Can we give our students a “fluidity” within our teaching which accepts rules and breaks them at the same time?
“It gives us a method—a putatively objective one—to the strong desire of our society to maintain correct language use” (552).
I wonder if the word “correct” is the right one. Yes, we desire a uniform use of language, but is it therefore because we desire “correctness” or because we desire understanding, clarity, etc. I find it difficult to believe that a written language in which there is no uniformity would be able to be understood by all. I academia we have articles that inform, to inform as many as possible we attempt to hold onto a certain use of language. That language could be IMing for all I care, but the uniformity seems necessary.
“To view writing as a skill in the university context reduces the possibility of perceiving it as a complex ability that is continually developing as one engages in new tasks with new materials for new audiences” (554).
Yes, and to not view it as at least a skill, in part, would be to believe you either can or you can’t.
“So, to reduce writing to second-class intellectual status is to influence the way faculty, students, and society view the teaching of writing” (555). YES!!
“What is remedial for a school like UCLA might well be standard for other state or community colleges and what is considered standard during one era might well be tagged remedial in the next” (556).
“The model we advance must honor the cognitive and emotional and situational dimensions of language, be psycholinguistic as well as literary and rhetorical in its focus, and aid us in understanding what we can observe as well as what we can only infer” (565).
While I understand and agree with this, I also think it is a little bit much! Too much for one human to attempt while teaching others.
“Consider, though, the message that would be sent to the schools and to the society at large if the university embraced- not just financially but conceptually—the teaching of writing; if we gave it full status, championed its rich relationship with inquiry, insisted on the importance of craft and grace, incorporated it into the heart of our currciculum” (567).
DEFINITELY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Royster, Jacqueline Jones. “When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own” (611).
“It seems to me that the agreement for inquiry and discovery needs to be deliberately reciprocal” (615).
“We need to get over our tendencies to be too possessive and to resist locking ourselves into the tunnels of our own visions and direct experience” (615).
Whether that be respecting students as individuals, what methods we use to teach, tolerance of others, in anything to do with the idea of teaching this would be good.
Talking about those who write about African American lit?
“However, like W.E.B. Du Bois, I’ve chosen not to be distracted or consumed by my rage at voyeurs, tourists, and trespassers, but to look at what I can do” (616).
“How do we negotiate the privilege of interpretation?” (618).
I find this annoying, anger making. Why should there be any privilege to interpretation? I have read, and attempted to interpret Shakespeare, but I’m not a man and never (or do not remember having) lived in his time. To me this is selfish and ridiculous. What am I missing?
Maybe I just lost the point of this article?
Bartholomae, David. “Inventing the University” (623).
“The student has to learn to speak our language, to speak as we do, to try on the peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse of our community” (623).
I need to remember this.
“he must dare to speak it or to carry off the bluff, since speaking and writing will most certainly be required long before the skill is ‘learned’” (624).
Our students need to know that part of what we do in “discourse” is simply assuming the language of the community.
“It is very hard for them to take on the role—the voice, the persona—of an authority whose authority is rooted in scholarship, analysis, or research. They slip, then, into a more immediately available and realizable of authority, the voice of a teacher giving a lesson or the voice of a parent lecturing at the dinner table (625).
“A ‘commonplace,’ then, is a culturally or institutionally authorized concept or statement that carries with it its own necessary elaboration” (626).
“Expert writers. . ., can better imagine how a reader will respond to a text and can transform or restructure what they have to say around a goal shared with a reader” (627).
“What these assignments fail to address is the central problem of academic writing, where a student must assume the right of speaking to someone who knows more about baseball or “To His Coy Mistress” than the student does, a reader for whom the general commonplaces and the readily available utterances about a subject are inadequate” (629).
“It is possible, however, to the the problem as (perhaps simultaneously) a problem in the way subjects are located in a field of discourse” (629).
“A writer does not write (and this is Barthe’s famous paradox) but is, himself, written by the language available to him” (631).
“The student, in effect, has to assume privilege without having any” (632).
“It is true, I think, that education has failed to involve students in scholarly projects, projects that allow students to act as though they were colleagues in an academic enterprise” (632).
Students must realize they can place themselves in an academic discussion.
“Our students, however, must have a place to begin. They cannot sit through lectures and read textbooks and, as a consequence, write a sociologists or write literary criticism. There must be steps along the way. Some of the steps will be marked by drafts and revisions” (645).
How would I go about trying to introduce students to academic language?
“The challenge to researchers, it seems to me, is to turn their attention again to products, to student writing, since the drama in a student’s essay, as he or she struggles with and against the languages of our contemporary life, is as intense and telling as the drama of an essay’s mental preparation or physical production” (649).
Miller, Richard E. “The Arts of Complicity: Pragmatism and the Culture of Schooling” (655).
“Citing Freire is, thus, a way of establishing one’s credentials in the field, of showing one’s true colors” (655).
“That there are problems involved in adopting Freire’s pedagogy –originally developed to address the needs of the inlliterate and dispossessed peoples of Brazil—to teach undergraduates in the United States is now commonly recognized . . .” (657)
“why is it that this image of the teacher as liberator of the oppressed, upon which Freire’s pedagogy relies so heavily, has had such a perduring appeal? . . .”what can we learn by problematizing our community’s most cherished self-representation” (657).
“Freire insisted from the beginning that the problem-posing approach had to ‘be forged with, not for, the oppressed. . .’(657).
“In effect, then, Freire, the educator, is saying that it is those who have been most successful in school who are the ones most likely to be deeply wedded to the ideology that stands in the way of communal action” (660).
“what puzzles me is why this vision of teaching and the rhetoric that surrounds it should appeal to teachers, particularly teachers of reading and writing. Why, as a profession, would we be drawn to an approach that depicts professionals in such a negative light?” (660).
Paraphrasing Scott—“The higher one climbs the social ladder, the more one must, in all phases of one’s life, ascribe to the dominanat ideology, the more confined are those spaces for voicing one’s doubts about that ideology the more one must see oneself as always on stage” (663).
So, the point being that we are as locked into ideology by priveledge and education as by the oppressivness that overwhelms the poor and the oppressed. I think there is something to this.
“by noting that students occupy a subordinate position in the educational system, I mean only to suggest that they, too, have their ‘hidden transcripts’ where they store their reservations about what is happening to them in the classroom” (664).
Good point.
“The classroom is, of course, one such place where the labor of others—both teachers and students—is constrained to meet the demands of outside forces. It is to that compromised space that we must now, turn our attention” (666).
“The classroom is, of course, one such place where the labor of others—both teachers and students—is constrained to meet the demands of outside forces. It is to that compromised space that we must now turn our attention” (666).
“Were I a polemicist, I might say what I was after is a pragmatic pedagogy, one grounded in “the arts of complicity, duplicity, and compromise,” the very same arts that are deployed, with such enervating effect, by the host of social, bureaucratic, and corporate institutions that govern our lives” (670).
This article is murky, hard to grasp, I’m not sure at all where this guy is coming from!
Brodkey, Linda. “On the Subjects of Class and Gender in ‘The Literacy Letters’”
“What Foucault and other poststructuralists have been arguing the last fifteen or twenty years is considerably easier to state than to act on: we are at once constituted and unified as subjects in language and discourse” (677).
“The question then is how to read what students write. And at issue is the unquestioned power of a pedagogical authority that insists that teachers concentrate on form at the expense of content” (678).
“Those who occupy the best subject positions a discourse has to offer would have a vested interest in maintaining the illusion of speaking rather than being spoken by discourse. Postermodern rhetoric would being by assuming that all discourses warrant variable subject positions ranging from mostly satisfying to mostly unsatisfying for those individuals named by them” (679).
“Discursive resistance requires opportunities for resistance. Altering an institutionalized discourse probably requires an unremitting negative critique of its ideology, a critique that is most often carried out in the academy by attempting to replace a particular theory (e.g., of science or art of education or law) with another” (679).