The Blessings of Literary Theory in Teaching Composition

One of the debates that I had with myself in attempting college level instruction for the first time (I am teaching the "College Prep English" course, our unofficial AP Lit/Comp course), was the benefits that literary theory provides students in learning the art of college level analytical composition.

My wife told me early on in the process of formulating my curriculum for the year that I should be sure to include literary theory as a portion of the class, and that I should do it early. Being enrolled at the time in the introductory Grad school theory class and encountering anew the pleasures and challenges of our major theoretical thinkers, I was surprised at her adamant suggestion. However, after some thought I agreed to give it a try, figuring that Literary theory couldn't hurt and I could always adjust.

She was absolutely right. And I'm not certain why it hadn't registered with me before the benefits this could provide. What had become second nature to me through undergraduate and now graduate training, namely that there are multiple set perspectives from which academics traditionally approach literature most of which can be employed to provide a legitimate reading of any given text, was (of course) news to my students (prisoners of the "correct interpretation" myth) and helped immensely in what has proven to be the most demanding aspect of my course for them - knowing what to write about when the teacher refuses to tell you.

What I had forgotten, or failed to realize, was that a basic knowledge of theory provides instant topics for analysis. I keep a small tool chest of basic analytic options that I can whip out at anytime that something new and striking doesn't just jump out at me as I go through a given text. I know that there are always several old tropes I can fall back on that will provide academically sound analytical work. My students didn't have this tool chest, and what's more were terrified by the cutting of the given topic umbilical cord. When I refused to budge on that point (leading guided brainstorming sessions of possible topics rather than providing even examples or lists) they soon found that the theories I was exposing them to could provide the scaffolding they needed to come up with topics on their own. Why it is that this was not immediately and painfully obvious I'm not certain I can say, but it has proven an invaluable tool to me as a teacher, and far more importantly, to my students as writers.

A Question of "Modern" Poetics - Reflecting on Modernism, Formalism, and Donald Hall's "Poetry and Ambition"

From my understanding of the history of the arts, (admittedly limited to a couple of semesters of humanities classes, and only two that focused on a historical perspective on the arts and western culture) the ideal of the new, the "original" as requirement for something to be art is relatively new. It seems to come into high focus with the severe break in thought and aesthetics that follows World War I and ignites the high modernist period in literature, the visual arts, "serious" music etc.

Embodied in Pound's cry to "make it new" the zeitgeist suddenly demanded a total break with the past to reflect the supposed fracturing of western culture as it tried desperately to destory itself in the first world war. This modernist aesthetic led to marvelous innovations and experiments in all the arts, and its theoricians and practitioners drove western art into a new era of muscular artistic freedom where all conventions existed only to be broken, where a given piece of art's only tie to convention may have been the absolute conformity required to ensure that they broke every traditional rule in order not to conform. However, before going to terribly far into the future we've taken these experiments to their logical extremities, pushed them as far as they can go before the carefully constructed arguments fall to pieces in the face of the argument that no, in fact, something that is that far from the traditional notions of art, literature, poetry, music etc. has now ceased to be art, music, poetry, or literature and has in fact moved on to become something else.

Now, with the exception of a few (okay, more than a few) bizarre experimental attempts we have in general not crossed that line. However, we've pushed literature to the edge of random gibberish in all genres, and it happened disturbingly quickly as E. E. Cummings, James Joyce, Faulkner, and perhaps William S. Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac at the far end demonstrated.

Now, this is not to resort to Ecclesiastes and complain that there is nothing new under the sun. There are poems to be written, stories to be told, films to be made, and pieces to be composed that are worthy artistic endeavors. While it can be argued that these will all be variations on very old themes, that is irrelevant. All of human endeavor is simultaneously variations on very old themes, and entirely new. Just as each individual human being is both a variation on a very old theme and something entirely original. The point where Eliot misses the boat in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" is in divorcing greatness from the individual personality. As is often argued in even "more" modern poetic circles the truth is paradoxical: The universal is found most thoroughly in the intensely personal. I feel that all art is much closer to the practices of the actor - creating individually diverse characters by constantly channeling the creation through yourself. You're not creating something entirely divorced from your own experience, from your own instincts, something imposed from the outside by tradition or anything else. Rather, something is created by the pursuit of alternative selves, the creation of a new "you" through the application of the circumstances of the script - the circumstances of the character - to yourself and through the power of the imagination creating for yourself the you who you would be had you been raised, born etc. in the circumstances provided. The very rules dictate the possibility of the most effective original, unstereotyped character.

In our continual pursuit (at least among those who archly determine that they are pursuing "art" as opposed to the rest of us peons who are simply writing what we love, perhaps even, heaven forbid, considering a general audience) of the new, we have abandoned the rules of any given artform except to attempt to find new ways to break them. Pound did indeed say "make it new," and thank goodness for his long fight in pursuit of true art, despite the elitist and intentionally difficult work he and so many of his contemporaries produced. They were determined in part it seemed, to stay just ahead of taste, so that they might always be cutting edge, always be avant garde. Still how new is it in 2009 to write a "sonnet" in which the only thing the poem has in common with the definition of the sonnet form are the letters s, o, n, e, and t? We've been doing this forever. Spinning our wheels for eighty-years. It is time to declare that the emperors no clothes on, and yet even this gesture is empty and meaningless because it reads as another act of rebellion when we've practiced rebellion so long that there's nothing left to rebel against except the principle of rebellion itself.

When the call for making it new was sounded most recently, nearly 100 years ago, at the beginning of the still continuing modernist period, (granted we've gone through a number of subgenres or variations on the theme of modernism since then, but we've never really divorced ourselves from it entirely, nor evolved into something new from it) it was not the origin of free verse, excuse me verse libre. Whitman had broken that particular barrier, with wonderful success years earlier. New variations on free verse were yet to appear, and wonderful works have been created in the aesthetic that has persisted since that time. I am not against Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Williams etc. I love their work, they are vibrant and alive still today. At the same time, this absurd insistance that the only way we can work with old forms is to destroy them must be one aspect of the lack of ambition in American Poetry that Donal Hall cites in his essay "Poetry and Ambition."

Much that Hall says is best used for discussion starters and warnings to avoid extremes, but the McPoem he describes is real. And one of its aspects is the robotic insistence of this rebellion against meter and rhyme. Equating the division between open and closed form poetry to the division between modern and "old" poetry is a false dichotomy. One can write a sonnet following the conventions and still do something new, channeling the constraints of form in much the way that the actor channels the constraints of a script, one might still push their experience, their imagination, their will into those limitations and create something new without destroying the limitations in the process. When we as poets demand an absolute absence of form in order to recreate something new "within" the form, we are "chopping [our own heads off] with golden axes and smiling on the strokes that murder us."

Finally then, a question, if we do what we do in an attempt to ensure originality, in an attempt (subconscious or conscious) to conform to standards set eighty to a hundred and forty-fifty years ago, how modern are we?

The Evils of Bell Curve Grading...or Why Last Night's Curve Talk Drove Me NUTS!

I remember as I was angrily declaiming against the idea of opening class by assigning the number of specific letter grades that would be given in the class having the sane part of me sit there and go, "What button got pressed here, because this reaction is a bit extreme, a bit...nuts?!" Later, with some distance I was able to figure out what it was that makes true curve grading, or the idea of declaring x number of each letter grades will be given at the beginning of a class really does upset me.

First, it offends my sense of equality of opportunity. In a perfect world with perfect students everyone should get an A. Now because we don't have an ideal situation, I can understand that the appearance of any "academically challenging" class where every student has an A or perhaps even A's and B's is a red flag. However, I cannot accept anything that artificially limits the grade of any student. To me every student should have the opportunity to earn his or her own A.

Second, I don't believe that my performance should be determined by the performance of others. Affected? Inevitable. Determined? Unethical! I do not accept that educational outcomes should be determined by forces outside the control of the individual. Yes, that is part of real life, but that aspect of real life will be reflected in the classroom naturally without us bringing it in artificially. Education is supposed to be like the real world, but there are also idealistic even utopian ideal to it that is supposed to promote people's potential. I see no reason to begin the real world's smack down early. Besides competition for jobs in general is far more reflective of what should happen in the classroom than the example given of competition for a single given position. That is in the real world, failure to achieve a particular position does not preclude you from achieving an equivalent position at another firm. In the classroom, one person achieving a particular grade should not preclude someone else from doing so. We're not limited to handing out a single A the way a firm may be limited to hiring for a single position. Unless we impose that limit and create artificial scarcity. I don't like it. The teacher has an obligation to society/subject and to his or her students and to grade in this fashion fails to honor that obligation to students.

Finally, I believe that grades should be determined by performance against known standards (even, dare I say it, objective standards - to the extent possible) and not against each other. My grade in a given course should be determined by the quality of my performance in that course and my ability to meet that criteria. If I do those things in an excellent manner I should get an "A." Is that going to be subjective somewhat? Yes. But better subjective than arbitrary.

Pedagogy at the End of All Things

This post is especially interesting, as its version 4.0 of my pedagogy for the semester, and 3.0 for the blog. For those of you who are reading (surely someone is out there) I promise this will not be the mammoth posting that version 2.0 was. Hopefully no one - with apologies to the unfortunate Dr. Souder - actually had to read that whole thing.

This class has done more for me professionally than any single other course I've ever taken, period. While this has been, ostensibly, a study of the theories of composition, the discussion has taken place inevitably, and nearly at all times in the context of the classroom. The theorists all paint themselves as rising to the defense of the students in one fashion or another. Therefore, I have taken the course as a chance to repeatedly re-evaluate my pedagogy in the light of the various theories we've been presented: some have changed my classroom practice already this semester, some I won't be using, and some figure into my ever grandiose plans for reshaping my courses over the summer. For certain, when I return in the fall, having had this course and the time to apply my conclusions to my teaching, I will never teach writing the same way again.

I keep reminding myself that I want this to be relatively short and practical. Short for a windbag like me is always relative, and even occasionally achievable. Practical, well...I'll try not to spend too much time playing with pure theory.

Given an ideal situation:
My writing instruction will focus on the development of rhetorical argument. The traditional modes will be taught in my classroom, but not as ends in themselves. Rather they will be presented as manners of thinking about problems that we address through writing. As Mike Rose indicates in "Remedial Writing Courses: A Critique and a Proposal," these techniques are really mental patterns for addressing problems, and it is in that fashion that they should be taught. As Dr. D said in the frustration of explaining the skills we teach in composition, "We teach thinking." Indeed we do.

In addition to a focus on argument, I want to make the They Say/I Say focus on dialogic writing a key to my pedagogy. In thinking and rethinking about what Graff and Birkenstein are saying in this text, I am convinced that the true focus of the text is not argument, it is dialogue. Now, Graff is famously, and correctly associated with argument, but the focus of They Say/I Say is not how to establish and back an argument, it's how to make that argument dialogic, how to take your argument out of a vacuum and make it a part a larger conversation. I want this to become a focus of my pedagogy.

I want to make sure that my class is a class between what Lindemann calls "the how" and "the what." That is I want process and the actual act of writing to be a major portion of my class as well as the moments of more formal instruction. Ideally a sixty-forty split or better in favor of class time spent in the acts of writing. I want each major piece to go through a full drafting and revising process with at least one rewrite. I want to provide a full workshop experience to my students allowing them to receive feedback from many voices and the experience of giving feedback themselves. I want to provide direct instruction and practice in the intricacies of process, focusing on Murray and Elbow's foundational work in this area.

I want my assessment to reflect my teaching aims. I won't assess writing in in-class essays or essay tests. I may require these types of responses from students, however, the purpose will not be to assess their writing, but to assess their ideas in connection with some other aspect of the high school English class. In grading these pieces writing elements will be handled with utmost leniency because students have not had the opportunity to revise or even to edit the piece I am receiving. When I want to assess the student's writing I will use a writing assignment that moves through the full writing process, with at least two full drafts before a final draft is accepted and a conference on at least one draft, if not both. Then this piece will become part of a portfolio which will form the backbone of the writing assessment in the course. I like Elbow's idea of not grading anything until I have two pieces in hand, and then you can see where the student wants to go and discuss the comparative strengths and weaknesses of each piece.

Politics is an unavoidable part of the classroom experience. As Orwell said, everything is political. That does not mean that I should turn ideologue and push an specific ideological or political agenda as part of my teaching. In fact, I think that the teacher's job is to play devil's advocate to the ideas the students present, showing that things are always at least two sided and that the arguments are often intricate and not easily resolved. In this fashion the teacher can encourage students to question their own ideas without intentionally or unintentionally promoting one side or another of any given issue. I don't believe that the teacher's personal political beliefs have any place in the classroom unless the students ask for them.

Finally, technology in the classroom is an entirely new aspect to my pedagogy following this year's experience. While I am most likely to find that my classroom approach will change very little, I will try to provide more opportunities for my students to use various pieces of composing technology in connection with the class. I am still floundering on this one, but would like to find ways to incorporate blogging, and the kind of digital document platform Google Docs provides as a part of working in the classroom. I could see having the responses to certain readings or general journaling take the form of blogs. The dilemma for me is how to use the blogs in the composition portion of class if not for responses. If I am not using a lot of readings, than what are the students blogging responses to? If it is journaling, how do I keep this particular portion of class from becoming a meaningless feel good exercise? There are of course more aspects than this to technology, I would like to learn more about digital portfolios to accompany an adoption of text portfolios in the classroom, AND I have already in the past included producing a web page as a means of addressing an assignment. That would continue.

At the end of the year I am stepping off into several new things that I've been intrigued by, but failed to employ in my classroom in the past: the use of portfolio assessment, a greater focus on process and a full application of writer's workshop, and a greater use of technology through the application of the programs/platforms available through web 2.0. I don't know that I will get all of this ready for the fall. I am also looking to redesign my instruction of literature by employing literature circles across the board in class. It should be an interesting year!

Wendy Bishop: All Writing is Creative...

...but is all writing creative writing? I thoroughly enjoyed this presentation. Dr. Bishop pursued writing in directions that I have become very, very interested in.

Accepting the traditional barrier for purposes of discussing it, I must then first propose a definition for "creative writing" as I understand it. When I think of creative writing, the kind of writing that gets its own course (or even section/emphasis of study), I think of poetry, short stories/novels, plays, and, after taking Juan's Creative Non-Fiction workshop a variety of personal essays, memoirs, and perhaps even autobiographies. I would have to contend that Emerson and Thoreau are eminent practitioners of creative writing. I think there are columnists who have gained the distinction as well.

That said, I'm on the fence. I would assert without fear that all writing is creative. We are at least synthesizing our ideas, experiences, influences etc. into something new on the paper or screen. Certainly this is creative in both the generative and aesthetic sense. However, there is, in the traditionally defined creative writing genres a difference of purpose that I believe is telling. Whatever lofty ideas presented/espoused by a given piece of literature, in order to be literature there has to be a primarily aesthetic goal. I think this is the distinguishing line between creative writing and writing geared toward other purposes.

Now, if one broadens the definition of creative writing all bets are off. One might easily argue that all writing is creative, therefore all writing is creative writing and at that point, I would accept the syllogism. I think even, that this would clarify the argument, which is really, what is the difference between writing with a primarily aesthetic goal, and writing for other purposes. (I am choosing aesthetic, bu it would be equally fair to say entertainment, and is probably best labeled as some combination of the two.) The question then is can all writing be aesthetic writing, that is writing that counts aesthetics as a (if not the) primary purpose. I would answer no. Academic writing, technical writing and many other types while requiring creativity (they are all creative, that is generative) are markedly different in tone and purpose from aesthetic writing.

Now surely someone will pull a piece (I have one in mind by Donal Murray myself) that surely blurs the boundaries if not outright defies them. This (okay, these) exception(s) are just that: exceptions. They prove the rule that there is a distinguishing line of style and tone between the types of writing that keeps many techniques of one from being affective in the other.

That said, I think that there is a ton the two can learn from each other, especially in terms of process and process difficulties - revision, editing, writer's block etc. I have been astounded by the correlations between the process theorists and the "theorists" on the creative side, as I detailed in much earlier post on Peter Elbow. I do think that a union of the two types of writing, recognizing that all writing is creative even if it isn't all aesthetic writing, would yield generative processes, and revision practices universally beneficial and applicable. I would welcome the opportunity to learn more of what Dr. Bishop did in this area, and to explore it further myself.

Kenneth A. Bruffee: Writing Together Can Be Fun?

I have to admit that my personal experience has made me upfront leery of any of the theorists so far who have really pushed collaboration in composition. I haven't had very many positive experiences with collaborative work.

I was always frustrated with peer review in high school and as an undergrad because it didn't seem to produce anything I could use. I would get it done because my teachers required it, but when it came to re-writing the paper I tore it apart and put it back together myself. I never actually followed anything they said. Part of this was (and probably still is) more than a little arrogance. I am very, very confident in my skills as a writer. Still, when the general level of quality was comments like "nice description" and "good word choice" or occasionally something more splashy like "nice imagery" can you blame me? Thanks guys, that will improve my paper, a lot.

As a college student I did have a good experience or two with the writing lab at BYU (yes, it did take an assigned visit to get me in there), I learned to enjoy the discussion process, and to help guide my peer reviewers towards questions I had about the piece (which provided mroe useful feedback as well) and otherwise found this most common of collaborative techniques a much more helpful tool. Then as a grad student last semester I took great pleasure in participating in one of Professor Morales' Graduate Writers' Workshop courses.

With the incredible amount of information Thomas provided for us in his presentation (Wow!) I have to admit that I was left with my head swimming somewhat. However, I picked up enough of what was happening to be forced to step back from previouis skepticism and say, "Huh. If someone this smart and well-respected is saying 'Hey, this is the way to go' perhaps I should reconsider. Certainly, I have learned as Bruffee points out, that, well taught, the collaborative revision we experience as peer review or a workshop format can be wonderfully beneficial, and if nothing else trains the critical eye in the participants. In addition, the format gives the teacher the opportunity (rare in many cases, or at least rarely occurring) to provide an additional audience, a "real" (okay a "somewhat less artifical") audience for student work. Thomas, thank you. It becomes apparent that something I've trivialized and set aside needs a much closer examination.

Kathleen Blake Yancey: Texts as Influences, Portfolios, Digital Portfolios, and Assessment

Rhonda Turner did an admirable job (several weeks ago now...whoops...) of presenting Kathleen Blake Yancey to the class. I am glad that she was able to contact Dr. Yancey directly as it was fascinating to hear the responses to her (Turner's) thoughtful questions direct from the source.

Like our esteemed presenter, I found Dr. Yancey's choice of most influential texts rather than people quite interesting. I think it says a lot about academics, and wonder how many of us would have to respond in the same fashion, choosing texts of one kind or another rather than people, if we were truly honest as to our biggest influences.

I have long been interested in the use of portfolio's in the classroom, but have never been sufficiently interested/motivated to get out and find the information necessary. Having seen this presentation and then done some reading (I read "Composition in a New Key" and "Palimpsest and Portfolios," both cited by Turner) I am now feeling much more motivated toward gathering the practical side of the information I would need to begin using portfolio assessment. In fact, it may become my big summer project this year (along with reading way more than is healthy for any one human being, and the usual summer job for a poor teacher and annual curriculum tweaks). The presentation of digital portfolio's was fascinating. I have offered the students in my classes the option of presenting a web page as one of their writing projects in connection with one of my favorite writing projects for years now (it is part of a Tom Romano inspired multi-genre project), however, I had never considered the possibility of making a general presentation format for all students of the type Turner demonstrated in class. I would like to learn more about both Portfolio assessment and digital portfolios for application in my own classroom.

In further reading that split off from these articles by Dr. Yancey I encountered two committee produced assessment pieces that she was a part of. The one I was most impressed by was the Position Statement written by the CCCC Committee on Assessment of which she was the chair at the time. The statement, while containing many of the weaknesses of documents of with its composition history (the over formal presentation, the strained stretching of positions to accomodate the wildly divergent views of a field like ours, etc.), offered several ideas that I found fascinating and that seem particular "Yanceyian" having learned about her work on assessment and on portfolios in particular.

One was that any piece of graded writing (and I believe that this would apply to anything given as a or as part of a summative assessment) should reflect the benefits of the entire writing process. In other words, it should be a drafted and revised paper rather than a composed at the moment piece. Interesting how our assessment often contradicts our teaching. Here we sit and preach process, process, process in terms of how to produce good writing, and then we assess writing by asking students to sit down and spur of the moment write up something that will see no revision, the barest possible minimum of editing, and no outside eyes at all for assessment of their writing skills. Interesting.

The second was that writing should not be assessed through a single piece, but always through multiple pieces - which would, by default, be by a portfolio of work. This was particularly interesting to me, when I read it as it coincided not only with the presentation info, but with an Elbow piece I had just read where he talked about having the students write and not grading anything until he had at least two pieces (drafts or different pieces I'm not entirely certain of at the moment; I don't think it matters much) in hand for the sake of comparison. Then he could point out comparative strengths and weaknesses from the student's own work, an idea I thought admirable.

In any case these two ideas on assessment made a lot of sense to me. I've questioned my teaching a lot in this class, but most has been an "Oooooh, what a cool idea I want to try that" feeling. This was more like "Ouch. She's write. This practice is unfair to my students." I think, judging by my own reaction to it, that - as far as my own immediate teaching practices - these may be the most impactful ideas I've run into this semester.

Cynthia Selfe

The first thing that I noticed about Synthia on the handout provided to us was the fascinatingly long and varied list of interests. That alone was enough to draw my solid interest. I think if we are to remain alive intellectually as engaged scholars we must be pursuing various avenues and aspects of interest. I would hope that someday someone who asked me (I don't expect I'll ever have done enough of importance for anyone to find out about it any other way) to receive such a long and vibrant list of interests. I remember reading in a memoir entitled Know it All about the author's experience meeting Alex Trebek. Trebek told him during their discussion that a person should maintain an intellectual curiosity even about things that bored them, or something to that effect. I think that is a worthy goal. We cannot specialize in everything, it's impossible, even within our own relatively narrow field of English. But we can maintain an intellectual curiousity about any of the infinite subjects available to us to learn about.

What I learned most from Cynthia's example is something I thought I already knew: the teacher of young people, especially the secondary teacher must maintain a certain level of familiarity with the newest, latest things especially in technology if they are to remain relevant. I knew that it helped that I still listen to current popular music, that I am an avid and opinionated fan of television and movies and so have those in common with my students, but had never made the same connection to the idea of technology itself. I realized in this class for the first time, that my Thoreauian approach to technology (Simplify! Simplify! interpreted as "if it's not absolutely necessary to my life try to do without it...) is perhaps detrimental to my profession as a teacher let alone my ability to relate to my students. I maintain that I do not need to carry around a new fancy cell-phone (I've grudgingly accepted a cell phone paid for by my in-laws as a hint we should call more often) or keep up to date with a site on all the latest social sites to do this, but red in the face I must admit that I have been willfully ignorant of too much. Red in the face not because I did it, but because the root motivation is fear. There is nothing I despise more than feeling stupid. Nothing. And Technology does that to me. A lot. Still, I have also maintained that fear is a stupid reason to avoid trying something, investigating it, at least making an attempt to understand. So this portion of the presentation really opened my eyes.

Pedagogy Statement 2/(Mid Term Long Essay)

Mid Term Long Essay/Pedagogy Statement Week 10

According to Richard Fulkerson’s “Composition at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century,” one controversial issue in the discussion of college composition pedagogy has been the “variant contemporary approaches to to teaching college writing” (Fulkerson, 658). On the one hand, teachers who pursue a Critical/Cultural Studies approach, one informed by the type of advocacy pedagogy promoted by Paulo Freire in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Teaching, 26), argue that the “larger purpose is to encourage students to resist and to negotiate[…] hegemonic discourses – in order to bring about more personally humane and socially equitable economic and political arrangements” (Berlin, qtd. In Fulkerson 660). Richard Fulkerson, in commenting on this approach says that “the course aim is not ‘improved writing’ but ‘liberation’ from dominant discourse” (Fulkerson, 660) . On the other hand, an expressivist approach, characterized by the focus on the promotion of authentic voice and sincerity of scholars such as Peter Elbow (Wenger, 3/2/2009), contends that the course aim should be to “foster a writer’s aesthetic, cognitive, and moral development” by “employing free writing, journal keeping, reflective writing, and small group dialogic collaborative response” (Burnham, qtd. In Fulkerson 667). Others, Current/Traditionalists, even maintain that one might focus nearly exclusively on product, truncating writing to a quick run through of “outline, write, edit, receive grade, do grammar exercises." My own view is that a variant of what Fulkerson calls Procedural Rhetoric that emphasizes “composition as argumentation” while using rhetoric to “introduce students to an academic discourse community” (Fulkerson 671) holds out the best hope for addressing the needs of students as writers and as (at least for as long as they are in college)academics because it engages students in dialectic with the critical and cultural conversations occurring around their topics, focuses on composition without a pre-determined ideological goal, and is extremely pragmatic in that it is equally adaptable to the various disciplines the students in composition courses will eventually pursue.

In his article “Two Cheers for the Argument Culture,” Gerald Graff writes, “argumentation tends to be seen as one practice among others rather than as […] the meta-practice that all academic practices partake of and converge on” (Two Cheers, 66), and I whole heartedly agree. My approach is described above as a variant of the procedural rhetoric approach because focusing on rhetoric does not eliminate the need to actively teach and move through the writing process, nor does it address the role of assessment, the role of the teacher or the role of technology in the composition classroom. All of these elements must be combined and fully considered before I feel one has truly established a holistic composition theory. I make this statement assigning myself two specific requirements for establishing my own position as a scholar/teacher: 1) The theory should have a strong theoretical basis even if that basis is merely used as a point of departure. 2) It should be a pedagogical theory. In other words, a failure to address all the components of a composition course is a failure to have a complete theory.

Purpose of the Composition Course

The purpose of the fresman composition course is to prepare students for the writing the academy demands of them. Elbow is wrong to put it off to later classes (Responses 87) because it puts the students at a disadvantage vis a vis the expectations of the professors who believe that the students know and are familiar with the genre/tropes of academic argumentation. However, Bartholomae is also wrong in his pursuit of difficult texts as fundamental to the course to prepare students for working with them because no one else is doing so (Responses 86) as that is not the purpose of freshman composition either. I appreciate Lindemann's argument for privileging writing and leaving the texts to the periphery (see Lindemann's Freshman Composition: No Place For Literature), and Elbow's call for the primacy of actual class time spent in the act writing. I remember the most productive writing classes I've ever taken (and I am speaking of specific class sessions here) were spent writing, working at a paragraph level (because we could competently produce paragraphs worth writing within a given period), and dealing with the specific problems of our own arguments, style, thought etc. I would privilege argumentation because I believe Graff's argument that dialogic argumentation captures the essence of the most basic academic activities. The freshman composition course needs to balance the primacy of the actual writing process as a practice in the practicality of producing text, but also needs to introduce the They Say/I Say expectation of dialogic argumentation as the basis of the writing students will be expected to do in the academy and beyond. Even after their time in academe is over, they will be better prepared for their professional lives in any field if they can write in a manner that engages other opinions (for support and refutation) to logically promote an idea/argument.

Argument in the Composition Course

Graff's writing handbook They Say/I Say is what I would use as a primary text. I would place argument at the center of the course, requiring students to engage other opinions in stating their own. Contrary to certain objections raised (see Ann Jurecic's "Getting a Clue: Gerald Graff and the Life of the Mind") writing that engages other opinions does not have to be "about" (Jurecic 326) secondary literature. On the contrary one could be taught to write such argumentation without having to touch critical responses at all. It is entirely possible to produce one's own opinion on a given issue (or piece of literature if the professor so chooses) first, and then engage other opinions to frame your argument, to gain support, and to address the other side effectively. The student's own thought is still the foundation of the entire text, and the text itself is still about the issue at hand, not "about" the "secondary literature" (Jurecic 326) at all. The other brings itself in as a support to the student's argument. This places me in agreement with scholars focusing on argument such as Graff and Bartholomae, and leaves me in contradiction to those, like Elbow, who might privilege other forms of writing in the course. Simply put, creative writing, as much as I love it, and as much as lessons can be learned from the processes and techniques that transfer to academic writing, should not be the focus of freshman composition. The personal writing favored by the expressivist approach has a smaller place perhaps, in that I think it is important for the students to be reflecting on their own process as writers and their growth in addition to producing argument. So, I believe their can be a peripheral role for blogging, journaling, etc. that would allow for this reflective piece. In addition, I believe that towards the end of the course as final assessment is approaching, the reflective writing of the student on the course, their growth, and what they've learned takes on an even greater importance which I will address later.

Process in the Composition Course

Focusing on argument does not alleviate the need to focus on other aspects of writing. I believe that teaching/reinforcing the writing process is essential to the freshman composition course. Students should spend time in class actually producing text, and in in conferencing with their peers and with the teacher about their work. Elbow argues throughout his work for the need to have actual writing taking place in the classroom and I agree that the students need to engage in the process in a place that reinforces its cyclical nature instead of focusing on the finished product alone. Most students will have come from high school writing backgrounds that did this (primarily because the high school curriculum, which places all elements of English studies in the same classroom during the same time period does not often allow the time for true pursuit of process). In addition, their other courses in the university will also focus on the finished product alone. In addition to the argument for presenting the true nature of the writing process and Elbow's argument for time in class producing text, I believe that Donald Murray's work on the writing process particularly that on what he terms "rehearsing" and "re-vision" are essential. Introducing the fact that it is the writer's job to revise - every paper, every time - as Tony mentioned in his presentation on Murray is important. Students don't realize this, and high school tends to emphasize the draft and done approach, or if we're lucky a draft-edit and done approach. I also think that an explicit instruction in recognizing the elements of Murray's rehearsing process can be very, very helpful to students, as this is a part of the writing process that, outside of Murray, (and outside of the university for that matter) I have never encountered before. The twining of argument and process in instruction, leads I believe to the fairest and most accurate methods of assessment.

Assessment in the Writing Class

In addressing assessment in the freshman composition course, I turn to three sources: Donald Murray's "The Listening Eye: Reflections on the Writing Conference," Peter Elbow's "Embracing Contraries in the Teaching Process," and the CCCC Committee on Assessment's (Chaired by Kathleen Blake Yancey) "Writing Assessment: A Position Statement."

A writing course must have both formative and summative assessment. Dr. Murray's powerful description of his growth towards the use of writing conferences and his slow removal of himself from a primary position as lecturer/editor in the writing classroom should be required reading for all teacher's of writing. I believe that the conferences described here, in which Dr. Murray uses Socratic questioning to bring out students' own knowledge of writing and of their work or to create a greater awareness of their work is the perfect form of formative assessment. Application of such writing conferences with both the instructor and peers throughout the course, should provide the primary source of formative assessment.

The second area of assessment that must be addressed is summative assessment. Following principles expressed in his teachings on the writing process, Elbow argues for a separation of what I call the nurturer and the gatekeeper roles of teaching. We all have an urge to protect and promote our students, simultaneously, we all have a notion of our responsibility to society and the institution that we work at to ensure that those who pass our courses receive grades that accurately reflect their knowledge/abilities. Elbow suggests balancing the roles by separating them. In taking this approach, the teacher would first engage the gatekeeper, designing a challenging course with thorough assessment that reflects, objectively a high standard that students are expected to meet. This is the role in which the teacher greets the students, laying out course expectations, and, perhaps, even providing a copy of any final assessment to show students where they will be expected to be at the end of the course. Following this, the teacher becomes the nurturer, doing everything possible to ready the students for the challenges inherent in the course and the assessment pieces. The gatekeeper re-emerges at the end of the course to then turn a purely critical eye on the students' final products knowing that he or she has already done all that was possible to prepare students for this point.

A final word on summative assessment is taken from the CCCC committee's position statement. In the statement the authors argue for assessing "preferably...more than one sample written on more than one occasion, with sufficient time to plan, draft, rewrite, and edit each product or performance." This says to me that a portfolio assessment system should be used, not surprising considering Dr. Yancey's chairing of the committee and her extensive work on assessment and the use of portfolios. For summative assessment I would use a portfolio assessment system, to consist not only of a range of student papers across the semester, but of an extensive reflective piece written by the student covering her or his progress in knowledge and skills throughout the course. Such a portfolio would, ideally, replace a final exam in a composition course.

The Role of the Technology in the Composition Classroom

As most students will be producing their text and doing their research on a computer, it is essential that the composition teacher consider the role of technology in his or her classroom. I believe that the teacher has an obligation to review with students, at least briefly, the principles of academic honesty and how to avoid unintentional plagiarism through accurate citation and honest disclosure. I also believe that the teacher should make use of technology's opportunities for collaboration and community. Activities such as discussion boards and blogging, the use of collaborative learning tools such as the google docs program which allows students to electronically access and edit a piece of writing in a shared electronic space, can all be profitably employed. The instructor should remain aware of caveats and forewarnings given by scholars in the field such as Cynthia Selfe and others that technology cannot be blindly seen as a panacea.

The Role of the Teacher in the Classroom

I believe that Elbow captures the conflicting roles of the teacher in any classroom very effectively in the piece mentioned above "Embracing Contraries in the Teaching Process." I believe that the role of gatekeeper is pretty straightforward. What, however, is the role of nurturer? What does it look like in the classroom? I believe that the answer to this question can be found in several areas. Murray's description of conferences included in the earlier section of this essay on assessment is a primary example of the teacher as nurturer. In a safe environment the teacher discusses with the student the strengths and weaknesses of their work with an eye not to summative assessment, but with a focus on helping the student to see where they are (or where their work is) and how they can get to where they want/need to be. The teacher functions in Elbow's words as "a kind of coach (Embracing 337)." I interpret this to mean that we are with students, engaged in the work they are engaged in and working in the trenches of the paper with them to help them improve, just as a coach is often in the middle of the action on an athletic field during practice. It means we need to get very specific and help students with the little things (grammar, syntax, paragraphing, etc.) while also helping them with big picture items such as theses, organization, the development of their arguments, familiarity with various occasions/genres etc. It means that we do (to a reasonable extent) what we ask our students to do, that is, students in a writing course should see us engaged in writing. They should see us as writers as well as professors. This means having the courage to voice your own doubts, interests, goals etc. as a writer where appropriate. I feel that, as described earlier, the conference promoted by Murray is or should be a key component of this role. The teacher then, is both nurturer and gatekeeper: he or she meets the obligations to institution and society by designing tough minded assignments and assessments and holding students to high standards in completing them; she or he meets the obligations to students by working on and between each assignment and assessment with the role of coach - helping in every way possible to improve student performance.

The Role of Politics in the Classroom

As suggested at the beginning of the essay there is a push in the purpose for the composition classroom that I have not addressed. This push, what Fulkerson calls the cultural/critical studies approach, reflects the liberation pedagogy of such academics as Paulo Freire and cites a specific ideological goal of the composition classroom to liberate students from the dominant discourse (Graff, 27). While it has been argued that an ideologically neutral classroom or teaching is impossible (which I concede), I argue that having any such explicitly political ideological goal in the classroom whether openly or not does not serve the purposes of freshman composition. Instead it leads to a focus on the political issues and texts themselves, and rather than teaching writing, the focus of the course becomes at least equally if not primarily the teaching of political thought (see Fulkerson, 665). Such an approach may serve the purposes of other courses at other times, although I would prefer even a naively attempted neutrality to such any approach explicitly promoting any ideological agenda. A teacher as a person in authority can say all that he or she wants that students are free to think for themselves, but if they promote a certain agenda while espousing this idea, they will in fact cause students to either respond without thought in the manner they believe that the teacher wants, or to adopt the position held by the authority figure in the room, who will inevitably by dint of experience be more convincing and authoritative in arguing their position than any of the students (Fulkerson, 666).

I believe that there is an alternative approach that allows us to challenge students' assumptions without imposing our own beliefs. Gerald Graff in an article entitled "Teaching Politcally Without Political Correctness" advocates simply adopting a contrarian's position to each student position. Instead of pushing one agenda all the time, the teacher should find themselves playing multiple roles from multiple political perspectives in response to the students so that they can never settle too comfortably into a single paradigm, but instead are constantly questioning their own assumptions. In Graff's words "in my own teaching I find myself being a Leninist one day and a Milton Friedmanite on the next, depending on my sense of the ideological tilt of the students. And in classes where the students themselves are politically divided...I often put on one party hat or the other by turns (as well as many intermediate positions), depending on the ebb and flow of the discussion." While Graff continues to elaborate his position very thoroughly, I think that the approach as described above reflects both goals: it challenges student assumptions and it avoids promoting a particular ideological position in class.

Conclusion

I have written a bumpy essay here, that is fantastically broad, with compositionists specializing in each of the sub areas I've addressed. However, in making a statement as to one's pedagogical position, I believe that all of these elements must be included. To avoid considering them in favor of one or another being sufficient is to do a disservice to our students by ignoring key areas of composition studies.

Mid-Term II: Donald Murray

IV. Donald M. Murray
Write before you write! Donald Murray was the director of the writing program at the University of New Hampshire and spent one of his careers teaching writing and teaching writing teachers. Murray’s scholarly work seems to focus highly on the writing process and on pedagogy. There does not seem to be any evidence of the type of philosophical purpose of the class debates that occur in the other major process figure we’ve covered in class Peter Elbow. Murray, like Elbow, derives his position in academia and his position as a writer from a determination to overcome dropping out of high school not once but twice before going back to school to study writing, finishing both high school and college at the same time and going on to become the youngest winner of the Pulitzer Prize in history while working as a journalist for the Boston Herald.

Murray’s work on the writing process focuses on the importance of the stages of pre-writing and Revision. Murray’s work on prewriting literally focuses on pre-writing activities as opposed to the pre-drafting­ activities taught as prewriting such as brainstorming, freewriting, etc. Notice these activities all actually involve putting pen to paper (even if metaphorically through digital interface). Murray focuses on the period of mental preparation that precedes even these pre-drafting activities, and which he calls rehearsal. He claims that the writer naturally delays, and that this is healthy and should be encouraged as the subconscious is at work on the writing problem. He even lists a series of signs that the subconscious will provide to indicate to the writer that it is time to begin. Beginning before the arrival of one or more of these signs will simply lead to frustration as the mind has not finished its rehearsal process.
Murray’s pedagogical work that I have most encountered is his focus on the conference as a primary tool for teaching writing. The interaction described at the conferences seems a Socratic approach based on drawing the knowledge from the students (or opening their eyes to new knowledge) by questioning them about their papers. Murray with a slight facetious wink, says that he does nothing, and that students do all the work. Jokingly he says that he is waiting to be found out and fired. In fact, he is pointing out to the reader that it is unnecessary for him to do more than guide the student towards the problems, that the discovery model/Socratic approach he is using involves very little direct instruction and does not assume that he actually knows exactly what to do with the students’ papers.

Mid-Term 1: Elbow/Bartholomae

III. Elbow/Bartholomae
The Elbow/Bartholomae debate seems to be a composition based continuation of modern society’s debate over the nature/nurture argument of human development. Bartholomae’s focus on the socially constructed identity of the students precludes his supporting Elbow’s identity based writing. If, from Bartholomae’s perspective, you don’t have an individual identity until you’ve been explicitly taught to analyze the society you grew up in and choose to either accept or reject it you can’t very well use that identity (which Elbow seems to presume is pre-existent in his students) as a basis for writing. How can you privilege personal writing (Elbow’s approach) if the students don’t truly have an independent personality until they’ve effectively been guided through a critique of their culture? I think this philosophical difference provides the irreconcilable rift between the two.

The other key point I see that differs between them, and where I disagree with Elbow is the focus in a freshman comp course. Elbow’s focus is on helping the writer develop a sincerity, truly developing their own voice. Bartholomae is focusing on the critical, more traditional academic writing. Elbow has maintained that he feels the one semester beginning writing course is not the place to focus on these skills, arguing instead that they should be introduced at higher and more major specific levels. Elbow pushes the students to trust language and themselves, preferring to promote a writer’s faith in his/her own ideas as opposed to an academic’s professional skepticism. Bartholomae fronts a very academic approach to literature and other readings, intentionally chooses difficult texts to introduce difficult reading as well as academic writing, and promotes a distrust of language and communication in order to highlight the possibility that the students’ responses may be more cultural than personal. In short, Elbow’s goal is to create writers of whatever stripe, while Bartholomae’s is to create a very specific type of writer (or at least open the door to the students becoming that very specific type of writer): the academic. This debate has been (was?) a flash point in comp theory, highlighting a continued variance in the field concerining not only how a freshman comp course should accomplish its aims, but what, exactly those aims are.

Erika Lindemann: Bartholomae + Elbow =???, literature in the composition classroom...

I truly enjoyed seeing a coherent response to the only logical solution to the Bartholomae/Elbow conflict: synthesis! Rebecca Wasil, and, by extension, Erika Lindemann, makes a needed and coherent call for reason when approaching the the issues these two very talented and intelligent gentlemen are broaching.

While the magnitude of the conflict and the unbending, absolute positions taken by both scholars as a result of such strong opposition makes it seem an almost Hegelian synthesis of opposites, Wasil presented Lindemann's synthesis very clearly as a common sense combination of two theorists not nearly as far apart as they make themselves seem.

The presentation clearly showed that the middle way is the best approach citing the presence of both "referential" and "persuasive" writing, the desire to empower writers, and the presence of tasks resmbling those "students encounter in academe, among others. This system approach echoes the presence of other theorists as well promoting collaboration, emphasizing the social (dialogic) nature of all writing, and allowing for textual analysis as part of the course.

Interestingly, Lindemann pushes against the use of literature in writing courses. I love literature, and I love writing about literature. Most of my experience with writing at the undergraduate and graduate level has been writing about literature. Part of what made the midterm so difficult for me was that I was no longer writing about literature. There was no principal text to analyze or expound upon. However, as we have pushed through the semester I have spent a lot of time rethinking the combined form of English course where we teach literature and writing simultaneously. In practice, we do, of course, write about literature all the time. And I think a writing component is absolutely necessary to a literature course. However, I would have to agree with Lindemann that the reverse does not hold true. The act of analyzing literature has been and will be a central component to the English profession, but what is its place in the composition classroom? Especially in a course like freshmen comp? We aren't instructing students in the writing of novels or poetry, or, generally the personal essay. In fact, should the students submit papers in these genres they would almost undoubtably fail the course becuase it fails to address what we hope to accomplish, which is analytical writing.

There are many types of writing, and many reasons to write. I love creative writing, I still harbor the dream (the delusion?) that one day writing will be my prince charming, scoop me (and my family) up onto its big white horse and carry me off to some far away place where I won't have the long hours of homework drudgery that are the trade off of teaching. However, the purpose of the type of writing course Lindemann discusses, that which is meant to prepare students for writing in an academic/professional setting, is not that type of writing. There is a place for this type of writing - many places - but the composition course is not one of them.

Therefore, if we are looking for argumentation and analysis, isn't that what we should be showing our students? Literature, as wonderful as it is, and it is the reason I have pursued my education in English and a key reason I teach, does not model the type of writing we want in these courses. Narrative writing is not a good model for analytical or persuasive writing except on the most shallow levels of style. The bits of six traits that make promoting wriitng across the curriculum a living hell because the other teachers say they shouldn't have to teach that (and they're right!) are the only thing that the types of writing generally have in common.

In addition it is rare, and at most secondary, in my experience that when dealing with literature we look at the surface instead of through it. The time is spent on the meaning, the ideas, the content, and rarely, if ever on the writing itself. Furthermore, I believe that discussing the surface, the writing itself, is fundamentally different when I am discussing literature than when I am discussing the type of analytical, academic writing asked for in composition classes. While I find that I cannot articulate it well, there is between discussing word choice in the context of the clarity of style that Lanham and Graff promote and word choice in the poetry of Yeats, Wordsworth, or Shakespeare. One is generally applicable to the study of composition, one is specific not only to our own discipline (lumping us all together in English whether we are primarily Lit people, Linguistics people, or Comp people academically/professionally), but to a subcategory of our own discipline.

If we are teaching poets, novelists, playwrights, memoirists, or the next Montaigne in our classes that is incidental to the fact that we are teaching the broad purposes of academic/professional writing at a high level, which is much broader than literature. While Literature can play a role (Who could argue against the use of Swift's "A Modest Proposal" as an example of persuasive writing?), it should not dominate the course as it fails to model the type of writing we are asking our students to produce.

The Substance of Style - Nick on Lanham

It is nice to have someone say that there is some value in the beauty of language. While we are engaged in the daily objectification of language's utility, and whacked over the head with the concise clarity of modern stylists, it is nice to remember that even Hemingway (king of the sentence that was most nearly a grunt in length) was an adroit handler of the extended lyrical prose line.

Lanham also comes as a breath of fresh air, as we've been focused so thoroughly on the message, that it was nice to see some attention paid the medium. As much as I loved studying Graff, and have been fascinated by much of what I've learned about rhetoric and the process focused theories of Murray, Bartholomae, and Elbow, it was nice to see someone address the handling of our medium, the words themselves, with such force and precision. Bully for the idea that the correct, clear and concise is not the be all and end all of writing.

As Nick presented I was struck again by the similarities of these composition theorists to the practices that I have seen preached within my admittedly rather limited study of creative writing. This is the third place I've seen a twist on the paramedic method - or at least on the idea that a well pruned and polished draft two follows the formula D2=(D1-[D1*.33]). Like many of the ideas that I discussed in an early post on Elbow, I first encountered this one while reading Stephen King's On Writing. Then I ran into it again within Stephen Koch's The Modern Library Writer's Workshop. While neither carries the percentage to a possible high end of 50% as Lanham does, it is still a general trimming of the fat, to force our tired words into trim fighting shape. Forcing key words to bear the burden, rather than passing it off on lesser syllabic constructs.

Like any theorist worth her or his salt, Lanham could be mistakenly pigeonholed of promoting solely the idea he's most known for. And like all of the theorists we've read, he's more complicated than he perhaps appears at first. The emphasis on the mediuma as well as the message has led me to focus on style nearly exclusively. This would be a distortion. Lanham himself - through the diagrams Nick provided us with on his handout - shows an interest in balancing analysis and instruction between medium and message. If the code plays such a central role in the shaping of our perceptions, even the shaping of reality, than we ignore it in writing in order to reach "deeper" concerns at our own peril. At the same time, Lanham avoids the facile "there are no deeper concerns, language's incompleteness of meaning prevents it" routine that is passed around certain circles of literary criticism.

Instead he promotes a balanced view that pauses to admire the medium as one ponders the message. His S shaped attention curve shows the attention sliding in and out of the surface of the text. While it may come naturally to an English major to accomplish such a dual vision when analyzing a poem it seems to be entirely unnatural most other text. Perhaps with proper consideration Lanham's economics of attention will allow us to balance between the camps of idea of ideal and that of surface only. In that fashion we pay attention to medium and message privileging neither.

Hugh Burns, Rhetoric, and Computers

The discussion last week was fascinating. I thoroughly enjoyed all that was presented by Dr. Burns (Dr. because we're west of the Mississippi, were we to the east it would be Mr.). As others have noted here, he did a wonderful job of addressing a variety of topics with a comfortable authority that was welcoming rather than daunting or pedantic.

I hesitate to say this as it probably reflects more on th student than the teachers, but I have sat through these classes on writing theory so far going where were my instructors at the Y? ("The Y" is one of many student [or Utah native] nicknames for BYU.) I don't remember my writing instruction lining up with rhetoric or expressionism, and it certainly did not begin to approach cultural studies. In coming into this class I feel I've been introduced to rhetoric for the first time. Somewhere along the way I had picked up a simplistic understanding of pathos and logos, and an entirely incorrect (if common) one of ethos and ethics. However, I never discussed writing in terms of patterns of reasoning, making claims, or any other explicit rhetorical language. I do remember being given explicit instruction in developing arguable theses (essentially making a claim, but it was never expressed that way), fully developing each paragraph, and I remember writing a lot of papers. Thinking of the equivalent of Freshmen comp, it was the worst class I took at BYU. I hated it. The advanced composition course, which I remember much more fondly, is much more associated in my mind with the specific papers I wrote, and the work done with other students and with the teacher to develop and address specific writing projects. I don't remember much theory at all.

Blah, blah, blah right? Well it is relevant because it ties me to this course in a strange way. I am grabbing at all kinds of things as I sit here that make me want to scream "I knew that!", but didn't really have a name for it. Its as if I knew these things subconsciously and am now bringing them out into the open with names as conscious tools and techniques for writing and writing instruction. It feels marvelous. Occasionally, however, as I noted in responding to the article on femininist research, I feel swamped by the language of the particular discourse community I'm trying to enter. The thorough grounding in rhetoric provided by Dr. Burns was wonderful, and spoke to me, I think (to a lesser degree as I have yet to directly encounter Aristotle for myself) in a way very much like he recounts his discovery of rhetoric spoke to him.

Understanding where all of this comes from and how it fits together through the history he provided was wonderful. In addition he explained a question I've had all along and for one reason or another never got around to asking. That is, what exactly are all these people talking about when they title something "A Rhetioric of __________." His explanation was simple, direct and supportive, lending dignity to the question and to me for asking, which I really appreciated. He told me that any such title is essentially indicating that it will in fact be discussing "The Rhetorical effects of ___________." This opened a lot of doors in reference to past presentations and readings.

I guess one of the reasons I didn't ask was that I thougth I had a good enough basic idea to be getting on with, and that it would become clearer. After getting the answer to my question (brought to the fore as well by the fact that several of Booth's key books seem to have been "A Rhetoric of _________."), I realize that I did not in fact have a very good understanding at all. The idea that we can and should study the rhetorical effects of a given type or form of discourse on the participants makes a lot of sense. So much so that it has completely replaced my previous clouded understanding to the piont that I don't remember exactly what I thought it was.

It was interesting to encounter one of the people responsible for making the computer programs I use smart enough to interfere with what I'm trying to do. Now if I was smart enough to use the interference to my advantage perhaps we'd have accomplished something. Seriously though, Burns' discussion of his work with computers and the manner in which they are applied to writing and learning processes was fascinating. I was accustomed to swear lightly and attack the close button when I saw that little paper clip (or any of its various permutations), but will perhaps think of it more kindly in the future.

A Mystifying History...Tasker and Holt-Underwood's "Feminist Research Methodologies in Historic Rhetoric and Composition"

The first thing I learned in picking up this article was how much I have yet to learn. I felt buried in the terminology that was used to describe various research practices. Even now after looking up historiography I am not certain exactly how the text is meant to be understood in its use of the word. I fear that I am not well versed in research methodologies.

I will choose then one of the points that I am sure I understood from the text. I found the question of how best to anthologize female writers an interesting one, in part because I have taken issue with what seems a bizarre abberration within the American Literature textbook that I use here at Peyton High. In this textbook, one encounters women in nearly every chapter, beginning with Anne Bradstreet and continuing in various quantities and qualities throughout the text. However, in an otherwise historically organized text, the chapters covering 19th Century Literature are devoid of female writers so that all the writers considered by the editors to be major enough for inclusion in a highschool text can be gathered in a single half chapter that stretches from Dickinson through the turn of the century, with a single exception for Willa Cather's "A Wagner Matinee."

I really detest this arrangment in this particular text. It removes the women from their context, deprives them of their rightful place among their peers and movements, and makes it seem, that the only way they would be included is to have a special chapter for women. As if, without that "female chapter" they wouldn't make the cut. In an otherwise historically based text, and in a year long survey of American Literature, I feel the arrangement is inappropriate. I have, as I have the liberty to do, taken the option of reinserting the women into their contexts and places, emphasizing all they accomplished and discussing their ideas in concert with the male thinkers of the time as equals. Even if some of these women (Emily Dickinson) for example were removed from their time by various circumstances as later discoveries, they were writing at the time and bring a new and important perspective to American thought/literature in their various periods. In discussing American Romanticism for example it would be criminal to leave Emily Dickinson out or to treat her as a separate artifact.

I recognize the role of anthologies made up entirely of female writers for courses that focus on the female writer, or as one of several texts within a survey course to provide a balancing feminine perspective to the dominant male discourse. However, the segregation of women into a room of their own within a survey course of the type I teach reflects all the evils implied by my very conscious use of segregation. To separate women writers (or rhetors) into their own space within an otherwise historical course seems to me to marginalize their contribution to their specific time and context, and to inihibit a full understanding of their achievement.

Oops! There it is..."Peer Review From the Students' Perspective: Invaluable or Invalid?"

This article seemed far more practical than the first.  

While I would not have had the data - or any data - to back me up before reading this article, I could certainly have argued for the claims made by Brammer and Rees based upon my own experience.

It was only later in college that I learned that peer review was even supposed to be something more than grammar, mechanics, and spellchecking.  And only later still, in classes provided by Garfield Re2 School District after I started teaching there (and later here at gradschool in one of Professor Morales' workshops) that I felt I had learned how I could really contribute to someone else's paper through the peer review process.  

While I am loquacious to a fault, I think the most effective peer comments I have received - and probably the most effective I have given - have come in the form of simple questions: questions that indicate points where the writing lacks clarity by expressing confusion, for example.  However, I wasn't introduced to this form of commenting until these professional development and graduate courses.  I was one of the students who would have questioned the value of peer reviews unless I was certain the student I was paired with "knew what they were doing" and unfortuantely was probably not of much use to anyone else.  

As Brammar and Rees suggest in their analysis of their results, the difference in these classes was a specfiic forthright discussion of the peer review process, the theory behind it, and the goals it was meant to accomplish.  Without this grounding, and without the practice of those skills required, the process remains opaque, students resent it, and most go along with it only because the teacher is insisting that they do so.  

One of the more interesting activities that we did with the Teacher's as Writers course in Garfield County was to practice our peer revision/workshop techniques by practicing techniques of critical analysis.  When students realize that peer review is based on the same how and why questions that shape critical analysis perhaps a better understanding of both activities will occurr.  Certainly as I discussed how and why a given poet was using the techniques she was using as an prelude to workshopping papers with a small group, I approached the papers with a more critical eye, with my mind prepped to ask analytical questions of the text.

While we treat the writing process as important, perhaps our undervaluing the final product prevents us from fully applying hte critical apparatus at our fingertips to revision and peer review.  "I can't analyze a student paper!" one might say.  "They just don't do enough."  However, until we convince ourselves and our students that the papers are in fact worthy of the same analytical treatment as a major literary text (at least for pedagogical purposes), the value of time spent in peer review will continue to be minimal, and the value of the results shallow, and literally superficial: focused upon the surface elements of grammar, mechanics, spelling, and usage.  

By forefronting these issues in an area as taken for granted as peer review Brammar and Rees succeed in both reaffirming peer review's value and place in composition pedagogy and delineating for us the importance of approaching it thoroughly and thoughfully if it is to achieve its potential as a learning experience for our students.  

"Recopying to Revise: Composition in an Old Key"

I am not certain what to make of Kratzke's loosely organized article.  Half a dirge for the failing standards of literacy in America and half a vague discussion of the role of computers in that failure "Recopying to Revise" left me frustrated with its lack of discussion of its title subject.  While Kratzke dispenses paeans to revision such as "we need to tell our students to slow down and double back, if only for a moment,"  (10) there is very little on the actual process of recopying and its effects or benefits.  

Instead Kratzke bemoans student thoughtlessness, the ease with which computers encourage students to dispense with revision altogether, the loss of literacy as a cognitive activity in world increasingly dominated by the image rather than the word.  

When I encountered the rhetorical question "How can we, without sounding like machine-smashing Luddites, convince our students that something as tedious as recopying can be beneficial to their abilities with technology?", I hope Kratzke might begin addressing recopying to revise in a practical manner, as an applicable classroom strategy.  Normally, when one poses a rhetorical question one answers it.  Ah, but not this time!  Instead, the reader is set up for an answer to one of the key questions of the text only to be diverted to a discussion of "recopying to revise suggests as much about technology in our lives as it does about the writing process"  (10).  To my knowledge Kratzke never returns to the rhetorical question ending the paragraph before.  There is a later reference to telling students that "it is all about the benjamins," but I fail to see how students could be convinced that recopying will drive them towards monetary rewards, except in the vague sense that we use monetary rewards to justify all education.  

When the practical aspects of the technique are finally addressed at the end of the article Kratzke says that "implementing recopying in the classroom might involve exchanging single paragraphs or using a sample paragraph as a common source."  While this cut down approach does make sense in light of all the objections (including the threat to one's job of student boredom with/resentment of teaching techniques which he acknowledges on pg. 19) he raises through various naysayers he's planted in the text, it seems to defeat his principle reason for suggesting the technique: that the act of recopying one's own paper is "revising in the truest sense of the word - to re-see expressions and ideas" and that "it [is] painfully obvious that the recopied version [is] superior to the original."  

While I know from my own experience that recopying the text can lead to the very opportunities for improvement that Kratzke indicates and appreciate his desire to inspire students to true, old fashioned re-vision, in which multiple drafts of a paper are created in order to develop the best possible product, I find this loose, periphrastic discussion of the topic confusing and can only wish that Kratzke had delivered a more practical, practice based discussion of the issue at hand.  

Bartholomae: the Academic Argument

I found Emily's presentation of the sides of the Bartholomae/Elbow debate in her side by side chart very enlightening.  It seems sad that two obviously brilliant men should become so locked in their positions that they fail to see how much ground they share.  

I enjoyed much of what Bartholomae's side of the argument had to offer.  I believe that composition courses (especially at the college level) have the primary responsibility of introducing students to the world of academic argument, that they need to teach students to place their work within the academic context already extant, and that the introduction of criticism is important because it is criticism, not literature that provides the basis of what we are asking/teaching students to do as academics.

That said, I think that Elbow's methodology in terms of basic process, the freewrite/edit/freewrite process of developing and finding ideas can be made to work with the production of the high level academic discourse that Bartholomae wants from his students. 

Elbow hits on a very powerful point that I've never encountered from another academic theorist speaking about academic writing when he talks about separating the critical and generative functions, and employing them in recursive cycles to develop the finished product.  While no process works for everyone, Elbow's does work for a heck of a lot of people.  

Rediscovering Elbow's specific version of free writing and encouraging my students to take that freedom in writing some of their papers this year was liberating.  The students looked at me like it was a trick.  "Really?"  "Whatever we want?"  "Grammar doesn't matter?  At all?  No Punctuation?"  I've never emphasized these things in first draft, as I'm sure none of us have.  However, I had, over a long period, failed to emphasize how much they don't matter in the process of generating ideas and in drafting anything but a final copy, and the net effect was to make a large portion of my students think that they mattered all the time.  

In fact, employing Elbow's recursive, creative writing process seems to me so natural that I can't believe I had let it slip out of my own pedagogy.  This more than any other academic approach I've encountered helps teach the process of writing.  

Now then, before I seem to lose myself entirely in Elbow, let me take this back to Bartholomae.  None of these aspects of Elbow's work contradict Bartholomae's academic focus.  One can follow this recursive process in the pursuit of academic, rhetorical prose as well as personal writing.  In fact, by separating the critical and generative faculties during the drafting process as Elbow suggests while maintaining the academic goals and focus that Bartholomae demands I would argue that better papers may be found than would be generated by either gentleman's approach alone.   

Patricia Bizzel: E Unum Pluribus?

I enjoyed learning about Patricia Bizzel's work and found many aspects of the presentation fascinating.  The idea that most appealed to me was Bizzel's blunt statement that students have to be taught how to think.  it is assumed that they have something to say, that they know how to think about literature to generate a response, that the problem is teaching them to formulate the response in the desired written form, not teaching them how to think.

Bizzel's boldfaced statement that we must teach students how to think belies the teacher's perception that student's don't answer because they are apathetic.  Instead, following this format, the students literally have nothing to say because they don't know how to think about literature so as to generate a response of the type the teacher is looking for.  

My question then is how do we teach them to think?  What is the practical how to approach to this aspect of pedagogy?  I'm sure if I puzzle through I could come up with some answer of my own, but what does Bizzel, who points out this failing, have to say about addressing it?  

The point that struck me most in my small contact with Patricia Bizzel was a side remark made during this week's presentation.  Shaynee indicated that Bizzel believes that once students leave the academic environment they will abandon the skills/methods of the academic discourse community to return to their native discourse community.

I find this disheartening.  As Graff indicates, I believe that the academic discourse community is foreign to all of our students at one point or another, and as such is a learned discourse one of the outer circles of other, nonnative discourse communities that we enter throughout our lives.  However, because all of the children in this nation are brought into this discourse community, might we not attempt something more than giving them a tool to use for college that they will then set aside?  Couldn't this academic discourse community be privileged in that it becomes a unifying point for Americans?

If it needs work (and it has needed work and continues to need work in order to avoid being exclusionary) than let's fix it and use it as a starting point for a discourse community in which we can all participate with ease, thus facilitating the kind of critical thinking and debate that are so integral to our public lives inside and outside of academe.  Or, if it is so rotten as to be unsalvageable as the source for a unifying discourse community, can we find another?

I think that at times in our haste to acknowledge each other's individuality we sacrifice the chance to communicate as effectively as we might be able to.  I find it saddening that we will have this chance to produce a more unifying discourse community and that after the time requried we'll all separate and go off back to our own private clubs.  

They Say/I Say

I wanted to find a way to contribute something new to my presentation through this blog on Graff.  After spending the time I have, the point I felt was covered slightly less than ideally in either presentation or handout was his latest book, They Say/I Say.  Carrying out a theory from Clueless in Academe  to its logical conclusion, Graff and Birkenstein create a writing textbook based around the instruction of rhetoric (argumentation) and employ a plethora of templates as the basis of their method.  In addition to presenting templates, they discuss how to tie the paper together, using metacommentary to shape reading, and the role of the vernacular, personal voice in academic writing.  

Now it must first be stated that there are several things that Graff is not trying to do, at least as I see it.  Graff is not interested in teaching writing in general.  He goal for this text, and for composition courses at the university level, is based in the idea that argumentation is the foundation of the academic conversation, and so his text focuses exclusively on the give and take, dialectical texts generally (if not universally) required of academics.  While he surely privileges academic writing and criticism in his approach, (Bartholomae) he explicitly quotes Elb0w on the importance of the "believing/doubting game."  Very much a pragmatist whose own early dislike for reading and academic pursuits has - by his own admittance - shaped his thinking somewhat,  (although neither as difficult nor as powerful as Elbow's or Murray's) Graff seems to worry very little about exactly how one arrives at his or her product, provided it is dialectical in nature, and takes a stance in the ongoing academic conversation around a given topic.  There is no debate about whether Elbow's authentic self or Bartholomae's socially constructed individual is the "truer" vision of the student writer, for example.  It seems one might freewrite and then add the argument templates to help shape the "mess" as one went through subsequent drafts, or begin immediately, after reading critical arguments, with filling in the templates as a generative exercise.  

Instead, Graff focuses on giving the students the tools he considers essential to entering the academic conversation.  To his mind, this means a rhetorical approach, focused on the basics of argumentation.  To put these basics in front of the students in an immediately usable form Graff believes in employing templates that allow students to borrow generic phrasing to construct arguments by plugging their own information/research in the blank.  

While some commenting on Graff's initial use of templates in Clueless in Academe were very critical (see Pedagogy Volume 5,Number 2, 2005), the issues raised seem to have been clearly addressed in They Say/I Say.  For example, in her contribution to the roundtable, Ann Jurecic complains that by using templates Graff limits the life of the mind to "Where as X argues _____, I claim ___."  She accuses him of presenting the life of the mind and the work of the academic as arguing primarily by staking a claim against another person.  

Perhaps this is a fair impression from the earlier text, however, in They Say/I Say  it becomes immediately clear that Graff is playing a much more complex game than Jurecic accuses him of. Instead of focusing only on staking a position in opposition to another critic (as he is accused of doing) he begins the text by making the point that one of the principal reasons for the "they say" half of the equation is to establish a context for one's paper, and a reason for the writing.  As he points out, launching into your own position without framing it in terms of other possibilities leaves the audience wondering why the claim is being argued.  

Furthermore, Graff continues from that point to focus on (in order) summarizing the views of others, quoting others, and then agreeing with others before he gets to "staking a position of opposition."  In addition, the portion of these rhetorical moves that he considers the most advanced is not that of directly opposing, but what he calls "agreeing with a difference."  Furthermore in this section of his text, Graff explicitly states the applicability of his templates to a paper in which one "weigh[s] a position's pros and cons rather than come out decisively either for or against."  Here Graff argues for the They Say/I Say templates in a context that is explicitly not engaged in direct argument with someone else.  Clearly this use of templates is far more complex and more thought out than some critics initially claimed.  

Andrea Lunsford Intellectual Property, and Collaborative Writing

It should come as no surprise that one who is as engaged with collaborative creative/scholarly efforst as Lunsford is would argue for a newer and looser understanding of intellectual property that allows for a loosening of copyright laws, and a greater sharing of ownership.  As someone whose aspirations (whether justified or not) include publishing in many genres, I am troubled by the idea that loosening copyright laws may lessen the incentive for artists to produce, and perhaps move the starving artist myth that much closer to an objective reality.  

I appreciate the idea of collaboration that Lunsford addresses, and indeed was sufficiently impressed by Albertson's presentation of Lunsford's thought on the subject to consider how I might apply the collaborative writing process to my classroom beyond the process of peer tutoring/peer review/workshop.  

I have never had what I always considered the dubious privilege of creating a shared paper (creative or scholarly).  Prior to the presentation this was something I was extremely grateful for, because for someone as perfectionistic as I am, as opinionated and outspoken, group work has always been something to be dreaded.  I have two alternating approaches to most group work:  try (and usually fail) to keep my head down and just do what I am told without causing a fuss, professing little or no preference for anything, or stick myself as far into every aspect as possible (again perfectionist, although there's probably a control freak aspect to that that is manifest as well) to ensure that I am comfortable with how the whole paper/project etc. plays out.  This is especially true of any group project where there is a one grade fits all grading policy.  This always made me particularly uncomfortable, receiving a grade for something overwhich I did not have final control.  It felt like (and I would argue it is to a large extent) being graded on someone else's work, an unpleasant feeling at best.  

Despite my reservations, Lunsford, who seems so intelligent and so capable in so many areas, made me question my own thought and practice, and I admit that much of my prejudice is based in fear rather than experience.  I would like to apply this creative solution to many interesting aspects of writing in my classroom.  The question is, how exactly?  Do I just adapt a writing assignment I already have for development by two or more students as a group project, or is this a large enough shift that it requires a more thorough reworking/recreation than adapting an existing project provides?  I'm not sure.  But for the first time in this teacher's experience I am curious enough to try finding out.  

To Wait or Not to Wait, That is the Question...

Over the years I have spent far more time looking at the processes of creative writing than academic writing.  (I still don't like that distinction, as if any act of organizing thought into text were not an act of creation!)  One of the debates that I see there that I found oddly reflected in Tony's presentation on Murray (and in the notes in our source book) was the strange combination of wait and dive in that Murray endorses.  

I found the pre-vision, vision and re-vision description of the writing process fascinating.  The Pre-vision process in particular interested me, because it was here that I find Murray's thought seems to embody a contradiction that I have run into in studying the writing process from a creative perspective.  In discussing pre-vision Tony indicated that Murray held the work in his head until he had a solic mental picture of it, in fact waiting for the presence of one of eight (Was it eight?  I think it was eight) mental clues that one is prepared to begin the physical process of putting words on paper, or - as the case is much more likely to be in modern times - on the screen.  The writer wrestles the piece around mentally, until one of the listed triggers arrives indicating a readiness to move from pre-vision to vision.  

Here is where I found that Murray seems to embody a contradiction that I have long pondered.  In reading any number of writing texts written strictly from a practioner's perspective (as opposed to a scholarly or theoretical approach like the texts used for this course) such as the previously mentioned Stephen Koch text, I have encountered the debate from various writers (with varying degrees of extreme prescriptivist answers and abstemious middle ways)of whether one must write daily - "Treat it as work.  You can't wait to get in the mood.  To be a professional writer, you must treat writing as a profession, something that you are always doing whether you are in the mood or not," seems to capture the extreme end of this attitude here - or whether one should wait until one is feeling inspired, or in the mood.  

I have seen writers who refuse to write without some sign of their own readiness similar to those described by Murray and those who prescribe a given number of words per-diem as the cure all for writing woes.  Murray seems to embody both.  I wonder how the practice of waiting for the metnal dialogue to reach the readiness point meshes with the encouraged practice of writing every day, presumably whether inspired or not as I have never met anyone who feels inspired all the time.  

Elbow: Bringing "Creative Writing" into the Academic Sphere

In presenting Elbow to the class, Tim Wenger focused primarily (and rightly I think) on Elbow's push for varying degrees and methods of applying freewriting at the beginning of the writing process.

One of the most interesting aspects of this presentation (and I've run into Elbow before as an undergraduate and very much like what he had to say then as well), is how much the varying degrees and methods of freewriting promoted by Elbow echo what I've encountered in recent ventures into a more formal study of "creative writing."

Tim Wenger outlined the process of freewriting employed by Elbow, which, depending on the specific adaptation described, amounts to either an exceptionally rough first draft or a long period of idea generating prior to a first formal attempt at an organized fully wrought draft of the piece.

In The Modern Library's Writers Workshop Stephen Koch, who taught in the creative writing and MFA programs at UNY-Stonybrook and Princeton University, and then spent twenty years in the program at the Columbia School of the Arts, repeatedly describes the process of discovering your story as a fiction writer in much the same way Elbow describes finding the arguments and essays of academic writing through his various freewriting processes. Koch argues for the necessity of discovering the story through a "closed door" first draft that delays taking notice of the audience (another Elbow tenet) and discovers the story as it goes along, without trying to outline it/plot it out first. He quotes writers from Eudora Welty to Stephen King in support of this idea of closing the door and diving in on that first situation, idea, character, etc. that is the first germ of the story.

I found it fascinating that the creative writing process so often divorced from the academic process in my experience. It seems, sadly, that they are treated like first cousins who shouldn't get too close lest they fall in love and have deformed offspring in which the writers analyze themselves mid-story/novel/poem. The reality, as echoed by the commonalities in approach of Elbow and these various fiction writers, is that a marraige of processes that already echo one another may lead to insights beneficial to both styles. Even in a place as seemingly unlikely as Graff and Berkenstein's They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Persuasive Writing," one can find the following quote emphasizing the connections between the genres: "It is our belief, that the "they say/I say" pattern cuts across different disciplines and genres of writing, including creative writing" (XIX). While, the argument is not directed as precisely at process as are the commonalities between Elbow and Koch et al that I am describing, it serves to underline the closeness of the genres.

Further along in the presentation, I found the idea Tim introduced as "planting seeds," and which Elbow described in the youtube video shown in the presentation as taking down notes and jotting ideas as soon as they come to you when you are in the first stages of a project are also echoed in Koch's text, where the enouragement to keep a writer's notebook and to instantly record story ideas and insights is echoed by Koch himself and a veritable army of professional literary figures.

In closing Tim addressed Elbow's critics by pointing out that he (that is Elbow) felt that they tended to ignore the other end of his process, the refining and critical aspect in favor of the beginning, where he comes off as an extreme expressivist with quotes like "make a mess." I agree. Elbow when fully studied argues as much for a polished and finished final product by applying tough critiquing and thorough reworking to any given piece before presenting it as a finished product. To reduce his thought to freewriting is a distortion along the lines of those discussed in Matsuda's "Process and Post Process: a Discursive History." As Matsuda indicates the variuos movements promoters have done, such a reductin exaggerates Elbow's ideas to cartoon like bubbles easily popped. They do no justice to the fullness of his practice and thought.

Finally, I remember the most powerful piece I encountered from Elbow focused not on the act of writing but the act of instruction. I don't have access to the piece itself and so I cannot quote from it, but in it, Elbow argues for the same separation of creator and critic in the teaching process that he promotes in the writing process. He suggests that if we (teachers) will prepare a final, in whatever form it takes, as difficult as justifiable, (being the critic first) we can then turn around in class and nurture and cheer and give everything to helping the students without fear that they will become to reliant on us or that we are giving some advantage that will make the assessment to easy, as we know that the students are going to need all they can do and all we can do for them to prepare for it. Then, switching from switching back to the critic (or from nurturer to gatekeeper as a colleague of mine calls it) we can grade the tests with out worrying about whether it is too difficult or an accurate assessment because we know that we have done everything possible to prepare out students for it. I loved this idea when I first encountered it, and it seems to me a brilliant and obvious extension of his writing process to instruction.

In the day to day of teaching, it is easy to fall into old ruts and run through the textbook without much thought and with little variation, to let the textbook become the defacto teacher of the course if we are too lazy, busy, or unaware. I think actively engaging in this bifurcated approach to course creation and instruction helps prevent that. I need to apply it more explicitly and effectively in my own teaching.