Mackey Moose & Gilly Goose

For Rachael, who’s wondering if all I talk about is my work here…   

More on Myers

I really got a lot out of this article. Refer to my previous post for bibliographic info. I’m going to do a short summary and some important quotes here so you can get a grip on what Myers is talking about.

 Myers, through a reading of Leonard, Bruffee, and Elbow, is challenging two teaching strategies used in composition: collaborative learning and having students write “real world” (as opposed to contained within the classroom) assignments. He warns that collaboration pedagogy can lead to a whitewashed consensus that ignores diversity. Myers critiques both Bruffee and Leonard, who support the use of collaboration in the classroom, for presenting an external reality that is untouchable instead of an external reality that is formed by our own ideologies. He also argues that teaching “real world” assignments is upholding the beliefs of those in power in the “real world” (business, administration) instead of teaching students how to challenge those beliefs.

Good Quotes:

On the problem of a teacher-directed class using collaboration – One of my favorite quotes in all academic texts because he flat-out says he is annoyed: “I am annoyed with Leonard’s rhetoric as a reformer because he assumes authority over other teachers and over students while denying he has it. He assumes authority as trained expert, university professor, empirical researcher, voice of the downtrodden students, bringing enlightenmnet to normal-school-trained teachers. But he denies his personal authority by saying the students are controlling the classroom, and his curriculum just follows the real world, and his reforms are based on the latest research. If we see that schools can be both places of liberation and places of oppression, then we have to ask how we are using what limited power over people’s lives we do have” (448).

On the skeptical attitude teachers should have to the effectiveness and importance of teaching “real world” writing: “One teaches job letters to the business communications students who need to get jobs downtown, without teaching that a job downtown is the answer to their problems. I have no specific new ideas for what we should do Monday morning, but I follow with interest those of other radical teachers. In this article, I am asking, not for a new kind of assignment, but for more skepticism about what assignments do to reproduce the structures of our society” (456).

On how personal ideologies construct external realities: “One cannot escape from one’s economic interests and ethnic background, but one can try to understand how they shape one’s thinking and social actions” (452).

On using professional writing as models in the composition classroom: “We should note how we just assume, lacking an agreed standard for writing quality, that good writing is writing that can be sold for money” (447).

The problem with the “real world”: “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). And more: “To accept the reality we see now is to accept the structure of illusion our system gives us. Worse, it is to see reality as something natural, outside our control, rather than to see it as something we make in our actions in society” (440).

Consensus, Knowledge, and Reality (a reading of this week’s readings)

Both my “assigned” reading for this week and our conversations this weekend have made me think over anew some ideas I have been churning in my mind lately, and so I offer up my post.

Some formalities to begin:

Myers, Greg. “Reality, Consensus, and Reform in the Rhetoric of Composition Teaching.” In Cross-Talk in Comp Theory. Ed. Victor Villanueva. Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English, 2003.

This grouping of readings, especially the one by Bizzell (“‘Contact Zones’ and English Studies”), made me think about how we are teaching composition, specifically what we are presenting in our classrooms as important texts and viewpoints to understand. Bizzell, reflecting on Mary Louise Pratt’s idea of the contact zone, says we need a model of teaching that “treats difference as an asset, not a liability” and that this model in our pedagogy and scholarship should be “not only possible, but normative” (483).

Pratt’s contact zones are the normatives (the mark of good scholarship) in a variety of disciplines. I’ll use history as an example. It is impossible to understand the complexity and therefore the reality of the Cold War without understanding all the competing political and social forces at play. You must give democracy its due. You also must give communism its say. Capitalism, Catholicism, agnosticism, anarchism, nationalism – they all must speak and be represented in the academic Cold War debate so that scholars might understand that historical moment. We must read “all the texts as brought to the contact zone, for the purpose of communicating across cultural boundaries” (484). She makes clear that it is our duty to let all voices be heard, to reach outside the canon into the corpus to resurrect lost and ignored arguments. Failing to do so is not only being intellectually dishonest, but also denying reality.

So it concerns me that when it comes to today – modern issues and modern times – we do not hold to the same standard. Particularly this weekend, during conversation surrounding the Feminism and War Conference, I listened as people throughout the university belittled and simplified the other side of the argument. They cast it aside instead of giving it the same thought, care, and time that we’ve learned to give every other “alternate” perspective. Why should we wait fifty years until these ideas are, quite literally, history in order to consider them in their proper perspective in the academic debate.

Few could deny that there is an ideological consensus pervading at the university. As Myers (a Marxist) warns us, we must be wary of that consensus, because consensus can be created by “eliminating or at least concealing diversity and conflict.” As academics, that very idea should shock us, for it is anti-intellectual, not to mention unjust, to try to eliminate or conceal diversity. But don’t we? Don’t we consider some perspectives worthy of academic study and others not just unworthy but dumb, uninformed, and wrong? When will people in academia realize “it is the reformers who are the establishment, and the opponents they label traditionalists [who] are the outsiders”? (Myers 448) And when will the new outsiders be welcomed back into the conversation? For without true conversation – without a mutual respect for viewpoints, values, and ideologies other than your own – truthful knowledge cannot be made. When the conversation becomes a monologue and the consensus praises conformity, reality is skewed and knowledge cannot thrive.

It strikes me as ironic that I am the lone voice calling for such tolerance in the very place that champions tolerance, that has the word plastered on bulletins and posters and in every major university diversity initiative. Academics need to take it upon themselves to have a true open mind – to respect and try to understand the underlying ideologies that inform all the perspectives in a debate – because you need to consider all the arguments to construct knowledge, and academics are in the business of building knowledge.

Revolution!

I’ve really enjoyed these last two weeks in LWP’s class. We’ve been studying BIG rhetoric and this week, we read Kuhn and Feyerabend.

What do I like about BIG rhetoric? I like how interdisiciplinary it is – how it finds an overarching connection between chemistry and history, political science and drama, English and mathematics. And what is that connection? Rhetoric, my friend, the ancient foundation of it all. But it’s not a set-in-stone foundation. It’s a constantly moving, shaping foundation, steeped in context but still with inherent truths. I like that.

What do I like about that? I like the humanity that it is grounded upon. We are a quirky people, we humans, but that quirkiness is what makes us human. To equate human knowledge with positivism is to try to whitewash our imperfection. It reminds me of Vonnegut’s Player Piano. Great book! It is a treatise against the dehumanization of individuals and communities through an abdication of human crafts and skills in favor of a society based upon and driven by heartless, brainless, human-less technology. I am concerned with how technology is shaping our current world – is it making us less human, as it requires us to rely less on actual human beings? What are we losing? What are we gaining?

I think I really dug Feyerabend because of his validation of all types of methodology (not all ideas – as LWP ponited out.) There is no one way to go about finding and communicating knowledge. Positivism fails because it fails to take into account messy human thoughts and complicated human relationships. Doesn’t then technology fail (in some areas)? Why aren’t we looking at that? (And if we are, where is it?)

I also liked Feyerabend’s passion. He was exciting. His ideas were exciting. Don’t we all need a little more fire? A little more revolution?

Jefferson said every generation needs a revolution. What’s ours, my friends?

601 Project Proposal

Laura J. Davies
October 9, 2006
CCR 601
Independent Reading and Writing Project Proposal

The Birth and Development of the Writing Major

An important sign of maturity for an academic discipline is for it to be a separate, autonomous field of study, in which graduates and undergraduates can pursue that specific field of knowledge towards a degree. Doctoral degrees in composition and rhetoric have expanded from minimal offerings twenty years ago to 66 different programs today, as listed on the Consortium of Doctoral Programs in Rhetoric and Composition website. Now, there is a new and exciting recent development in the field of composition and rhetoric: the creation of undergraduate writing majors, situated in both separate writing departments, which also house the university-wide writing programs, and in English departments.
For my independent reading and writing project for CCR 601, I want to investigate the writing major, which is being developed and implemented at colleges and universities across the country. I want to see how this administrative development reflects on the discipline as a whole: how does composition and rhetoric assert itself in the academy on the undergraduate level? I find the undergraduate major interesting because it is often said that composition, like law and medicine, is a graduate discipline. How are faculty bridging that gap and presenting a worthwhile, varied, four-year program of study to undergraduates?
I am fascinated by the processes that go into building an undergraduate major:
how its objectives are framed, how tracks and courses are conceptualized, how syllabi are constructed, how texts are selected. I want to see how different institutions define writing. Do they emphasize creative writing, technical writing, journalism, or are they a smorgasbord of all sorts of writing? Do the writing programs echo art and music by situating writing as productive knowledge, or do they include studies in history and methodology, making writing and rhetoric more like theoretical or practical knowledge? How is a writing major different from an English, journalism, or communications major (especially at institutions that offer all four!)
For me, a doctoral student in CCR at Syracuse University, the writing major is an especially relevant topic of inquiry now because the Writing Program here at Syracuse is currently in the process of proposing the adoption of a writing major. Therefore, I can use Syracuse’s proposal as a dynamic case study for my project. I also plan on using program descriptions from other colleges and universities (Ithaca College, University of Florida, Loyola College of Maryland) who have implemented writing majors as examples that showcase the variety of undergraduate writing degree programs. The writing major is a relatively new area of study in composition and rhetoric, so there are several recent articles dealing with the topic. Since I want to someday run a writing program, I believe that this project will give me a good foundation about a current development in writing program administration.
Generative Bibliography

Culler, Jonathan. “Imagining the Coherence of the English Major.” Profession 2003 [Modern Language Association]: 85-93.

Cushman, Ellen. “Vertical Writing Programs in Departments of Rhetoric and Writing.” Composition Studies in the New Millennium: Rereading the Past, Rewriting the Future. Ed. Lynn Z. Bloom, Donald A. Daiker, and Edward M. White. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003.

Downs, Doug, and Sandra Jamieson. “Writing Majors, Minors, Tracks, & Concentrations.” Madison, NJ: Drew University Composition Program. 12 Mar. 2006.

“Guidelines and Directions for College Courses in Advanced Composition.” College Composition and Communication 18 (1967): 266-268.

Hult, Christine. “The Organization and Administration of an Undergraduate Writing Emphasis.” ERIC Document Reproduction Service, ED 358 479, 1993.

Jenseth, Richard. “Assignment Sequencing in Advanced Composition.” The ATAC Newsletter 1.1 (1989): 10-11.

Lovitt, Carl R. “Literature Requirements in the Curricula of Writing Degrees and Concentrations: Examining a Shifting Institutional Relationship.” WPA: Writing Program Administration 29.1-2 (Fall 2005): 11-30.

Mathes, J.C. “A Taxonomy of Communication Acts for the Design of Advanced Writing Courses.” Journal of Advanced Composition 1 (1980): 53-57.

Olson, Gary A., and Julie Drew, eds. Landmark Essays on Advanced Composition. Mahwah, NJ: Hermagoras Press, 1996.

Penfield, Elizabeth. “Freshman English/Advanced Writing: How Do We Distinguish the Two? Teaching Advanced Composition. Ed. Katherine H. Adams and John L. Adams. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1991. 17-30.

Shamoon, Linda K., Rebecca Moore Howard, Sandra Jamieson, and Robert A. Schwegler, eds. Coming of Age: The Advanced Writing Curriculum. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Boynton/Cook, 2000.

Shumaker, Arthur W. “How Can a Major in Composition Be Established?” Journal of Advanced Composition 2.1-2 (1981): 139-146.

Trimbur, John. “The Problem of Freshman English (Only): Towards Programs of Study in Writing.” WPA: Writing Program Administration 22.3 (Spring 1999): 9-30.

Weisser, Christian R. Moving Beyond Academic Discourse: Composition Studies and the Public Sphere. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois UP, 2002.

Yancey, Kathleen Blake. “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key.” CCC 56.2 (2004):297-328.

Momma Mina

Shaughnessy, Mina P. “Diving In: An Introduction to  Basic Writing.” In Cross-Talk in Comp Theory. Ed. Victor Villanueva. Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English, 2002.

In her article, Shaughnessy creates a developmental model for how we, as composition teachers, grow to accept the problems basic writers have as pedagogical challenges. Pointing out that all of the terminology used to describe basic writers is medical and remedial in nature (clinic, lab, etc.), Shaughnessy calls us to put that aside, as it masks the real issues at stake. She lays out a progression of four steps that trace how teachers treat basic writers:

1. GUARDING THE TOWER – We can’t let these horribly underprepared students into academia! The teacher teaches these basic writers the same way he has taught them in the past, beacuse not doing so would be “cheating.”
2. CONVERTING THE NATIVES – The teacher begins to recognize that at least some of the students are capable of making it, and sets out to give the students formulas and rules so they might imitate academic discourse.
3. SOUNDING THE DEPTHS – Seeing that the no-fail formulas are, indeed, flunking with the students, the teacher looks for reasons why these seemingly smart young men and women can’t write well. The teacher begins to realize the gap between the students’ written and spoken lanuage. Could the problem lie there? In spoken discourse, knowledge is batted around willy-nilly; there is no need to explain or press issues further. Students, used to this type of discourse, don’t translate well to academic writing, where they are encouraged – and expected – to play with language and subtle layers of meaning. The students need to learn how to be students. Only then can they become writers.
4. DIVING IN – This is the step where the teacher embraces the unique challenge of the basic writer. Working with basic writers is no longer a chore, it is a worthwhile professional and pedagogical pursuit.

Good Quotes (great article – I could quote it all!)

“DIVING IN is simply deciding that teaching them [basic writers] to write well is not only suitable but challenging work for those who would be teachers and scholars in a democracy” (317). She hit it right on. I despise teachers who think that freshman level – not even to mention basic writing – is “below” them. Isn’t that what we want to do? Give all members of a democracy the tools to participate in it? To me, having that role in a democracy is so exciting. I am empowering people to change the society they live in for the better.

 ”Our teacher begins to see that teaching at the remedial level is not a matter of being simpler but of being more profound, of not only starting from ’scratch’ but also determining where ’scratch’ is” (317).

“The writer might lack the vocabulary that would enable him to move more easily up the ladder of abstraction and must instead forge out of a nonanalytical vocabulary a way of discussing thoughts about thoughts, a task so formidable as to discourage him, as travelers in a foreign land are discouraged, from venturing far beyond bread-and-butter matters” (317). I like that – discussing thoughts about thoughts. I think that’s what paralyzes so many students who are learning how to really analyze for the first time. I can see some of my WRT 105 students in here.

“Are they [students] aware, for example, after years of right/wrong testing, after the ACTs and the GEDs and the OATs, after straining to memorize what they read but never learning to doubt it, after “psyching out” answers rather than discovering them, are they aware that the rules have changed and that the rewards now go to those who can sustain a play of mind upon ideas – teasing out the contradictions and ambiguities and frailities of statements?” (316) I think this is so right-on-the-mark good. I’m going to put in on my syllabus next semester. I mean, isn’t this what we’re trying to do in our composition classrooms? And how often is this NOT the case in other classes?

“Somewhere between the folly of pretending that errors don’t matter and the rigidity of insisting that they matter more than anything, the teacher must find his answer, searching always under pressure for short cuts that will not ultimately restrict the intellectual power of his students.” This line is so hard to find! I like how Shaughnessy is continuously stressing the intelligence of basic writers. It’s not something we really think about, is it?

“Obliged because of the exigencies brought on by open admissions to serve his time in the defense of the academy, he does if not his best, at least his duty, setting forth the material to be mastered, as if he expected students to learn it, but feeling grateful when a national holiday happens to fall on a basic-writing day and looking always for ways of evading conscription next semester” (313). I liked this quote a lot because I saw myself in it – the first thing I do every semester is see when class is cancelled beacuse of a holiday! Yikes!

Other Thoughts

Shaughnessy is writing in response to the change to the open-admissions policy, which brought in lots of underprepared writers to the universities. Were there basic writer problems before open admissions? How else has open admissions changed our composition classes?

Shaughnessy wrote this in 1976 – 30 years ago. Have things gotten better for basic writing pedagogy?

What kind of instruction will best prepare basic writers to participate in democracy? What is important? What is not? Should our “regular” composition classes look like our basic writing class, if the emphasis is on democracy?

How do Honors classes pose the same challenges as basic writing classes?

LWP: Part One of Constructing an Ecology of Composition

This is an intricate – but fascinating – argument. The rhetorical moves are so smart! I don’t think I can come up with a concise summary, so I’m going to map out what I see happening in each major point.

How can composition forge an autonomous identity that situates itself in the field (ecology) of academia, where every part is dependent on all others? How does composition become both independent and interdependent in the academy? Perhaps the paradigm in which composition was born – post-moderninsm – can provide us with answers. (3)

Composition was born in the post-modern world, which is “marked by themes of loss, illusion, instability, marginality, decentering, and finitude” and characterized by “critiques that challenge reason, consciousness, knowledge, meaning, communication, freedom, and other values asserted by the Enlightenment and developed in modern sciences, humanities, and public life” (pg. 5). YIKES! CRISIS! Post-modernism = meaningless lives. What can we do???

How about having a “new, positive framework for human life?”  (5) Sounds good to me! This could come from  a “new world hypothesis” that cuts at the base of every discipline, including empirical science. (5) It will have a theme of rationality and must involve a “revival of hermeneutics as an interpretive theory of inquiry.” (5) OK? You on board? Let’s go!

F irst, we have to critique scientism (aka positivism), which says that knowledge must be defined through absolute, “objective” scientific terms, and the discourse of knowledge should be achieved through a scientific method and be “exact, formal, literal, and univocal” (10) The disciplines who most subscribe to scientism are empirical (“hard”) sciences and philosophy. This is a problem, though, when we’re talking about people and social processes: these human (“soft”) sciences don’t have universal truths; they have understandings instead, and LWP thinks that those understandings are just as valuable as universal truths. These understandings come about through the use of interpretive hermeneutics.

Now, to critique scientism, you can’t just scoot around it. You must deconstruct it. Kuhn begins that deconstruction by saying that empirical science is as influenced by subjectivity and historical context as the “soft” science: “science itself is a social, historicocultural process that proceeds by basically rhetorical strategies” (12). How so, you ask? Because “scientific practice is rife with unformalizable elements,” specifically tacit knowledge, which is “all the cognitive structures, bodily parts, and extensions of either that bear on human action at a given moment and are instrumental to it” (13). Tacit knowledge and skills are subconscious but constructs our reality.

Dreyfus claims that human knowledge comes from being situated in that reality: “Facts are not imposed on a separate reality by an observer’s theories; rather, the observer understadns them as a total function of his own relation to the context – historical, cultural, situational…there can be no such things as rules for thought and behavior that would function the same in every context.” (17) CONTEXT drives everything, not absolute rules.

Tacit knowledge “provides a language for the scientist to think with, a lens to see through, a world view to dwell in” (18). So what does this mean? The logic by which scientists go about making their discoveries is rhetorical; “knowledge becomes  a matter of ‘warrented assertion’ within the constext of a community of language users who form its rhetorical audience” (19). Hello Toulmin!

Now we’re going to shift to talking about how hermeneutics plays into this argument. The opposite of empirical objectivism (which was just debunked) is flat-out crazy irrational subjectivism, which is not going to give us a new positive world order. A new type of hermeneutics (interpretation) must enter the argument and take up positivism from a new, outside angle. How can we do that? We cannot look to an autonomous author (positivism) or even an autonomous reader – both which are impossible – to create knowledge. The new hermeneutics begins “not with a subjective but an intersubjective turn. It takes as point of origin (rather than foundation) the situation in which human beings find themselves before philosophy or sicence, before the recognition of self as consciousness or world as object” (22). This world of pure experience, this “life-world,” creates all human understanding and is the basis for all knowledge (23). In this way, reason is rooted in humanness, not absolute truths.

So how is this human-centered knowledge created? Through the one thing we have in common: discourse. As an example,  “science the a rhetorical proactice of reason…science arises from praxis, develops through practical reason, and returns to praxis.” Therefore, in the sciences, the knowledge-making process begins in discourse, moves to scientific inquiry, and is shared through discourse. Neato! Now, human sciences are a bit different: the people who are investigating the human subjects are not only engaged in discourse with one another but also with their objects of study. Double neat-o. LWP says: “all sciences share a hermeneutical nature, first, through their grounding in a prescientific understanding [the life-world], and second, in constituting their meanings and truths thorugh dialogue and interpretation [discourse.]” (25)

Now, are use of hermeneutics – interpretation – must be critical: “the critical spirit embeds moments of distance, irony, analysis, and judgment within the interpretive effort.” It allows us to see our development and our progress. Now what limits our interpretations – why must we be critical? Because even our own consciousnesses – our own bodies – are affected by outside institutions. How can we critique, then? By using lenses such as Marxism, pyschoanalysis, critical theory, or analyzing the structure of language.

Let’s bring what we have together (in LWP terms): “the irreducibility of the human world as a web of significations constituted through social practices…this affirmative notion of context as providing menaing and the possibility of knowledge represents the precise counterpart (as God-term) to the discreditied ideas of an autonomous, context-free authority – prescence, logos, reason, an empirical world,  and the like” (30). So what now? There is “an enlarged concept of context” in post-modern thought that can unify the disciplines (30). It “encompasses more than the human world because it projects on the universe at large the metaphor of dramatistic event” (30).

What? Tell me more!

“A contextualist theory is one in which all parts are not only interdependent but mutually defining and transactive, so that through their shifting relationships they continually constitute new parts or elements as well as new structures” (32).  Binaries aren’t stable but exist to define one another. The world is a true ecology: “a total interrelatedness and reciprocity of change for all parts and all levels” (33). 

Humans cannot be separated from their context: the context of their language, the knowledge they possess and encounter, and their own minds.

Composition, through rhetoric, can explore the context of everything, and thus form the baseline for all disciplines.

How does that work for you?

Rhetoric of Inquiry: Charles Darwin

Campbell, John Angus. “Charles Darwin: Rhetorician of Science.” In The Rhetorical Turn. Ed. Herbert W. Simons. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

Campbell applies the theory of rhetoric of inquiry to show how Darwin uses rhetorical strategies to persuade both a popular and a professional audience. To appeal to people outside the scientific community, he uses common sense and straightforward English language in a charming way that downplayed his genius. To appeal to his colleagues, Darwin misled the reader in his introduction of Origin by claiming that he came to his discovery of natural selection through inductive observations, in the respected Baconian tradition, even though his notebooks prove he worked the other way, starting with a deductive theory. Darwin used metaphors like “struggle for existence” rhetorically, to make his claims both easy to reference and to connect a variety of ideas together. Campbell, by showing the rhetorical moves that Darwin made in The Origin of Species, uses rhetoric of inquiry to prove that even the discourse of science, commonly believed to be objective, is persuasive at its heart.

Braddock’s Topic Sentences

Went to the Lafayette Apple Festival today – loads o’fun.

 Here’s what Braddock says. Pretty straightforward, but some interesting connections:

Braddock, Richard. “The Frequency and Placement of Topic Sentences in Expository Prose.” In Cross-Talk in Comp Theory, 2nd ed. Ed. Victor Villanueva. Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English, 2003.

Braddock, in response to the popular paragraph model prescribed by composition textbooks, which direct students to write expository paragraphs that begin with a topic sentence, shows through researching a set of 25 essays that this formula holds true with only 13% of paragraphs written by professional writers. He discovers four general types of topic sentences: simple and delayed-completion topic sentences, which are more explicit, and assembled and inferred topic sentences, which are more implicit. All in all, professional writers only wrote explicit topic sentences – the kind taught in textbooks – half the time. He challenges writing instructors to look more closely at how professional writers write and to teach students how to complicate their expository prose through writing a variety of the four kinds of topic sentences.

Interesting to Note:

    Braddock confines the implications of his research to “teachers and textbook writers should exercise caution in making statements about the frequency with which contemporary professional writers use simple or even explicit topic sentences in expository paragraphs.” I think this study has more reach than this. I see connections to Perl’s article – it shows that althought there is a prescribed model that seems to make sense and works most of the time, such as the writing “process” and the write-a-topic-sentence-first rule, it does not hold true for all writers or for all rhetorical situations. Judging the quality of an expository essay alone on whether or not there is a topic sentence at the beginning of every paragraph is overlooking the important part: what the essay does. I don’t think anyone really evaluates an essay based on such rudimentary, mechanical criteria as this, however. I think Braddock might be overplaying the importance of the topic sentence. My family laughed out loud when I read them the title. I mean, really.

But it is interesting to see that the “good” writers break the rules. There is something to say about knowing that a topic sentence or an organizing idea is needed to make a paragraph work. I think the good writers internalize that maxim and have it play out in a variety of ways in their own prose, hence Braddock’s four types of topic sentences.

 He does admit to a hierarchy of topic sentences: major topic sentences, that deal with more of the paper than just a single paragraph, and subtopic sentences, which refer to smaller points within the larger work. He uses Kellogg’s T-unit to split the paragraphs into T-units: the topic “sentences” are really topic “T-units.”

I think there can be some interesting connections between Braddock’s study and the debate over the writing process(es). There is no one way to write, but there probably are methods one can teach a struggling writer to implement in order to make his or her prose more fluid. Including one of the four types of topic sentences is one of those ways.

Britton Part 2

Isn’t it funny that Britton is from Britain? I looked specifically at Chapters 3, 11, and the appendici.

Britton, James N., et al. The Development of Writing Abilities (11-18). London: MacMillan, 1975.

In his study, Britton looked at 2122 pieces of writing by 500 pupils (ages 11-18) from 85 classes in 65 schools in England. He, along with his team of fellow researches and teachers, classified the writing through two categories: the sense of audience and the overall function of the piece. He found that 92% of the writing fell into two out of ten “sense of audience” categories: pupil-to-examiner and teacher-to-learner. Also, the majority of the writing fell to in the “reader-as-participant” category, as opposed to the “reader-as-spectator” category. From these two major findings, Britton claims that the emphasis of schools on testing inhibits students from developing expressive writing and writing for a larger public audience.

Quotes/Things of Interest:

Britton’s inquiry is aimed to “provide a map of the uses of the written language.” As he states, there has not been any exhaustive work on how writers develop. We know what adult, professional writers do, and we have studied the writing of small children. But what lies in the gulf? (53)

Britton points out that upon receiving a task, a student must either “make the task his own,” turn it into something else that he is involved and interested in, or “remain uninvolved” and just go through the motions, writing without engaging thinking. I wonder how many students slide by in school by doing that…how many WRT 105ers on that “Mind the Gap” essay? (54)

I think the binary scales that the team came up with while reading through the 2000+ scripts are useful beginning categories to looking at writing:

• generalizing upon experience/particularizing an experience
• presenting a view/exploring to arrive at a view
• writer’s persona close to self/persona remote from self
• interpreting experience shared by writer and reader/relating experience not shared by reader (55)

 ”Writing for public audience develops out of writing in a teaching rather than a testing situation” (192)

“In effect, development in spectator-role writing is from the earliest stages a move in the direction of a public audience” (193)

Can you tell I’m interested in public audiences? 

Britton explains the difference between the two types of teacher/student relationship: open (learner-teacher) and closed (pupil-examiner): “the closed view sees teaching as instruction, while the open view sees learning as exploration and discovery.” (194)

“Curricular aims did not include the fostering of writing that reflects independent thinking; rather, attention was directed towards classificatory writing which reflects information in the form in which both teacher and textbook traditionally present it.” (197)

“What the sample as we find it suggests is the surprising degree to which learning situations in different subjects, with different syllabuses, and with the whole background of potentially different roads from experience into words and back to experience – the degree to which such learning situations (to judge by the writing) grow more and more like each other, more and more concentrated on one use of the written word.” (198)

A Couple of Thoughts

• How has the influx of APs and national exam distorted the tasks of writing to reflect on those “pupil to examiner” and non-expressive writings even more?
• How has technology affected the writing of students (Britton claims it might decrease the need for writing – I argue the opposite)
• Britton says he is going to linguistically analyze the different function categories of writing. Did he? What did he find?

Peace out!