Noteworthy Notetaking

This is more from Coming of Age. It is really a fascinating book, chock-full of important texts. It comes with a CD-Rom with more material than what is contained in the book.

Miller, Thomas P. “Rhetoric Within and Without Composition: Reimagining the Civic.” 32-41.

We need to come up with a more modern goal of composition than “good man speaking well” because that left out women and others who lacked cultural power (34). The new civic philosophy of rhetoric explores more critically the dialectical relationships between audiences, writers, contexts, and purposes (34). This new philosophy “can enable us to bring our work with service learning, new technologies, and political contreoversies into a unified project that challenges the hierarchy of research, teaching, and service that limits the social implications of academic work and devalues the work of the humanities” (34).

Adam Smith helped develop college English studies to assist students from lower classes acculturate into high society and academia (36). He devalued collaboration and discourse in the public sphere because natural laws of economics and consumption ruled knowledge.

Both the sophists and the expanding print world of the 18th century highlighted the “ethnographic dimension”: that knowledge is created within cultural contexts, and there are some shared beliefs between groups. If we use this to think about the new civic, then we aren’t just being reactionary when we long for rhetoric again. Rhetoric means something now, when we live in such a multicultural society (38).

“We need a sense of the civic that treats differences as a productive part of collaborative action” (38).

If we use rhetoric as the foundation of the major, then we are asking undergraduate majors to not just write, but to debate questions about what is moral and right. “Embracing our tradition as practical moralists can help us position ourselves at sites of controversy where established assumptions are called into question in disciplinary debates, political conflicts, and changes in popular mores. The civic tradition providees strategies and concepts that can enable us to make productive use of such controversies” (39).

Students use rhetoric and rhetorical strategies “to question what is assumed, where those assumptions come from, and what gives them authority” (40). Writing majors can turn out students who are critical thinkers.

The civic possibilities of the internet are astounding – a new era of democracy.

We need to teach not just rhetoric – we need to teach rhetorically by using a “civic imagination” (41).

Shamoon, Linda K. “The Academic Effacement of a Career: “Writer”"

Shamoon interviews five writers who work as academic, technical, creative, and professional writers, showing through them that the pigeonholing of current (1998) writing majors deny the broad scope of what writing actually can be as a profession. Each writer is not writing only one genre – the different modes reflect and support each other – and they need to be able to use a common set of skills (“developing a line of sustained inquiry; senestitivity to language, voice, tone, and nuance; drafting and reworking; researching information; and an operational knowledge of multiple genres”) to write everything that they do (48). It is important to look at what real writers are doing in order to build an undergraduate major in writing, and if we do that, we see that the curriculum should focus on three tings: expertise (genre theory, style, grammar, editing, technology, digital writing), history and critique(of the book, authorship, copyrights, the profession), and the role of the writer in society (ethics). (51).

Part II of Coming of Age: “Considering Options for Core Courses in Advanced Writing”

How do these courses differ from Syracuse’s proposed common course? What do they have in common? How do they speak to each other?

Lunsford, Andrea Abernethy. “Histories of Writing and Contemporary Authorship.” 55-58.

Lunsford is interested in the history of writing. How does writing define our selves and our societies? In a course that she teaches called Histories and Theories of Writing, she uses Phaedrus, Burke’s “Terministic Screens,” works by Ong, Derrida, Foucault, Gelb, Barry Sanders, Ilich, along with, more recently, scholarship on digital writing (Turkle’s essay “Who Am We?”) and readings on nonalphabetic scripts (Michael Joyce Of Two Minds.) These texts get students to think about the writing we do and the writing we read in new ways – as something made, not something set in stone (56-57).

She also, thanks to student urging, includes a personal history of writing (literacy histories) as a beginning assignment in the course (using Augustine’s Confessions, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, etc.) (57). This personal investigation allows students to more authentically read and critique the histories of writing listed above. Lunsford also includes a unit on collaboration, where students read about and discuss the problems and benefits of collaborative writing.

This course invites these questions:
“What is writing, where does it come from, and what does it mean – on many levels – to write? How can writing work to both oppress and liberate people? How is writing imbricated in personal as well as legal, social, political, economic, and spiritual journeys? What rights and duties accompany various acts of writing? What is the relationship of writing and language, and in what ways can they and can’t they be the objects of possessive ownership?” (58).

Jamieson, Sandra. “Theories of Composing.” 59-65.

According to Jamieson, it is important to introduce undergraduates to writing theories because these theories gives students a “lens through which [they] may view their own writing and the writing process itself” (59). They invite students to theorize about how langauge constructs who we are and who we think we are (59). Her common core course is entitled “Theories of Composing,” and it is meant as a capstone course for the major, to be taken at the end of coursework. It has four goals: “that students develop a deeper understanding of the writing process in general; that they realize the complexity of literacy and writing; that they come to a deeper comprehension of their own writing process; and that they become mor conscious of the rhetorical choices that writers make in different writing situations” (60).

Values! “I believe it is essential for students in this class to understand how theory, pedagogy, and the writing process itself develop from the values we hold and the belief system that drives those values” (61).

This course gives a student of any major the realization that writing happens out of context to a particular audience (61).

She uses Villanueva’s Cross-Talk in Comp Theory and Wiles and et al Composition in Four Keys and structures her class like her graduate course, with focus areas on current traditionalism, expressivism, cognitivism, and social constructionism (62). Students have a difficult time grappling the theory at first, but they soon learn how to join the conversation (63-64).

Stygall, Gail. “Discourse Studies” 66-70.

What is discourse studies? Studying the interaction of language and society: “The analysis of talk in writing groups; studies in discourse patterns in student writing and features indicating laguage variety; the analysis of how standard language is deployed in public debates about race and ethnicity; the intricacies of legal textual practices; genre analysis; and the study of second language writing” (67). Discourse studies helps students become more aware of how other people (family, friends, employers) use language and how they use it, and what this all means in the end. The course moves from collecting data, to analyzing just the data, to learning discourse theory, to fully analyzing the discourse. Stygall integrates linguistics into the course.

Why is this course helpful? Discourse analysis allows students to better use rhetoric because it allows students to better analyze their audience’s context and goals. “Discourse analysis is, to my mind, the linguistic arm of rhetoric” (70).

The above three courses fall in “writing studies.”

And More…

From Coming of Age…

 Bullock, Richard. “Feathering Our Nest?: A Critical View from Within the Discipline.” 19-24.

Bullock claims that the development of the undergraduate writing major “may have effects we don’t intend” (20). Those effects are “creating programs that prepare teachers of college-level writing in the absence of need, making programs larger despite dismal employment prospects fo our graduates, focusing on self-aggrandizement) often phrased in terms of ‘respect for us as professionals with a field’) rather than on being of use to students” (21). We want to teach students who like to write – is that clouding our mission as writing teachers?

We must be careful of accepting too many students into graduate programs with no chance of eventual employment – that’s unethical (22). Writing/composition and rhetoric tries to distance itself from literature in this fashion, but the major might put us in the same boat that we jumped ship from.

If we join the abolitionist movement, “we risk losing our power base” (23). The first-year course is required at 98% of American colleges and universities. “As we professionalize, as we turn our attention away from first-year comp to more theoretical scholarly pursuits and advanced courses and major programs, we may indeed gain opportunities for enhanced respect, interested students, and vaired teaching opportunities; we may also forfeit the power of our service role” (24). Can we have it both ways?

“Professionalizing – institutionalizing through developing undergraduate majors as well as graduate programs – is risky business, and for us writing folk, the risk inheres in losing sight of our strenghts – being pragmatic, student-centered, experiemntal, even subversive – and taking on the weaknesses of others as we ‘discipline’ ourselves” (24).

Schwegler, Robert A. “Curriculum Development in Composition.” 25-31.

What is a curriculum? “A set of practices and material conditions: catalog descriptions and course proposals shephered through often-contentious committees; catalog text and registration booklets promulgated widely, making binding and nonbinding promises and placing numbered course listings in the semblance of a coherent plan; teaching schedules and general education requirements stated according to course titles and numbers; the content of job announcemetns and tenure/promotion discussions; categories for distributing physical and monetary resources; part of the everyday langauge of students, instructors, adminstrators, and schoalrs,; minds of bureaucrats and politicians usuing their recollections of college to forumlate educational policy and funding” (25-26)

“Curricular formation is competitve” – it decides space, funding, prestige, students, faculty (26).

Composition, as opposed to literature, seems a course of study without any content (26). How do you make a “skill” into a curriculum, then? “Because writing was regarded as a skill – a means to an end – it lacked, in constrast to literary studey, both the variety and a principle of division that could lead to the creation of a curriculum that included numerous specialized courses” (27). How do you divide up a skill? On the stages of composing? On sentences, paragraphs, words, essays? These seem silly and not worthy of full courses.

One way to split up courses in writing is by genre – led to 3-way split of journalism, creative writing, technical writing.

We can focus on “activity fields” or “discursive fields” (30). These would analyze specific discursive communities by “investigate recurring textual and discursive practices; relationships of textual knowledge, resources, and power; and systems of representation – all while stressing discursive participation in a feild and offering opportunities for practice and response” (30).

Instead of “skill,” we should use the term “expertise” (29). Anyone can have the skill to drive, but not everyone can have the expertise to play the piano or compose music.

Activity fields allow for a variety of specialized courses focused on production (31).

More Project Notes

As I’ve done reading, I’ve noticed a theme of “legitimacy” come out of discussions about the writing major: legitimizing the field of composition both to the larger university community as a worthwhile course of study for undergraduates and to those within the field, positioning the discipline as one centered on something more than just the first-year course. It is, as I imagine it, a maturing of the field from one focused horizontally (across-the-curriculum, freshman composition, service/skill course) to one focused vertically, with a scaffolding course sequence leading to sophistication in matters of rhetoric and writing.

With the major, there are numerous questions that must be answered, but one of the most fundamental is what students should study when they study “writing.”

Shamoon, Linda K., et al, eds. Coming of Age: The Advanced Writing Curriculum. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2000.

Howard, Rebecca Moore. “Introduction: History, Politics, Pedagogy, and Advanced Writing.” xiii-xxii.

 How the book was conceived: the editors asked contributors to describe “ideal advanced writing courses” and “reflect on what those courses contributed to their students, to the university’s advanced writing curriculum, and to composition studies” (xiii). It was imagined as not just advanced composition, but as “advanced undergraduate writing curriculum” (xiv). How that new term is taken up varies: is it preparing students to be writers? to be teachers? to be active public citizens?

“The advanced undergraduate writing curriculum should prepare students for careers as writers, with the term writer broadly defined, and it should also prepare students for highly rhetorical participation in public life” (xv) Can we substitute “writing major” for “advanced undergraduate writing curriculum?

On how individual programs might balance the aims of a writing curriculum: “We recommend that the question of balance be decided according to local constraints but that every progarm strive to have some representation from each category [civic, professional, theoretical/historical], so as to provide undergraduate students of advanced writing with a reflexive sense of themselves as writers; with a historical understanding of the profession of writing; with a sense of the writer’s responsibilities to audience, self, and community; and with tools for entering the profession of writing” (xv).

Possible core courses are in Part II of the book. Possible electives are in Part III.

Why the shift from “advanced composition to advanced writing?” The history of advanced composition courses: “Long-established courses in advanced composition have tended to be offered as discrete courses that respond to student demand but that do not present writing as a field, a discipline, or a coherent professional category. Where more than one such course is offered, the courses are typically not designed to be in dialogue with one antoher. This leaves the writer with no clear identity as Writer, the advanced composition course with no clear institutional or intellectual purpose beyond the course itself, and composition studies in general with only a shaky claim to disciplinary status. WHen the knowledge base of a discipline – its history, theory, research, and practice – is used only to inform skill-oriented pedagogy and is never shared with undergraduates as a field, the riches of that discipline are being only partially used” (xvi).

Part IV is about program design

About the perils of writing faculty and writing programs: they are not valued enough on a broad institutional level to be completely stable and untouchable. “Developing writing curricula  – and especially advanced writing curricula – is an activity deeply embedded in institutional and intellectual politics” (xx).

 About the future of writing majors: “We predict that these programs will become reality, endure, and grow in number, precisely because so many writing faculty recognize the argument made in this book: there are compelling intellectual, occupational, and disciplinary reasons to establish writing as an advanced program of study” (xxi).

The advanced writing curriculum takes the pressure of first-year composition courses to bear all the responsibility for forming and informing college students as writers (xxi).

I’ll start with Part IV, because it seems to have the most direct application to my project.

Part IV: Designing and Protecting the Advanced Writing Program

Ramage, John. “From Profession to Discipline: The Politics of Establishing a Writing Concentration.” 137.

When establishing an advanced writing curriculum, faculty should be ready to defend their program against literature departments, against other faculty and departments who think that writing is not theoretical, and be ready to split into a new department and possibly abolish first-year composition. “The larger community is eager for the program,” but there are political hoops to jump through first.

Conefrey, Theresa. “Needs, Numbers, and the Creation of a Writing Studies Major.” 138.

A case study of how Conefrey and her colleagues created a writing major at the University of Hawaii at Hilo – they solicited input several times throughout the process and responded to the suggestions by emphasizing practical over theoretical courses (a professional emphasis) in order to prepare students to be professional writers, creative writers, and teachers of writing. Collaboration as a tool for learning was used in the professional writing courses. The requirements were based on the existing English major requirements, which made it simpler for the curriculum to be understood and eventually passed by the faculty.

Fischer, Ruth Overman and Christopher J. Thaiss. “Advanced Writing at GMU: Responding to Community Needs, Encouraging Faculty Interests.” 139.

A case study of George Mason University’s concentrations in writing in the English major: creative writing and nonfiction writing and editing. Through this case study, the authors show how they developed a program based on these ideas: have your program reflect the needs and values of the surrounding community, develop courses and curricula around faculty strengths, start small, cooperate with administration, and always look for outside funding and opportunities to diversify.

McCormick, Kathleen and Donald C. Jones. “Developing a Professional and Technical Writing Major That Integrates Composition Theory, Literacy Theory, and Cultural Studies.” 140.

The University of Hartford established its writing major by working collaboratively with other departments: faculty valued the first-year course, so they agreed to support the major, and when the faculty saw what was happening in the upper division courses, they became more supportive of the first-year course. At Hartford, the theory and the practice of writing are taught together, not divided into separate courses.

Schwalm, David. “Getting Approved.” 141.

Schwalm offers suggestions on how to prepare, submit, and defend a writing major proposal.

Connors, Robert J. “Afterward: ‘Advanced Composition’ and Advanced Writing.” 143-149.

Connors writes a history of advanced composition courses. From 1900-1920, tenured professors who taught the required first-year course developed advanced composition courses (Connors marks it the “heyday for hte invention of various sorts of advanced composition in American colleges” (143)).

Advanced composition fell into three different areas: journalism, creative writing, and technical/business writing (144). These three fields, which were “invented within English,” “quickly established enough genre identity or vocational cachet to break away into status as special fields seen as preparations for careers in writing” (144). Advanced composition was never really a unified entity, then – any course was categorized as one of these three. Each of these smaller fields claimed their courses, leaving advanced composition nothing: “the general advanced composition course was never able to escape a terrible unreal universality, a continuing curse of abstraction based upon the fact that it was defined as what was left over – a remnant culture…’Advanced composition’ was what was left after all the actual kinds of advanced writing had evacuated the field” (145).

Connors points to the failure of JAC to stay a journal about advanced composition and the defunct ATAC as proof that “advanced composition simply did not have enough gluten to sustain a group effort” (146).

The advanced courses offered in writing really had nothing to do with composition or rhetoric: they belonged to journalism, creative writing, and technical writing: “Journalists, creatives, and vocationals cultivated their own gardens, and they were not – ahem! – our garden” (146).

Things have changed – there is a paradigm shift!

The new undergraduate advanced writing curriculum “proposes and provides a program for an entirely new conception of undergraduate literacy education, one based on the centrality of writing rather than literature. This conception will be, in fact, the alternative English major for the twenty-first century” (147).

We should not place our ultimate hopes in a writing-across-the-curriculum intiative. We are allowed to think bigger than that – we can stake our claim on our own discipline. It is “the beginnig of a whole new phase of composition studies” (147). It can bring a new light on the question of what to do with the first-year course: the advanced writing curriculum can be “the counterpart or antristrophe of the abolition movement. The advanced writing curriculum is the fox to abolitionism’s hedgehog; the abolition movement is about one great thing, but hte advanced writing curriculum is about many small things – which, I would argue, cumulate into one great thing” (148). Is that one great thing the writing major? This is my original question – my original point! Connors said it – can I say it again?

“Though emerging from the cave of the first-year requirement will be liberating, we must also face the fear that comes with letting go of familiar chains” (149).

Part I: Redirecting the Field from Advanced Composition to Advanced Writing

Bloom, Lynn Z. “Advancing Composition.” 3-18.

There is no one global definition of advanced composition because “ultimately advanced composition is a concept – and a course – with a variety of local options” (5).

Hogan’s 1980 survey revealed over 50 types of advanced composition courses (6).

Bloom looks at the advanced writing courses offered at Dartmouth and Amherst from the late 1800s to the 1980s, and found a wide discrepency in the aims and focuses of them. There are two general categories, however: courses designed to further help the non-successful writer past the freshman year and those for the student who wants to become a professional writer (8-10).

Many advanced composition courses were vague and disconnected to one another, allowing each instructor to tailor the content of the course to his or her own particular interests. The instructor’s goals for the students were roughly the same for the first-year course: to practice revising and editing, organizing clear thoughts, analyzing, inventing topics of inquiry, etc. When the term “rhetoric” is used, it is used vaguely (11-12).

Bloom looks to textbooks to shed light on what advanced writing is all about. For style manuals, Strunk and White is ever-popular, along with Lanham’s Revising Prose and Williams’ Style (13). I love that book! Rhetorics used in advanced composition focus on entire works and genres instead of the “assignments” of freshman composition, so that their audience seems to be “beyond the teacher and the classroom” – almost professional (15). Readers don’t have questions or prompts for writing as freshman readers do; they are often collections of essays, like Best American Essays.

Tenured faculty, not adjuncts or TAs, usually teach advanced composition courses (16).

Important text? Haswell, Richard. Gaining Ground in College Writing: Tales of Development and Interpretation (1991)