Family + Community = Knowledge

Toni Morrison reminds us that we must connect with our ancient properties, “It has to be done; otherwise we are dead. If you kill the ancestors, you’ve just killed everything.” I am fascinated with lineage, and often contemplate my place as the connector between past and present. It is why I am proud to be a mother and, at the same time, give daily thanks to my risk-taking ancestors who sacrificed to provide opportunities for their descendents (like me). Every day I think of Bettina Trapaglia, my dad’s grandmother, who came to this country to wed a stranger, gave birth to five daughters, and carried rocks on her back at a lime quarry just south of Pueblo. While she never was allowed to become an American citizen because she couldn’t read or write in English, she gave birth to several generations of teachers. She pulled weeds in a small garden plot, so that my dad and uncle could do their homework instead of their chores. It was this act of love that taught them the value of education—my familial inheritance.

So when I personally think about my own scholarly journey, I must give homage to my great-grandmother, as well as other ancestors. I recognize that I have the opportunity to bury my nose in a book because my great-grandmother carried rocks on her back. I realize that, from this point of view, scholarly work is a privilege.

This notion of a non-academic scholarly influence is what fascinated me most about our rhetorical lineage project. Our group divided up the direct influences on Dr. Souder. After Dr. Souder told me that AnaLouise Keating was the literary executor of Gloria Anzaldúa’s work and one of her important influences, I eagerly volunteered to connect with and research Dr. Keating. I had the honor of emailing her several times to ask her questions.

When I asked Dr. Keating about her scholarly influences, she mentioned a high school English teacher, Emerson and, of course, Anzaldúa. I emailed her again to ask for any professors who impacted her during her graduate studies. She told me of her dissertation chair, Chadwick Hansen, and explained that her dissertation focused on Emerson. However, she pointedly felt that she was not greatly influenced within the walls of the academy, but instead stated that Anzaldúa was clearly the strongest influence on her scholarship. And, she didn’t meet Anzaldúa until after she had earned her Ph.D.

I think it is significant that Keating felt her greatest scholarly influence happened after her traditional schooling. This highlights the importance of lifelong learning and underscores the co-creative relationship Keating and Anzaldúa shared. While the two individually contribute to the academic discourse, their collective work reminds us of the collaborative beauty of creation and discovery. I am admittedly a fan of Kant, Marx and even Robert Frost. But, I was most excited that one of our family tree “super stars” was Anzaldúa. It reminded me that, even in the midst of our testosterone-laden tree, there is also a matrilineal source to our academic work. I’m proud to add my name to the branch that leads from me to Dr. Souder to Dr. Keating to Gloria Anzaldúa. I’m equally honored to connect my academic work to the non-scholarly sacrifices and lessons of my ancestors like Bettina Trapaglia. And, in an even more profound connection of family and the academy, it was amazing to share this scholarly journey with my recently re-acquainted cousin Marilyn Antenucci.

“If you cut yourself off from the roots, you’ll wither . . . Roots that ignore the branches turn into termite dust.” – Toni Morrison, Paradise

But damn it, listen to me . . . I have something to tell you

I've spent weeks contemplating the idea of personal writing within an academic setting, grappling with the notion that the personal can actually do some heavy rhetorical lifting. If you don't believe that the personal has the argument-based muscle for serious scholarly work, please consider this new Tiger Woods advertisement for Nike.

Nike, one of the all-time masters of marketing rhetoric, has certainly transformed the personal woes of Tiger Woods--with a little dash of intimate words from his dead father--into an amazing case for buying shoes and gear. This certainly is a great, if not slightly sleazy, use of the personal to make an argument. (Reading the comments of this ad on YouTube, the ad is successful in selling its message.)

Peter Elbow discusses why he uses the personal in his first-year composition classroom. He asks himself, "Whether I should invite my first year students to be self-absorbed and see themselves at the center of the discourse--in a sense, credulous; or whether I should invite them to be personally modest and intellectually scrupulous and to see themselves as at the periphery--in a sense, skeptical and distrustful." He opts for the more self-focused approach, shrugging off the usual complaints that personal writing is self-indulgent and overly sentimental. He encourages students to plop themselves in the center of their writing, rather than merely summarizing the wise words of published people.

Elbow is advocating for writing that is relevent to students' lives. He recognizes the irony of asking students to write "up" to teachers who possess broader knowledge of the topic than the student writer does. It creates a phony rhetorical situation and, as Elbow points out, it creates timid emerging writers. On the other hand, there are some topics that the student does know more than the teacher. Thus, when students write about their own lives, they have an intrinsic authority on the topic. Elbow writes, "Unless we can set things up so that our first year students are often telling us about things that they know better than we do, we are sabotaging the essential dynamic of writers."

Since memory is one of Aristotle's five canons of rhetoric, it is interesting to consider this tension between the academic and the personal within a context of memory. Academic writing priviledges external memory--the kind that can be found in books, on library shelves and separate from the writer. Elbow-esque writing values internal memory--the kind that be can found in the fleshy, gray crinkles of each writer's brain. When you considers these rhetorical connections, it becomes easier to see the personal as more than extracurricular but as part of the classroom.

Despite these notions of memory, Bartholomae contends that Elbow desires "an open space, free from the past." While Elbow doesn't necessarily seek this, I think Tiger Woods would welcome a world free from his past . . . or at the very least, the authorial opportunity to control the story.

Several Random Things I Want to Share with My Classmates

Adolescent Thoughts on Grammar
On Spring Break, I read a great just-for-fun book, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery. I couldn't wait to share this great quote from the book on the teaching of grammar. After a teacher explains to her teenage students that the point of teaching grammar "is to make us speak and write well," the adolescent narrator says:

"I have never heard anything so grossly inept . . . to tell a group of adolescents who already know how to speak and write that that is the purpose of grammar is like telling someone that they need to read a history of toilets through the ages in order to pee and poop" (157-158).

Anonymous Geo-shagging and the Future of Global Positioning
In class on Tuesday night, we talked about the next step in social networking. I mentioned that global positioning will be the next layer in how we use media to connect. About a year ago, I read a great article on this subject that I think you will enjoy. Here is the link:

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/wireless/magazine/17-02/lp_guineapig?currentPage=all

An Update on the Rhetorical Family Tree
I am part of the group researching the scholarly influences of Dr. Souder. While the class is very aware of the significantly influential Dr. Hugh Burns, my task is to research another amazing influence on Dr. Souder--Dr. AnaLouise Keating. Dr. Keating is in the Women's Studies Department of TWU, where Dr. Souder is working on her second (!) doctorate in Women's Studies. Dr. Keating also happens to be the literary executor for the revolutionary writer Gloria Anzaldúa, who died in 2004. These two women co-wrote This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation.

Keating's academic influences seem to come from outside of the academy. She explains that Anzaldúa was by far her greatest scholarly influence, yet she met her a year after receiving her doctorate. She did, however, tell me that her dissertation advisor, at the University of Illinois at Chicago, was Dr. Chadwick Hansen. Hansen, although an English professor for 20 years at UIC, is also a jazz historian. He co-authored several books on the subject, including: Hot Man, the Life of Art Hodes.

Hansen is also the author of Witchcraft at Salem. Written in 1969, Hansen's book undermines much scholarship on this topic by noting that there was actually witchcraft being practiced in Salem. Wow! Let me restate this, Hansen writes that there were actually practicing witches in Salem, plus he also talks about Freud-like female hysteria in both accusers and the accused. (There are twelve fairly recent reviews of this book on Amazon, and the book is still in print.)

Hansen, who attended Yale under the V12 program for veterans, certainly seems like an interesting connection to Dr. Keating, who is so well-regarded for her feminist writings.

When the cure is worse than the disease . . .

A publisher that I have worked with before contacted me last week. She asked me to write a unit with activities that teach “voice” to middle school students. Yet, she added, “I don’t even think that voice can be taught in isolation, but this is what teachers keep asking for and I’d like to have something to give them.” Certainly, this was a strange request to write something for someone who doesn’t “believe” in what you are writing. It is also an interesting illustration about the way things get taught and published: Teachers feel pressured to teach something by test, administrators or standards. They beg publishers for helpful materials. Publishers create materials and then more people start teaching that same thing.

This interesting real-life scenario of teaching a piece of writing in isolation reminded me of Mike Rose’s essay “Language of Exclusion.” He explores the medical inspiration on the realm of remedial writing, which is based in the evolution of how learning disabilities were diagnosed and “treated” and the increasing access to education. Rose explains that the term “remedial” has its roots in the medical and can be “connected to disease and mental defect” (594). The word was initially used when talking about people with specific neurological issues and has widened to encompass those with learning disabilities to those who are regular students performing below average in content areas.

Beyond this etymological connection, there is also an historic association between the medical and educational fields. Rose suggests this was appealing to a scientifically minded society in the 1920s and 30s. To illustrate, Rose quotes a textbook, Modern Methods in Written Examinations: “Teaching bears a resemblance to the practice of medicine. Like a successful physician, the good teacher must be something of a diagnostician . . . after a careful diagnosis he is able to prescribe intelligently the best remedial or corrective measures” (595).

This diagnostic aura influenced (and still does) the teaching of writing. As Rose explains it, “The theoretical and pedagogical model that was available for ‘corrective teaching’ led educators to view writing problems within a medical paradigm. Thus they set out to diagnose as precisely as possible the errors (defects) in a student’s paper” (595). He even explains that in the 1930s that they used the label “sick sections” to highlight writing sections that needed work. This clinical approach to writing instruction seeks to isolate problems and cure them. Teachers are led to believe that they can fix writing by zeroing in on a problem, prescribing a curative work sheet on “voice” or “sentence fluency,” and voila! Thus, students and teachers believe that by improving the defective parts, they will construct a successful whole.

David Russell, in his essay “American Origins of the Writing-Across-the-Curriculum Movement,” questions this isolationist approach to writing instruction, “This narrow conception of writing and learning fit well with the industrial model American schools adopted. Progress could be measured in the number of errors reduced per dollar invested, and students could be tracked and taught according to their ‘deficiencies.’ Thus, writing instruction past the elementary school was viewed as mere remediation of deficiencies in skill rather than as a means of fostering a continuously developing intellectual and social attainment” (153-154). When we, as Russell suggests, emphasize the diagnosis of errors, we create the illusion that writing is merely an act of error reduction, rather than a means of communication and discovery and learning.

The investigative work done by Mina Shaughnessy illustrates that emerging writers view the act of writing through this narrow scope of reducing errors. Shaughnessy, in her “Introduction to Errors and Expectations,” writes that basic writers see, “academic writing as a trap, not a way of saying something to someone . . . exposing as it goes all that the writer doesn’t know . . . he is aware that he leaves a trail of error behind him when he writes. He can usually think of little else while writing” (391). When we view writing as something to be fixed, error becomes the obsessive focus of both student writer and writing teacher. And, ironically, the unintentional side-effects of such cures render the student “hopelessly tangled” (391). Shaughnessy provides an example of a basic writer whose sentence disintegrates from simple to incoherent, as the student is immobilized by an error-focused compulsion.

Working on problems in isolation creates an overemphasis on details at the expense of the larger picture—of ideas, content and communication. Nancy Sommers’s exploration of revision strategy in both emerging and experienced writers shows that students narrowly focus on the details and forget or feel overwhelmed by the broader scope of writing. She explains, in her essay on “Revision Strategies,” that students “concentrate on particular words apart from their role in the text” (326). She says that students “do what they have been taught in consistently narrow and predictable ways” and that “the students do not have strategies for handling the whole essay” (327).

These are the dangers that we face when we choose to teach writing in an isolated, prescriptive, clinical way. We risk an obsessive focus on error and details that distracts us from the bigger picture of writing as an act of discovery, communication and learning. Of course, this is exactly the solace I found in the promise of Progressive Education, as discussed last night in Erin’s presentation on John Dewey.

Now with all of this being said, am I’m going to write the unit on teaching voice? Of course I am. Getting paid to write is always a delightful proposition. But, in defense of my ideals, I am going to include an introduction that explains the contradictions of teaching “voice” in isolation.

**By the way, I know that the majority of class was skeptical about Progressive Education. Here is a link to the school my children attend (www.psas.ws). It is very much based on the ideals of Progressive Education, while still manages to be academically rigorous.

Samuel T., how I love thee!

I try to be open minded and unconventional (as unconventional as a married mother-of-three can be), yet I judge men of history when they are not good family men, abandoning their wives for a tortured relationship with opium and touring Europe. So, I started with negative feelings toward Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I also consider myself a great lover of poetry—all poetry except hard-core gangsta rap and Romantic poetry. With my disdain for Romantic poets and bad husbands, I expected to dislike Coleridge. Call me a slob, but my mind was nearly shut on the subject of him.

Yet, in reading Rex Veeder’s essay “Coleridge’s Philosophy of Composition: An Overview of a Romantic Rhetorician,” I became inspired—not Coleridge-defined inspiration, but at the very least, excited. Speaking of inspiration, I agree with Linda Flower that Coleridge’s theory of inspiration could be harmful to the ideals of composition teaching, which believe writing can actually be taught not divined. When we value lightning bolt inspiration, we make writing seem mysterious, inaccessible and magical. This historic notion of inspiration is likely the biggest cause of “writer’s block” throughout the centuries. Yet, if Coleridge was bi-polar, as some modern thinkers have suggested, he probably did experience fits of mania, posing as inspiration.

With all of these strikes against Coleridge, I still find much to celebrate in Veeder’s estimation of him. Coleridge advocates for the personal. He, according to Veeder, believes that “the composing act, therefore, has a personal and a social dimension. It requires the composer to examine personal insight and to research and observation” (23). Further, Coleridge privileges personal knowledge. He says, “No knowledge could be acquired without subjective influence” (24). He values both the intimate and the intuitive and believes that the writer serves as a conduit between the intuitive and the objective. Veeder writes, “Composition is an intimate act, tentative and exploring, where the composer reveals a sustained and personal involvement in both the subject and the process of discovering the implications of the subject’s relationship to writer and audience” (26).

He acknowledges that composing can be a non-linear process. “Coleridge’s favorite metaphor for the composing process is the spiral . . . if we were to visualize Coleridge’s method, we would have to make extensive use of concentric circles, spirals, and loops” (26). Veeder also writes, “The structure of the essay would suggest a looping activity rather than a linear one, where the writer digresses often, but brings the subject of digression back to the central concern of the essay” (27).

And, he, of course, encourages the presence of the creative in writing. He applies the Romantic emphasis on imaginative thinking onto the composing process, and he even devises his own map of imaginative thinking. His writer-ly life is punctuated with a wide variety of genres, from poetry to sermons, from essays to criticism. Coleridge also believes that as we create as writers, “our habits of thinking and composing create who we are” (28).

These ideals of the personal, the non-linear, and the creative are recognized as values of more modern composition theorists, like Wendy Bishop, Gordon Rohman, Ken Macrorie, Ann Berthoff. He seems to have much in common with feminist theorists who write about oppressive composition practices that require the suppression of the self and of the personal, and thus, erase a diversity of voices from our communal discourse. For so long, we have compartmentalized writing in terms of head vs. heart, objective vs. personal, academic vs. creative. Coleridge’s theories of writing blur these distinctions.

He also values diversity: “Coleridge’s great metaphor for composition is the journey outward from the center of the self in order to embrace diversity and bring difference into harmony with the self” (22). Veeder writes of Coleridge’s thoughts on composition methodology, “Practicing this kind of composition forms the habits Coleridge felt were necessary for an individual to interact with a diverse society: suspension of judgement, the ability to reflect, the ability to speculate and compare, the ability to act on ideas and not appetites” (28).

Quite possibly, despite his sappy poetry, Coleridge was a man who lived before his time.

The Lovely Language Arts in Four Parts

Language arts is a dusty word for me, conjuring up visions of grammar exercises, spelling sentences and inadequate excerpts of stories found in clunky reading textbooks. (It is hard to not also think about chalk-encrusted teachers, institutional green walls and asbestos tiles, or scrawny pimply bra-snapping boys.) Yet, last week, Dr. Hugh Burns blew the dust off of my middle school memories. He spoke about language arts, stating he loved all four aspects: reading, writing, listening and speaking. While this might not strike you as being especially profound, it resonated with me. Actually, the resonance was exactly what I liked about it. I get the feeling that Dr. Burns is good at packaging things, and this statement made the language arts seem like a nice poetic package.



Maybe I’m a bit slower than an English graduate student should be, but I was grateful to be reminded of the big picture that encircles our field of study. Because what was wrong with the language arts languishing in my memory, it was all about chunks, parts and pieces. Suddenly, thinking of Burns’ four-sided frame, I could almost feel the disparate pieces in my brain connecting to each other with new electric synergy. OK, maybe I’m overstating a bit, but only a small bit. (Even those of you who already had your eye on the big picture, have to admit that “listening” is an interesting addition to this list.)

It is with this frame that I re-read Nancy Sommer’s essay “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers” and read for the first time “Shaping at the Point of Utterance,” both from the Norton book. While I enjoyed much about both essays, I want to focus here on the ways they relate speaking to writing—connecting two of the language arts. Sommers is critical of the work of writing process theorists Gordon Rohman and James Britton, “What is striking about these theories of writing is that they model themselves on speech” (323). She argues that by basing the writing process on the speaking process, we are imposing a linear structure onto writing. “What this movement fails to take into account in its linear structure . . . is the recursive shaping of thought by language; what it fails to take into account is revision” (323). Because once something is said, it cannot be unsaid. We cannot take an eraser or a delete key to speech, and unfortunately, there is no Ctrl+Z (undo) feature in real life. Sommers quotes Roland Barthes, who points out that speech is “irreversible.” And, further, he states, “writing begins at the point where speech becomes impossible” (324). It is when we overemphasize the connection between speech and writing, according to Sommers, that we will paralyze our ability to revise. She notes this when examining the way that student writers perceive the revision process. When people speak, they often repeat themselves. So, Sommers states, “The aim of revision according to the students’ own description is therefore to clean up speech; the redundancy of speech is unnecessary in writing, their logic suggests, because writing, unlike speech, can be reread” (326).

The many authors, James Britton and company, of “Shaping at the Point of Utterance” also (made obvious by the title) connect the dots between the arts of speaking and writing. They counter theorists like Sommers, “I want to suggest here that rhetoricians, in their current concern for successive drafts and revision processes in composing, may be underestimating the importance of ‘shaping at the point of utterance,’ or the value of spontaneous inventiveness” (461). They claim that the writing process should borrow from the speaking process because “in normal speech we do, almost of necessity, shape as we utter” (461). Writers should harness this power generated from invention-on-the-spot to shape their ideas, suggest the authors. They note that when we speak, we trust that our words and sentences will end with closure and have purpose. Speaking puts words together with spontaneity, and the authors argue that “highly effective writing may be produced in just that spontaneous manner, and that the best treatment for empty verbalism will rarely be a course of successive draft making” (463). When we shape our words in the spur-of-the-moment, we are also able to shape our ideas and find the patterns in our thinking process. The authors quote Barrett Mandel, who writes, “It is the act of writing that produces discoveries . . . words flow from a pen, not from a mind” (463).

These two essays counter each other’s ideals. Sommers values the power of recursive revision in the writing process, while James Britton and friends favor the initial invention. In a complete oversimplification of these arguments, Sommers likes the end and Britton’s group likes the beginning. Despite these disagreements, both essays fit themselves within the larger frame of language arts, juxtaposing their ideals within a larger context.

Sommers notes that many students struggle in writing because they often reduce it to pieces, words or rules, forgetting that there is “something larger.” As students of rhetoric and composition, we must also avoid a reductionist over-amplification of details and remember the theories we study are connected by history, people, ideas and the four language arts. While no light bulb appeared or no trumpets sounded, I was grateful to Dr. Burns for this poetic framing of the language arts. (The word seems so lovely now.) I was happy that I practiced the art of listening while he practiced his art of speaking. This is one of the simple formulas behind discovery and the development of knowledge.


**On a completely different note, March is Women’s History Month. Let’s all celebrate by sharing the story of the maverick, yet virtuous, Mary Astell.

Fish, Flower and Word Power

I think we would all agree that there is a language of the powerful. Yet, we must consider in our roles as teachers, writers, editors, mothers: should we work to promote (or condone) the hierarchal system of language or do we enable the power-less to speak and write in their own vernacular?

Stanley Fish writes in his blog, “It may be true that the standard language is an instrument of power and a device for protecting the status quo, but that very truth is a reason for teaching it to students who are being prepared for entry into the world as it now is rather than the world as it might be in some utopian imagination—all dialects equal, all habit of speech and writing equally rewarded.”

Fish is right when he states, “You are not going to be able to change the world if you are not equipped with the tools that speak to its present condition. You don’t strike a blow against a power structure by making yourself vulnerable to its prejudices.” If you are not in the same room or speaking the same language, it is easy to be ignored by those who clutch power within their sweaty fists. And, yes, when you give someone the opportunity to judge you immediately on your form, they are less apt to keep their ears and eyes open long enough to consider your ideas or arguments.

Yet, don’t we become a part of the power structure when we surrender to the required forms? We also unwillingly (or willingly) accept that language should exclude people and protect the status quo. Fish highlighted an organization in his blog, the ACTA co-founded by Lynne Cheney. The group seeks a standard way of teaching and specific, core topics at the university-level. Fish describes one angle of their argument expressed in a formal report that “says teach the subject matter so that it points in a particular ideological direction, the direction of traditional values and a stable canon . . . they see themselves as warriors in the culture wars. The battle they are fighting in the report is over the core curriculum, the defense of which is for them a moral as well as an educational imperative as it is for those who oppose it.”

What if a power structure surrendered to the language of the people? I must admit that I’m one of those rare feminists who is still a practicing Catholic, and one of the Church’s beautiful moments—in a long and flawed history—was when they gave up the exclusionary language of Latin and embraced the vernacular languages of people all over the world. (It is pretty smart marketing, too, considering the best way to connect with your audience.)

However, I don’t think it is worth waiting for the other patriarchies of the world to freely relinquish their power. I also think that communication requires us to agree upon some standards, otherwise we are only talking or writing to ourselves. And, while I don’t think that grammar should be used in a punitive or mocking way (I do sheepishily enjoy poking fun at inappropriate apostrophes), I also agree that no one should pretend that “da bomb” is a complete sentence.

Before we get mired in this crazy web of considerations and ideals, we should acknowledge the work of Dr. Linda Flower. Flower theorizes (and practices) on the empowerment ability of intercultural discourse. She recognizes that the “power-less” must know and use the language of the power-full to gain entry into the larger conversation. Once they are part of the conversation and people are listening, the once power-less can incorporate and integrate their own modes of communication to a more captive audience. Flower bases some of her theories on the work of Gloria Anzaldúa who wrote of the idea of “borders” and “border thinking,” using the Mexican-American border as a metaphor. Through her writings, Anzaldúa shows how to use language to bridge the border gaps, create intercultural connections and to empower the power-less. Best of all, these ideas don't just exist in someone's "utopian imagination." Flower has been exercising these very ideals into real action in the urban neighborhoods of Pittsburgh with remarkable results.

"I am an act of kneading, of uniting and joining that not only has produced both a creature of darkness and a creature of light, but also a creature that questions the definitions of light and dark and gives them new meanings." — Gloria Anzaldúa

Arise from Your Arm Chairs

Research seems so delightfully simple sitting on my couch with a humming laptop warming my legs. Everything that I need seems so close, within reach, from this cushy vantage point. Yet, Richard Enos in his article “Recovering the Lost Art” warns us against this “lap-top research.” He cautions against “’close readings’ that presuppose the text to be the only source of knowledge” (14).

Just this morning, I had a real-life collision with this notion. While doing research for an article about historic women of Pueblo for a local alternative paper, I attempted a little lap-top research and emailed the collection archivist at the library, asking her to suggest women that I must include. She insisted that I come to library and comb through the archives myself. Once I got there, I realized that she didn’t want to just release this information into cyberspace, but she wanted to hand me the information, to share the pictures, to see the whites of my eyes and make sure I would handle the information with care.

She had worked many years collecting these biographies and stories about women in Pueblo – a difficult task that requires gleaning information from non-textual sources. While no books had been written about the first female judge in Pueblo, there were newspaper accounts. But the pioneering midwife who delivered many children in Salt Creek in the first half of the 20th century, that information had to come through oral transmission. Enos challenges us to recognize the value of oral sources. When he talks about developing new methods for research, he states, “the benefits of developing new research applies to rhetoric that is both written and oral” (16). The story of the Latina midwife and the first female judge are both important to Pueblo’s history. But, we only know about the midwife because someone exercised their research muscles, looked beyond the bookshelf or the Internet. This also illustrates why primary research is essential to our broader understanding of history – without it we wouldn’t know the stories of traditionally excluded voices like minority women, especially those doing “women’s work.”

Beyond this, I realized that cozying up with primary research – handwritten letters, photographs, news articles, political campaign materials – provides an interesting catalyst to the invention part of the writing process. The intimacy offered by primary sources is a form of pre-writing. As Rohman and Wecke discuss in their essay, prewriting is the essential step in writing that happens before putting words on the paper, the beginning steps where writers form their concepts.

Without effective concept formation, the authors explain that “although students quite easily mastered the mechanics of transference . . . the concepts they ended up with were too often without meaning . . . the concepts that the students used were not truly their concepts: that is, they did not answer the students’ sense of what was real in their experience of themselves or their subjects” (Norton 219). Connection with primary sources gives writers this sense of real experience, deflates the problems of “phony involvement,” as labeled by Rohman and Wecke.

As the authors conclude their essay, they state, “the badness of writing is not incorrect grammar or inelegant expression; it is rather a matter of stale perspective, cliché reponse . . . usually such writing, no matter how ‘correct,’ is merely a gumming together of long strips of words which refer to nothing more than other words without anywhere a vital touch with anyone or anything.” Primary resources provide that vital touch that can give words meaning.

Enos echoes these same sentiments when he grumbles about the trends in rhetorical scholarship. He states that scholarship now merely “elicits a reaction to secondary sources” and includes “these commentaries (that) contained not a hint of research, but a load of speculative, subjective critical remarks” (11).

Primary sources, used for rhetorical scholarship or an article in an alternative newspaper, provide meaningful motivation, context, and the opportunity to “arise from your arm chairs” and engage. They offer the opportunity to create human connection, which further enhances meaningfulness, whether dirtying your hands in Homeric lands or chatting with the collection archivist over dusty photographs and handwritten notes.

Baseball, Hot Dogs, Apple Pie and . . . Audience

In Chaim Perelman’s “The Social Contexts of Argumentation,” he discusses the ideas of audience and a quest for truth. Perelman suggests that the power of the argument lies in the realm of the audience. “The development of all argumentation is a function of the audience to which it is addressed and to which the speaker is obliged to adapt himself” (252). Thus, when you are making an argument –whether written or spoken—you must first consider the perspective of the audience. You can only convince an audience of your argument, if you first view your deliberations from the audience’s place in the world. An effective speaker (defined by Perelman as “the person putting forward the argumentation”) must adapt her argument to fit the audience. In fact, in an effective argument, Perelman believes that the audience’s viewpoint is actually more important than the views of the speaker. While this at first seems counter-intuitive, modern modes of marketing certainly support Perelman’s theory. Marketers are making an argument in favor of a certain product, convincing consumers of the need to purchase a particular product. Successful marketing campaigns spend many dollars learning about their audience, developing psychographic profiles of different types of consumers. And, only after examining in-depth customer data, marketing companies will develop their messages (arguments) custom-fit to a variety of target audiences.

Furthering this point, Perelman recognizes that “the diversity of audiences is extreme” (253). He warns against assuming a universal audience when developing your arguments. He believes that a universal audience does not exist. When a speaker envisions a universal audience for his arguments, he is only conjuring up an audience based on his own prejudices and perspectives. “That universal audience,” says Perelman, “which is then not a concrete social reality but a construction of the speaker based on elements in his experience. They can vary in countless other ways—according to age, sex, temperament, competence and every sort of social or political criterion” (253).

Once a speaker has established her audience, she must then determine a common ground – a common language and common ideas – to start her argument. Perelman states that effective speakers adapt to their audience by creating connections over things already agreed. “It follows that all argumentation depends for its premises—as indeed for its entire development—on that which is accepted, that which is acknowledged as true, as normal and probable, as valid . . . the theses granted will sometimes be those of common sense, as that is, conceived by the audience,” says Perelman (253-254). Successful arguments begin when the speaker establishes community with the audience, when she states this is how we are alike. To revisit the marketers’ analogy, market messages in America often invoke images, like baseball, soaring eagles, apple pie and pick-up trucks, that resonate with the American public. These images create an immediate commonality between the message (argument) and the audience.

As for how Perelman’s theories on audience and argumentation might relate to an educational pedagogy, all teaching can be related to an argument. Teachers, when successful, convince students to learn, that learning is important, and that the information they are sharing is relevant, useful and true. Good teachers recognize, like Perelman, that they must consider their audience when developing their lessons (arguments). Successful teaching happens when a teacher understands that contemplating the student perspective, adapting lessons to a students’ worldview, establishing a common language and connections are all more important than his own world view.

The Omnipotent Topic Sentence

What makes good writing? Is it the explicit use of the all-powerful topic sentence hovering over your words, clarifying and organizing your paragraphs? Richard Braddock in “The Frequency and Placement of Topic Sentence in Expository Prose” debunks the mythology behind the simple, explicit topic sentence. He states, “I estimate that only 13% of the expository paragraphs of contemporary professional writers begin with a topic sentence” (280). He discovers this scintillating statistic after a tedious counting of “T-units,” and an equally tedious description of his process. His measurements are interesting in that they confirm what I long suspect (and by long, I mean back to freshman high school English) that writing students have oft been taught a stilted form of writing that in no way mirrors the good stuff they read.

Ken Macrorie in “from Telling Writing” gives this stilted form of writing a name: “Engfish”—a smelly fish-like substance that resembles the English language. The examples he gives of bad student writing are delightfully bad in their ability to use words that say nothing. And, as he points out, language arts text books have for eons modeled the exact kind of writing that no one would want to read: “If you are a student who desires assistance in order to write effectively and fluently, then this text book is written for you” (298). They showcase writing that contorts wilty words students don’t understand—or even want to understand—and create examples that have no relevance to a student’s life. He talks about a writer who “places his vocabulary on exhibit . . . rather than put it to work” (300).This can be said of both student and textbook writers.

While I delighted in reading Braddocks’s desire to diminish the simple topic sentence and reveled in Macrorie’s examples of Engfish, I wonder: “How can you teach good writing?” Macrorie offers the practices of free writing—with or without focus—as a means of teasing out good writing. He seems mystified as he defines the technique, “Apparently the writer put down words so fast he used his own natural language without thinking of his expression” (302).

I, as a writer and sometimes teacher of writing, agree with Macrorie’s amazement at the mystery of freewriting to surprisingly wriggle out good writing. Yet, there is also a place, in the beginning, to teach students the science of creating a formulaic, fill-in-the-blank, explicit topic sentence. It is simply good exercise for the writing muscles. Topic sentences create a map for readers, but more importantly, they create a map for writers. This brand of topic sentence, amusingly described, by Francis Christensen, as “a sort of ectoplasmic ghost hovering over the paragraph” (283), teach fledgling writers the ability to see an omnipresent organization that exists in good writing. Once they grasp that, they can move onto the more sophisticated versions, as defined by Braddock: the delayed-completion topic sentence, the inferred topic sentence or the assembled topic sentence.

It is this ideal that Christensen in “A Generative Rhetoric of the Paragraph” espouses--the ideal that students must practice technique before they can master the art. He states:

“The teacher who thinks that writing is an art and that art cannot be taught, that the teacher can only inspire and then keep out of the way will not find anything he can use. But the teacher who believes, as I do, that the only freedom in any art comes from the mastery of technique . . .” (296)

It reminds you of Picasso, who had to master painting women as they looked before he could successfully paint a woman with a breast on her forehead. But, the mistake most teachers make is clinging to the familiarity and comfort of the clunky and explicit topic sentence, requiring students to stick to the formula long after they have mastered the notion.

This again brings me to the question: “What makes good writing?” I think Macrorie says it well, “ most good writing is clear, vigorous, honest, alive, sensuous, appropriate, unsentimental, rhythmic, without pretension, fresh, metaphorical, evocative in sound, economical, authoritative, surprising, memorable, and light” (311). In this great, seemingly conclusive list, we don’t see mention of topic sentences. They are tools of the craft . . . not the craft themselves.

Seeking Truth: Innate Knowledge vs. the Information Superhighway

The timeline featured in Tuesday’s lecture graphically reminds us that our relationship with language has traveled through time. Just as our economies have evolved, our use of language has too. For centuries, we have used language to discover truth—with a capital or lowercase “t.” Socrates promoted the use of questions as a truth-discovery tool. Yet, now we arrive at truth by amassing information.

We may still ask questions as we navigate through jungles of information. But, Socrates encouraged questions within—discovering the innate knowledge we inherited at birth. Now, we comb through external knowledge, hoping to explore the information generated by a variety of truth-tellers.

In our readings this week, we learn that Edward Tyrell Channing, a Boylston Professor from 1819 to 1851, recognized the revolutionary role of information in modern rhetoric. Information, he theorized, helped to create informed audiences, nurtured individual thoughts and opinions, and opened up the American market place of ideas. I don’t know enough of the history of composition to know if his thoughts were a turning point, but this idea is certainly interesting to contemplate in our current day crowded by information.

Our ability to connect with information changed dramatically over the last century. Over an entire lifetime, people, at the turn of the 20th century, absorbed the same amount information that can currently be found in a single issue of the Sunday New York Times. Developments over the last 100 years in mass media created new technological ways to explore and share information. The most recent, of course, is the Internet. The Internet, whether with a capital or lowercase “i,” has created a world where information is infinite.

As a student and writer who is often required to research, this access to information is fantastic. Consider the ability to read literary theory using Google books—no trips to the library, no clunky theoretical tome. Despite obstacles like China’s censorship of Google and America’s persisting digital divide, this abundance of information has mostly broken through barriers and provided access to new and greater audiences.

With all that in mind, infinite and immediate information has created interesting side effects that impact writing. A glut of the information market (remember supply and demand) has decreased the value of information. People now believe (remember Google books) that information should be free. While free information is certainly nice to have, it is also responsible for the demise of institutions like the print newspaper. Who wants a cumbersome mound of ink-smudged paper filled with annoying ads and inserts, when you can easily read any newspaper in the world—or your favorite niche blogger—from your laptop? Yet, trained writers are paid to investigate and write these same stories read for free online. To continue paying these writers, newspapers struggle unsuccessfully to find new ways to charge readers for using their web-based news. (Just this morning, the New York Times announced its intentions to charge for frequent access to articles on its web site. Something, I predict will fail.) In his book Free, author Chris Anderson forecasts a world populated by many more writers who mostly are unpaid. He suggests that current paid writing positions will quickly evolve into part-time gigs that are either paid or not.

As some of us pursue the profession of writing, we may be entering a world that will no longer pay us to perform our craft. And, as we witnessed in class on Tuesday, access to literacy and education revolutionized the world. Will global access to information and the rise of everyday writers do the same? Has it already?