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Back to the Future of Composition

2009-04-10T10:36:00.000-07:00

As we read The Rhetoric of Cool as our final text in composition theory this semester, it seems too easy to say that composition studies will begin focusing on aspects of new media in the future. Jeff Rice is thinking futuristically when he asserts that we should focus on understanding how new media "generate new rhetorical moves" (7), but I'm more pessimistic about our ability as a discipline to actually implement these types of new media compositions in the first-year composition classroom for several reasons:

1) The current model of education doesn't lend itself to pedagogies of new media compositions. One frustration that I've continuously felt in developing new pedagogies for my writing courses is the fact that I have to assess the writing that students produce. It's hard to escape the unproductive banking metaphor of education that Paolo Freire opposes when students are literally paying money for their education to receive a grade in a class. The transactional model prevents me from introducing ambiguous assignments because it is extremely difficult to provide a definitive rubric for assessment. Although I don't see much of a difference with the arbitrary nature of how we currently assess writing, the more precise pedagogy of thesis-driven writing is necessary for assessment. Unless this is changed at the institutional level, I don't see much room for progress on the pedagogical level.

2) Most prefer permanence over change. As we read in The Rhetoric of Cool, the opportunity to develop new theories of writing in response to new media was largely ignored in 1963. Rice also discusses how current textbooks only include hermeneutic approaches to new media without many suggestions for composing new media projects. Although I see a great opportunity for using Rice's pedagogical suggestions for assigning new media compositions, I don't see a majority of first-year writing teachers implementing new media assignments for a majority of their course assignments. As a business/advertising major for my undergrad degree, I feel more prepared to compose using the rhetoric of cool, but I think the domain of first-year writing courses should include instruction in new media composing that doesn't include advertising messages. Unfortunately, I don't see this as a realistic goal for all first-year courses.

However, I do feel optimistic about the future of my own first-year and second-year composition courses. I feel like I'm leaving this course with an instability of knowledge in composition theory ... which is a good thing. What I mean is that in all of the readings and theories I have encountered this semester, not one of them represents me fully as a composition teacher and theorist. This has allowed me to approach theory using Peter Elbow's "Believing Game," in which I've explored new theories by trying to fully embrace them. Although some of our readings will ultimately be minimized in my teaching, I am able to create a pedagogy of cool that samples some of the greatest hits in my view of composition theory.

As for the future of my blog; naturally I will be abandoning it for the next month or so. My capacity for writing will be tested as I begin working on 3 major projects, which are all due over the next few weeks. However, I will probably begin writing in my blog next semester for some of my other classes. The prospect of endless "freestyle" blog entries is too hard to resist.

When I wake up in the morning...

2009-04-03T14:23:00.000-07:00

In thinking about my response to this week's readings, I was struck by what I was doing in 1994 while the New London Group composed their "programmatic manifesto" for a pedagogy of multiliteracies. As a young 8th grader at Jefferson Middle School, my favorite TV characters, Zack Morris and Kelly Kapowski, finally got married in Saved by the Bell's final episode set in Las Vegas. It was the end of an era. Although English was perpetually my least favorite course in school, I was always interested in discovering the new stories that Saved by the Bell had to offer. Much like Zack Morris, I would pretend to pause time with a "timeout" and address the audience of my life. Writing was strictly a scholastic function for me, and any organic communication between me and my middle school buddies was strictly oral.

When I fast forward to 2009, I'm amazed by the multiplicity of communication venues I participate in, and how each requires it's own literacy. The type of literacy I would need for writing a 4Cs conference proposal is vastly different than the literacy that I need to talk some serious trash in my Yahoo fantasy baseball league. The exigencies are different, the genres are different, but the exposure to all of these rhetorical situations have given me a flexibility to create a strong message for the correct moment. The question I continue to ponder after reading the New London Group article is "What is the domain of the first-year writing course when using this approach to teaching writing?" Should we teach students to write effective trash talk in their fantasy baseball leagues? I'm not sure that's the case.

It's seems that in some ways the New London Group anticipated a proliferation of new communication channels, but I'm not sure they anticipated to what extent. New literacies are continuously arising out of these new channels of communication, and it's difficult to know which ones to teach, which ones to peripherally discuss, and which ones to exclude from the first-year composition course. I guess it's hard not to be overwhelmed. However, I find A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies to be liberating for my own approach to teaching. Instead of just teaching a single institutional literacy, I'm able to tap into the literacies that my students are already familiar with.

In many ways, it seems vital to use the conventions of these "fringe" literacies to encourage transferability in our writing courses. We should try to read the rhetorical situations in our own class to see what literacies would be most familiar to our students so that we can start from what they know. For instance, we could poll our students at the beginning of the semester to see what kind of composing they do on a daily basis, whether it's instant messaging or visual composing. From this information, we can understand what types of composing we could transfer into other genres of writing to introduce the literacies of power to our students. The goal would not be to instill the discourse of power in our students or to teach the fringe discourses but to teach the flexibility between composing a Saved by the Bell message and composing a 4Cs proposal. I know I would've responded to that teaching style in middle school.

Charles Bazerman @ 2008 4Cs

2009-03-28T09:10:00.000-07:00

In the case that we invoke Charles Bazerman in class this week and you observe that I am trying to conceal my laughter, I wanted to post a video that explains why. In my first and only encounter with the man at the 2008 4Cs, I watched him dance throughout the New Orleans Hilton behind a popular jazz band. The events in this particular clip occurred just before he gave his opening remarks as the 2008 convention chair.

I'm glad I could finally share that with you, and hopefully, this satisfies Wendy's demands that I always include images in my blog postings. :)

My original post for this week appears below.

My Teaching Philosophy

2009-03-28T08:35:00.001-07:00

As a first year student ten years ago, I anxiously entered my first-year composition course, lacking confidence in my writing. I walked straight to the back of the classroom and sat in the desk furthest from the front. Above all, I was nervous about the inevitability of making a bad grade. Yet when my teacher started to introduce the course, my anxieties slowly began to ease, particularly when he described the daily journal assignment. Although the journal didn't count heavily toward the weight of the final grade, I could tell that my teacher was most excited about this assignment. After describing the requirements for this assignment, he pulled out a ragged wire-bound notebook held together by duct tape and read a sample entry from his own journal. After he finished reading, he showed us the scribbled handwriting and doodles on the criss-crossed graph paper of his journal and encouraged us to take ownership of our own journal. Most importantly, he told us that the journal would only count as a completion grade.

To this day, I give credit to that class for creating the moment when the academic world was demystified in my life. No longer did I feel like I had to put everything down on paper exactly how it should appear in the final draft. In keeping with the format of standardized testing, my high school English teachers had drilled the idea of the highly structured five-paragraph essay into my entire identity as a writer. The last thing I needed was more instruction on how to write in a formal tone. So, I learned to embrace the messiness of prewriting and drafting that occurred in my journals that semester and carried it on throughout my academic career. To that end, I try to encourage my own students to embrace the messiness in their academic lives because often the best ideas emerge from the mess.

In order to encourage this messy exploration, I have adapted my first-year composition teacher's journal assignment to my own classroom. The journal is a place my students can use as a writing space that is free from evaluative and critical comments. This is the space where I foster my students' messes by prompting them with a question or thought provoking idea that allows them to practice the craft of writing without the nagging instinct to automatically revise. I want my students to learn to free themselves from structure while trying to initially get their ideas down on the page.

Furthermore, I envision my classroom as a place for peers to come together and learn from each other. In writing center theory, a common strategy used by tutors is to ask students to demonstrate unclear writing by verbally describing what their meaning is to another peer. In the same way, I allow for class discussion that gives students the opportunity to orally articulate their views of the subject. Specifically, I want my students to have a chance to describe the mess they make in their journals in order to make sense of some of the new ideas they are exploring. Eventually, these ideas will either have to be organized or abandoned, and I want my students to have time to interact with their peers in a group setting because, ultimately, writing is a social act.

In addition to giving my students a creative space for writing, I also try to encourage them to make connections with their larger academic world. To facilitate this, I allow my students to choose their own topics when writing an assigned essay. Realistically, I understand that students will often have difficulty with finding interesting topics and writing them in unfamiliar genres, so the brainstorming activities in class will help students discover the issues and genres in other aspects of their academic and personal lives. Once students are aware of the value of writing in connection with other aspects of academia, they are more likely to use the skills they learn in my class throughout the rest of their lives.

I walked out of my first-year composition class with a C in the course. However, I learned to become a more creative and confident writer because I was introduced to a type of writing that was not evaluated. My teacher demonstrated an enthusiasm for writing that helped me to embrace the messiness wholeheartedly. Accordingly, I want to be that teacher in the lives of each and every one of my students.

An Open Letter to Dr. Raul Sanchez

2009-03-13T09:58:00.000-07:00

Dear Raul,

I just finished reading your book The Function of Theory in Composition Studies for my composition theory course at TCU, and I have to say, I'm intrigued by your argument. As a teacher of first-year composition, I've often resisted teaching critical/cultural studies in my classroom because it wasn't focused on teaching writing. In order to achieve a more writing-centered classroom, I've often adopted expressivist theories of teaching writing, yet your distinction between writing-as-generative and writing as representative has persuaded me to question this position. Although expressivist theories of writing encourage students to generate meanings which are separate from socially-constructed knowledge, you argue that "writing-as-generation is a more complex version of writing-as-representation" (94). In this sense, the writer becomes the subject for which their writing represents. Thus, the writing process is once again an interpretation of subjects (in this case, the self).

Having finished reading your book 10 minutes ago, I feel quite dissatisfied, as you anticipated. On the one hand, I'm quite persuaded by your assertion that "the function of theory in composition studies is to provide generalized accounts of what writing is and how it works" (1). As a budding composition theorist with almost no background in literature, I have felt at odds with some of the hermeneutical theories in composition. Although I believe that teaching interpretation in the composition classroom can be beneficial to model socially-approved writing, I believe that interpretation itself should not be the focus of a first-year writing course. On the other hand, it is unclear to me how you propose that we theorize about writing without the subject. What differentiates this approach to theorizing writing from current-traditional rhetoric?

I am most intrigued by your use of a quote by Kenneth Burke at the end of your book to explain this paradox between a theory and a grammar of writing. In conceding that a "way of seeing is also a way of not seeing" (100), you assert that your perspective has limitations for composition theory. Furthermore, your deconstruction of my view that writing is representation of a subject has left a gap in my understanding of your way of seeing theory in composition. If writing doesn't represent a subject, what is its purpose? I understand that you are arguing for the separation of a theory of writing and a theory of subject in composition studies, but does this require a return to the empirical research that cognitive theorists focused on? I guess my point is, you deconstruct the subject-centered way of seeing without detailing your way of seeing. Maybe this is my own misunderstanding, but for me, you've raised more questions than you've answered.

Although I had difficulty understanding how you propose to theorize writing without a subject, I did find your distinctions between writing-as-generation and writing-as-representation to be quite helpful. Some expressivist theories of writing focus on inquiry which often leads to the discovery of new ideas. This inquiry enacts the process of writing-as-generation, leading to a detachment from socially-constructed knowledge in order to form new knowledge through writing. Even though this doesn't separate subject from writing theory, it seems that this would be an interesting direction to take the subject-centered debate.

Raul, though I admire your willingness to argue for a different direction in composition theory, let's be honest; your proposal to change the debate on subject-centered writing is a radical perspective that might not be realistic. I think it would be more productive to shift the debate away from the hermeneutical model of interpretation-focused theories to more generative-focused theories.

Thanks for sharing your perspective,

Joel

Journal Review: Rhetoric Society Quarterly

2009-03-06T10:14:00.000-08:00

Mission

Rhetoric Society Quarterly (RSQ) is published in January, April, July, and October for the Rhetoric Society of America (RSA). Readers of RSQ are rhetoricians working in the fields of communication, composition, English, history, criticism, and pedagogy. RSQ aims to publish work that advances a shared understanding of a multi-disciplinary field.

Topics of Interest

RSQ is primarily interested in publishing manuscripts in rhetorical studies that focus on theory, history, criticism, and pedagogy.

Editorial Board

The current editor for RSQ is Carolyn Rae Miller, North Carolina University. Other noteworthy scholars on the editorial board:

Barry Brummett, University of Texas:

Brummett has published several books on the rhetoric of style and pop culture. He is also the editor of two volumes of Landmark Essays on Kenneth Burke.

Andrea Lunsford, Stanford University

Aside from publishing the often used textbook (Everything's an Argument) and the equally ubiquitous handbook (The Everyday Writer) for first-year composition, Lunsford's academic interests include women's rhetoric, collaborative writing, and issues of audience in the composition classroom.

Barbara Warnick, University of Pittsburgh

Warnick has published extensively on the rhetoric of new media with such titles as Rhetoric Online: Persuasion and Politics on the World Wide Web, Online Ethos, and Critical Literacy in a Digital Era.

David Zarefsky, Northwestern University

As a professor of Communication Studies, Zarefsky's interests are focused more on the oral tradition of rhetoric. He has published several textbooks on public speaking and the fundamentals of argument.

Submission Policies

Manuscripts should be 8,000-10,000 words or longer and should not bear the identification of the author except on the title page. Author should include a 150 word abstract. All citations should be in MLA format with in-text citations and a works cited page. Submissions are accepted electronically and should be in Microsoft Word document format (.doc or .docx) or Rich Text Format (.rtf).

Recent Representative Articles

Professor Burke's "Bennington Project" by Scott Wibble; June 2008

In this rhetorical history, Wibble uses Kenneth Burke's teaching style at Bennington College to contextualize Burke's rhetorical theories and critical methods published in A Grammar of Motives, A Rhetoric of Motives, The Rhetoric of Religion, and Language as Symbolic Action. Using primary research from the Kenneth Burke Papers collection at Pennsylvania State University as well as former student interviews, Wibble tries to link Burke's teaching practices to some of the theories he developed in print. Specifically, Wibble discusses the link between Burke's insistence that students should use his methods of indexing and charting "in their daily lives to examine ... the often unexpressed assumptions that propelled so much human activity toward competition and, ultimately, physical and social destruction" (262). Wibble's research attempts to illuminate the often confusing theories of Kenneth Burke to gain insight into his motivations for encouraging a dramatic theory of interpretation.

Black Jewish Identity Conflict: A Divided Universal Audience and the Impact of Dissociative Disruption by Janice W. Fernheimer; January 2009

Fernheimer claims that Chaim Perelman's conceptions of "dissociation" and the "universal audience" developed in The New Rhetoric are limited in the case of the black jewish community. Specifically, her argument outlines how dissociation and the universal audience are ineffective tools for "the expansion of existing identities, communicating across particular audiences, and resolving conflict when identity is the issue at stake" (46). Fernheimer goes on to develop a new concept of "dissociative disruption" as a tool that aids in describing and solving the conflict in identity for black jews. Fernheimer first identifies a situation that modern rhetoric hasn't addressed--in her case black jews and the concepts of "dissociation" and the "universal audience"--and then proposes a new theory to aid in identifying how this rhetorical situation could be better understood.

Authentic Voices?

2009-02-27T11:40:00.000-08:00

As I begin to develop my syllabus for my class next semester (ENGL 20803), I am concerned with the ways I can challenge my students to write in ways that are unfamiliar to them. Over the past 3 years, I've taught many diverse students that have either spoken English as a second language or use a different "voice" to communicate in their primary discourse community, yet I've found that these students are often the most skilled at appropriating the "voice" of standard academic English. Because these students realize that they are being asked to communicate in a style of writing that is much different than their own, they are more diligent in working to try to fit their message to a formal style of writing.

However, the majority of my past students have been native English speakers who innately use a style of writing that is already similar to formal English. These students are usually less likely to revise their initial writing because they don't have to appropriate a foreign style of writing. So, as I consider different assignments for my class, I want to know how I can encourage students that are already familiar with the style of formal English to engage in cross-boundary discourse. Will challenging them to appropriate other styles help these students be more diligent in their construction of formal English?

In When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own, Jacqueline Jones Royster describes her ability to communicate in a variety of voices. However, after a presentation in which she spoke using the "voice" of the characters of the novel, a colleague approached her afterward and complemented her "willingness to share with us your 'authentic' voice!" (618). Although she withheld her true sentiments in that moment, Royster writes that she claims "all [her] voices as [her] own very much authentic voices" (619). Royster no longer describes these voices as appropriations of other "voices." Instead, these very much diverse styles of writing and speaking are as much a part of her as the "voice" of her initial discourse community. Royster's ability to seamlessly shift between different voices of writing that she considers her own allows her to communicate within different discourse communities. Shouldn't writers who predominately use the discourse of power strive to understand and develop the ability to communicate in marginalized discourse communities as well?

In The Arts of Complicity, Richard E. Miller examines students' willingness to defer their own "private transcript" to the dominant "public transcript." Although he uses these terms suggested by James Scott to define the discourse of the classroom, these categories define the different "voices" of the classroom and suggest that the "public transcript" is the one that often prevails. Instead of privileging the dominant form of discourse, Miller proposes that teachers should provide "students with the opportunity to speak, read, and write in a wider range of discursive contexts than is available to them" (674) in the current academic culture. Even though Miller's suggestion doesn't tear down the wall between the private and public transcripts like Paulo Freire argued for, it does urge students to develop authentic "voices" for multiple discursive communities.

So, I'm back to my syllabus for next year, and I'm stuck. In my view, it's important to encourage this multiplicity of authentic voice, but I'm having trouble finding pragmatic ways to make this a reality in the classroom. I suppose I could develop a smaller scale assignment that would ask my students to write the same journal entry in two different styles, but I would love to find a more substantial way to incorporate this into my class. Any ideas?

Theorizing My Writing: Expressivism and Process

2009-02-21T08:47:00.000-08:00

As I stare at my computer monitor, perched in my office chair, the cursor from the blank screen taunts me. Today is not unusual from other Saturday afternoons since I started writing this blog, but for some reason, I'm having extra difficulty trying to theorize my own writing from our readings so far. In my master's program at ACU, I was highly influenced by the expressivist theories of Peter Elbow and James Moffett, yet it seems that the expressivist movement has fallen out of favor with current composition pedagogy. In my first year of college, I used to dread opening a Microsoft Word document because I knew that a blank screen would appear with a blinking cursor, waiting impatiently for my writing. Yet, I found the expressivist strategies of freewriting and tuning out audience helped me to overcome this crippling writer's block. Even for this blog entry, I began by freewriting in my journal for awhile until I found an adequate direction.

In order to mold this raw journal writing into something more substantial, I've looked to the process theories of Donald Murray and Nancy Sommers. Naturally, I've absorbed these theories over the years through writing courses that were informed by process, but these theories helped to emphasize my need to frame my freewriting in the context of a more advanced discourse community. From the earliest stages of invention and prewriting, I usually attempt to be more messy with my writing. This helps me to unload the ideas in my head onto the blank sheet of paper or empty Microsoft Word document without having to deal with the encroaching audience over my shoulder. My drafting and revision stages are more concerned with trying to fit this writing into a more acceptable form within a discourse community.

In Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers, Nancy Sommers helps to explain how my own writing process has changed over the past ten years. I wouldn't say that I've become a better writer, but my view that "revision is a recursive process" (52) has changed my writing significantly. No longer am I writing a first draft and disguising it as a completed piece of writing. I have, instead, become quite meticulous in crafting my final product into a piece of writing that fits the situation for the right audience. So, even though my writing product has improved substantially over the past 10 years, its more a result of my attention to revision in the writing process.

Throughout the revision process, I've learned to pay specific attention to the rhetorical situation in which my writing will enter. To that end, James Kinneavy's The Basic Aims of Discourse has helped me to anticipate the many different types of forms that my writing could possibly take. To Kinneavy, "discourses exist in a continuum with decreasing referential and increasing emotive affirmations" (133). This awareness of the spectrum of the aims of discourse can help me to shape my writing into a specific form for a specific rhetorical situation or audience.

As I wind down this final draft of my blog, I can't help but realize that my writing process has become scrupulous. Over a span of several hours, I have prewritten, drafted, and revised this post while reading and making brownies in between it all.

Over the past ten years, it's taken me longer to complete a writing task, but I've learned to spend some time in the trenches with my revision process to help my writing become more coherent. Speaking of brownies, I think I'll go eat my reward for finishing this entry. Mmmm, brownies.

Inquiry: A prerequisite for invention

2009-02-13T06:51:00.000-08:00

In Composition Is Not Rhetoric, Sharon Crowley claims that the required first-year composition course no longer has anything to do with rhetoric, citing, primarily, the lack of focus on invention. Crowley distinguishes the rhetorical conception of invention as a place for "the systematic discovery and investigation of the available arguments in a given situation," while the modern composition course isolates invention as a means to quickly find a topic to use in the writing process. Furthermore, Crowley notes that rhetorical discourse should intervene in "social and civic discursive networks" and that modern composition has, instead, focused more of its attention on the personal and expressive nature of writing.

As a "scandalously low-paid and contingently-hired faculty" member at both Abilene Christian University (ACU) and Texas Christian University (TCU), I have taught first-year composition for two vastly different programs. I am unable to speak to Crowley's wider criticism of all composition programs, but, perhaps, I can offer some insight into this issue through the lens of the two programs for which I have taught. I would like to focus on two questions going forward: Is Crowley correct in her assertion that first-year composition neglects rhetoric and is it necessary to infuse first-year composition courses with the art of rhetoric?

The first-year composition course at ACU focuses on writing as an argument with one analysis essay and three argumentative essays: classical argument, evaluative argument, and proposal argument. Throughout the curriculum, students focus their arguments on issues of social and civic importance with the aim that these arguments should convince an actual audience. However, the students are not required to find an actual audience, and due to the lack of focus on invention, most arguments fall into the groove of other arguments that have been averred before. In this situation, I believe Crowely's critique to be accurate of my specific situation. If the students had been assigned an actual audience for whom they would create their argument, they would have been more prepared to develop writing that would "intervene" in social and civic matters, yet without a more substantial invention stage, the curriculum would have elicited some of the same tired arguments because of the lack of research. After this first-year argument-based course, ACU's second-year composition course is a literature-based course.

In contrast, the common syllabus at TCU emphasizes writing as inquiry with a focus on personal writing. Students write a personal essay, discovery essay, ethnographic essay, and argumentative essay. Although invention is sometimes minimized to help students find a topic for their essay, the first three essays emphasize writing as a discovery process in which students systematically discover and investigate all the aspects of their topic. The process of inquiry in this curriculum teaches students the art of invention in Crowley's view -- "the systematic discovery and investigation of the available arguments in a given situation" -- by using personal and expressive writing instead of argumentative writing. After an emphasis on inquiry, students create an argumentative essay that should engage social or civic discursive networks. TCU's second-year composition course is, then, an argument-based curriculum.

Although TCU's model of first-year composition focuses on writing as inquiry, I'm not sure that I can equate the personal model of inquiry with the rhetorical model of invention. Writing as inquiry teaches students to open themselves up to different interpretations and understandings of their own personal experience, but it certainly doesn't show them how to find all available arguments in social and civic networks. In this sense, Crowley is correct in her assertion that rhetoric no longer exists in first-year composition at ACU and TCU. However, a first-year composition course that focuses on writing as inquiry may be just as valuable as a prerequisite for a second-year course in rhetoric. Teaching students to discover and investigate matters of personal interests will help these students to shift into an invention-centered rhetoric course like the one Crowley conceptualizes. Therefore, an ideal model would be for a true rhetoric course to build upon an inquiry-focused first-year course.

Process and the Oral Tradition

2009-02-07T10:20:00.000-08:00

I really struggled with the blog prompt this week:

"The idea of writing as process is no longer new to us, but it was once paradigm-shifting. Considering the 2500-year history of writing instruction that we've just read: what seems really new about the process movement? and where does it seem to return to, borrow from, and/or adapt from composition theories of the past?"

The Breuch article and the post process movement was a bit more intriguing to me than making connections with the process movement and the history of writing instruction. Specifically, I was interested in the larger question this poses about foundational and anti-foundational pedagogies. Does a foundational pedagogy of writing instruction eventually lead to an emphasis on mastery? If so, how can the process pedagogy be utilized within the classroom while de-emphasizing mastery? Okay, now that I've gotten that out of my system, I'll attempt to address the prompt as best I can.

After reading A Short History of Writing Instruction by James J. Murphy, I was struck by the speed in which the written tradition of rhetoric replaced the oral tradition of rhetoric. After writing technologies became more efficient and more accessible, oral discourse was eventually transcribed on wax tablets, paper, or computer screens instead of composed through the ancient tradition of memory. Once memory was replaced by these more concrete spaces for knowledge, some composition theorists in the 20th century began to articulate their views that writing should be a process.

The writing process, as articulated by Donald Murray, Janet Emig, Sondra Perl and Nancy Sommers, doesn't seem all that different from some classical pedagogy in the oral tradition. For instance, Murray claims that the writing process is composed of 3 stages: prewriting, writing, and rewriting. Similarly, in On Invention, Cicero describes a process for composing oral arguments: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. Murray claims that prewriting "usually takes about 85% of the writer's time" and "the writer focuses on that subject, spots an audience, [and] chooses a form which may carry his subject to his audience" (4).

Throughout Murray's conception of prewriting, the author invents a subject and arranges that subject in the form and style that will best communicate to the audience. Naturally, Murray excludes memory and delivery from his conception of the writing process because they are not necessary. However, the innovation and affordability of writing technologies allows Murray and other theorists to propose that writers should pay attention to these 3 parts of rhetoric within each stage of the writing process.

It seems that the process movement borrows heavily from ancient rhetoric in order to adapt the art of communication for new technologies. In using the first 3 parts of rhetoric, the process movement's main contribution to communication is the ability to revisit a draft. My question about the process movement is to inquire into the value of this recursive form of developing writing. Would it be more productive to emphasize our students to create a strong and nearly flawless first draft by focusing individually on arrangement and then style? Does this also lead to a harmful emphasis on mastery?

Imitatio and Originality?: How imitation can change the hegemonic discourse.

2009-01-30T10:17:00.000-08:00

Forgive me for borrowing from my presentation in my Latina/o Literature seminar this week, but I find the the early writing history of William Carlos Williams instrumental in illustrating my point about imitation and originality. Williams was born as the son of an English immigrant father and a Puerto Rican immigrant mother in Rutherford, NJ. As a high school student, Williams filled the pages of his journals with poetry in the style of both Yeats and Whitman, yet he was often secretive about his Whitmanesque verse. Yeats represented the eloquence of romantic poetry that Williams thought he was expected to write while Whitman represented a new free form of poetry that was independent of the British tradition.

Much like the education model of writing instruction in the Renaissance, Williams imitated the styles and forms of his favorite writers in his early education. However, he was more passionate about the poetry in the style of Whitman because the form represented an originality that was purely American. After writing the poem entitled The Wanderer, in which the old poet's self floats down the river and the new poet's self becomes the wanderer, Williams fully embraced this new and wholly original style of writing in an attempt to find a form of prose and poetry that can be identified as the original, American style.

The example of William Carlos Williams helps to illustrate the importance of imitation in the early stages of every writer. Before Williams was able to create a form of writing that was new and original, it was necessary for him to understand the conventions of writing that were dominant in his time. Once he was able to anticipate his audience's expectations in form, he was able to shift their perspective to his new and original form by using some conventions of the old form. Otherwise, Williams wouldn't have been able to develop this original form of American literature while, at the same time, expect that his audience would understand his intentions.

Kenneth Burke discusses this idea at length in his 1933 book entitled Permanence and Change. He explores theories of change by first determining the dominant orientation or weltanschauung (traditional forms of literature could be one type of orientation). Once a person understands an audience's orientation, changes to that orientation can be initiated through several of Burke's theories. One such theory is to use an orientation's opposite to find a graded series in between two dialectically-opposite orientations. For instance, the opposite of hot is cold. However, in between being hot and cold, a person is warm, lukewarm, tepid, room-temperature, cool, and chilly. In order to change a person's orientation from hot to cold, you begin first with shifting to the next step on the graded series: warm. What I'm trying to get at here is that in order for a person to develop new and original forms of writing, they must first begin by understanding the current conventional forms of writing through such activities as imitation.

With the modern composition classroom becoming more focused on diversity and originality, imitation becomes even more necessary. Unlike writing instruction in the Renaissance, modern students are coming from increasingly diverse backgrounds as education becomes more accessible. Yet first-year composition courses should not focus on imitation as a means to destroying diversity but instead to teach the forms of writing of the hegemonic culture. The goal in this is not to squash originality but to familiarize students with the dominant form or orientation of writing in order for them to initiate effective change in form. Much like Williams, imitation will help a diverse group of students develop an original voice while knowing how to use the conventions of the dominant form of writing to help shift their intended audience to accept their new forms of originality. As a teacher, if I do not help my students learn to write in the dominant form of writing, I am helping to reinforce the power that the current hegemonic form holds over their originality.

Habitual Learning: Roman Writing Instruction

2009-01-24T13:08:00.000-08:00

Over this past week, my peers and I have been reading the first half of James J. Murphy's "A Short History of Writing Instruction: From Ancient Greece to Modern America." In an attempt to apply ancient histories of writing instruction to my own teaching pedagogy, I intend to give a brief summary of early Roman writing instruction. Through this summary, I hope to inquire into my own teaching strategies to find out a) the origin of my current strategies and b) strategies in Roman writing instruction that I might be able to adapt as my own.

As in ancient Greek writing instruction, early Roman writing instruction emphasized the progymnasmata, a set of graded exercises that helped to build one rhetorical skill on top of another until the students achieved a comprehensive knowledge of writing and rhetoric. However, the Roman version of the progymnasmata was more structured than its Greek predecessor. The Roman's emphasized the progymnasmata in order to develop and instill habitual learning rather than to emphasize each graded exercise. Hermogenes of Tarsus wrote one of the more popular Greek textbooks used in everyday Roman instruction, and it describes the key components in the progymnasmata: fable, tales, chreia, proverb, refutation and confirmation, commonplace, encomium, comparison, impersonation, description, thesis, and laws. These exercises were categorized into Aristotle's three types of rhetoric: deliberative, judicial, and epideictic. Ultimately, the Roman students were required to participate in a declamation, a fictitious speech that was designed to exhibit all areas of knowledge learned from the exercises within the progymnasmata.

If I were required to design a curriculum of writing as a WPA, the progymnasmata might be an instructive technique to help insure that every student within a writing program would be exposed to different writing challenges. However, as an instructor, I choose to focus on the individual exercises within the progymnasmata. The commonplace exercise is one that I emphasize often within my own pedagogy. At the beginning of the semester, I encourage my students to write a personal essay in order to illuminate a commonplace topic from their own perspective. Within this personal essay, students focus on describing something that is seemingly well-known while providing a critical and subjective reflection to give their audience a fresh perspective on the matter.

Impersonation is one exercise in the progymnasmata that I am unfamiliar with in my own pedagogy. It would be instructive to have my students compose an imaginary dialogue with the authors of the works we are reading in class. One way I intend to emphasize this exercise in my own teaching is through peer response journals. Within peer response journals, students write a response to the author in their journal. Then, students pass their journal to a peer and give a textual response to what has been written. Instead of passing their journals to peers for a response, students would imagine the author's response and script an imaginary dialogue.

What I appreciate most about the Roman approach to writing instruction is their willingness to create a curriculum that attempts to establish strong writing and speaking habits. Every exercise in the Roman approach focuses on developing the habit of knowing what to say at the right time. Although I want to encourage my students to be creative, a lot of what it means to be a good writer/speaker is the ability to write/speak the words that the audience wants to read/hear. There may be many ways to achieve the right tone for each situation, but, ultimately, it is necessary develop this intuition as a writer/speaker through habit in order to frame creativity through the lens of the rhetorical situation. It is this type of habitual learning that I hope to emphasize with my students while also encouraging them to be creative with how they choose to address the writing situation.

Why Writing is Still a Mystery to Me

2009-01-19T14:02:00.001-08:00

As an 8-year-old boy, I learned to write in my most formative years by imitating the style of Donald J. Sobol in his "Encyclopedia Brown: Boy Detective" book series. In these short stories, Leroy "Encyclopedia" Brown is paid to solve a mystery in each chapter of the book. Every mystery is filled with small clues that Encyclopedia tries to logically put together in order to solve the mystery. After each short story, Encyclopedia proclaimed that he understood what happened in the mystery and the reader would turn to the last few pages of the book in order to find out the logical solution. I worked hard as a young writer to insert these seemingly minor hints or clues in my own writing so that I could surprise my audience at the end of each story. I wasn't always trying to write in the mystery genre, but I wanted my audience to be impressed by the logical skills of my characters.

However, after continuously challenging myself to be a creative writer in elementary and middle school, my high school English teachers demanded that my writing be more formal and structural. They introduced me to the 5-paragraph essay and showed me how to incorporate sources to bolster my own writing. Many of the goals for my four years of high school English tried to encourage students to score well on the state and AP standardized writing tests. I was taught how to craft a superior essay for an unknown, evaluative audience (which, I acknowledge, was an important rhetorical skill to possess), but as a result, I lacked a desire and enjoyment for writing that was present in my elementary and middle school years. Although I was skilled at appropriating the style and language of academic prose, I wasn't quite sure how to wield it in a way that was my own; I lacked a unique voice in my writing.

Consequently, I entered my first-year college composition course as a well-structured but highly insecure writer. Within the first day of class, my professor described a journal assignment for the course by pulling out his own tattered wire-bound journal and read a sample entry of his own writing. I was inspired by the way he shared a piece of his writing that was so personal, but, initially, I was unable to create that type of writing for my own journal. My first few entries were often composed of copied musical lyrics and poetry from my favorite contemporary artists. However, I quickly began to take over the journal entries, playfully developing different writing styles and forms. In the journal, I was finally a given a venue for my inner thoughts and creativity to spill upon the page. I was able to recapture the playful writing style from my early days as a young and burgeoning mystery writer. Throughout the course, my professor collected my journal to make sure to make sure it contained the correct number of entries and graded it for completion. I hadn't participated in unevaluated writing since I was a young boy, and I was beginning to enjoy writing again.

Through this journaling process, I was able to develop my own writing voice while drawing on my previous formal writing instruction to create a unique academic writing persona. Since that first-year composition course, I have filled many sketchbooks with different types of writing, and my current journal continues to dialectically inform much of my academic writing here at TCU. As a graduate instructor, I hope to impress upon my students a similar approach to their own academic writing. While I think that it is important to be able to write in a formal and academic style, it is equally important to have a unique and distinct voice within academia.