I couldn’t figure out how to post to Immy’s blog…

…so here’s my post:

 It’s funny that Emig was reporting on students being unable to move out of the prescripted five-paragraph essay into different forms that fit their inquiry more authentically. 35 years later, I’m still telling my students to think beyond that. When will this end?

I do see the good in the 5-paragraph form for teaching students how to write a constructive analysis or argument. It shows them that they must be able to extend an argument and have sufficient background material. I wonder if it is just a step in growing as a writer – overcoming that comfortable model – that all writers will have to face in the later grades in high school and in college. Is that just now a natural progression?

I also wonder why boys are more hesitant to be reflexive in their writing. Is it because the assignment or the person handing out the assignment doesn’t strike them? Or is it in their nature as boys? Nature or nurture? I know there’s lots written about the literacy practices of boys, but a thought…

The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders / Chapter 3

Emig, Janet. The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders. Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English, 1971.

Chapter 3: The Composing Process: Mode of Analysis

In this chapter, Emig presents both an outline and a narrative that describe the “elements, moemnts and stages within the composing process” of the 8 12th-grade subjects she chose to study. Here are some of the highlights:

1. All writing emerges from a stimulus. There are different kinds of stimuli (what prompts a student to write). That stimulus affects the kind of writing that emerges, specifically the mode and the tenor of it. (tenor = level of formality) Emig adopts and adapts R.N. Wilson’s categories for the 4 types of experiences – or fields of discourse - that cause students to write: encounters with the natural world, human interrelations, the self, and “encounters with induced environments or artifacts” – aka school assignments. Also, Emig updates Britton, Rosen, and Martin’s characterization of expressive student writing as either poetic (acting as spectator) and communicative (acting as participant) into reflexive and extensive writing. Reflexive asks “what does this experience mean?” and extensive asks, “How, because of this experience, do I interact with my environment?” (37) These 2 categories aren’t as cut-and-dry as “poetic” and “communicative” – activeness and passivity bleed into one another.
2. The way a student receives an assignment is based on the registers of the assignment (the field, mode, and tenor of discourse), how the assignment is worded, how the student understands the assignment, the student’s ability to perform and complete the assignment, and the student’s motivation to compete the assignmnet. We must keep in mind that students might have differing degrees of success in writing in all the different modes.
3. Prewriting is everything that happens between when a student recieves a stimulus to write and begins to the think about it to when they first start to write. It happens once.
4. Planning is all the work the student does – both in writing and out loud – to compose a piece. It can happen numerous times. The more parameters a teacher gives for an assignment, the less prewriting and planning a student does. However, the teacher has to walk a fine line from constricting a student and overwhelming them with an open book of ambiguity when it comes to a writing assignment.
5. Interveners and Interventions – during the process of writing, events and people will affect the student and thus affect the piece he or she is writing.
6. Starting – “when the id…breaks through the controls usually exerted by the ego and super-ego.” (40) This stage is easily observed, but the first thing a writer writes isn’t necessarily the first line of the finished piece.
7. Composing – Emig points out that composing out loud is different from composing on the page. Composing out loud requires more anticipation than planning (students do not see the piece as a whole before starting, so they can only anticipate a section of it.) When composing, students accept or abandon elements of discourse in their piece or choose to synthesize or substitute a new element with other elements already in the piece. Composing also gives birth to a certain style, characterized by certain grammatical and syntatic structures that repeat (in writing) and a tempo (in composing out loud.)
8. Reformulation – this does not happen in out-loud compositions, but in writing, students reformulate their peices by correcting mechanical and style errors, revising bigger sections for more global reasons (organization, point of view), and/or entirely rewriting the entire piece (or almost all of it).
9. Stopping – pretty self-explanatory. The writer stops writing. Emig says that the writer stops most easily when the deadline coincides with the writer’s belief that he or she has successfully written the piece.
10. Contemplation of Product – the writer looks back on his or her work to evaluate its effectiveness.
11. Seeming Teacher Influence on Piece – how did the teacher affect this piece? This is determined not only by the teacher’s evaluation of the piece. To answer this, you need to listen to student’s own statements about the piece they wrote, look at how they are writing the piece, listen to how students describe the writing instruction they are receiving, and look at how teachers are actually teaching composition in the classroom.

The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders / Chapter 2

Emig, Janet. The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders. Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English, 1971.

Chapter 2: The Design of the Study

This chapter, as noted, is how the study on the writing processes of 12th graders was designed. Here are the nitpicky details on the students who participated:

• 8 students participated:
  • 5 girls, 3 boys
  • 6 white, 1 African-American, 1 Asian-American
• They came from 6 high schools around Chicago:
  • 1 all-white, upper-class suburban school
  • 1 ethnically and economically diverse school north of the city, well-known as one of the nation’s best
  • 1 ethnically diverse, lower-middle-class suburban school
  • 1 ethnically and economically diverse Chicago city school
  • 1 “ghetto” Chicago city school that was almost exclusively black
  • 1 private school affiliated with a local university
• All the students were considered to be average to above-average in intelligence
• 6 of the students were recognized for their above-average ability as writers; the other 2 were noticed for their interest in writing (not necessarily their aptitude for it.)

 So, basically, a group of above-average students from a slew of different backgrounds in and around Chicago.

Here’s what the students did during the study:

• Session 1: had a 20-minute conversation with the researcher, then composed out loud and wrote down a small piece in whatever mode or form they wanted. This was tape-recorded and observed. Then, the students had to write for homework a composition about a person, event, or idea that interests them.
• Session 2: another out-loud composition. Then, the students was interviewed about their planning/prewriting techniques that they did to write the previous week’s homework.
• Session 3: the students gave a “writing autobiography” – they talked about all the writing and reading related to writing that they had done in their lives so far. 6 students brought in writing samples.
• Session 4: the students had to write an imaginative piece of writing between Session 3 and 4 (7-10 days) and keep track of the prewriting and composing strategies they used while writing the piece. This description was tape-recorded.

 Why was the study conceived this way? So that students would write both “reflexive and extensive” modes. It didn’t work out that way. The first 2 “compose aloud” sessions and the first homework composition were supposed to elicit personal, reflexive writing, but the writing that was produced was not reflective or “engaged.”

And, only 6 of the 8 subjects did the last assignment (recording their composing process for writing the piece of poetry or fiction.)

Office Hours = Blogging Time

I have 31 essays staring at me and sitting on my desk, but I’m not grading them – yet. I figure I’ll be happier if I spend this next 30 minutes checking up on our conversations. It will make me feel human, unlike grading, which will make me feel like a monstrous marking machine.

See you on your blogs!

What happens just offstage

I’m going to try a new format for doing my notes. I like the predictable pattern of Collin’s suggested notetaking method, but I didn’t feel like his categories fit the way I think about my notes. I’m going to now try a synthesis of Dianna’s abstracting (that she showed us in Louise’s class) and some of Collin’s categories. Here it goes:

Sue Ellen Holbrook. “Women’s Work: The Feminizing of Composition.” Rhetoric Review 9.2 (1991): 201-229.

Holbrook argues that women and the field of composition have a parallel, unappreciated, and undervalued status in the modern academy. She cites that even within the field of composition and rhetoric, women are underrepresented in the scholarly journals and in more senior academic and administrative roles, such as writing program administrators or full, tenured professors. She has numerous tables in her appendices, including charts that show which professions are comprised by a majority of men or women, tables that show the wage discrepencies between male and female professors, and tables that show the percentage of women who write certain types of books in the field of rhetoric and composition (i.e. basic writing texts, workbooks, theory, etc.) Composition and rhetoric is a female-dominated field, but even still, it is being largely shaped on the disciplinary level by men. This discrepency needs to be addressed in order for women to achieve social and economic equality in the field and the academy.

Quotes:

“Saturated by women practitioners, focused on pedagogy, allied wiht education departments and school teaching, conceived as having a “service” and elentary place in the curriculum, and pervaded by paraprofessionalism, composition has become women’s work. And so it will remain – disproportionaltely the work of women and work of lesser value – as long as these conditions remain.” (211)

Top 5

Hartzog, Carol P. “Composition and the Academy: A Preliminary Report on AAU Writing Programs.” ADE Bulletin (Spring 1986), 49-52.

Hewlett, Sylvia Ann. A Lesser Life: The Myth of Women’s Liberation in America. New York: William Morrow, 1986.

Hummer, Patricia M. The Decade of Elusive Promise: Professional Women in the United States, 1920-1930. UMI Research P, 1976.

Morlock, Laura. “Discipline Variation in the Status of Academic Women.” Academic Women on the Move. Ed. Alice S. Rossi and Ann Calderwood. New York: Russell Sage, 1973. 255-312.

Weaver, Barbara. “Bibliography of Writing Textbooks.” WPA: Writing Program Administration 9 (Spring 1986): n.pag.

Jacqueline Jones Royster and Jean C. Williams. “History in the Spaces Left: African American Presence and Narratives of Composition Studies.” CCC 50.4 (1999): 563-584.

Royster and Williams claim that African-Americans have been pigeon holed in the field of composition and rhetoric and therefore, African American students and scholars are misrepresented, their problems and needs are generalized, and their scholarship and pedagogy go ignored. They blame the primacy of the published histories of rhetoric and composition (Berlin, Brereton, Kitzhauer, etc.) for perpetuating this marginalization, pointing out that because these texts were published first, they form a sort of accepted canon in the field, making perspectives not discussed in them (such as African-American rhetorics) the “other.” They challenge scholars to look for rhetorical practices both in the places that these first historians of the field have shed light on and the other, perhaps more non-traditional places that were cast into the shadows by these authors.

 Quotes:

“‘Official’ narratives set the agenda for how and whether other narratives can operate with consequence, and they also set hte measures of universality – that is, the terms by which we assign generality, validity, reliability, credibility, significance, authority, and so forth.” (580)

“These same narratives have simultaneously directed our analytical gaze selectively, casting, therefore, both light and shadow across the historical terrain.” (581)

“We can ask, instead, basic questions, such as: For whom is this claim true? For whom is it not true? What else is happening? What are the operational conditions? In the interest of the larger enterprises of knowledge making and public policy making, we are encouraged by such strategies to resist primacy and to operate in a more generative and less offensive manner.” (581)

“Composition histories show that when we consistently ignore, peripheralize, or reference rather than address non-officialized experiences, inadequate images continue to prevail and actually become increasingly resilient in supporting the mythologies and negative consequences for African American students and faculty.” (582)

Question:

How will focused attention on the work of African-American composition scholars and rhetoricians help African-American university students?

Top Five

Berlin, James A. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987.

Cook, William. “Writing in the Spaces Left.” CCC 44 (1993): 9-25.

Fontaine, Sheryl, and Susan Hunter, eds. Writing Ourselves into the Story: Unheard Voices from Composition Studies. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993.

Miller, Susan. Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition. Carbondale: Southern University UP, 1991.

Shaughnessy, Mina P. Errors and Expectations: A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing. New York: Oxford UP, 1977.

Goggin, Maureen Daly. “Composing a Discipline: The Role of Scholarly Journals in the Disciplinary Emergence of Rhetoric and Composition” Rhetoric Review 15.2 (Spring 1997): 322-349

Goggin traces the history of the field of rhetoric and composition through the establishment of the major journals in the field and the conversations taking place in those publications. She notes three major “eras” in the half-century history of the discipline: the formation of the field with the first CCCC and the creation of CCC in 1950, the expansion of the field as it reached out to other disciplines and asked larger, more theoretical questions from 1965 to the 1980s, and the calls for the unification of the field from the 1980s on. Goggin points out that such discilplinary unification is impossible and unnecessary, as other fields are equally as diverse. However, she warns that for composition to keep its place in the academy, it must have an importance beyond that of first-year composition. For if that universal requirement is done away with, what will keep composition alive?

Questions

Can there really be a composition and rhetoric field without the first-year course? What does composition look like without that course? What is left – of our jobs and our research interests?

Quotes

“We are fettered to an enterprise not of our making, one inherited some one hundred years ago, and one over which we are able to exert little to no power. First-year writing…continues to be composed by other departments, other disciplines, and by other adminstrative units within colleges and universities.” (339)

“Disciplines are made up of individuals who are enmeshed in a complex webs of institutions that both make possible a range of problems and activities but that limit other problems and activities in which they can engage…disciplinary practices are carried out in real places by real people with their own complex assortment of political, social, and cultural beliefs.” (338)

“Disciplines are…composed by and, in turn, compose scholars.” (323)

Top Five

Bazerman, Charles. “Response: Curricular Responsibilities and Professional Definition.” Reconceiving Writing, Rethinking Writing Instruction. Ed. Joseph Petraglia. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1995. 249-59.

Booth, Wayne C. “The Idea of a University – As Seen by a Rhetorician.” Professing the New Rhetorics: A Sourcebook. Ed. Theresa Enos and Stuart C. Brown. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1994. 228-52.

—- “The Revival of Rhetoric.” PLMA 80 (1965) 8-12.

Goggin, Maureen Daly. “Disciplinary Instability.” Reconceiving Writing, Rethinking Writing Instruction. Ed. Joseph Petraglia. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1995.27-48.

Lunsford, Andrea A. “Composing Ourselves: Politics, Commitment, and the Teaching of Writing.” College Composition and Communication 41 (1990): 71-82.

Toulmin, Stephen. Human Understanding. Vol. 1. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1972.

Goggin, Maureen Daly. “The Tangled Roots of Literature, Speech Communication, Linguistics, Rhetoric/Composition, and Creative Writing: A Selected Bibliography on the History of English Studies.” RSQ 29.4 (Fall 1999): 63-87.

This article is a large bibliography of the various fields in which scholarship in rhetoric and composition has been published. Through the extensive bibliographies, which include books, articles, and dissertations, Goggin proves that the field of composition and rhetoric is inherently multidisciplinary and in order to understand the complex nature of the discipline, one must look beyond the obvious and find the hidden scholarship in other areas.

Top Five

Just a good source for a lot of important texts to read. Look at it all!

Berlin

Berlin, James A. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987.

 Note: This note entry only covers the first 91 pages of the book. The next entry will deal with the monograph in its entirity.

 Berlin’s history of the twentieth-century field of rhetoric and composition traces the discipline and its relationship to literary studies (poetics) through the numerous movements in the past hundred years, starting with current-traditionalism and progressivism. It is one of the foremost histories of the field. He divides twentieth-century rhetoric into objective, subjective, and transactional rhetorics.

Good/Bad

 1. His statement that the kind of pedagogy we use to teach our students writing directly affects their attitude towards others in society. (7)

2. He is insistent that rhetoric is a tool for the masses to gain power and a voice; instruction in rhetoric should look outward, not inward.

1. I find it interesting that he chooses to use the term “rhetoric” in his title and throughout his book, which traces the history of composition, specifically the freshman composition course. Rhetoric seems to correspond to civics. does he think there is a difference between rhetoric and composition? 

2. Progressive education’s use of objective tests to evaluate student writing seems remarkably un-progressive, doesn’t it? Can good writing be quantified. And even if it can, what does that tell us about how to write?

3. What is good about using literature to teach writing? I don’t like it personally, but I’d like to hear their argument, because I think it is more complicated than good literature cultures students.

Quotes

“Since the expertise of the English department is in literary criticism, and since the university exists to provide expert instruction, writing coursees should deal with matters the English faculty knows best – literary texts. Lost in departments where such arguments prevail, I would add, is the historical concern of rhetoric for practical action in areas of public conern affectin all citiznes. Where this concern is lost, rhetoric becomes subsumed by poetic and becomes a reflective disciplin rather than an active discipline.” (52)

 ”Democratic conceptions of language and rhetoric establish an open community for free discoures, a community where the rights of the people to express themselves are protected. This makes knowledge available to all, whereas its opposite makes ignorance the normal state of the majority.” (87)

The Punishment of Freshman Composition

After reading the three articles, I was instantly struck at the irony of the freshman composition debate: it was conceived as a punishment for students who failed the Harvard entrance exam and, in the next 120 years, it was regarded as a punishment by the unfortunate, overworked instructors who had to teach it year after year, semester after semester. (Crowley 72) Why, then, would I choose it to be my life-long profession? I have several answers swimming in my head for that one. I don’t see it as punishment. Hopefully, my students don’t see it as a punishment. It has the possibility of so much more than the drilling of correct usage or even instructing of persuasive organization. It can be a vehicle in which to introduce students to the responsibilities they have as the educated elite to be active, engaged citizens. I truly believe that commitment to learning and service.

I was impressed by Collin’s notetaking system, so I’ll try it here:

Robert Connors. “Overwork and Underpay: Labor and Status of Composition Teachers since 1880.” _Rhetoric Review 9.1 (1990): 108-25. Rpt in Selected Essays of Robert J. Connors. Ed. Lisa Ede and Andrea J. Lunsford. Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s, 2003.

Composition, unlike literature or really any other academic discipline, has historically required intense individual contact between students and instructors, resulting in perpetually overworked instructors, and the huge workload and low status of the job has made it an “untouchable” field staffed primarily by women and young PhDs.

Agree/Disagree

1. Co-education helped transform the study of rhetoric from the public sphere (speaking) to the private sphere (writing).

2. The number of students flocking to the universities both democraticized them and created this composition mess. It’s interesting that the problems cited in the title of this essay – overwork and underpay – are a direct consequence of opening higher education up to the middle class and, later, “the masses.”

3. Women were attracted to the field because of the close, nuturing contact with students.
1. Is the teaching of composition really that much more time consuming than other disciplines? I’d like to know what other fields say.

2. Why was the field created if nobody liked it? Was it a grassroots movement from the overworked, underpaid instructor class? Who were the compositionists and rhetoritians when everyone wanted to escape composition and teach literature?

Good Quotes

“Rhetoric has changed in a hundred years from an academic desideratum to a grim apprenticeship.” (181)

“While teachers in other fields were dealing successfully with the larger numbers in their classes by evolving techniques of discussion and lecture, composition teachers were tied to the reading of thousands of themes.” (188)

“Composition teaching and literary teaching are not comparable in their demands on a teacher. This is hard to talk about, given the way our departments function.” (195)

Top Five

Baldwin, C.S. “The Value of the Office-Hour in the Teaching of Rhetoric.” Educational Review 8 (1894): 290-93

Hill, Adam S. “An Answer to the Cry for More English.” Twenty Years of School and College English. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1896.

Hopkins, Edwin M. “The Labor and Cost of Composition Teaching: The Present Conditions.” Proceedings of the NEA. 1912. 747-51.

Campbell, Oscar James. “The Failure of Freshman English.” English Journal 28 (1939): 177-85.

Stewart, Charles A. “Appointment and Promotion of College Instructors.” Educational Review 44 (1912): 249-66

Crowley, Sharon. “The Invention of Freshman English” (pp. 46-78) “Terms of Employment” pp. 118-131

Freshman English was constructed as a punishment for those students who failed the written entrance exam at Harvard and regarded by its instructors as a drudgery: a course that did not apply to their research and that regelated them to the underclass of their departments.

Agree/Disagree

1. The German university system prized research (the creation of knowledge) over pedagogy. This separation plagues composition today. It is why we feel like we need to legitimize ourselves, because truthfully under that model, we don’t belong at the university.

2. The roots of freshman composition in the classical college curriculum as rhetoric. It was redefined with the entrance exam requirement.

3. Most colleges do not require an exit exam – so we want them to just go through the motions of the course, be taught “skills,” but do we know what it looks like when a student masters them? And can they possibly be mastered in a semester? If not, what’s the point of the freshman course?

4. I like her claim that English departments owe their existence to freshman composition – and their funding as well.

1. I don’t think that instructors today are “squeamish” about imparting their views to students about what a proper, upstanding citizen should think and care about. Isn’t that an underlying goal of the diversity intiative at SU, in a way?

2. Crowley seems to argue that teaching a standard, correct version of English is insulting to students and against the democratic turn in the history of the university. But don’t students want to learn how to read and write in the standard format, so that they can get good, high paying jobs in society after school is over? Isn’t it still true that a man is known by the English he keeps?

3. I disagree with Crowley’s ending statement in “The Invention of Freshman English.” You can have a freshman English course that allows for students to become aware citizens who want to change the world. I believe that that is a possibility within the realm of traditional rhetoric. The course needs to be reconcieved, not thrown out. It’s an amazing opportunity – you see every entering student at the university. Imagine the possibilities with that!

4. I like teaching. I like that being part of my identity. I would hate to be a researcher and a researcher only. That’s why I got into composition – for the love of the teaching and the opportunities I saw through that.

Good Quotes

“But the teachers of other subjects did not need to justify their fields of study at the university level, and so they had no need to establish entrance exams that could be failed by the bulk of would-be matriculants. The entrance examination in English repeatedly and continually created appropriate subjects for the study of English – subjects who were visibly, graphically, unable to meet Harvard’s standards.” (71)
“The point of the required course is not to acquire some level of skill or knowledge that can be measured upon exit; it is instead to subject students to discipline, to force them to recognize the power of the institution to insist on conformity with its standards.” (74)
“Universities apparently value introductory composition so much that they insist it be universally required, and yet they make inadequate provision for its teaching.” (118)

“First-year composition has always been staffed by people identified as teachers rather than scholars.” (121)

Situating Myself in Rhetoric and Composition

What has attracted you to the field of composition and rhetoric? What questions do you wish to pursue?

 

I taught my first course in freshman composition in the spring of 2005, and, as luck would have it, I enrolled in my first graduate course in composition that semester as well. I had just switched my focus in my master’s degree work at the University of New Hampshire from creative non-fiction writing to teaching English. The requirements for the MST degree were very open – I just needed to take eight courses that had something to do with writing, teaching, or a combination of the two. I was substitute teaching during the day to make some extra money, and Paul Matsuda’s Tuesday night transactional writing course fit my schedule well. Not knowing anything about composition – or what “transactional” could possibly mean – I enrolled.

I was the only master’s student in that class, and I knew I was instantly over my head, surrounded by eager PhD students who spat out names, titles, and multisyllabic words I had never heard before with an ease I envied. Even though I was intimidated coming home from that first class, I was determined to succeed. I would stay in that class. I would read everything. I would throw myself into their discussions. I would get an A. And, hopefully, I would understand what “transactional writing” meant.

That class introduced me composition as a discipline, a field previously unknown to me. That course, along with the section of first-year composition that I taught that semester, sold me on the field. I was struck about how composition and rhetoric focuses on the choice of the rhetor/writer: their conscious (or unconscious?) choice of diction, form, or subject directly affects how their words and ideas are received by their audience and, in no small way, their specific words affect what their message says. I have always been interested in choice; when driving down Erie Boulevard, I find myself thinking, “I wonder why the Air-Flo sign is teal,” or “I wonder how Brueggers’ chose that font for their logo.” It’s a continuation of something I did as a child – I took books of speeches down to my basement and read them out loud, marveling about how one word or phrase changed the entire feeling of a piece. Language was invigorating. Making that correct, crucial choice amazed me.

The field of composition also addresses another, more concrete area of interest for me. I am interested in how technology has affected both communities and communication. I see technology in a broad sense, from how the Industrial Revolution transformed the farm into a business enterprise, kicking the men and then the women off the homestead and forever changing family and societal dynamics and power structures, to how cell phones, instant messaging, and emailing have simultaneously drawn the distant corners of the world close together and alienated neighbors. Are we as scholars looking at the consequences of technology as well as its benefits? And are those consequences acceptable to us as human beings?

I am also very interested in the pedagogical aspect of the field. I think it is important that we view our students as writers and as emerging members of society. We have a responsibility to them to provide them with an education that will inspire them to change their communities for the better, and we must give them the tools in order to do that. In first-year composition, I believe it is important to teach students to critically engage with the texts that surround them, both traditional print texts and other, non-traditional rhetorical forms. I want to teach my students that everything around them is a rhetorical choice, influenced by history, culture, and technology. I think that if they can see their world through this kind of rhetorical lens, they won’t take the status quo for granted, instead challenging reality and insisting on a better way to live. At Syracuse, I want to investigate ways that this pedagogy can be put into action in both my individual classes and, on a broader level, how this concept can be incorporated into a writing program as a whole. I am interested in how writing program administration functions, especially the institutional politics that influence and shape it. I would like to run a writing program someday, and because I don’t know much about it at all, I think I’d like to pursue writing program administration for my independent reading project.

I feel like I have a wide variety of interests coming into the CCR PhD, and I’m not quite sure as of yet how they fit into the discipline of rhetoric and composition. I am at once both sure that I fit into this field and nervous because so many aspects of the discipline don’t seem to coincide with my particular interests. It is such a varied field, as Louise Phelps explained in her entry on composition studies in the Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition, unlike other academic disciplines like biology or history that have cores of shared ideologies and methodologies. I’m looking forward to my work in CCR 601 because I believe it will help me begin to carve out my niche in composition.