Concepts in Composition
Concepts in Composition
Concepts in Composition
Concepts in Composition is designed to foster reflection on how theory impacts practice, allow-
ing prospective teachers to assume the dual role of both teacher and student as they enter
the discipline of Writing Studies and become familiar with some of its critical conversations.
Now in its third edition, the volume offers up-to-date scholarship and a deeper focus on
diversity, both in the classroom and in relation to Writing Studies and literacy more broadly.
This text continues to offer a wealth of practical assignments, classroom activities, and read-
ings in each chapter. It is the ideal resource for the undergraduate or graduate student looking
to pursue a career in writing instruction.
Irene L. Clark is Professor of English, Director of Composition, and Director of the Master’s
Option in Rhetoric and Composition at California State University, Northridge. She previ-
ously taught at the University of Southern California (USC), where she also co-directed
the university’s Writing Program and directed its Writing Center. She has authored several
textbooks for both undergraduate and graduate students and written a number of articles
concerned with Writing Studies, genre, and transfer. Her recent scholarly interest is in the
interconnection between literacy and current work in neuroplasticity—the ability of the brain
to alter in response to experience. She holds a B.A. in Music from Hunter College, an M.A. in
English from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in English Literature from USC.
Concepts in Composition
Theory and Practices in the Teaching
of Writing
Third Edition
Irene L. Clark
With Contributions by
Betty Bamberg
John Edlund
Olga Griswold
Sharon Klein
Julie Neff-Lippmann
Jennifer Sheppard
Third edition published 2019
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
2019 Taylor & Francis
The right of the Irene L. Clark to be identified as the author of the
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explanation without intent to infringe.
First edition published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc. 2003
Second edition published by Routledge 2012
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Clark, Irene L., author
Title: Concepts in composition : theory and practices in the
teaching of writing / Irene L. Clark.
Description: Third edition. | New York : Routledge, 2019. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018059439| ISBN 9781138088641
(hardcover) | ISBN 9781138088658 (softcover) | ISBN
9780203728659 (ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: English language—Rhetoric—Study and teaching.
| English language—Composition and exercises—Study and
teaching. | English language—Study and teaching—Foreign
speakers. | Report writing—Study and teaching.
Classification: LCC PE1404 .C528 2019 | DDC 808/.042071—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018059439
Typeset in Bembo
by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK
Contents
Preface viii
Acknowledgments xi
4 Audiences 119
IRENE L. CLARK
The idea for Concepts in Composition: Theory and Practice in the Teaching of Writing originated
when I was flying home from New York, having come from a conference concerned with
the teaching of college composition. Flying west from New York to LA is always longer than
the flight east, and I was using the extra flight time to read through some class notes I had
brought with me. The course was intended for prospective high school teachers and graduate
teaching assistants, and I had organized my course materials around theoretical concepts that
I felt were the most important for my students to understand in terms of their influence on
classroom practice. As I flipped through and organized my papers, some of which spilled onto
the floor beneath my seat, I began to think about how useful they would be for both students
and teachers if they were organized into a book.
Thus was Concepts in Composition conceived, and, in accordance with the structure of my
course, I organized each chapter into the following elements:
The goal of that first edition, which has been sustained in the second and third, is to enable
prospective teachers to reflect on how theory impacts practice, to become conscious of how
they think about writing in the context of a first-year writing class, and to develop strate-
gies that can help students improve as writers. Each chapter addresses a theoretical concept
that impacts classroom teaching and includes suggestions for writing, discussion, and further
exploration. Having used the book in many classes, I have found that its approach enables
prospective instructors to assume the dual role of both teacher and student as they enter the
conversations of the discipline, become familiar with some of its critical issues, and feel con-
fident about their teaching.
High in the air, jotting down ideas, flipping through my notes, I initially thought that
I would write every chapter myself. However, once on the ground, breathing relatively
fresh air, I decided that the breadth of scholarship and diversity of perspective would be
significantly improved if I enlisted the aid of scholars in the field who had expertise in
particular concepts in composition. The result was a more substantive book that is con-
siderably richer, due to the contributions of several of my knowledgeable colleagues who
graciously agreed to revise and in some instances to write completely new chapters for
this third edition. I am deeply appreciative of their impressive breadth of knowledge and
remarkable good humor.
Preface ix
The Third Edition
The third edition of this book, as was the case for the first and the second editions, provides an
overview of significant concepts in composition, integrating composition theory with class-
room application. However, the third edition, even more than the previous two, is focused
on how the discipline, now known as Writing Studies, now recognizes that the teaching
and learning of writing is a great deal more complicated than was otherwise believed, both
in terms of scholarship and pedagogy, and frequently overlaps with other disciplines such
as Education, Communication, Linguistics, and Psychology. Although all contributors have
remained committed to the “Concepts in Composition” approach that informed the first
and second editions, the third edition reflects deepening understandings and the recognition
that several aspects of the discipline have branched into sub-categories, with specific areas of
scholarship. Online, multimodal, and digital writing have been a separate focus for some time,
but other areas, such as threshold concepts, cognition, assessment, genre, and transfer now
have their own conferences and journals. Although it was always understood that the teaching
of writing was a complicated enterprise, we now realize that many other elements need to be
considered, such as prior knowledge, motivation, identity, dispositions, and agency, as well as
political, social, and cultural contexts.
The recognition that Writing Studies is a diverse and complicated discipline has
resulted in changes to several chapter titles. Chapter 1, which in the first edition was titled
“Process,” and in the second was titled “Processes,” is now titled “Processes: Issues and
Approaches,” “Invention” is now titled “Invention: Issues and Strategies,” “Revision”
is now titled “Revision: Issues and Strategies,” and the chapter concerned with genre is
now titled “Genre, Transfer, and Related Issues,” “Assessment” is now titled “Assessment:
Issues and Controversies,” “Language and Diversity” is now titled “Language, Linguistic
Diversity, and Writing,” and the chapter that was once titled “Electronic Writing Spaces”
is now titled “Issues in Digital and Multimodal Writing: Composition Instruction for the
21st Century.” There is also a new chapter titled “Reading/Writing Connections” that dis-
cusses scholarship concerned with reading and suggests strategies for incorporating reading
instruction into writing courses.
Of course, no one book could adequately discuss the amount of scholarship concerned
with each of these concepts in composition, so in terms of what is new in this third edition, I
have focused on four areas that have recently become of particular significance: the intercon-
nection between reading and writing; the increased emphasis on genre and transfer; concern
for disadvantaged students particularly as they are impacted by assessment; and the increased
importance of new media. In addition to being addressed directly in specific chapters, these
topics are referenced in other chapters as well.
In essence, however, this third edition retains its deep concern for helping students suc-
ceed, both within and beyond the writing class. Toward that end, its emphasis is on helping
teachers not only to develop meaningful and purposeful assignments, lessons, and projects
for classroom use, but also to understand the “concepts of composition” on which effective
classroom pedagogy is based. Although many factors can contribute to a teacher’s success in
a writing class, the message in this book—that writing teachers need to be acquainted with
the theories of composition and rhetoric that have influenced composition pedagogy for
more than 50 years—has not changed. As our field has developed and gained prominence as
a scholarly discipline, fewer academics now believe that teaching writing means simply cor-
recting grammatical errors and is an enterprise that anyone who writes well can do without
a great deal of knowledge, training, and motivation. The many journals, books, confer-
ences and organizations that are associated with this burgeoning discipline have brought
x Preface
the recognition that helping students improve as writers requires a thorough grounding in
both theory and practice.
For all contributors to this book, the most daunting challenge has been figuring out how
to address each multifaceted concept in composition within the confines of a single chapter.
Composition scholarship is extensive, and the question of what to include and what to omit
was the subject of many conversations among my contributors, all of whom were concerned
about simplifying, but who also recognized the paradox of teaching composition: that teach-
ers need to know a little about each concept to plan their courses effectively, but that it is only
through classroom experience that they will be able to understand the interaction of theory
and practice. It is a credit to my contributors that they all managed to find a middle ground
between too much and too little information, presenting a balanced perspective for beginning
teachers while pointing the way to further exploration and research.
It is often the case that new teachers, worried about how to fill class time, become impa-
tient with courses that address theory at all. “Just tell me what I need to teach,” they implore.
“Give me a syllabus and I’ll follow it.” The third edition of Concepts in Composition: Theory
and Practice in the Teaching of Writing, as was the case with the two previous editions, aims to
help teachers find answers for themselves by helping them understand connections between a
theoretical concept and a classroom lesson. It is only when teachers understand that relation-
ship that they will be able to teach effectively.
A companion website is available for use with this volume, with additional materials for
instructors using the book in the classroom. Please check the Routledge website for details: www.
routledge.com/Concepts-in-Composition-Theory-and-Practice-in-the-Teaching-of-
Writing/Clark/p/book/9780415885164.
Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful to the contributors to this third edition. Their willingness to update and
completely revise their chapters, their breadth of scholarship, and their generosity of spirit
have been crucial to the development of this third edition. I would also like to thank Nicole
Salazar, Brian Eschrich, Simon Barraclough, and the editorial staff at Routledge publishers,
who provided continued support and encouragement, as did my wonderful graduate students
at California State University, Northridge, whose enthusiasm for the first edition sparked my
own efforts. And then, finally, and always, there is my husband and family, who have devot-
edly supported my publishing efforts and encouraged me in all my endeavors, both scholarly
and otherwise.
1 Processes
Approaches and Issues
Irene L. Clark
There is a “general notion in our culture, a sort of debased Romantic version of creativ-
ity wherein verbal artifacts are supposed to be produced as easily and inevitably as a hen lays
eggs. . . . The classical rhetoricians knew better.”
(Bizzell, 1986, p. 50)
In the first edition of Concepts in Composition (2002), Chapter 1 was titled “Process” to empha-
size that an important goal of a first-year writing course is to enable students to develop a
writing process that works effectively for them. This focus on “process” originated when
Composition began to be recognized as a subject of study, when the saying “writing is a
process” became almost a mantra. In the second edition (2012), the first chapter was titled
“Processes,” a change in title that reflected the recognition that there is no one writing “pro-
cess” that works for everyone, that writers use various processes at different times, depending
on what sort of text they wish to write, and that writing is interconnected with other pro-
cesses, such as reading and reflection. Six years later, as I revise Chapter 1 for a third edition,
Composition is now known as “Writing Studies,” and burgeoning research has yielded addi-
tional insight into the study and teaching of writing. Although it is still considered important
for students to understand that writing is a process and to develop effective processes of read-
ing and writing, we now understand that the study of writing is a great deal more complicated
than was otherwise believed and involves many other considerations, among them rhetoric,
prior knowledge, motivation, genre, transfer, and sense of agency. If the goal of a writing
course is to enable students to improve as writers, we have to extend research into other
areas—hence the current title, “Processes: Approaches and Issues.”
This chapter provides a brief historical overview of the discipline that is now known as
Writing Studies. It begins by reviewing what is often referred to as the “process movement”
and explains several competing views or theories of composing. It also discusses the intercon-
nection of writing with reading, rhetoric, and reflection, and briefly explores the potential
impact of new media on the teaching of writing, a topic that will be discussed in greater
depth in Chapter 10. It also provides information about the role of “threshold concepts” in
the teaching of writing and the issue of transfer.
to instruct someone in [a] discipline is not a matter of getting him to commit results
to mind. Rather, it is to teach him to participate in the process that makes possible the
establishment of knowledge. . . .Knowledge is a process, not a product.
(p. 72)
Pouring information into the heads of resistant students does not usually result in writing
improvement, and the term “process” remains of key importance for both teachers and schol-
ars. Motivating students and helping them develop an effective writing process continues to
be a key goal of a writing course. However, it is now also recognized that knowledge about
writing is also necessary for students to continue to develop as writers, in particular, an under-
standing of rhetoric and genre.
Of course, this picture constitutes a generalization, and it is likely that many teachers, intui-
tively understanding what was helpful to beginning writers, did not adhere to this model
of “teaching” writing. Yet, that this model did indeed exist I can attest to from my own
college experience, where essay topics were assigned regardless of whether students knew
or cared much about them, and where few, if any, process-oriented activities—prewriting
strategies, multiple drafts, collaborative groups, student–teacher conferences—were encour-
aged or even mentioned. When I submitted a paper as a college student, I would wait with
trepidation for the teacher to return it, which he or she would eventually do, usually with-
out having written anything other than a grade or perhaps a brief evaluative comment on
the front page.
In a review essay titled, “Of Pre- and Post-Process: Reviews and Ruminations,” Richard
Fulkerson (2001) characterized the situation of how first-year writing used to be similar
to “riding a bicycle. If you knew how to do it, then you could demonstrate your ability
on demand; hence the idea of in-class and time-limited writing” (p. 96). Fulkerson (2001)
described his own experience in a “pre-process program” as follows:
In the fall quarter, we had an anthology of readings, a handbook of grammar, and the
2nd edition of McCrimmon’s Writing with a Purpose. We wrote at least five papers. One
assigned topic was “My First Day at School.” Another was “any philosophical issue.” A
third was a limited research paper about some historic person, who we were to argue was
or was not “great” based on several readings in the anthology. Dr. Staton would assign
the topic orally, and we would have about a week to write. Then he marked the paper,
put a grade on it, and a brief comment.
(p. 95)
Learning to write in those days meant being able to figure out what the teacher wanted in
order to create an acceptable “product,” and, apparently, few teachers thought that helping
students acquire a workable writing “process” was part of their job. Whatever process stu-
dents used, they had to manage on their own. Unfortunately, this model still exists, not usu-
ally in first-year writing classes, but often in other classes designated as “writing-intensive,”
where writing is assigned but not actually taught.
This lack of attention to the process writers engage in when they write reflected a concept
of creativity that to some extent persists in our culture—that is, that a “good” writer is some-
one who can produce an excellent text as quickly, independently, and effortlessly as a bird
learns to fly. This idea suggests that those of us who struggle, for whom writing is a laborious,
time-consuming, and often painful process (i.e., most, if not all, of us), are not, by definition,
“good” writers. One could either write, or one couldn’t. Such was the fantasy of that time,
and even now our culture continues to value speed and ease of production, particularly in
reference to the speaking ability of our politicians, who are deemed “good speakers” if they
can think on their feet.
In ancient times, however, classical rhetoricians understood the concept of “process,”
although the concept was used in the preparation of speeches, not for the writing of essays.
In ancient Greece and Rome, rhetoricians envisioned the composing process as consisting of
five stages—invention (the discovery of ideas), arrangement (putting ideas in a persuasively
effective order), style (finding the right language in which to present the ideas), memory
Processes 5
(memorizing the speech), and delivery (using voice and gesture to present the speech effec-
tively). Apparently, it was understood that a “gifted” speaker had to engage in an elaborate
process in order to deliver an effective speech.
The result of the Dartmouth Conference was to reassert for U.S. teachers the value of the
expressive model of writing. Writing is to be pursued in a free and supportive environ-
ment in which the student is encouraged to engage in an act of self-discovery.
(p. 210)
This emphasis on the personal and private nature of composing was also manifested in the
recommendations of early Composition scholars such as Ken Macrorie, Donald Murray,
Walker Gibson, and Peter Elbow.
What does it actually mean to view writing as a process? Broadly speaking, a process
approach to writing and the teaching of writing means devoting increased attention to writers
and the activities in which writers engage when they create and produce a text, as opposed to
analyzing and attempting to reproduce “model” texts. Reacting against a pedagogy oriented
toward error correction and formulaic patterns of organization, the process approach, as it
evolved during the 1960s and 1970s, was concerned with discovering how writers produce
texts, developing a model of the writing process, and helping writers find a process that would
enable them to write more effectively and continue to improve as writers. Although to many
writers and teachers the concept of a writing “process” was not news, the increased emphasis
in the classroom on helping students acquire an effective process and on finding out what suc-
cessful writers did when they wrote, constituted a new pedagogical approach and a potentially
exciting research direction.
This is an assignment that will enable you to gain conscious awareness of the process
you use to write papers that are assigned in classes (and the extent to which that process
might be different when you write for other purposes). It is an assignment that you can
also use with your students.
Think about a paper you have written recently for a college class. Then draw two
pictures:
1 The first picture should represent how you actually engaged in writing this particu-
lar piece. It might show a place or places where you did that writing.
2 The second picture should represent the whole writing process for this particular
piece. The picture might show how this writing activity got started, interactions
Processes 7
with other people and other texts, experiences that have influenced the direction or
approach you used, the number and type of drafts, your evaluations of, and emo-
tions about this activity at different times.
1 Describe the writing assignment and class for which it was intended. How did you
feel about the assignment? Were you interested in it immediately? Did you find it
difficult or confusing?
2 List as many activities associated with that writing as you possibly can recall. Some
questions to consider:
•• What was the first action you performed to complete the writing task? What
actions followed?
•• Did you think about the writing when you were involved in other activities
(driving a car, for example)?
•• Did you talk with anyone about the topic?
•• What sort of revision did you do?
•• Were these behaviors typical of what you usually do when you are given a
writing assignment?
•• Do you feel your writing process is effective?
•• Do you use a different process when you are working on something that you,
yourself, have decided to write? If so, how is it different?
Modern rhetoric does not so much replace one authority with another; rather it attacks
the very idea of absolute authority. People who use rhetoric don’t have to be atheists or
moral relativists, but they must realize that the constraints on how we discuss issues are
different as we move from community to community, audience to audience.
(p. 13)
In writing about an issue such as whether women should submit to their husband in marriage,
Killingsworth pointed out, a student would have to base his or her arguments “on something
more than the Bible” (p. 12). Incorporating rhetoric into a writing class will enable students to
understand how the values of an intended audience impact the direction and credibility of a text.
1 The process of writing is best understood as a set of distinctive thinking processes that
writers orchestrate or organize during the act of composing.
2 These processes have a hierarchical, highly embedded organization in which any process
can be embedded within any other.
3 The act of composing itself is a goal-directed thinking process, guided by the writer’s
own growing network of goals.
4 Writers create their own goals in two key ways: by generating both high-level goals and
supporting subgoals that embody the writer’s developing sense of purpose, and then, at
times, by changing major goals or even establishing new ones based on what has been
learned in the act of writing.
(p. 366)
Flower and Hayes also focused on the role of problem-definition in the writing process, not-
ing in their article “The Cognition of Discovery: Defining a Rhetorical Problem” (1980)
that although a teacher may give “20 students the same assignment, the writers themselves
Processes 11
create the problem they solve” (p. 23). Using the technique of “protocols” (having students
speak aloud as they compose), Flower and Hayes constructed a model of the rhetorical prob-
lem itself, which consisted of two major units: the rhetorical situation, which consists of the
“writer’s given,” including the audience and the assignment, and the set of goals that the
writer creates for himself. The four goals they noted involved the reader, creating a persona
or voice, building a meaning, and producing a formal text, which, as they point out, “closely
parallel the four terms of the communication triangle: reader, writer, world, word” (p. 25).
Although recent scholarship in Writing Studies has not privileged cognitive approaches to
the study and teaching of writing, current research in neuroscience has generated renewed
interest in cognition. A recently published book titled Contemporary Perspectives on Cognition
and Writing (2017) consists of chapters that explore and affirm the importance of cognition
and neuroscience for understanding and teaching writing.
Moffett’s second scale, the subject scale, categorized discourse by how far away the writer
or speaker is from the subject being considered. For example, a person may be sitting at a
table in a cafeteria eating lunch, noting what is happening at the given moment. Later on, he
or she might report on what happened in the cafeteria during lunch, generalize about what
usually happens in the cafeteria at lunch, or argue that something might or should happen
in the cafeteria at lunch. These two scales, the audience scale and the subject scale, Moffett
suggested, can be used to help students recreate their experience through language, enabling
them to develop facility in writing. Moffett’s concept of a language-arts curriculum based on
this sequence was explained in considerable detail in his textbook A Student-Centered Language
Arts Curriculum (1968a).
A British study, The Development of Writing Abilities 11–18, published in 1975 by James
Britton, Tony Burgess, Nancy Martin, Alex McLeod, and Harold Rosen, also included the
notion of sequential development. Aimed at creating a model that would “characterize all
mature written utterances and then go on to trace the developmental steps that led to them”
(p. 6), this system of Britton and his colleagues categorized all student writing by function—
the transactional, which communicates information to an unknown audience; the expressive,
12 Irene L. Clark
which communicates information to a known audience; and the poetic, which deals only
tangentially with any form of audience. Britton et al. characterized most school writing as
transactional, but argued that because students are most engaged in expressive writing, this is
the type of writing that is most likely to foster the development of writing ability.
Both Moffett’s work and the work of Britton et al., evolving from the theories of Jean
Piaget, addressed the question of how children learn to move beyond their early egocentri-
cism to reach out to an audience; a topic addressed by Linda Flower in her seminal article
“Writer-Based Prose: A Cognitive Basis for Problems in Writing” (1979). According to
Flower, novice writers often have difficulty transcending their own egocentric perspective to
consider the needs of their intended audience. As a result, their texts are often characterized
by what she refers to as “writer-based prose”—that is, texts in which information is omitted
or inadequately explained, definitions unclarified—in other words, texts that reflect what
might be in their writers’ minds at the time of writing but that have not been sufficiently
contextualized or modified for a reader. Often reflecting the order in which the writer first
generated ideas, writer-based prose may be clear to the writer, but a reader may have dif-
ficulty understanding it. Awareness of writer-based prose in the writing class can be used
to help novice writers transform “writer-based” to “reader-based” prose, enabling them to
develop a better understanding of the concept of audience.
Pursuing a similar direction, Andrea Lunsford, in an article titled “Cognitive Development
and the Basic Writer” (1979), claimed that the difficulties novice or “basic” writers have with
writing are because of their not having reached a level of cognitive development that would
enable them to form abstractions. To remedy this problem, Lunsford suggested a variety of
workshop activities focusing on analysis and active thinking. During that same year (1979),
Sharon Pianko published “A Description of the Composing Processes of College Freshman
Writers,” in which she claimed that the composing process of basic writers is less developed
than that of more skillful writers.
Enabling students to use their own powers, to make discoveries, to take alternative
paths. It does not suggest that the world can best be examined by a set of rules . . . The
program gives the student first, freedom to find his voice and let his subjects find
him . . . for both teacher and student, a constant reading for truth, in writing and
commenting on that writing. This is a hard requirement, for no one speaks truth
consistently.
(pp. vii–viii)
For Macrorie, good writers speak in honest voices and tell some kind of truth; a perspective
similar to that of Donald Stewart (1972), for whom the most important goal of a writing
course was for students to engage in a process of self-discovery, manifested in the student’s
text by the appearance in the text of an authentic voice. Donald Graves (1983) also referred
to voice as infusing a text with the writer’s presence. Perhaps the best-known proponent of
the concept of voice, Peter Elbow (1986), although acknowledging the difficulty of defin-
ing voice, nevertheless viewed the discovery of voice as a necessary prerequisite of growth.
“I can grow or change,” Elbow maintained, but “not unless I start out inhabiting my own
14 Irene L. Clark
voice or style. . . . In short, I need to accept myself as I am before I can tap my power or
start to grow” (p. 204). Voice, for Elbow, constitutes both a motivating force and a source
of power. In its emphasis on empowering the inner self, the expressivist approach to writing
is sometimes referred to as the “romantic” school of writing, in contrast to the “classical” or
“cognitive” school, which view writing in terms of intellectual development as manifested
in problem solving.
Of course, there is no reason that the “process” approach should be so closely con-
nected to expressivist writing. As Ladd Tobin (1994) points out, “a teacher could assign
a personal essay but ignore the writing process or assign a critical analysis yet nurture the
process” (p. 6). Nevertheless, process and personal or expressivist writing were often asso-
ciated with one another in the early days of the process movement, and today the expres-
sionists remain:
a force in rhetoric and composition studies. Such as Peter Elbow, Donald Murray, Ken
Macrorie . . . continue to explore writing as a private and personal act. It is this group
that continues to insist on the importance of the individual against the demands of insti-
tutional conformity, holding out for the personal as the source of all value.
(Berlin, 1990, pp. 218–219)
Social Constructionism
Although cognitive and expressivist approaches to Composition dominated scholarship dur-
ing the 1970s and 1980s, during the mid-1980s, publications began to appear that questioned
both the validity and the utility of focusing on the individual. Patricia Bizzell’s “Cognition,
Convention, and Certainty: What We Need to Know About Writing” (1983) argued that
writers are not autonomous individuals, distinct and removed from culture, but, rather, that
individual consciousness is shaped by culture through language. This perspective implied
that all writers, even when they are presumably composing only for themselves or writing
notes for a subsequent piece of writing, are mentally influenced by the “inner speech,” as
Vygotsky (1978) referred to it, that develops in response to a particular culture’s concept of
language and thought. From this perspective, then, writing is socially constructed because it
both reflects and shapes thinking; a position that in Composition studies is known as social
constructionism. Social constructionist approaches to Composition emphasize the role of com-
munity in shaping discourse and the importance of understanding community expectations
when working with students. Bizzell’s article (1983), for example, pointed out that although
Flower and Hayes’s cognitive-based model described how writing occurs, it focused too
strongly on the individual writer and did not help Composition teachers “advise students on
difficult questions of practice” (p. 222).
Social constructionist approaches to Composition derive from perspectives in philosophy,
as well as other fields, that emphasize the importance of community consensus in determining
knowledge. This view is based on the idea that individuals perceive the world according to
the shared beliefs and perceptions of the community or communities to which they belong; it
is one that writers in fields such as history or ethnography have supported for some time. The
philosopher, Richard Rorty, for example, in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), main-
tained that knowledge is a “socially constructed belief,” a viewpoint that straddles a middle
position between absolute relativism, in which an individual may choose to believe anything,
and the positivist notion of objective truth derived from an absolute reality. The anthropolo-
gist, Clifford Geertz (1983), similarly argued that modern consciousness is an “enormous
multiplicity” of cultural values, and Charles Bazerman (1981) has emphasized the role of the
scientific community in shaping the writing of scientists.
Processes 15
In Composition, social constructionist approaches have been associated with the work of
David Bartholomae, Kenneth Bruffee, Patricia Bizzell, and James Berlin, who all focused on
the social context of writing and the role of community in determining the appropriateness
and effectiveness of a text. Kenneth Bruffee’s “Collaborative Learning and the ‘Conversation
of Mankind’” (1984) maintained that every person is born into the “conversation of man-
kind” and that it is this conversation that gives meaning and value to what we do, influencing
both thinking and writing. “We can think because we can talk, and we think in ways we have
learned to talk” (p. 87), Bruffee explained.
Collaborative Learning
Bruffee’s scholarship is also associated with collaborative learning: a concept that frequently
informs the pedagogy used in writing classes. An important goal of this approach is to balance
authority between students and teacher, so that students can participate in their own learning
through peer editing and writing groups. This idea, as Bruffee pointed out, is actually quite
similar to the work of the early process theorists such as Peter Elbow, who had long advo-
cated the effectiveness of the “teacherless” classroom and the necessity of delegating author-
ity to writing groups. According to this perspective, students learn only when they have
assumed responsibility for their own learning. They do not develop writing skills by listening
to a teacher lecture about the writing process. Rather they must engage fully in that process
themselves, working together with peers.
•• Model the activity by first engaging in it yourself in front of the class. Before putting
students into groups for peer editing, ask students to volunteer a paper to be edited, or
use one from another class. Make copies for the class and demonstrate how you expect
students to proceed.
•• Determine the procedures for group work, such as whether students should read
papers silently or aloud, how many copies of the paper students should bring in, how
much time should be allotted for each paper, and the sort of comments that should
be encouraged.
•• Assign the groups yourself through random selection. If students choose their own
groups, they may spend the time socializing instead of working. To enable the groups
16 Irene L. Clark
to develop a productive working relationship, keep the groups constant throughout the
semester, unless there is a good reason for changing them.
•• For peer editing, develop assignment-specific questions (see the following “For Writing
and Discussion” section for an example).
•• When possible, require students to report their discussion results to the class. This works
well when students engage in group research because it requires them to take responsibil-
ity for their work. They should be aware that they will be standing in front of the class
and that inadequate preparation will be apparent to everyone!
Writing Assignment
One important insight arising from research into the composing process is that no
approach or strategy is appropriate for all writers and that, as Muriel Harris points out,
“there is a very real danger in imposing a single ‘ideal’ composing style on students.” In
fact, the more we engage in research about the composing process, the more we realize
how much more we need to learn.
As a writer and a student of writing, you have learned a great deal about the writing
process from your own experiences: some of them useful, some less so, and it is your
writing background that will serve as the primary resource for this assignment. Think
about your own history as a writer—your classroom successes and failures, teachers and
writers who have influenced you, assignments you have completed, and strategies you
have developed as you grappled with various types of writing assignments throughout
your academic career. Then in an essay of three to five pages, respond to the follow-
ing question:
Based on your experience as a writer and a student, what insights into the
composing process do you consider to be the most important?
In discussing insights you have gained, please enliven your prose with specific exam-
ples and anecdotes.
First draft: 3 copies due in class on __. First drafts must be typed.
Final draft due on __.
1 Does the essay respond to the prompt—that is, what insights into the composing
process does the writer consider most important?
2 Examine the introduction. What function does it serve? To attract attention? To
indicate a direction for the essay? How does the introduction prepare the reader for
other sections in the essay?
Processes 17
3 Examine the essay for support. What are the main ideas or themes? What specific
examples, anecdotes, or explanations are used to support these ideas or themes?
4 Examine the essay for coherence. What strategies are used to connect each para-
graph with the next?
5 Examine the essay for style and sentence structure. What specific words does the
writer use to illustrate main points? What kind of person do you sense behind
the prose? How does the writer make this person seem real? How does the
writer use sentence structure to develop the essay? Is the essay’s style sufficiently
varied? Are the sentences choppy?
6 What has the writer done to make the essay interesting? What did you learn from
this essay? What did the writer do to enhance the audience appeal of this essay?
Collaborating Online
Access to new media has now enabled students to collaborate virtually—sharing ideas and
drafts online, working in groups on various projects without meeting face to face. Beach,
Anson, Breuch, and Swiss (2009) discuss a number of options for using “digital discussion
environments to enhance writing instruction and student engagement” (p. 48). Defining
“digital discussion environments” as those that promote conversation and collaboration, these
authors provide an overview of both synchronous (real-time) discussions, used when students
are on the computer at the same time, and asynchronous discussions, when students write sepa-
rate messages at different times. Synchronous discussions tend to be more conversational and
are sometimes used even when all students are in a classroom; asynchronous discussions occur
when students are not in the same location and can serve as a written transcript of an ongoing
discussion. Both can be useful in enabling students to learn from one another and build upon
one another’s ideas.
Online writing and collaboration can take many forms: having students respond to a read-
ing, discovering a purpose for writing, finding additional research, responding to drafts, dis-
cussing ideas for a project, or enabling students to become aware of audience. Whatever
purpose it might serve, however, planning is crucial, just as it is in a face-to-face classroom.
When they engage in a digital collaboration, students should have a clear idea of what they
are expected to do or learn in the context of a particular assignment or task. Possibilities for
online collaboration will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 9.
(continued)
18 Irene L. Clark
(continued)
Vygotsky, L. (1978). In M. Cole,V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner, & E. Souberman (Eds.), Mind in soci-
ety. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Collaborative Learning
Bizzell, P. (1983). Cognition, convention, and certainty: What we need to know about writing.
PRETEXT, 3: 213–243.
Brooke, R. (1991). Writing and sense of self: Identity negotiation in writing workshops. Urbana, IL:
NCTE.
Brooke, R., Mirtz, R., & Evans, R. (1994). Small groups in writing workshops. Urbana, IL: NCTE.
Bruffee, K. A. (1984, November). Collaborative learning and the “conversation of mankind.”
College English, 46: 635–652.
Elbow, P. (1973). Writing without teachers. New York: Oxford University Press.
Forman, J. (Ed.). (1992). New visions of collaborative writing. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook.
George, D. (1984) Working with peer groups in the composition classroom. CCC, 35: 320–326.
Gere, A. R. (1987). Writing groups: History, theory, and implications. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois
University Press.
Lunsford, A., & Ede, L. (1990). Singular texts/plural authors: Perspectives on collaborative writing.
Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
Mason, E. (1970). Collaborative learning. London: Ward Lock.
Smith, D. (1989). Some difficulties with collaborative learning. Journal of Advanced Composition, 9:
45–57.
Spellmeyer, K. (1994). On conventions and collaboration: The open road and the iron cage. In
J. Clifford, & J. Schilb (Eds.), Writing theory and critical theory. New York: MLA.
Trimbur, J. (1989, October). Consensus and difference in collaborative learning. College English,
51: 602–616.
Collaborating Online
Beach, R., Anson, C., Breuch L. B., & Swiss, T. (2009). Teaching writing using blogs, wikis, and other
digital tools. Norwood, MA: Christopher-Gordon.
Gane, N., & Beer, D. (2008). New media. Oxford: Berg.
Wysocki, A. F., Johnson-Eilola, J., & Selfe, C. L. (2004). Writing new media:Theory and applications for
expanding the teaching of composition. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press.
Post-Process Theory
Concern about the effectiveness and validity of the process movement has been manifested in
literature concerned with “post-process theory,” a term that refers to the idea that the process
movement is no longer pertinent, either theoretically or pedagogically. In Post-Process Theory:
Beyond the Writing-Process Paradigm (1999), Thomas Kent asserted that because every commu-
nication act requires the writer to “guess” how a text will affect a reader, it is impossible to
model communication, and, therefore, there is no writing process that can be presented in the
classroom. “No single course can teach a student how to produce or analyze discourse,” Kent
maintains, “for the hermeneutic guessing required in all discourse production and analysis can
be only refined; it cannot be codified and then taught” (p. 39). In his essay in that collection,
Gary Olson (1999) took this position further, asserting not only that writing cannot be taught
but also that it cannot even be adequately described. To construct a model of the writing
process, Olson states, is to be in conflict with the postmodern rejection of certainty and the
corresponding emphasis on assertion as a valued academic skill. For Olson, “the vocabulary of
process is no longer useful” (p. 9), and, therefore, compositionists must move away from “a
discourse of mastery and assertion toward a more dialogic, dynamic, open-ended, receptive,
nonassertive stance” (p. 14). Olson, however, did not suggest how this perspective can benefit
students or be applied in a pedagogical context.
Another criticism of the process movement focused on the emphasis on formula with
which the writing process has been presented in the classroom. Joseph Petraglia and David
Russell both rejected the rigidity of a “prewrite, write, revise, edit” model, Petraglia noting
in “Is There Life after Process?” (1999) that Composition scholarship seems to be increas-
ingly irrelevant to working effectively with students. Russell, embracing an activity theory
orientation, emphasized that there are many writing processes. Instead of teaching one pro-
cess, Russell (1999) maintains, compositionists study those various processes to “(re)classify
them, commodify them, and involve students with (teach) them in a curriculum” (p. 88) that
acknowledges that some writing activities can be performed mechanistically, whereas oth-
ers cannot. As yet, post-process theory has not been applied to effective classroom teaching.
20 Irene L. Clark
However, for an excellent and enjoyable review of post-process scholarship, read Richard
Fulkerson’s “Of Pre- and Post-Process: Reviews and Ruminations” (2001).
Reading as a Process
Interconnections between writing and reading will be discussed in detail in Chapter 6, but in
the context of this chapter, it is important to note that reading, like, writing, is also a process
and also requires rhetorical understanding. Although most entering college students are able
to read or “decode” words that are printed on a page, many are unable to understand the
texts assigned in their college classes because they don’t understand “academic writing as a
process in which writers engage with other texts” (Bean, 2005, p. xxiii). Helping students
develop an effective reading process, also includes the concept of “critical” reading as a means
of enabling students to recognize biased perspectives in various texts, including visual texts
such as websites and advertisements.
Processes 23
The idea that reading is a process enables students to approach a text purposefully, not
simply to begin reading passively, sentence by sentence, without considering why it was
written, the conversation it is addressing, and the strategies the writer has used to accomplish
a particular purpose. In working with students in a writing class, I urge them to develop a
process of reading that I refer to as “the three-pass approach,” which consists of the following
process-oriented activities:
(For additional information on this three-pass approach, see Clark, College Arguments:
Understanding the Genres, 2nd Edition, 2016.)
Writing Assignment
Understanding Yourself as a Writer1
Although all writers engage in planning, drafting, and revising, they do so in a variety
of ways and no writer approaches every writing task the same way. One way to move
away from writing habits that have not worked well for you in the past is to understand
what type of writer you are. Think about the models of writers described here. In the
space provided, indicate the extent to which this description pertains to your own writ-
ing habits.
Writers Who Plan in Advance. These people tend to think about their ideas and plan their
writing in their minds or on paper before they begin to write. As a result, their first drafts
are usually better than most first drafts often are, even though these drafts will probably
still need additional revision before they can be submitted. People who plan in advance
use spare moments of their time to think—while they eat lunch, drive, and wait in line.
When they start to write, they usually have at least some idea about what they want to say.
Writers Who Discover Ideas through Writing. Although every writer discovers ideas
through writing, at least sometimes, these writers use writing to find out what they
want to say, planning and revising while they write. They begin by writing whatever
comes into their minds and then reconsider and rewrite again and again. Writers who
discover ideas through writing may even throw out a whole first draft and begin again.
Writers Who Spend Equal Time on Planning, Writing, and Revising. Some writers divide
the writing task into stages, a method that is probably the most effective in writing a
college essay as long as adequate time is allowed for each stage of the process. However,
it is important to keep in mind that an effective plan involves more than a few notes
scratched on a sheet of paper, that sufficient time must be allowed for drafting, and that
a revision means a great deal more than correcting a few sentences.
Writers Who Delay. This is a familiar type of writer—those who delay writing until
right before the paper is due. These writers sometimes stay up all night, trying to write
a complete draft of a paper, and, thus, when they submit their work, they are really
submitting a first draft, not usually their best work. Of course, for various reasons, all
writers probably procrastinate sometimes. But those who always write first drafts under
conditions of pressure or panic are unlikely to do as well as they could.
Writing Assignment
Assessing Your Own Writing Process
This self-assessment will enable you to look at your own writing process, to evaluate
the strategies you use when you write. Try to answer each question as fully as possible.
1 Mark the scale below to indicate how easy or difficult you find the process of
writing. Easy–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––Difficult
Please explain your selection, indicating the reasons for your response.
2 Describe how you usually write your papers.
(continued)
26 Irene L. Clark
(continued)
3 What practices or “rules of writing” do you find to be useful? Which do you find
to be phony or not useful?
4 Which of the following problems have you experienced?
•• Beginning the paper
•• Knowing what you want to say
•• Writing an introduction
•• Getting a first sentence
•• Finding a thesis
•• Organizing the paper
•• Deciding how to structure your ideas
•• Writing an outline
•• Addressing the needs of your audience
•• Knowing what your reader wants
•• Deciding what information to include
•• Working on coherence and style
•• Connecting each paragraph to your overall point
•• Writing sentences that connect with one another
•• Making your writing lively and interesting to read
•• Finding the right words.
5 Based on your responses to the previous questions, what changes would you like to
make in your writing behavior?
Writing Assignment
Writing Class Observation
If you currently attend a college or university where writing classes are taught, arrange
to observe at least three classes over a two-week period. Then, based on your observa-
tions, write a two-part report of five to seven pages that addresses the following:
Part I. Describe the writing class you observed, including many specific details such
as the name of the teacher, the level of the class, how often the class meets, the
number of students, the textbook used, the assignment the students are working on,
the handouts that were used, the seating arrangement—any details that will enable
a reader to understand what the teacher and students were doing during various
segments of the class.
Part II. Discuss how observing these classes has provided you with information that
you will use to plan your own writing class. Specific points to address in this sec-
tion include the teacher, students, classroom dynamics, methodology, and materials.
What did you learn in this class from both the teacher and the students that will be
helpful to you?
Note that your purpose is NOT to evaluate the teacher or the methods in any way, but
rather to reflect on what you have learned and can apply to your own teaching.
Processes 27
Classroom Observation Guidelines
1 Select the “teacher volunteer” whose class you plan to observe.
2 Plan to observe at least three successive class meetings, or a total of four class meet-
ings over a three-week period.
3 Contact the teacher (via telephone, e-mail, or mail) and make certain that you
will be the only observer in class on the days of your visits. Request that he or she
provides you with a copy of the course syllabus and any other important handouts
when you observe your first class.
4 Find out if the teacher has any preference regarding your “role” as observer in his/
her class. For example, should you get up and walk around if group work is in
progress or remain in your seat and listen in on the closest group?
5 During your first observation, take as many notes as you feel are necessary to pro-
vide you with a full record of your experience.
6 During your second and subsequent observations, focus on what you consider to
be the most informative and important insights you have gained.
7 If possible, have a short “debriefing” session with the instructor when you have
finished the sequence of observations.
8 Be sure to arrive on time for the class. Do not leave until the class has ended.
Student Behaviors
•• What kind of writing are the students doing?
•• How many students are participating?
•• What are students doing who are not participating?
•• Are students reading their work aloud?
•• Are students speaking to one another?
•• Are students working in groups?
•• How are students reacting to the day’s agenda and topic?
Teacher Behaviors
•• What sort of voice does the teacher use?
•• Has the teacher engaged the students?
•• What kind of working relationship does the teacher have with the students?
•• What is the evidence that suggests that kind of working relationship?
•• What does the teacher do when students participate or ask questions? Characterize
the teacher’s strategies for listening and promoting dialogue.
(continued)
28 Irene L. Clark
(continued)
Teacher Activities
•• Presenting the assignment/lesson.
•• Modeling a particular writing strategy.
•• Teacher addressing class as a whole.
•• Teacher addressing a small group.
•• Teacher speaking with an individual student.
•• Teacher presenting the lesson.
Overall, you should be aware of how writing and reading are addressed in the class, how
students are engaged, with the instructor and with each other, how the lesson has been
planned, and how much student participation drives and supports the action of the class.
Writing Assignment
Keeping a Reflective Writing Journal
A useful strategy for gaining insight into your own writing process is to keep a reflective
writing journal. A reflective writing journal will enable you to recall writing experi-
ences in your past, from which you can develop your own “theory” of writing. Insights
fostered by this means will be useful for helping your students to develop an effective
writing process. The following are some suggestions for entries into your reflective
writing journal:
REFLECTIVE MEMO1
To accompany a draft
Processes 29
1 My thesis is
2 This thesis needs to be argued because
3 My thesis needs to be read because
4 If I had two more days to work on this, I would
5 My favorite section is
6 My favorite sentence is
7 What could we spend more time on in class that would enable me to do this assign-
ment more competently?
Note
1 This form is based on a discussion of various types of writers in Lisa Ede (1995) Work in Progress (3rd
ed.), Boston/New York: St. Martin’s Press.
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Readings
Composing Behaviors of One- and Multi-Draft Writers
Muriel Harris
A belief shared by teachers of writing, one that we fervently try to inculcate in our students,
is that revision can improve writing. This notion, that revision generally results in better text,
often pairs up with another assumption, that revision occurs as we work through separate
drafts. Thus, “hand in your working drafts tomorrow and the final ones next Friday” is a com-
mon assignment, as is the following bit of textbook advice: “When the draft is completed, a
good critical reading should help the writer re-envision the essay and could very well lead
to substantial rewriting” (Axelrod and Cooper 10). This textbook advice, hardly atypical, is
based on the rationale that gaining distance from a piece of discourse helps the writer to
judge it more critically. As evidence for this assumption. Richard Beach’s 1976 study of the
self-evaluation strategies of revisers and non-revisers demonstrated that extensive revisers
were more capable of detaching themselves and gaining aesthetic distance from their writing
than were non-revisers. Nancy Sommers’ later theoretical work on revision also sensitized
us to students’ need to re-see their texts rather than to view revision as an editing process at
the limited level of word changes.
A logical conclusion, then, is to train student writers to re-see and then re-draft a piece
of discourse. There are other compelling reasons for helping students view first or working
drafts as fluid and not yet molded into final form. The opportunities for outside intervention,
through teacher critiques and suggestions or peer evaluation sessions, can be valuable.
And it is equally important to help students move beyond their limited approaches and limit-
ing tendency to settle for whatever rolls out on paper the first time around. The novice view
of a first draft as writtenin-stone (or fast-drying cement) can preclude engaging more fully
with the ideas being expressed. On the other hand, we have to acknowledge that there
are advantages in being able, where it is appropriate, to master the art of one-draft writing.
When students write essay exams or placement essays and when they go on to on-the-job
writing where time doesn’t permit multiple drafts, they need to produce first drafts which are
also coherent, finished final drafts. Yet, even acknowledging that need, we still seem justi-
fied in advocating that our students master the art of redrafting to shape a text into a more
effective form.
The notion that reworking a text through multiple drafts and/or visible changes is generally
a beneficial process is also an underlying assumption in some lines of research. This had
been particularly evident in studies of computer-aided revision, where counts were taken of
changes in macrostructure and microstructure with and without word processing. If more
changes were made on a word processor than were written by hand, the conclusion was that
word processors are an aid to revision. Such research is based on the premise that revision
equals visible changes in a text and that these changes will improve the text.
Given this widely entrenched notion of redrafting as being advantageous, it would be
comforting to turn to research results for clearcut evidence that reworking of text produces
better writing. But studies of revision do not provide the conclusive picture that we need in
order to assert that we should continue coaxing our students into writing multiple drafts.
Lillian Bridwell’s 1980 survey of revision studies led her to conclude that “questions about
the relationship between revision and qualitative improvement remain largely unanswered”
Composing Behaviors 33
(199), and her own study demonstrated that the most extensively revised papers “received
a range of quality ratings from the top to the bottom of the scale” (216). In another review of
research on revision, Stephen Witte cities studies which similarly suggest that the amount
of re-drafting (which Witte calls “retranscription”) often bears little relation to the overall qual-
ity of completed texts (“Revising” 256). Similarly, Linda Flower and John Hayes, et al., cit-
ing studies which also dispute the notion that more re-drafting should mean better papers,
conclude that the amount of change is not a key variable in revision and that revision as
an obligatory stage required by teachers doesn’t necessarily produce better writing. (For a
teacher’s affirmation of the same phenomenon, see Henley.)
Constricting revision to retranscription (i.e., to altering what has been written) also denies
the reality of pre-text, a composing phenomenon studied by Stephen Witte in “Pre-Text and
Composing.” Witte defines a writer’s pre-text as “the mental construction of ‘text’ prior to
transcription” (397). Pre-text thus “refers to a writer’s linguistic representation of intended
meaning, a ‘trial locution’ that is produced in the mind, stored in the writer’s memory, and
sometimes manipulated mentally prior to being transcribed as written text” (397). Pre-texts
are distinguished from abstract plans in that pre-texts approximate written prose. As the
outcome of planning, pre-text can also be the basis for further planning. In his study Witte
found great diversity in how writers construct and use pre-text. Some writers construct little
or no pre-text; others rely heavily on extensive pre-texts; others create short pre-texts; and
still others move back and forth between extensive and short pre-texts. The point here is that
Witte has shown us that revision can and does occur in pre-texts, before visible marks are
made on paper. In an earlier paper, “Revising, Composing Theory, and Research Design,”
Witte suggests that the pre-text writers construct before making marks on paper is prob-
ably a function of the quality, kind, and extent of planning that occurs before transcribing
on paper. The danger here is that we might conclude that the development from novice to
expert writer entails learning to make greater use of pre-text prior to transcribing. After all, in
Linda Flower’s memorable phrase, pre-text is “the last cheap gas before transcribing text”
(see Witte, “Pre-Text” 422). But Witte notes that his data do not support a “vote for pre-text”
(“Pre-Text” 401). For the students in Witte’s study, more extensive use of pre-text doesn’t
automatically lead to better written text. Thus it appears so far that the quality of revision can
neither be measured by the pound nor tracked through discreet stages.
But a discussion of whether more or fewer drafts is an indication of more mature writ-
ing is itself not adequate. As Maxine Hairston reminds us in “Different Products, Different
Processes,” we must also consider the writing task that is involved in any particular case of
generating discourse. In her taxonomy of writing categories, categories that depict a vari-
ety of revision behaviors that are true to the experience of many of us, Hairston divides
writing into three classes; first, routine maintenance writing which is simple communication
about uncomplicated matters; second, extended, relatively complex writing that requires the
writer’s attention but is self-limiting in that the writer already knows most of what she is going
to write and may be writing under time constraints; and third, extended reflective writing in
which the form and content emerge as the writing proceeds. Even with this oversimplified,
brief summary of Hairston’s classes of writing, we recognize that the matter of when and if
re-drafting takes place can differ according to the demands of different tasks and situations
as well as the different skills levels of writers.
Many—or perhaps even most—of us may nod in agreement as we recognize in Hairston’s
classes of writing a description of the different types of writing we do. But given the range
34 Muriel Harris
of individual differences that exist among writers, we still cannot conclude that the nature
of effective revision is always tied to the writing task, because such a conclusion would not
account for what we know also exists—some expert writers who, despite the writing task,
work at either end of the spectrum as confirmed, consistent one-drafters or as perpetual
multi-drafters. That writers exhibit a diversity of revising habits has been noted by Lester
Faigley and Stephen Witte in “Analyzing Revision.” When testing the taxonomy of revision
changes they had created, Faigley and Witte found that expert writers exhibited “extreme
diversity” in the ways they revised:
One expert writer in the present study made almost no revisions; another started with an
almost stream-of-consciousness text that she then converted to an organized essay in
the second draft; another limited his major revisions to a single long insert; and another
revised mostly by pruning.
(410)
Similarly, when summarizing interviews with well-known authors such as those in the Writers at
Work: The Paris Review Interviews series, Lillian Bridwell notes that these discussions reveal a
wide range of revision strategies among these writers, from rapid producers of text who do little
revising as they proceed to writers who move along by revising every sentence (198).
More extensive insights into a variety of composing styles are offered in Tom Waldrep’s
collection of essays by successful scholars working in composition, Writers on Writing. Here
too as writers describe their composing processes, we see a variety of approaches, includ-
ing some writers who plan extensively before their pens hit paper (or before the cursor blips
on their screens). Their planning is so complete that their texts generally emerge in a single
draft with minor, if any, editing as they write. Self-descriptions of some experienced writers in
the field of composition give us vivid accounts of how these one-drafters work. For example,
Patricia Y. Murray notes that prior to typing, she sees words, phrases, sentences, and para-
graphs taking shape in her head. Her composing, she concludes, has been done before her
fingers touch the typewriter, though as she also notes, she revises and edits as she types
(234). William Lutz offers a similar account:
Before I write, I write in my mind. The more difficult and complex the writing, the more
time I need to think before I write. Ideas incubate in my mind. While I talk, drive, swim,
and exercise I am thinking, planning, writing. I think about the introduction, what exam-
ples to use, how to develop the main idea, what kind of conclusion to use. I write, revise,
rewrite, agonize, despair, give up, only to start all over again, and all of this before I ever
begin to put words on paper. . . . Writing is not a process of discovery for me . . . . The
writing process takes place in my mind. Once that process is complete the product
emerges. Often I can write pages without pause and with very little, if any, revision or
even minor changes.
(186–87)
Even with such descriptions from experienced writers, we are hesitant either to discard the
notion that writing is a process of discovery for many of us or to typecast writers who make
many visible changes on the page and/or work through multiple drafts as inadequate writ-
ers. After all, many of us, probably the majority, fall somewhere along the continuum from
Composing Behaviors 35
one- to multi-drafters. We may find ourselves as both one- and multi-drafters with the classes
of writing that Hairston describes, or we may generally identify ourselves as doing both but
also functioning more often as a one- or multi-drafter. Just as we have seen that at one end
of the spectrum there are some confirmed one-drafters, so too must we recognize that at the
other end of that spectrum there are some confirmed multi-drafters, expert writers for whom
extensive revising occurs when writing (so that a piece of discourse may go through several
or more drafts or be reworked heavily as the original draft evolves.) David Bartholomae, a
self-described multi-drafter, states that he never outlines but works instead with two pads of
paper, one to write on and one for making plans, storing sentences, and taking notes. He
views his first drafts as disorganized and has to revise extensively, with the result that the
revisions bear little resemblance to the first drafts (22–26). Similarly, Lynn Z. Bloom notes
that she cannot predict at the outset a great deal of what she is going to say. Only by writing
does she learn how her content will develop or how she will handle the structure, organiza-
tion, and style of her paragraphs, sentences, and whole essay (33).
Thus, if we wish to draw a more inclusive picture of composing behaviors for revision, we
have to put together a description that accounts for differences in levels of ability and experi-
ence (from novice to expert), for differences in writing tasks, and also for differences in the
as yet largely unexplored area of composing process differences among writers. My interest
here is in the composing processes of different writers, more particularly, the reality of those
writers at either end of that long spectrum, the one-drafters at one end and the multi-drafters
at the other. By one-draft writers I mean those writers who construct their plans and the pre-
texts that carry out those plans as well as do all or most of the revising of those plans and
pre-texts mentally, before transcribing. They do little or no retranscribing. True one-drafters
have not arrived at this developmentally or as a result of training in writing, and they should
not be confused with other writers who—driven by deadlines, lack of motivation, insuffi-
cient experience with writing, or anxieties about “getting it right the first time”—do little or no
scratching out of what they have written. Multi-drafters, on the other hand, need to interact
with their transcriptions in order to revise. Independent of how much planning they do or
pre-text they compose, they continue to revise after they have transcribed words onto paper.
Again, true multi-drafters have not reached this stage developmentally or as a result of any
intervention by teachers. This is not to say that we can classify writers into two categories,
one- and multi-drafters, because all the evidence we have and, more importantly, our own
experience tells us that most writers are not one or the other but exist somewhere between
these two ends of the continuum.
However, one- and multi-drafters do exist, and we do need to learn more about them to
gain a clearer picture not only of what is involved in different revising processes but also to
provide a basis for considering the pedagogical implications of dealing with individual differ-
ences. There is a strong argument for looking instead at the middle range of writers who do
some writing in single drafts and others in multiple drafts or with a lot of retranscribing as
they proceed, for it is very probable that the largest number of writers cluster there. But those
of us who teach in the individualized setting of conferences or writing lab tutorials know that
we can never overlook or put aside the concerns of every unique individual with whom we
work. Perhaps we are overly intrigued with individual differences, partly because we see that
some students can be ill-served in the group setting of the classrooms and partly because
looking at individual differences gives us such enlightening glimpses into the complex reality
of composing processes. Clinicians in other fields would argue that looking at the extremes
36 Muriel Harris
offers a clearer view of what may be involved in the behaviors of the majority. But those
who do research in writing also acknowledge that we need to understand dimensions of
variation among writers, particularly those patterned differences or “alternate paths to expert
performance” that have clear implications for instruction (Freedman et al. 19). In this case,
whatever we learn about patterns of behavior among one- and multi-drafters has direct impli-
cations for instruction as we need to know the various trade-offs involved in any classroom
instruction which would encourage more single or multiple drafting. And, as we will see when
looking at what is involved in being able to revise before drafting or in being able to return
and re-draft what has been transcribed, there are trade-offs indeed. Whatever arguments are
offered, we must also acknowledge that no picture of revision is complete until it includes all
that is known and observed about a variety of revision behaviors among writers.
But what do we know about one- and multi-drafters other than anecdotal accounts that
confirm their existence? Much evidence is waiting to be gathered from the storehouse of
various published interviews in which well-known writers have been asked to describe their
writing. And Ann Ruggles Gere’s study of the revising behaviors of a blind student gives us
a description of a student writer who does not redraft but writes “first draft/final draft” papers,
finished products produced in one sitting for her courses as a master’s degree candidate. The
student describes periods of thinking about a topic before writing. While she doesn’t know
exactly what she will say until actually writing it, she typically knows what will be contained
in the first paragraph as she types the title. Her attention is not focused on words as she
concentrates instead on images and larger contexts. A similar description of a one-drafter
is found in Joy Reid’s “The Radical Outliner and the Radical Brainstormer.” Comparing her
husband and herself, both composition teachers, Reid notes the differences between her-
self, an outliner (and a one-drafter), and her husband, a brainstormer (and a multi-drafter),
differences which parallel those of the writers in Writers on Writing that I have described.
The descriptions of all of the one- and multi-draft writers mentioned so far offer a fairly
consistent picture, but these descriptions do little more than reaffirm their existence. In an
effort to learn more, I sought out some one- and multi-drafters in order to observe them
composing and to explore what might be involved. Since my intent was not to determine the
percentage of one- and multi-drafters among any population of writers (though that would be
an interesting topic indeed, as I suspect there are more than we may initially guess—or at
least more who hover close to either end of the continuum). I sought out experienced writers
who identify themselves as very definitely one- or multi-drafters. The subjects I selected for
observation were graduate students who teach composition or communications courses, my
rationale being that these people can more easily categorize and articulate their own writing
habits. From among the group of subjects who described themselves as very definitely either
one- or multi-drafters, I selected those who showed evidence of being experienced, compe-
tent writers. Of the eight selected subjects (four one-drafters and four multi-drafters), all were
at least several years into their graduate studies in English or communications and were
either near completion or had recently completed advanced degrees. All had received high
scores in standardized tests for verbal skills such as the SAT or GRE exams; all had grade
point averages ranging from B+ to A in their graduate courses; and all wrote frequently in a
variety of tasks, including academic papers for courses and journal publications, conference
papers, the usual business writing of practicing academics (e.g., letters of recommendation
for students, memos, instructional materials for classes, etc.), and personal writing such as
letters to family and friends. They clearly earned their description as experienced writers.
Experienced writers were used because I also wished to exclude those novices who may,
Composing Behaviors 37
through development of their writing skills, change their composing behaviors, and also those
novices whose composing habits are the result of other factors such as disinterest (e.g., the
one-drafter who habitually begins the paper at 3 a.m. the night before it’s due) or anxiety (e.g.,
the multi-drafter who fears she is never “right” and keeps working and re-working her text).
The experienced writers whom I observed all confirmed that their composing behaviors
have not changed over time. That is, they all stated that their writing habits have not altered
as they became experienced writers and/or as they moved through writing courses. However,
their descriptions of themselves as one- or multi-drafters were not as completely accurate
as might be expected. Self-reporting, even among teachers of writing, is not a totally reliable
measure. As I observed and talked with the eight writers, I found three very definite one-
drafters, Ted, Nina, and Amy; one writer, Jackie, who tends to be a one-drafter but does
some revising after writing; two very definite multi-drafters, Bill and Pam; and two writers,
Karen and Cindy, who described themselves as multi-drafters and who tend to revise exten-
sively but who can also produce first draft/final draft writing under some conditions. To gather
data on their composing behaviors, I interviewed each person for an hour, asking questions
about the types of writing they do, the activities they engage in before writing, the details of
what happens as they write, their revision behaviors, the manner in which sentences are
composed, and their attitudes and past history of writing. Each person was also asked to
spend an hour writing in response to an assignment. The specific assignment was a request
from an academic advisor asking for the writers’ descriptions of the skills needed to succeed
in their field of study. As they wrote, all eight writers were asked to give thinking-aloud pro-
tocols and were videotaped for future study. Brief interviews after writing focused on eliciting
information about how accurately the writing session reflected their general writing habits
and behaviors. Each type of information collected is, at best, incomplete because accounts
of one’s own composing processes may not be entirely accurate, because thinking-aloud
protocols while writing are only partial accounts of what is being thought about, and because
one-hour writing tasks preclude observing some of the kinds of activities that writers report.
But even with these limitations I observed patterns of composing behaviors that should dif-
ferentiate one-draft writers from multi-draft writers.
Conclusions
One way to summarize the characteristics of one- and multi-drafters is to consider what
they gain by being one-drafters and at what cost they gain these advantages. Clearly, one-
drafters are efficient writers. This efficiency is achieved by mentally revising beforehand,
by generating options verbally rather than on paper, by generating only a limited number of
options before settling on one and getting on with the task, and by doing little or no re-reading.
They are able to pace themselves and can probably perform comfortably in situations such
as the workplace or in in-class writing where it is advantageous to produce first-draft, final-
draft pieces of discourse. Their drafts are readily accessible to readers, and they can expend
effort early on in polishing the text for greater clarity. But at what cost? One-drafters are obvi-
ously in danger of cutting themselves off from further exploration, from a richer field of dis-
covery than is possible during the time in which they generate options. When they exhibit a
willingness to settle on one of their options, they may thereby have eliminated the possibility
of searching for a better one. In their impatience to move on, they may even settle on options
they know could be improved on. Their impulse to write dwindles as these writers experi-
ence little or none of the excitement of discovery or exploration during writing. The interesting
portion of a writing task, the struggle with text and sense of exploration, is largely completed
when they begin to commit themselves to paper (or computer screen). Because they are less
likely to enjoy writing, the task of starting is more likely to be put off to the last minute and to
become a stressful situation, thus reinforcing their inclination not to re-read and their desire
to be done and to put the paper behind them forever once they have finished. And it appears
that it is as hard for true one-drafters to suspend the need for closure as it is for multi-drafters
to reach quick decisions and push themselves rapidly toward closure.
Multi-drafters appear to be the flip side of the same coin. Their relative inefficiency causes
them to miss deadlines, to create Writer-Based first drafts, to produce large quantities of text
that is discarded, and to get lost in their own writing. They need to re-read and re-draft, and
they probably appear at first glance to be poorer writers than one-drafters. But they are more
likely to be writers who will plunge in eagerly, will write and re-write, and will use writing to
explore widely and richly. They also are more likely to affirm the value of writing as a heuristic,
the merits of freewriting, and the need for cutting and pasting of text. They may, if statistics
are gathered, be the writers who benefit most from collaborative discussions such as those in
writing labs with tutors. Their drafts are truly amenable to change and available for re-working.
Implications
Acknowledging the reality of one- and multi-drafting involves enlarging both our perspec-
tives on revision and our instructional practices with students. In terms of what the reality of
one-drafting and multi-drafting tells us about revision, it is apparent that we need to account
for this diversity of revision behaviors as we construct a more detailed picture of revision.
44 Muriel Harris
As Stephen Witte notes, “revising research that limits itself to examining changes in written text
or drafts espouses a reductionist view of revising as a stage in a linear sequence of stages”
(“Revising” 266). Revision can and does occur when writers set goals, create plans, and com-
pose pre-text, as well as when they transcribe and re-draft after transcription. Revision can be
triggered by cognitive activity alone and/or by interaction with text; and attitudes, preferences,
and cognitive make-up play a role in when and how much a writer revises—or is willing to
revise—a text.
Yet, while recognizing the many dimensions to be explored in understanding revision, we
can also use this diversity as a source for helping students with different types of problems
and concerns. For students who are one-drafters or have tendencies toward single drafting,
we need to provide help in several areas. They’ll have to learn to do more reviewing of written
text both as they write and afterwards, in order to evaluate and revise. They will also need
to be aware that they should have strategies that provide for more exploration and invention
than they may presently allow themselves. While acknowledging their distaste for return-
ing to a draft to open it up again, we also need to help them see how and when this can be
productive. Moreover, we can provide assistance in helping one-drafters and other writers
who cluster near that end of the spectrum recognize that sometimes they have a preference
for choosing an option even after they recognize that it may not be the best one. When Tim,
one of the one-drafters I observed, noted at one point in his protocol that he should take a
different direction for one of his paragraphs but won’t, he shows similarities to another writer,
David, observed by Witte (“Pre-Text and Composing” 406), who is reluctant to spend more
than fifteen seconds reworking a sentence in pre-text, even though he demonstrates the
ability to evoke criteria that could lead to better formulations if he chose to stop and revise
mentally (David typically does little revision of written text). This impatience, this need to
keep moving along, that does not always allow for the production of good text, can obviously
work against producing good text, and it is unlikely that such writers will either recognize or
conquer the problem on their own. They may have snared themselves in their own vicious
circles if their tendency to procrastinate puts them in a deadline crunch, which, in turn, does
not afford them the luxury of time to consider new options. Such behaviors can become a
composing habit so entrenched that it is no longer noticed.
As we work with one-drafters, we will also have to learn ourselves how to distinguish
them from writers who see themselves as one-drafters because they are not inclined, for
one reason or another, to expend more energy on drafting. Inertia, lack of motivation, lack of
information about what multiple drafts can do, higher priorities for other tasks, and so on are
not characteristic of true one-drafters, and we must be able to identify the writer who might
take refuge behind a label of “one-drafter” from the writer who exhibits some or many of the
characteristics of one-draft composing and who wants to become a better writer. For exam-
ple, in our writing lab I have worked with students who think they are one-drafters because
of assorted fears, anxieties, and misinformation. “But I have to get it right the first time.” “My
teachers never liked to see scratching out on the paper, even when we wrote in class,” or “I
hate making choices, so I go with what I have” are not the comments of true one-drafters.
With multiple-drafters we have other work to do. To become more efficient writers, they
will need to become more proficient planners and creaters of pre-text, though given their
heavy dependence on seeing what they have written, they will probably still rely a great deal
on reading and working with their transcribed text. They will also need to become more profi-
cient at times at focusing on a topic quickly, recognizing the difficulties involved in agonizing
Composing Behaviors 45
endlessly over possibilities. In the words of a reviewer of this paper, they will have to learn
when and how “to get on with it.”
Besides assisting with these strategies, we can help students become more aware of
their composing behaviors. We can assist multi-drafters in recognizing that they are not slow
or inept writers but writers who may linger too long over making choices. For writers who
have difficulty returning to a completed text in order to revise, we can relate the problem to
the larger picture, an impatience with returning to any completed task. Granted, this is not a
giant leap forward, but too many students are willing to throw in the towel with writing skills in
particular without recognizing the link to their more general orientations to life. Similarly, the
impatient writer who, like Ted, proclaims to have a virulent case of the “I-hate-to-write” syn-
drome may be a competent one-drafter (or have a preference for fewer drafts) who needs to
see that it is the transcribing stage of writing that is the source of the impatience, procrastina-
tion, and irritation. On the other hand, writers more inclined to be multi-drafters need to rec-
ognize that their frustration, self-criticism, and/or low grades may be due to having readers
intervene at too early a stage in the drafting. What I am suggesting here is that some writers
unknowingly get themselves caught in linguistic traps. They think they are making generali-
zations about the whole act of “writing,” that blanket term for all the processes involved, when
they may well be voicing problems or attitudes about one or another of the processes. What
is needed here is some assistance in helping students define their problems more precisely.
To do this, classroom teachers can open conferences like a writing lab tutorial, by asking
questions about the student’s writing processes and difficulties.
In addition to individualizing our work with students, we can also look at our own teaching
practices. When we offer classroom strategies and heuristics, we need to remind our stu-
dents that it is likely that some will be very inappropriate for different students. Being unable
to freewrite is not necessarily a sign of an inept writer. One writer’s written text may be just as
effective a heuristic for that writer as the planning sheets are for another writer. Beyond these
strategies and acknowledgments, we have to examine how we talk about or teach compos-
ing processes. There is a very real danger in imposing a single, “ideal” composing style
on students, as Jack Selzer found teachers attempting to do in his survey of the literature.
Similarly, as Susan McLeod notes, teachers tend to teach their own composing behaviors in
the classroom and are thus in danger either of imposing their redrafting approaches on stu-
dents whose preference for revising prior to transcribing serves them well or of touting their
one- or few-draft strategies to students who fare better when interacting with their transcribed
text. Imposing personal preferences, observes McLeod, would put us in the peculiar position
of trying to fix something that isn’t broken. And there’s enough of that going around as is.
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14.3 (1986): 16–21.
Murray, Patricia Y. “Doing Writing.” Waldrep 1:225–39.
Reid, Joy. “The Radical Outliner and the Radical Brainstormer: A Perspective on Composing Processes.”
TESOL Quarterly 18 (1985): 529–34.
Selzer, Jack. “Exploring Options in Composing.” College Composition and Communication 35 (1984):
276–84.
Sommers, Nancy. “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers.” College
Composition and Communication 31 (1980): 378–88.
Waldrep, Tom, ed. Writers on Writing. Vol. 1, New York: Random House, 1985. 2 vols.
Witte, Stephen P. “Pre-Text and Composing.” College Composition and Communication 38 (1987):
397–425.
—— “Revising, Composing Theory, and Research Design.” The Acquisition of Written Language:
Response and Revision. Ed. Sarah Warshauer Freedman. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1985, 250–84.
Moving Writers, Shaping Motives, Motivating Critique and Change
A Genre Approach to Teaching Writing
Mary Jo Reiff
UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE
What prompted me to write this essay for this anthology? My “assignment” was to write about
the genre of the Pedagogical Insight essay. I immediately called on my genre knowledge—
my past experience with reading and writing similar texts in similar situations—to orient me
to the expectations of this genre. While I am familiar with the genre of “the essay”—and my
awareness alerted me to the fact that my piece could be less formal than an article, a piece
based more in experience than in research—I was not as familiar with the expectations of
this particular genre, a Pedagogical Insight essay. I began, then, with these questions: What
are the actions that this genre performs? How will I position myself within this genre—what
identity and relations will I assume? In what ways will the genre define and sustain the field’s
discussions of pedagogy or pedagogical approaches? What are the potential sites of resist-
ance and transformation?
I looked for clues about how the assignment located me within a situation and provided
me with the rhetorical means for acting within that situation. From the authors’ invitation, I
constructed the rhetorical situation that helped motivate and shape my response. The audi-
ence was described as “new teachers,” and the purpose was “to ground abstract composi-
tion theory, as presented by the anthologized articles, in the immediacy of a real classroom
context and a real teacher’s lived experience.” There was a specified length (1,500 words),
but within the constraints of audience, purpose, and format, there was also a great deal of
choice within this genre, with the authors noting that they “hope for a great diversity in tone,
stance, and focus.” A sample Pedagogical Insight essay was included in the materials sent—
an example of one writer’s “appropriate” response.
Writing an effective response would mean conceiving of my role as a writer not only in
relation to readers and other writers and their purposes, but also in relation to the social and
cultural formations in which they interact. As a result, the larger cultural context beyond the
immediate situation of this Pedagogical Insight essay also helped to generate and organ-
ize my response. In the materials passed along to help contextualize my response, I was
given the proposal (shaped in response to the editors at the National Council of Teachers
of English as well as to a secondary audience of contributors and reviewers) that positioned
the imagined readers of this anthology, positioned the book intertextually (among “compet-
ing texts”), and provided an overview of how the book responds to material conditions and
functions epistemologically. My response, then, is situated very purposefully and mediated
by various contextual factors, not the least of which is a response to the multiple and related
voices included in this section on relations.
Legal language is part of a lawyer’s professional training, so the habit of “talking like a
lawyer” is deeply rooted in the practices of the community. This tells us that lawyers feel
Moving Writers, Shaping Motives 49
compelled to use established jargon to maintain a legitimate status in the eyes of other
community members. In addition, formal language is needed to surround legal proceed-
ings with an air of solemnity, and to send the message that any legal proceeding is a
significant matter with important consequences.
The writer also notes how this use of legal language reinscribes a power relationship of
sorts, separating “insiders” (members of the profession) from “outsiders” (the public) by
cultivating a language “that reads like a foreign language to those outside the profession.”
For students like this one, using genre as a lens for inquiry cultivates a consciousness of the
rhetorical strategies used to carry out the social actions of a group or disciplinary commu-
nity, thus making the complex, multitextured relations of the legal community more tangible
and accessible.
Works Cited
Devitt, Amy, Mary Jo Reiff, and Anis Bawarshi. Scenes of Writing: Strategies for Composing with
Genres. New York: Longman, 2004.
McComiskey, Bruce. Teaching Composition as a Social Process. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2000.
Peters, Brad. “Genre, Antigenre, and Reinventing the Forms of Conceptualization.” Genre and Writing:
Issues, Arguments, Alternatives. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook, 1997.
Smith, Summer. “The Genre of the End Comment: Conventions in Teacher Responses to Student
Writing.” College Composition and Communication 48.2 (1997): 249–68.
2 Invention
Issues and Strategies
Irene L. Clark
During the early days of the process movement, many writing classes focused on the value
of having students reflect on personal experience in order to discover ideas and write in an
“authentic” personal voice. Invention, as was emphasized in the scholarship of Peter Elbow
and Ken Macrorie, among others, meant discovering ideas from within the self, and the pro-
cess of discovery was viewed as a private act involving individual introspection. This expres-
sivist perspective on invention remains an important component in some writing classes.
However, it is now recognized that although recalling one’s own experiences and beliefs
are important elements in invention, discovering ideas for writing also involves connection
with others within a social sphere. As noted in the epigraph to this chapter, LeFevre’s perspec-
tive is that because all individuals are strongly influenced by social forces, “invention is better
understood as a social act in which an individual who is at the same time a social being inter-
acts in a distinctive way with society and culture to create something” (p. 2). LeFevre’s book
(1987) emphasized that “invention is neither a purely individual nor an interpersonal act or
process. Rather it is encouraged or constrained by social collectives whose views are transmit-
ted through such things as institutions, societal prohibitions, and cultural expectations” (p. 50).
This chapter presents an overview of invention, emphasizing that both the individual and
the social views are important to the process of discovering and shaping ideas. One of my
favorite expressions, one which I use in all of my classes, is “it depends”—which, in the con-
text of writing, means that the invention of ideas for a writing task depends on many factors,
such as the purpose, the genre, the audience, and the disciplinary or professional context for
which the writing is intended. Reflecting on personal experience may enable a writer to dis-
cover useful ideas, particularly when writing a literacy autobiography, but awareness of other
elements is also important, even for an essay that is based on life events. The focus of this
chapter, then, will be on several factors that pertain to invention: its roots in classical rhetoric,
ideas and controversies associated with the origin of ideas, and perspectives, approaches and
classroom strategies that teachers and students can experiment with in their own writing and
adapt in other literacy contexts. It will also suggest strategies for writing a literacy autobiogra-
phy, a genre that is assigned in many writing classes, and discuss the problem of writer’s block,
which is explored in further detail in the reading at the end of this chapter.
My experience in teaching writing at various levels suggests that there are two main reasons
that students have difficulty “inventing,” “generating,” or “discovering” material for the essays
they are assigned in their college classes. The first is that they don’t understand the assignment
and therefore don’t know how to proceed. The second is that they wait until the last minute
to begin. And, of course, both of these reasons are interconnected. When students are confused
Invention 53
about an assignment, they may wait until the last minute to begin working on it. And when
they haven’t spent enough time thinking about it, they may be unable to figure out what to
do. Whichever comes first, the process causes considerable anxiety.
We are all familiar with the scene: students up all night, staring at a blank screen and scrib-
bling notes that never develop into useful ideas—unable to write anything they are proud to
submit. Or they may manage to write a draft or part of a draft but then discover that it doesn’t
fulfill the requirements of the assignment because they didn’t understand what was expected
and/or didn’t engage with it seriously. Because students so frequently experience problems
with generating or locating ideas, helping them develop effective invention strategies is a very
important part of the writing class and should be addressed many times over the semester.
As a concept in composition, “invention” refers to the process writers use to search for,
discover, create, or “invent” material for a piece of writing, and at one time people thought
that invention was a first step that must be completed before beginning to write. Now we
understand that invention occurs throughout the writing process and can be both a conscious
and an unconscious process. For a few writers, particularly those who are familiar with a topic
or field and have written about it before, invention seems to happen effortlessly, involving
little more than thinking about it and jotting down a few ideas. But for most writers, particu-
larly those who are new to the university and are unclear about the expectations of academic
genres, invention involves considerable effort, often accompanied by stress. Even people
who write frequently in their professional lives say that they have at least some difficulty with
invention. As I prepared to revise this chapter on invention, for example, I spent considerable
time thinking about what I might add or omit, and students, who have had little experience
with the composing process and are unfamiliar with academic writing, often find writing
assignments anxiety provoking, to say the least.
1 Current approaches to and debates about invention have their roots in the past, particu-
larly in classical rhetoric.
2 What is deemed an “appropriate” subject is strongly influenced by societal values.
3 The process of invention is strongly influenced by the subject and rhetorical situation
being addressed.
Rhetoric could not be considered a true art because it did not rest on universal principles.
Moreover, rhetoricians, like poets, were more interested in opinions, in appearances,
even in lies, than in the transcendental truth that the philosopher sought. They made the
“worse appear the better reason.” They were mere enchanters of the soul, more inter-
ested in dazzling their audiences than in instructing.
(Quoted in Covino and Joliffe, 1995, p. 492)
These objections to those who use language to manipulate still pertain today; often we disdain
the “sophistry” of politicians or advertisers, and the distressing polarization within the country
and the overwhelming amount of information being disseminated through various media has
resulted in frequent accusations of falsehood and a distrust of ever knowing what is actually true.
Non-artistic proofs are unimportant to the concept of invention because they consisted
of appeals to physical evidence, such as contracts or testimony. These are not invented
by the speaker because they involve the interpretation of already existing material such
as laws, witnesses, contracts, tortures, oaths. Apparently, the lawyer pleading a case in
court made most use of this kind of proof, but the politician or the panegyrist could use
them too.
(p. 18)
However, “artistic” proofs (called “artistic” because they are part of the “art” of rhetoric)
could be discovered, and these constituted the subject matter of The Art of Rhetoric, which
focused on three types of artistic proofs or appeals which still have validity today. The first
was ethos, usually translated as the character of the speaker as it comes across in a speech.
According to Covino and Jolliffe (1995),
theorists in ancient Greece and Rome did not agree among themselves whether ethos
exists solely in the text a rhetor creates, or whether the rhetor must evince ethos in his or
her life as well as in his or her texts.
(p. 15)
But Aristotle believed that “a rhetor could not depend . . . on the audience’s knowing more
about the rhetor’s ethos than the text itself established” (Covino & Joliffe, 1995, p. 15). In
other words, the text must speak for itself—that is, it must demonstrate that the rhetor is a
person of good sense, virtue, and will. In the context of the composition class, ethos refers to
a writer rather than a speaker, but the principle is the same, because a writer who has estab-
lished trustworthiness and good will in a text will be more convincing than one who has
not. All of us are more likely to accept another person’s ideas if we think of that person as
knowledgeable, trustworthy, logical, and fair, as opposed to ignorant, untrustworthy, illogi-
cal, and biased.
Aristotle’s idea of the credible rhetor has been affirmed in a 21st century study of academic
writing in multiple disciplines by Chris Thaiss and Terri Zawacki, which they reported on
58 Irene L. Clark
in Engaged Writers, Dynamic Disciplines (2006). The primary characteristics they discovered as
relevant across the disciplines were “clear evidence that the writer(s) have been persistent,
open-minded, and disciplined in study” (p. 5). Apparently, these characteristics are as impor-
tant today as they were in ancient Greece.
The second type of proof Aristotle discussed was pathos, which is sometimes called the
emotional or pathetic appeal. The main idea behind pathos was that an effective discourse will
appeal to or move an audience, and Aristotle’s (333 bc) Rhetoric contains a list of emotions
that could be used for this purpose, such as pity, fear, indignation, or anger. Aristotle also cat-
egorized potential audiences into character types such as the young, the old, aristocrats, and
the wealthy, assigning various emotions to each character type. This type of appeal also has
relevance for the composition class, in that an effective text will take into consideration what
is likely to move an intended audience. Moreover, a consideration of audience can serve as
an effective invention strategy that can aid in discovery.
Aristotle’s third and most important proof was logos, the appeal to reason, which in ancient
Greece did not refer simply to logic, but rather to “thought plus action.” As Covino and
Jolliffe (1995) explained,
just as ethos moves an audience by activating their faith in the credibility of the rhetor and
pathos stimulates their feelings and seeks a change in their attitudes and actions, so logos,
accompanied by the other two appeals, mobilizes the powers of reasoning.
(p. 17)
The Topoi
In addition to discussing the types of proofs that can be used to develop a more persuasive
text, Aristotle also referred to places in the memory, or topoi, where ideas can be stored and
retrieved. These topoi can be considered types of argumentative strategies and reasons that
can be useful in various rhetorical situations, and his idea was for orators to ask themselves
questions that the topoi generated, thereby developing content. The most frequently used
and most usable topics deriving from Aristotle’s system are definition, comparison, cause-and-
effect, and authority. Aristotle was the first rhetorician to introduce the topics, but others such
as Cicero and Quintilian developed them further, often describing “the places as though they
were hidden away.” Quintilian (1994), for example, defined the topoi as “the secret places
where arguments reside and from which they must be drawn forth” (p. 50).
It must be clarified here, however, that the word “topic” as it was conceived of in ancient
times, is not synonymous with the way in which the term is used today. When a teacher
asks a class to list “topics” they would like to write about, he or she means a subject, drawn
either from books, general knowledge, or personal experience. Ancient rhetoricians, how-
ever, thought of topics as existing in:
the structures of language or in the issues that concerned the community. That is why
they were called common places—they were available to anyone who spoke or wrote the
language in which they were couched and who was reasonably familiar with the ethical
and political discussions taking place in the community.
(Crowley, 1994, p. 50)
Heuristics
Whether the emphasis on personal writing during the early phases of the process move-
ment was really helpful to at-risk students can be debated, but, certainly, scholars of that
time devoted significant attention to invention; considerably more than they do today. Ken
Macrorie and Peter Elbow emphasized the importance of freewriting as a means of helping
students find a voice in writing, and another direction that has now become incorporated
into the teaching of composition was the use of “heuristics,” defined in Wikipedia as “any
approach to problem-solving, learning, or discovery that employs a practical method, not
guaranteed to be optimal, perfect, logical, or rational, but instead sufficient for reaching an
immediate goal.” The idea behind the use of heuristics was that it was better to have a sys-
tematic strategy for generating ideas rather than simply waiting for an idea to strike—like a
bolt of lightning.
The extent to which any heuristic can be effective, of course, will vary according to
many variables, but when composition scholarship began address the topic of invention and
the effectiveness of heuristics, Janice Lauer (1970) in “Heuristics and Composition” set up
criteria for judging the effectiveness of heuristic procedures, which, she maintains, have both
generative and evaluative powers. Such procedures, she emphasizes, must be distinguished
both from trial-and-error methods, which are nonsystematic and, hence, inefficient, and from
rule-governed procedures, which are overly rigorous. Lauer’s article also establishes the crite-
ria of transcendency, flexibility, and generative capacity for judging the effectiveness of a heu-
ristic procedure. Translated into questions, these characteristics may be perceived as follows:
1 Transcendency
How can writers transfer this model’s questions or operations from one subject to
another?
2 Flexible Order
Is the model flexible so that a thinker can return to a previous step or skip to an invit-
ing one as the evolving idea suggests?
3 Generative Capacity
Is the model generative so that it involves the writer in various operations—such as
visualizing, classifying, defining, rearranging, and dividing?
Lauer’s attempt to develop useful strategies for composition students, however, was criticized
by Ann Berthoff (1971) who condemned heuristics as being overly mechanical, in an article
titled “The Problem of Problem Solving.” Berthoff’s criticism was then countered by Lauer
(1972) who argued that heuristics were, by definition, open-ended, not rigid, flexible, and
not oriented toward finding a “right” answer.
The Lauer–Berthoff debate over heuristics was indicative of the interest in invention that
characterized the process movement in the 1960s and 1970s. In “Pre-Writing: The Stage of
Discovery in the Writing Process,” D. Gordon Rohman (1965) claimed that engaging in
prewriting enabled students to produce writing that “showed a statistically significant superi-
ority to essays produced in control sections” (p. 112). Young, Becker, and Pike in their book,
Rhetoric: Discovery and Change (1970), devised an elaborate invention scheme derived from
tagmemic linguistics, which approached composing in terms of a complex invention strategy
that requires a writer to examine a subject from nine different perspectives. The tagmemicists
maintained that because people conceive of the world in terms of repeatable units that are
part of a larger system, understanding those units can enable writers to investigate and, thus,
62 Irene L. Clark
generate material for a wider range of subjects. The tagmemic system is quite complicated,
and only a few writers use it on a regular basis, but it became the subject of significant schol-
arship during the 1970s. Those who are interested in this approach to invention can find
additional information in the following publications
1 Coming to Terms. The concept of “coming to terms” involves “translating” a text written
by another writer into one’s own words. The focus is on trying to understand the writer’s
“project”—the ideas the writer wants to argue and the methods and strategies he uses to
do so. To “translate” a text, students find keywords, passages, or “flashpoints” they find
most important, examine how the writer connects examples to ideas, and the type of
experience and evidence used.
2 Forwarding. The idea of forwarding involves “taking words, images, or ideas from a text
and putting them to use in new contexts” (p. 37). The analogy Harris uses is that of
e-mail, in which a writer will “forward” a post that they think will interest particular
friends and make some comment about it, sometimes in the form of text-message sym-
bols. Forwarding a text can involve using a text as an illustration, citing a text to support
one’s own argument, drawing on ideas from a text in discussing a topic, and extending a
concept or definition from a text in one’s own writing.
3 Countering. The idea of “countering,” as Harris defines it, involves looking at other texts
in order to suggest a different way of thinking. It can mean arguing the other side of an
issue, redefining or reexamining “a term that a text has left undefined or unexamined”
(p. 57), or showing the limits of an idea.
Invention 63
All of these activities or “moves” can help students generate ideas for an essay, ultimately
enabling them to construct their own approach or position. What is particularly valuable
about this approach is that it involves students with other texts as a means of discovering
ideas and requires students to participate actively in the invention process, rather than wait
for an idea to strike. It also focuses students’ attention on the intertextuality that characterizes
academic writing.
supplement the ‘paper-thin line’ of his own experience, to provide additional windows
on what is and what ought to be in the world. However, texts refer not just to the world
but to a world-view, not to an unmediated state of existence but to the author’s percep-
tion of the state of things.
(p. 21)
Brent’s concept of rhetorical reading focuses on the importance for readers of becoming
aware of how their own world view influences how they view a particular source and of
ultimately considering which texts are most persuasive. This rhetorical perspective helps writ-
ers focus on why a text was written (the purpose), the nature of the conversation, and the
conception of the intended audience.
A similarly rhetorical perspective on research writing is discussed in Bryna Siegel Finer’s
article, “Critical Praxis for Researched Writing: A Rhetorical Model for Teaching Students to
‘Do’ Research” (2015, Journal of Teaching Writing, 28(2): 41–66). Noting that the “research”
paper has been a problematic genre for many years, Finer uses the term “researched” writ-
ing, which is based on assigning problem-based research topics, preparing students to be
rhetorically aware not only of the conversations that the problem has generated, but also
of how genres coordinate ways of thinking. This emphasis on the generative possibilities of
genre is discussed in great detail in Anis Bawarshi’s book Genre and the Invention of the Writer:
Reconsidering the Place of Invention in Composition (2003). Bawarshi argues for a genre-based
pedagogy as a means of helping students understand that writing varies according to chang-
ing contexts, such as rhetorical situations and disciplines, and that students should “learn to
examine social and rhetorical texts in order to produce texts that successfully participate in
disciplinary and social conversations” (Arnold, 2005, n.p.).
64 Irene L. Clark
They Say, I Say: The Moves That Matter
Related to the concept of “moves” in using readings to generate ideas is a very useful text-
book entitled They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing, by Gerald Graff and
Cathy Birkenstein (2018), which exists in multiple versions, some with and some without
readings on various topics. Graff and Birkenstein maintained that the statement, “they say/I
say,” helps students understand that academic writing involves entering a conversation and
that this move constitutes a:
template that represents the deep, underlying structure, the internal DNA as it were, of
all effective argument. Effective persuasive writers do more than make well-supported
claims (“I say”); they also map those claims relative to the claims of others (“they say”).
(p. xii)
An example provided in the first edition of this book (2006) is the following:
Graff and Birkenstein maintained that the “they say/I say” model can help students with
invention, enabling them to find something to say. They argue that students are:
more likely to discover what they want to say not by thinking about a subject in an isola-
tion booth, but by reading texts, listening closely to what other writers say, and looking for
an opening in which they can enter the conversation. In other words, listening closely to
others and summarizing what they have to say can help writers generate their own ideas.
(p. xiii)
I have found the “they say/I say” approach very useful for students who are unclear about
how to develop a thesis—not only first-year writing students, but upper division and gradu-
ate students as well. However, some composition scholars are uncomfortable with the word
“template” and with some of the other templates that are illustrated in They Say/I Say, fearing
that this approach will result in mechanical, formulaic writing. Anticipating this concern, Graff
and Birkenstein emphasized that their approach can help students “enter” the academic con-
versation by demystifying what academic writing is, and that their templates “have a generative
quality, prompting students to make moves in their writing that they might not otherwise make
or even know they should make” (p. xiii). They pointed out that these “moves” are the same
as those that seasoned writers have picked up unconsciously and that templates have a long and
rich history that “reflect the classical rhetorical tradition of imitating established models” (p. xv).
Writer’s Block
Writer’s block or some form of writer’s anxiety has been experienced by most, if not all,
writers from time to time; not only by student writers but also by professional and acclaimed
writers. In fact, Mike Rose (1984) began his groundbreaking Writer’s Block: The Cognitive
Dimension with a quotation from Flaubert that describes the agony of staying “a whole day
with your head in your hands, trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.”
Rose’s study suggested that at least “10% of college students block frequently, and the boom
of ‘writer’s block’ workshops stands as a reminder that writer’s block is a problem outside
of the classroom as well” (p. 1). Rose (1984) cited the following factors as contributing to
writer’s block:
1 The rules by which students guide their composing processes are rigid, inappropriately
invoked, or incorrect.
2 Their assumptions about composing are misleading.
3 They edit too early in the composing process.
66 Irene L. Clark
4 They lack appropriate planning and discourse strategies or rely on inflexible or inappro-
priate strategies.
5 They invoke conflicting rules, assumptions, plans, and strategies.
6 They evaluate their writing with inappropriate criteria or criteria that are inadequately
understood.
Rose maintained that students who block seem to be depending on rules and plans that impede
rather than aid the composing process. He cited the example of “Ruth,” who believed that
every sentence she wrote had to come out grammatically correct the first time around. This
belief led Ruth to edit each sentence before she proceeded to the next, thus closing off the
flow of ideas. Another example was “Martha,” who spent days developing a complex plan for
her paper, leaving her little time to actually write.
In terms of invention, Rose asserted that people who suffer from writer’s block are more
likely to generate material if the strategies they use are well structured. Non-structured tech-
niques, such as freewriting and brainstorming, can be useful, Rose (1984) maintained; how-
ever, the resulting morass of ideas “can sometimes lead to more disorder than order, more
confusing divergence than clarifying focus” (p. 91).
Another work concerned with writer’s block that was prominent during the early days of
the process movement was James Adams’s Conceptual Blockbusting (1974), which suggested
that most of us, but particularly anxiety-ridden students, are prevented from exploring ideas
freely because of emotional blocks that inhibit us from doing so. A few of these blocks con-
tribute to the problem students have in generating ideas for papers, in particular:
1 The fear of taking a risk. Adams pointed out that because most of us have grown up
rewarded when we produced the “right answer” and punished when we made a mistake,
we tend to avoid risk whenever possible. Yet exploring ideas for papers means taking
risks, to some extent. To come up with anything new means considering, at least for a
short time, a notion that has not been mentioned before, a notion that one may later
reject as inappropriate in some way. Because students fear the rejection associated with
risk-taking, they are often unable to entertain new ideas and will reject even a glimmer
of creative thought, which may prove to be unsuitable and subject them to ridicule.
2 No appetite for chaos. Because the fear of making a mistake is rooted in insecurity, most
of us tend to avoid ambiguity whenever possible, opting for safety over uncertainty, a
condition Adams (1974) referred to as “having no appetite for chaos.” Thus, because
they are uncomfortable with the “chaos” that characterizes the stage in the writing pro-
cess that exists before one generates an idea or focuses a topic, many students reach for
order before they have given the topic sufficient exploration. Thus, they find themselves
“stuck” with dead-end or uninteresting topics.
3 Preference for judging, rather than generating ideas. This emotional block, according to Adams,
also has its root in our preference for safety, rather than for risk, producing in students a
tendency to judge an idea too early or indiscriminately. Adams (1974) stated, “If you are
a compulsive idea-judger, you should realize that this is a habit that may exclude ideas
from your own mind before they have had time to bear fruit” (p. 47).
4 Inability to incubate. There is a general agreement that the unconscious plays an important
role in problem-solving, and it is, therefore, important for students to give their ideas an
opportunity to incubate, to wrestle with a problem over several days. Yet students often
procrastinate, putting off work on their papers until the day before they are due. They
often find themselves blocked before they can’t even get started.
5 Lack of motivation. Students are often asked to write about topics in which they have lit-
tle interest; their motivation lies only in the grade they hope to receive. Yet, as Adams
Invention 67
pointed out, it is unlikely that students can come up with an interesting idea for a paper
if they aren’t motivated, at least somewhat, by the topic.
Writer’s block and writing anxiety continue to be addressed from time to time in writing
scholarship, with recent approaches addressing psychological or emotional factors. Cynthia
A. Arem in Conquering Writing Anxiety (2011) distinguished between writer’s anxiety and
writer’s block. In her view, writer’s anxiety is “characterized by dread, nervousness, worry,
or hatred of writing. Some face anguish and panic” (p. 1) and is a condition that is deep-
seated. In contrast, Arem defined writer’s block as “a condition producing a transitory inability
to express one’s thoughts on paper. It is characterized by feelings of frustration, rather than
dread, hatred or panic” (p. 1). Arem’s book contains self-assessment charts and strategies to
break cycles of both writer’s anxiety and writer’s block and considers the influence of indi-
vidual learning styles. Among the ways suggested include creating a positive writing mindset,
calming techniques, visualization strategies, and the therapeutic use of writing journals.
Invention Strategies
Journals
Journals are another source of ideas for an essay, and students often enjoy writing them. For
journals to be useful to the invention process, though, it is important to explain that a journal
in a composition class is not a diary of daily events, but, rather, a place for grappling with
ideas or responding to readings. Students will be able to distinguish between journals and
diaries if you prompt journal entries with specific questions, at least in the beginning of the
class, and to ask those whose entries are particularly well developed if you might share them
with other students.
Clustering
Clustering is similar to freewriting and brainstorming in that its aim is to elicit as many ideas
as possible. Clustering, however, enables students to group ideas visually and to see possible
connections between ideas. To use clustering, the writer places the central idea or topic in
the center of the paper and circles it. Around this circled word, he or she writes other words
that are associated with this central idea and puts circles around them as well. Then they write
other words that are associated with these other ideas and use lines to connect them either to
each other or to other words on the page. Clustering helps writers develop details and find
connections that might not have been discovered otherwise.
1 Read the assignment aloud, paying particular attention to the place where the writing task
is discussed.
2 List the key terms in the assignment that give directions.
List any terms that need to be defined.
70 Irene L. Clark
3 Summarize the type of writing task that the assignment requires. Remember that most
college writing assignments require a thesis or main point although, at a beginning stage,
a writer may not know yet what that thesis will be.
4 What type of information does this paper require? Will the information be based primar-
ily on personal experience or opinion? Will it be necessary to find information from the
library or the Internet?
5 Locate any requirements of the assignment that may not be directly stated, but which are
necessary in order for the assignment to be completed satisfactorily.
•• Does this assignment require terms to be defined? If so, which ones?
•• Does this assignment require an interconnection between ideas—such as applying a
theory to a situation or text?
•• Does this assignment require the writer to take a position on a controversial subject?
If so, list two opposing views. Does this assignment require the writer to consider
questions of degree or make a judgment (does it say “to what extent” for example)?
6 Who is the audience for this paper, aside from the teacher? What sort of knowledge
about the topic can a writer assume the audience has?
Respond to the following questions about audience.
•• Before the people in my intended audience have read this paper, they are likely to have
the following beliefs about this topic:
•• After the people in my intended audience have read this paper, I would like them to
have the following beliefs about this topic:
7 Why does this topic matter? Why would anyone care about it? Why is it important to
think about? Are there implications or consequences that should be addressed?
8 A possible thesis or main point for this paper might be . . .
Procedure:
1 Create a preliminary list:
Review your brainstorming notes and readings. It might be useful to do this with
a highlighter or different-colored pen so that you can clearly mark the ideas that you
think might be effective in your essay. At this stage, don’t worry if you’re interested in
a number of different (and possibly unrelated) ideas. In fact, be as inclusive as you can.
Just develop a primary list of points (ideas and/or opinions you have about this topic)
and evidence (facts, examples, and quotes) that you like for your essay. Then in the space
provided below, list those points.
Invention 71
Reminder:
The above list will probably include many different kinds of ideas: some broad, some narrow,
some opinions, some explanations. Don’t be concerned about this variety of ideas, and don’t
try to jump to a thesis statement too soon. Sometimes you need to work with ideas for a while
before you finally arrive at what you “really want to say.” Be especially aware of the trap that
many students fall into—A MERE LIST OF POINTS IS NOT A THESIS STATEMENT.
2 Reread the writing task for this assignment, comparing your list to the actual question you are sup-
posed to address. In any writing situation, you need to compare your brainstorming with
the assigned task, because it is very easy to move in other directions.
3 Examine, narrow and reorder your list. Decide which points you like best, listing them
below.
4 Look over your list and see if you can find a preliminary thesis statement or argument that responds
to the assignment prompt. List that preliminary thesis below.
Possible Thesis:
Exploration Questions
Exploration questions are useful for exploring a topic that is concerned with a controversy;
one that requires the writer to develop a thesis or position (a characteristic of most college
writing assignments). Responding in writing to these questions enables the writer to under-
stand a controversy in terms of background and issue; an insight that helps writers construct
a point of view. A sheet that can be used for this purpose appears on page 72 of this volume.
Topical Questions
Another questioning strategy, loosely based on Artistotle’s On Rhetoric (1991), uses the idea
of “topics” as a means of discovering material for an argument, a strategy that was devel-
oped by Edward Corbett (1981) in The Little Rhetoric and Handbook. Corbett’s questions
are listed below.
72 Irene L. Clark
Questions about concepts:
Exploration Questions
(Useful for developing ideas for an essay concerned with a controversy)
1 Is there a controversy associated with this topic? If so, briefly outline the nature of the
controversy.
2 What was your opinion on this controversy when you were growing up? What opinion
did your family and community have on this topic?
3 How did your school experiences influence your conception of the topic? Did your
teachers and classmates feel the same way about it as did your family? Were there any
points of disagreement?
4 Can you think of at least two people who hold differing views about this topic? If so,
describe these people and summarize what you believe were their points of view.
5 Has your opinion changed about this topic in any way? Why or why not?
6 Do you think that this topic is important for people to think about? Why or why not?
Journalistic Questions
The five questions journalists frequently ask to generate information about a topic can be used
effectively as an invention strategy. They are particularly useful in writing about a problem, a
focus that characterizes a number of writing assignments, but they can also be adapted to other sit-
uations or experiences. The following are the five questions, phrased in the context of a problem.
The Pentad
The author/scholar/rhetorician Kenneth Burke contributed many ideas to the field of rhetoric,
but in terms of invention, he is best known for the strategy known as the “pentad.” The pentad
Invention 73
is a scheme for investigating pretty much anything, and, indeed, Burke regarded the field of
rhetoric as inclusive of almost all human actions, defining it as “the use of language in such a
way as to produce a desired impression on the reader or hearer” (1953, p. 165). Thus, Burke,
like Aristotle, conceived of rhetoric in terms of audience, claiming in The Rhetoric of Motives
(1950) that meaning always involves an element of persuasion. The pentad was first introduced
in A Grammar of Motives (1952) as a device for analyzing literature, and, indeed, it is well suited
for this purpose. However, it can also be used to investigate other subjects.
The pentad consists of five terms that can be used to “invent” material. These are as
follows:
•• Act (What does it say? What happened? What sort of action is it?)
•• Agent (Who wrote it? Who did it? What kind of agent is it?)
•• Agency (How was it done? What were the methods of accomplishing it?)
•• Scene (Where did it happen? What background is necessary to understand? When did it
happen?)
•• Purpose (Why did it happen? What is its purpose?)
References
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CA: W. H. Freeman.
Arem, C. A. (2011). Conquering writing anxiety. Engleword, CO: Morton Publishing.
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Aristotle. (1991). Aristotle on rhetoric: A theory of civic discourse. Ed. & trans. G. A. Kennedy. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Bawarshi, A. (2003). Genre and the invention of the writer: Reconsidering the place of invention in composition.
Logan, UT: Utah State University Press.
Berthoff, A. (1971). The problem of problem solving. CCC, 22: 237–242.
Blair, H. (1966/1783). Lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres. Ed. H. Harding. Carbondale, IL: Southern
Illinois University Press.
Booth, W. C. (1974). Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press.
Burke, K. (1950). A rhetoric of motives. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Burke, K. (1952). A grammar of motives. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Burke, K. (1953). Counterstatement. Los Altos, CA: Hermes.
Campbell, G. (1963/1776). The philosophy of rhetoric. Ed. L. Bitzer. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois
University Press.
Cicero. (1942). De Oratore. Trans. E. W. Sutton, & H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Connors, R. (1987). Personal writing assignments. CCC, 38: 166–183.
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Corbett, E. P., & Connors, R. J. (1999). Classical rhetoric for the modern student (4th ed.). New York:
Oxford University Press.
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and Bacon.
Crowley, S. (1990). The methodical memory: Invention in current-traditional rhetoric. Carbondale, IL:
Southern Illinois University Press.
Crowley, S. (1994). Ancient rhetorics for contemporary students. New York: Macmillan.
Finer, B. S. (2015). Critical praxis for researched writing: A rhetorical model for teaching students to
“do research.” Journal of Teaching Writing, 28(2): 41–66.
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W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.
Harris, J. (2006). Rewriting: How to do things with texts. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press.
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Washington State University.
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208–210.
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Quintilian. (1920). Institutio oratoria. Trans. H. E. Butler. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Quintilian. (1994). Ancient rhetorics. In S. Crowley (Ed.), Ancient rhetorics for contemporary students. New
York: Macmillan.
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Rose, M. (1980). Rigid rules, inflexible plans, and the stifling of language: A cognitivist analysis of
writer’s block. CCC, 31: 389–401.
Rose, M. (1984). Writer’s block: The cognitive dimension. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University
Press.
Thaiss, C., & Zawacki, M. T. (2006). Engaged writers, dynamic disciplines. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/
Cook Heinemann.
Winterowd, W. R., & Blum, J. (1994). Composition in the rhetorical tradition. Urbana, IL: NCTE.
Young, R. E., Becker, A. L., & Pike, K. L. (1970). Rhetoric: Discovery and change. New York: Harcourt.
Zoellner, R. (1969). Talk-write: A behavioral approach to writing. College English, 30: 267–320.
Reading
Rigid Rules, Inflexible Plans, and the Stifling of Language
A Cognitivist Analysis of Writer’s Block
Mike Rose
Ruth will labor over the first paragraph of an essay for hours. She’ll write a sentence, then
erase it. Try another, then scratch part of it out. Finally, as the evening winds on toward
ten o’clock and Ruth, anxious about tomorrow’s deadline, begins to wind into herself, she’ll
compose that first paragraph only to sit back and level her favorite exasperated interdiction
at herself and her page: “No. You can’t say that. You’ll bore them to death.”
Ruth is one of ten UCLA undergraduates with whom I discussed writer’s block, that frus-
trating, self-defeating inability to generate the next line, the right phrase, the sentence that
will release the flow of words once again. These ten people represented a fair cross-section
of the UCLA student community: lower-middle-class to upper-middle-class backgrounds
and high schools, third-world and Caucasian origins, biology to fine arts majors, C+ to A−
grade point averages, enthusiastic to blasé attitudes toward school. They were set off from
the community by the twin facts that all ten could write competently, and all were currently
enrolled in at least one course that required a significant amount of writing. They were set
off among themselves by the fact that five of them wrote with relative to enviable ease while
the other five experienced moderate to nearly immobilizing writer’s block. This blocking usu-
ally resulted in rushed, often late papers and resultant grades that did not truly reflect these
students’ writing ability. And then, of course, there were other less measurable but probably
more serious results: a growing distrust of their abilities and an aversion toward the compos-
ing process itself.
What separated the five students who blocked from those who didn’t? It wasn’t skill; that
was held fairly constant. The answer could have rested in the emotional realm—anxiety,
fear of evaluation, insecurity, etc. Or perhaps blocking in some way resulted from variation
in cognitive style. Perhaps, too, blocking originated in and typified a melding of emotion
and cognition not unlike the relationship posited by Shapiro between neurotic feeling and
neurotic thinking.1 Each of these was possible. Extended clinical interviews and testing
could have teased out the answer. But there was one answer that surfaced readily in brief
explorations of these students’ writing processes. It was not profoundly emotional, nor was
it embedded in that still unclear construct of cognitive style. It was constant, surprising,
almost amusing if its results weren’t so troublesome, and, in the final analysis, obvious: the
five students who experienced blocking were all operating either with writing rules or with
planning strategies that impeded rather than enhanced the composing process. The five
students who were not hampered by writer’s block also utilized rules, but they were less
rigid ones, and thus more appropriate to a complex process like writing. Also, the plans
these non-blockers brought to the writing process were more functional, more flexible, more
open to information from the outside.
These observations are the result of one to three interviews with each student. I used
recent notes, drafts, and finished compositions to direct and hone my questions. This pro-
cedure is admittedly non-experimental, certainly more clinical than scientific; still, it did
lead to several inferences that lay the foundation for future, more rigorous investigation:
Rigid Rules, Inflexible Plans 77
(a) composing is a highly complex problem-solving process2 and (b) certain disruptions of
that process can be explained with cognitive psychology’s problem-solving framework. Such
investigation might include a study using “stimulated recall” techniques to validate or dis-
confirm these hunches. In such a study, blockers and non-blockers would write essays.
Their activity would be videotaped and, immediately after writing, they would be shown their
respective tapes and questioned about the rules, plans, and beliefs operating in their writing
behavior. This procedure would bring us close to the composing process (the writers’ recall
is stimulated by their viewing the tape), yet would not interfere with actual composing.
In the next section I will introduce several key concepts in the problem-solving literature.
In section three I will let the students speak for themselves. Fourth, I will offer a cognitiv-
ist analysis of blockers’ and non-blockers’ grace or torpor. I will close with a brief note on
treatment.
Rules
Robert M. Gagné defines “rule” as “an inferred capability that enables the individual to
respond to a class of stimulus situations with a class of performances.”3 Rules can be learned
directly4 or by inference through experience.5 But, in either case, most problem-solving theo-
rists would affirm Gagné’s dictum that “rules are probably the major organizing factor, and
quite possibly the primary one, in intellectual functioning.”6 As Gagné implies, we wouldn’t be
able to function without rules; they guide response to the myriad stimuli that confront us daily,
and might even be the central element in complex problem-solving behavior.
78 Mike Rose
Dunker, Polya, and Miller, Galanter, and Pribram offer a very useful distinction between
two general kinds of rules: algorithms and heuristics.7 Algorithms are precise rules that will
always result in a specific answer if applied to an appropriate problem. Most mathematical
rules, for example, are algorithms. Functions are constant (e.g., pi), procedures are routine
(squaring the radius), and outcomes are completely predictable. However, few day-to-day
situations are mathematically circumscribed enough to warrant the application of algorithms.
Most often we function with the aid of fairly general heuristics or “rules of thumb,” guidelines
that allow varying degrees of flexibility when approaching problems. Rather than operating
with algorithmic precision and certainty, we search, critically, through alternatives, using our
heuristic as a divining rod—”if a math problem stumps you, try working backwards to solu-
tion”; “if the car won’t start, check x, y, or z,” and so forth. Heuristics won’t allow the precision
or the certitude afforded by algorithmic operations; heuristics can even be so “loose” as to be
vague. But in a world where tasks and problems are rarely mathematically precise, heuristic
rules become the most appropriate, the most functional rules available to us: “a heuristic
does not guarantee the optimal solution or, indeed, any solution at all; rather, heuristics offer
solutions that are good enough most of the time.”8
Plans
People don’t proceed through problem situations, in or out of a laboratory, without some
set of internalized instructions to the self, some program, some course of action that, even
roughly, takes goals and possible paths to that goal into consideration. Miller, Galanter, and
Pribram have referred to this course of action as a plan: “A plan is any hierarchical process
in the organism that can control the order in which a sequence of operations is to be per-
formed” (p. 16). They name the fundamental plan in human problem-solving behavior the
TOTE, with the initial T representing a test that matches a possible solution against the per-
ceived end-goal of problem completion. O represents the clearance to operate if the com-
parison between solution and goal indicates that the solution is a sensible one. The second
T represents a further, post-operation, test or comparison of solution with goal, and if the two
mesh and problem solution is at hand the person exits (E) from problem-solving behavior.
If the second test presents further discordance between solution and goal, a further solu-
tion is attempted in TOTE-fashion. Such plans can be both long-term and global and, as
problem-solving is underway, short-term and immediate.9 Though the mechanicality of this
information-processing model renders it simplistic and, possibly, unreal, the central notion
of a plan and an operating procedure is an important one in problem-solving theory; it at
least attempts to metaphorically explain what earlier cognitive psychologists could not—the
mental procedures (see pp. 390–391) underlying problem-solving behavior.
Before concluding this section, a distinction between heuristic rules and plans should be
attempted; it is a distinction often blurred in the literature, blurred because, after all, we are
very much in the area of gestating theory and preliminary models. Heuristic rules seem to
function with the flexibility of plans. Is, for example, “If the car won’t start, try x, y, or z” a heu-
ristic or a plan? It could be either, though two qualifications will mark it as heuristic rather than
plan. (A) Plans subsume and sequence heuristic and algorithmic rules. Rules are usually
“smaller,” more discrete cognitive capabilities; plans can become quite large and complex,
composed of a series of ordered algorithms, heuristics, and further planning “sub-routines.”
(B) Plans, as was mentioned earlier, include criteria to determine successful goal-attainment
Rigid Rules, Inflexible Plans 79
and, as well, include “feedback” processes—ways to incorporate and use information gained
from “tests” of potential solutions against desired goals.
One other distinction should be made: that is, between “set” and plan. Set, also called
“determining tendency” or “readiness,”10 refers to the fact that people often approach prob-
lems with habitual ways of reacting, appropriate to a specific problem,11 but much of the
literature on set has shown its rigidifying, dysfunctional effects.12 Set differs from plan in that
set represents a limiting and narrowing of response alternatives with no inherent process to
shift alternatives. It is a kind of cognitive habit that can limit perception, not a course of action
with multiple paths that directs and sequences response possibilities.
The constructs of rules and plans advance the understanding of problem-solving beyond
that possible with earlier, less developed formulations. Still, critical problems remain. Though
mathematical and computer models move one toward more complex (and thus more real)
problems than the earlier research, they are still too neat, too rigidly sequenced to approxi-
mate the stunning complexity of day-to-day (not to mention highly creative) problem-solving
behavior. Also, information-processing models of problem-solving are built on logic theo-
rems, chess strategies, and simple planning tasks. Even Gagné seems to feel more com-
fortable with illustrations from mathematics and science rather than with social science and
humanities problems. So although these complex models and constructs tell us a good deal
about problem-solving behavior, they are still laboratory simulations, still invoked from the
outside rather than self-generated, and still founded on the mathematico-logical.
Two Carnegie-Mellon researchers, however, have recently extended the above into a
truly real, amorphous, unmathematical problem-solving process—writing. Relying on pro-
tocol analysis (thinking aloud while solving problems), Linda Flower and John Hayes have
attempted to tease out the role of heuristic rules and plans in writing behavior.13 Their
research pushes problem-solving investigations to the real and complex and pushes, from
the other end, the often mysterious process of writing toward the explainable. The latter is
important, for at least since Plotinus many have viewed the composing process as unex-
plainable, inspired, infused with the transcendent. But Flower and Hayes are beginning, any-
way, to show how writing generates from a problem-solving process with rich heuristic rules
and plans of its own. They show, as well, how many writing problems arise from a paucity of
heuristics and suggest an intervention that provides such rules.
This paper, too, treats writing as a problem-solving process, focusing, however, on
what happens when the process dead-ends in writer’s block. It will further suggest that,
as opposed to Flower and Hayes’ students who need more rules and plans, blockers may
well be stymied by possessing rigid or inappropriate rules, or inflexible or confused plans.
Ironically enough, these are occasionally instilled by the composition teacher or gleaned
from the writing textbook.
In high school I was given a formula that stated that you must write a thesis paragraph
with only three points in it, and then develop each of those points. When I hit college I
was given longer assignments. That stuck me for a bit, but then I realized that I could
use as many ideas in my thesis paragraph as I needed and then develop paragraphs for
each one. I asked someone about this and then tried it. I didn’t get any negative feed-
back, so I figured it was o.k.
Debbie’s statement brings one last difference between our blockers and non-blockers into
focus; it has been implied above, but needs specific formulation: the goals these people
Rigid Rules, Inflexible Plans 83
have, and the plans they generate to attain these goals, are quite mutable. Part of the muta-
bility comes from the fluid way the goals and plans are conceived, and part of it arises from
the effective impact of feedback on these goals and plans.
In most cases, the rules our blockers use are not “wrong” or “incorrect”—it is good practice,
for example, to “grab your audience with a catchy opening” or “craft a solid first paragraph
before going on.” The problem is that these rules seem to be followed as though they were
algorithms, absolute dicta, rather than the loose heuristics that they were intended to be.
Either through instruction, or the power of the textbook, or the predilections of some of our
blockers for absolutes, or all three, these useful rules of thumb have been transformed into
near-algorithmic urgencies. The result, to paraphrase Karl Dunker, is that these rules do not
allow a flexible penetration into the nature of the problem. It is this transformation of heuristic
into algorithm that contributes to the writer’s block of Ruth and Laurel.
Whereas “grab your audience” could be a useful heuristic, “always make three or more
points in an essay” is a pretty questionable one. Any such rule, though probably taught to aid
the writer who needs structure, ultimately transforms a highly fluid process like writing into a
mechanical lockstep. As heuristics, such rules can be troublesome. As algorithms, they are
simply incorrect.
Set
As with any problem-solving task, students approach writing assignments with a variety of
orientations or sets. Some are functional, others are not. Martha and Jane (see note 14),
coming out of the life sciences and social sciences respectively, bring certain methodological
orientations with them—certain sets or “directions” that make composing for the humanities
a difficult, sometimes confusing, task. In fact, this orientation may cause them to misperceive
the task. Martha has formulated a planning strategy from her predisposition to see processes
in terms of linear, interrelated steps in a system. Jane doesn’t realize that she can revise the
statement that “committed” her to the direction her essay has taken. Both of these students
are stymied because of formative experiences associated with their majors—experiences,
perhaps, that nicely reinforce our very strong tendency to organize experiences temporally.
If fluidity and multi-directionality are central to the nature of plans, then the plans that Mike
formulates are not true plans at all but, rather, inflexible and static cognitive blueprints.15
Put another way, Mike’s “plans” represent a restricted “closed system” (vs. “open system”)
kind of thinking, where closed system thinking is defined as focusing on “a limited number
of units or items, or members, and those properties of the members which are to be used
are known to begin with and do not change as the thinking proceeds,” and open system
84 Mike Rose
thinking is characterized by an “adventurous exploration of multiple alternatives with strate-
gies that allow redirection once ‘dead ends’ are encountered.”16 Composing calls for open,
even adventurous thinking, not for constrained, no-exit cognition.
Feedback
The above difficulties are made all the more problematic by the fact that they seem resistant
to or isolated from corrective feedback. One of the most striking things about Dale, Debbie,
and Miles is the ease with which they seek out, interpret, and apply feedback on their rules,
plans, and productions. They “operate” and then they “test,” and the testing is not only
against some internalized goal, but against the requirements of external audience as well.
According to D. E. Berlyne, one of the primary forces that motivate problem-solving behavior
is a curiosity that arises from conceptual conflict—the convergence of incompatible beliefs or
ideas. In Structure and Direction in Thinking,17 Berlyne presents six major types of concep-
tual conflict, the second of which he terms “perplexity”:
This kind of conflict occurs when there are factors inclining the subject toward each of a
set of mutually exclusive beliefs.
(p. 257)
If one substitutes “rules” for “beliefs” in the above definition, perplexity becomes a useful
notion here. Because perplexity is unpleasant, people are motivated to reduce it by problem-
solving behavior that can result in “disequalization:”
But “disequalization” is not automatic. As I have suggested, Martha and Sylvia hold to rules
that conflict, but their perplexity does not lead to curiosity and resultant problem-solving
behavior. Their perplexity, contra Berlyne, leads to immobilization. Thus “disequalization” will
have to be effected from without. The importance of each of, particularly, Sylvia’s rules needs
an evaluation that will aid her in rejecting some rules and balancing and sequencing others.
A Note on Treatment
Rather than get embroiled in a blocker’s misery, the teacher or tutor might interview the
student in order to build a writing history and profile: How much and what kind of writing
was done in high school? What is the student’s major? What kind of writing does it require?
How does the student compose? Are there rough drafts or outlines available? By what rules
does the student operate? How would he or she define “good” writing? etc. This sort of
interview reveals an incredible amount of information about individual composing processes.
Furthermore, it ofen reveals the rigid rule or the inflexible plan that may lie at the base of
the student’s writing problem. That was precisely what happened with the five blockers.
Rigid Rules, Inflexible Plans 85
And with Ruth, Laurel, and Martha (and Jane) what was revealed made virtually immedi-
ate remedy possible. Dysfunctional rules are easily replaced with or counter-balanced by
functional ones if there is no emotional reason to hold onto that which simply doesn’t work.
Furthermore, students can be trained to select, to “know which rules are appropriate for
which problems.”18 Mike’s difficulties, perhaps because plans are more complex and perva-
sive than rules, took longer to correct. But inflexible plans, too, can be remedied by pointing
out their dysfunctional qualities and by assisting the student in developing appropriate and
flexible alternatives. Operating this way, I was successful with Mike. Sylvia’s story, however,
did not end as smoothly. Though I had three forty-five minute contacts with her, I was not
able to appreciably alter her behavior. Berlyne’s theory bore results with Martha but not with
Sylvia. Her rules were in conflict, and perhaps that conflict was not exclusively cognitive.
Her case keeps analyses like these honest; it reminds us that the cognitive often melds with,
and can be overpowered by, the affective. So while Ruth, Laurel, Martha, and Mike could
profit from tutorials that explore the rules and plans in their writing behavior, students like
Sylvia may need more extended, more affectively oriented counseling sessions that blend
the instructional with the psychodynamic.
Notes
1 David Shapiro, Neurotic Styles (New York: Basic Books, 1965).
2 Barbara Hayes-Ruth, a Rand cognitive psychologist, and I are currently developing an information-
processing model of the composing process. A good deal of work has already been done by Linda
Flower and John Hayes (see p. 393 of this article). I have just received—and recommend—their “Writing
as Problem Solving” (paper presented at American Educational Research Association, April, 1979).
3 The Conditions of Learning (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), p. 193.
4 E. James Archer, “The Psychological Nature of Concepts,” in H. J. Klausmeier and C. W. Harris, eds.,
Analysis of Concept Learning (New York: Academic Press, 1966), pp. 37–44; David P. Ausubel, The
Psychology of Meaningful Verbal Behavior (New York: Grune and Stratton, 1963); Robert M. Gagné,
“Problem Solving,” in Arthur W. Melton, ed., Categories of Human Learning (New York: Academic
Press, 1964), pp. 293–317; George A. Miller, Language and Communication (New York: McGraw-
Hill, 1951).
5 George Katona, Organizing and Memorizing (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1940); Roger N.
Shepard, Carl I. Hovland, and Herbert M. Jenkins, “Learning and Memorization of Classifications,”
Psychological Monographs, 75, No. 13 (1961) (entire No. 517); Robert S. Wood-worth, Dynamics of
Behavior (New York: Henry Holt, 1958), chs. 10–12.
6 The Conditions of Learning, pp. 190–91.
7 Karl Dunker, “On Problem Solving,” Psychological Monographs, 58, No. 5 (1945) (entire No. 270);
George A. Polya, How to Solve It (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945); George A. Miller, Eugene
Galanter, and Karl H. Pribram, Plans and the Structure of Behavior (New York: Henry Holt, 1960).
8 Lyle E. Bourne, Jr., Bruce R. Ekstrand, and Roger L. Dominowski, The Psychology of Thinking
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971).
9 John R. Hayes, “Problem Topology and the Solution Process,” in Carl P. Duncan, ed., Thinking:
Current Experimental Studies (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1967), pp. 167–81.
10 Hulda J. Rees and Harold E. Israel, “An Investigation of the Establishment and Operation of Mental
Sets.” Psychological Monographs, 46 (1925) (entire No. 210).
11 Ibid.; Melvin H. Marx, Wilton W. Murphy, and Aaron J. Brownstein, “Recognition of Complex Visual
Stimuli as a Function of Training with Abstracted Patterns,” Journal of Experimental Psychology, 62
(1961), 456–60.
86 Mike Rose
12 James L. Adams, Conceptual Blockbusting (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1974); Edward DeBono,
New Think (New York: Basic Books, 1958); Ronald H. Forgus, Perception (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1966), ch. 13; Abraham Luchins and Edith Hirsch Luchins, Rigidity of Behavior (Eugene: Univ. of
Oregon Books, 1959); N. R. F. Maier, “Reasoning in Humans. I. On Direction,” Journal of Comparative
Psychology, 10 (1920), 115–43.
13 “Plans and the Cognitive Process of Writing,” paper presented at the National Institute of Education
Writing Conference, June 1977; “Problem Solving Strategies and the Writing Process,” College
English, 39 (1977), 449–61. See also footnote 2.
14 Jane, a student not discussed in this paper, was surprised to find out that a topic paragraph can be
rewritten after a paper’s conclusion to make that paragraph reflect what the essay truly contains. She
had gotten so indoctrinated with Psychology’s (her major) insistence that a hypothesis be formulated
and then left untouched before an experiment begins that she thought revision of one’s “major prem-
ise” was somehow illegal. She had formed a rule out of her exposure to social science methodology,
and the rule was totally inappropriate for most writing situations.
15 Cf. “A plan is flexible if the order of execution of its parts can be easily interchanged without affecting
the feasibility of the plan . . . the flexible planner might tend to think of lists of things he had to do; the
inflexible planner would have his time planned like a sequence of cause–effect relations. The former
could rearrange his lists to suit his opportunities, but the latter would be unable to strike while the
iron was hot and would generally require considerable ‘lead-time’ before he could incorporate any
alternative sub-plans” (Miller, Galanter, and Pribram, p. 120).
16 Frederic Bartlett, Thinking (New York: Basic Books, 1958), pp. 74–76.
17 Structure and Direction in Thinking (New York: John Wiley, 1965), p. 255.
18 Flower and Hayes, “Plans and the Cognitive Process of Writing,” p. 26.
3 Revision
Issues and Strategies
Betty Bamberg and Irene L. Clark
A section written by Doug Downs in Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing
Studies (2015) is titled “Revision is Central to Developing Writing” (p. 66), a statement with
which all writers and writing teachers are likely to agree. Of course, there are people who
claim that they do their best work under pressure—typing or scribbling a draft at 3 a.m. the
morning before it is due, a process often accompanied by considerable stress. I have heard
this statement many times, but I doubt that it is true for most writers, and unlikely to be true
for students. A student writer who hastily writes an essay at 3 a.m. would probably be able to
write a better essay if he or she had left enough time to revise.
Downs defined revision as referring to the “significant development of a text’s ideas, struc-
ture, and/or design,” distinct from “line editing or copyediting to ‘polish’ a text” (p. 66), and
he then presented two “corollaries” pertaining to revision: (1) that unrevised writing “will
rarely be as well-suited to its purpose as it could be with revision,” and (2) that writers who
don’t revise are likely to see fewer positive results from their writing than those who build
time for feedback and revision” (p. 66). As is stated in the epigraph to this chapter, Downs
compared the revision process to driving with headlights:
The headlights reach only a fraction of the way to the destination; a writer can only
begin writing what they ‘see’ at the beginning. Driving to the end of the headlights first
reach—writing the first draft—lets the headlights now illuminate the next distance ahead.
(p. 66)
This chapter traces varying perspectives on what is involved in revision and discusses what
research and theory have revealed about the ways that writers, especially student writers,
revise and sometimes resist revising. It emphasizes the importance of teaching and demon-
strating revision and suggests ways for teachers to encourage students to revise in ways that
develop and shape the meaning of their texts and result in more effective pieces of writing.
Focusing on “revision” as an important theoretical and pedagogical concept in composition,
the chapter will address the following aspects of the topic:
The chapter also includes strategies that students can practice in class and adapt to their own
writing processes.
•• Is my grammar correct?
•• Is this word spelled correctly?
•• Do I need a comma here?
This second set of questions reflects an older view of revision, which considered it to be a
mechanical process involving little more than correcting errors or making minor changes in
sentence structure or word choice to improve style. The first set of questions, on the other
hand, illustrates a perspective on revision that has emerged from composing process research
and theory over the last 40 years. This perspective, which is concerned primarily with issues
of audience, purpose, content, organization, genre, and style, reconceptualizes revision as a
primary means of developing, elaborating, and shaping the intended meaning of a text.
Obstacles to Revision
PC Is Ridiculous!
A debate has scourged the United States for several decades regarding the issue of “PC.” The
abbreviation is often confused with several different means, such as Personal Computer, President’s
Choice, but instead I am addressing the coined term “Political Correctness.” Everyday the debate
about PC becomes a more prominent topic in the classroom, the newspapers, and casual conversa-
tion and people are getting sick of it.
The truth of the matter is actually simple. No matter what Stanley Fish might claim, politi-
cal correctness stifles free speech and will ultimately lead to a completely repressive society. At this
point, students are afraid to open their mouths and say what they really think because they are
afraid of being labeled “racist” or “sexist.” Is this what education is about? Is this what our society
has come to? Isn’t it time we stopped being afraid of telling the truth?
Our country was founded on the Bill of Rights and the first amendment to that document guar-
antees freedom of speech. If the PC people continue to make policy in our colleges and universities,
free speech will no longer be a guaranteed right for students. Are students supposed to be considered
second citizens? Isn’t the university a place where people can speak freely? The PC movement has
gotten completely out of hand and all policies concerned with it on campus ought to be eliminated.
Conclusion
Revision is acknowledged as crucial to shaping and discovering meaning during composing.
However, helping students learn to make meaning-based revisions is a challenging task. To
begin, students must develop a different concept of revision. Instead of viewing it as chang-
ing sentences and words or hunting for errors, they need to see it as a process of making
106 Betty Bamberg and Irene L. Clark
changes in content and organization and of shaping the text in terms of their purpose and
audience. Next, students must learn criteria for evaluating writing. Most students need direct
instruction not only in gaining an understanding of these criteria but also in applying them.
Teachers play a crucial role in providing this instruction, but providing such instruction can
be challenging. Not only is the writing process itself complex, but school-sponsored writing
also often lacks real purposes and audiences. Moreover, classroom structures usually constrain
and limit the composing process. Despite these difficulties, knowledgeable teachers can cre-
ate classroom environments that encourage and support substantive revision. If students learn
criteria for evaluating their own writing and that of their peers and can draw on a repertoire
of rhetorical strategies for revision, they will be able to use revision as a means of discovering
meaning and shaping their texts for specific audiences and purposes.
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Reading
Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced
Adult Writers
Nancy Sommers
Although various aspects of the writing process have been studied extensively of late,
research on revision has been notably absent. The reason for this, I suspect, is that cur-
rent models of the writing process have directed attention away from revision. With few
exceptions, these models are linear; they separate the writing process into discrete stages.
Two representative models are Gordon Rohman’s suggestion that the composing process
moves from prewriting to writing to rewriting and James Britton’s model of the writing process
as a series of stages described in metaphors of linear growth, conception—incubation—
production.1 What is striking about these theories of writing is that they model themselves
on speech: Rohman defines the writer in a way that cannot distinguish him from a speaker
(“A writer is a man who . . . puts [his] experience into words in his own mind”—p. 15); and
Britton bases his theory of writing on what he calls (following Jakobson) the “expressiveness”
of speech.2 Moreover, Britton’s study itself follows the “linear model” of the relation of thought
and language in speech proposed by Vygotsky, a relationship embodied in the linear move-
ment “from the motive which engenders a thought to the shaping of the thought, first in inner
speech, then in meanings of words, and finally in words” (quoted in Britton, p. 40). What this
movement fails to take into account in its linear structure—”first . . . then . . . finally”—is the
recursive shaping of thought by language; what it fails to take into account is revision. In
these linear conceptions of the writing process revision is understood as a separate stage at
the end of the process—a stage that comes after the completion of a first or second draft and
one that is temporally distinct from the prewriting and writing stages of the process.3
The linear model bases itself on speech in two specific ways. First of all, it is based on
traditional rhetorical models, models that were created to serve the spoken art of oratory. In
whatever ways the parts of classical rhetoric are described, they offer “stages” of composi-
tion that are repeated in contemporary models of the writing process. Edward Corbett, for
instance, describes the “five parts of a discourse”—inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria,
pronuntiatio—and, disregarding the last two parts since “after rhetoric came to be concerned
mainly with written discourse, there was no further need to deal with them,”4 he produces
a model very close to Britton’s conception [inventio], incubation [dispositio], production
[elocutio]. Other rhetorics also follow this procedure, and they do so not simply because of
historical accident. Rather, the process represented in the linear model is based on the irre-
versibility of speech. Speech, Roland Barthes says, “is irreversible:”
A word cannot be retracted, except precisely by saying that one retracts it. To cross out
here is to add: if I want to erase what I have just said, I cannot do it without showing the
eraser itself (I must say: “or rather . . .” “I expressed myself badly ..”); paradoxically, it is
ephemeral speech which is indelible, not monumental writing. All that one can do in the
case of a spoken utterance is to tack on another utterance.5
What is impossible in speech is revision: like the example Barthes gives, revision in speech is
an afterthought. In the same way, each stage of the linear model must be exclusive (distinct
Revision Strategies 111
from the other stages) or else it becomes trivial and counterproductive to refer to these junc-
tures as “stages.”
By staging revision after enunciation, the linear models reduce revision in writing, as in
speech, to no more than an afterthought. In this way such models make the study of revision
impossible. Revision, in Rohman’s model, is simply the repetition of writing; or to pursue
Britton’s organic metaphor, revision is simply the further growth of what is already there, the
“pre-conceived” product. The absence of research on revision, then, is a function of a theory
of writing which makes revision both superfluous and redundant, a theory which does not
distinguish between writing and speech.
What the linear models do produce is a parody of writing. Isolating revision and then dis-
regarding it plays havoc with the experiences composition teachers have of the actual writing
and rewriting of experienced writers. Why should the linear model be preferred? Why should
revision be forgotten, superfluous? Why do teachers offer the linear model and students
accept it? One reason, Barthes suggests, is that “there is a fundamental tie between teach-
ing and speech,” while “writing begins at the point where speech becomes impossible.”6 The
spoken word cannot be revised. The possibility of revision distinguishes the written text from
speech. In fact, according to Barthes, this is the essential difference between writing and
speaking. When we must revise, when the very idea is subject to recursive shaping by lan-
guage, then speech becomes inadequate. This is a matter to which I will return, but first we
should examine, theoretically, a detailed exploration of what student writers as distinguished
from experienced adult writers do when they write and rewrite their work. Dissatisfied with
both the linear model of writing and the lack of attention to the process of revision, I con-
ducted a series of studies over the past three years which examined the revision processes
of student writers and experienced writers to see what role revision played in their writing
processes. In the course of my work the revision process was redefined as a sequence
of changes in a composition—changes which are initiated by cues and occur continually
throughout the writing of a work.
Methodology
I used a case study approach. The student writers were twenty freshmen at Boston University
and the University of Oklahoma with SAT verbal scores ranging from 450–600 in their first
semester of composition. The twenty experienced adult writers from Boston and Oklahoma
City included journalists, editors, and academics. To refer to the two groups, I use the terms
student writers and experienced writers because the principal difference between these two
groups is the amount of experience they have had in writing.
Each writer wrote three essays, expressive, explanatory, and persuasive, and rewrote
each essay twice, producing nine written products in draft and final form. Each writer was
interviewed three times after the final revision of each essay. And each writer suggested revi-
sions for a composition written by an anonymous author. Thus extensive written and spoken
documents were obtained from each writer.
The essays were analyzed by counting and categorizing the changes made. Four revi-
sion operations were identified: deletion, substitution, addition, and reordering. And four lev-
els of changes were identified: word, phrase, sentence, theme (the extended statement of
one idea). A coding system was developed for identifying the frequency of revision by level
and operation. In addition, transcripts of the interviews in which the writers interpreted their
112 Nancy Sommers
revisions were used to develop what was called a scale of concerns for each writer. This
scale enabled me to codify what were the writer’s primary concerns, secondary concerns,
tertiary concerns, and whether the writers used the same scale of concerns when revising
the second or third drafts as they used in revising the first draft.
Scratch Out and Do Over Again: “I say scratch out and do over, and that means what it
says. Scratching out and cutting out. I read what I have written and I cross out a word and
put another word in; a more decent word or a better word. Then if there is somewhere to
use a sentence that I have crossed out, I will put it there.”
Reviewing: “Reviewing means just using better words and eliminating words that are not
needed. I go over and change words around.”
Reviewing: “I just review every word and make sure that everything is worded right. I see
if I am rambling; I see if I can put a better word in or leave one out. Usually when I read
what I have written, I say to myself, ‘that word is so bland or so trite,’ and then I go and
get my thesaurus.”
Redoing: “Redoing means cleaning up the paper and crossing out. It is looking at some-
thing and saying, no that has to go, or no, that is not right.”
Marking Out: “I don’t use the word rewriting because I only write one draft and the
changes that I make are made on top of the draft. The changes that I make are usually
just marking out words and putting different ones in.”
Slashing and Throwing Out: “I throw things out and say they are not good. I like to write
like Fitzgerald did by inspiration, and if I feel inspired then I don’t need to slash and throw
much out.”
The predominant concern in these definitions is vocabulary. The students understand the
revision process as a rewording activity. They do so because they perceive words as the
unit of written discourse. That is, they concentrate on particular words apart from their role
in the text. Thus one student quoted above thinks in terms of dictionaries, and, following
the eighteenth-century theory of words parodied in Gulliver’s Travels, he imagines a load
of things carried about to be exchanged. Lexical changes are the major revision activities
of the students because economy is their goal. They are governed, like the linear model
itself, by the Law of Occam’s razor that prohibits logically needless repetition: redundancy
and superfluity. Nothing governs speech more than such superfluities; speech constantly
repeats itself precisely because spoken words, as Barthes writes, are expendable in the
cause of communication. 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
Revision Strategies 113
suggests, because writing, unlike speech, can be reread. Thus one student said, “Redoing
means cleaning up the paper and crossing out.” The remarkable contradiction of cleaning by
marking might, indeed, stand for student revision as I have encountered it.
The students place a symbolic importance on their selection and rejection of words as the
determiners of success or failure for their compositions. When revising, they primarily ask
themselves: can I find a better word or phrase? A more impressive, not so clichéd, or less
hum-drum word? Am I repeating the same word or phrase too often? They approach the revi-
sion process with what could be labeled as a “thesaurus philosophy of writing;” the students
consider the thesaurus a harvest of lexical substitutions and believe that most problems in their
essays can be solved by rewording. What is revealed in the students’ use of the thesaurus is a
governing attitude toward their writing: that the meaning to be communicated is already there,
already finished, already produced, ready to be communicated, and all that is necessary is
a better word “rightly worded.” One student defined revision as “redoing;” “redoing” meant
“just using better words and eliminating words that are not needed.” For the students, writing
is translating: the thought to the page, the language of speech to the more formal language
of prose, the word to its synonym. Whatever is translated, an original text already exists for
students, one which need not be discovered or acted upon, but simply communicated.7
The students list repetition as one of the elements they most worry about. This cues
signals to them that they need to eliminate the repetition either by substituting or delet-
ing words or phrases. Repetition occurs, in large part, because student writing imitates—
transcribes—speech: attention to repetitious words is a manner of cleaning speech. Without
a sense of the developmental possibilities of revision (and writing in general) students seek,
on the authority of many textbooks, simply to clean up their language and prepare to type.
What is curious, however, is that students are aware of lexical repetition, but not conceptual
repetition. They only notice the repetition if they can “hear” it: they do not diagnose lexical
repetition as symptomatic of problems on a deeper level. By rewording their sentences to
avoid the lexical repetition, the students solve the immediate problem, but blind themselves
to problems on a textual level; although they are using different words, they are sometimes
merely restating the same idea with different words. Such blindness, as I discovered with
student writers, is the inability to “see” revision as a process: the inability to “re-view” their
work again, as it were, with different eyes, and to start over.
The revision strategies described above are consistent with the students’ understanding
of the revision process as requiring lexical changes but not semantic changes. For the stu-
dents, the extent to which they revise is a function of their level of inspiration. In fact, they
use the word inspiration to describe the ease or difficulty with which their essay is written,
and the extent to which the essay needs to be revised. If students feel inspired, if the writing
comes easily, and if they don’t get stuck on individual words or phrases, then they say that
they cannot see any reason to revise. Because students do not see revision as an activity in
which they modify and develop perspectives and ideas, they feel that if they know what they
want to say, then there is little reason for making revisions.
The only modification of ideas in the students’ essays occurred when they tried out two or
three introductory paragraphs. This results, in part, because the students have been taught
in another version of the linear model of composing to use a thesis statement as a controlling
device in their introductory paragraphs. Since they write their introductions and their thesis
statements even before they have really discovered what they want to say, their early close
attention to the thesis statement, and more generally the linear model, function to restrict
114 Nancy Sommers
and circumscribe not only the development of their ideas, but also their ability to change the
direction of these ideas.
Too often as composition teachers we conclude that students do not willingly revise. The
evidence from my research suggests that it is not that students are unwilling to revise, but
rather that they do what they have been taught to do in a consistently narrow and predictable
way. On every occasion when I asked students why they hadn’t made any more changes,
they essentially replied, “I knew something larger was wrong, but I didn’t think it would help
to move words around.” The students have strategies for handling words and phrases and
their strategies helped them on a word or sentence level. What they lack, however, is a set
of strategies to help them identify the “something larger” that they sensed was wrong and
work from there. The students do not have strategies for handling the whole essay. They lack
procedures or heuristics to help them reorder lines of reasoning or ask questions about their
purposes and readers. The students view their compositions in a linear way as a series of
parts. Even such potentially useful concepts as “unity” or “form” are reduced to the rule that
a composition, if it is to have form, must have an introduction, a body, and a conclusion, or
the sum total of the necessary parts.
The students decide to stop revising when they decide that they have not violated any of
the rules for revising. These rules, such as “Never begin a sentence with a conjunction” or
“Never end a sentence with a preposition,” are lexically cued and rigidly applied. In general,
students will subordinate the demands of the specific problems of their text to the demands
of the rules. Changes are made in compliance with abstract rules about the product, rules
that quite often do not apply to the specific problems in the text. These revision strategies are
teacher-based, directed towards a teacher-reader who expects compliance with rules—with
pre-existing “conceptions”—and who will only examine parts of the composition (writing com-
ments about those parts in the margins of their essays) and will cite any violations of rules
in those parts. At best the students see their writing altogether passively through the eyes
of former teachers or their surrogates, the textbooks, and are bound to the rules which they
have been taught.
Rewriting: “It is a matter of looking at the kernel of what I have written, the content, and
then thinking about it, responding to it, making decisions, and actually restructuring it.”
Rewriting: “I rewrite as I write. It is hard to tell what is a first draft because it is not deter-
mined by time. In one draft, I might cross out three pages, write two, cross out a fourth,
rewrite it, and call it a draft. I am constantly writing and rewriting. I can only conceptualize
so much in my first draft—only so much information can be held in my head at one time;
my rewriting efforts are a reflection of how much information I can encompass at one
time. There are levels and agenda which I have to attend to in each draft.”
Rewriting: “Rewriting means, on one level, finding the argument, and on another level,
language changes to make the argument more effective. Most of the time I feel as if I can
go on rewriting forever. There is always one part of a piece that I could keep working on.
Revision Strategies 115
It is always difficult to know at what point to abandon a piece of writing. I like this idea that
a piece of writing is never finished, just abandoned.”
Rewriting: “My first draft is usually very scattered. In rewriting, I find the line of argument.
After the argument is resolved, I am much more interested in word choice and phrasing.”
Revising: “My cardinal rule in revising is never to fall in love with what I have written in a
first or second draft. An idea, sentence, or even a phrase that looks catchy, I don’t trust.
Part of this idea is to wait a while. I am much more in love with something after I have
written it than I am a day or two later. It is much easier to change anything with time.”
Revising: “It means taking apart what I have written and putting it back together again.
I ask major theoretical questions of my ideas, respond to those questions, and think of
proportion and structure, and try to find a controlling metaphor. I find out which ideas can
be developed and which should be dropped. I am constantly chiseling and changing as
I revise.”
The experienced writers describe their primary objective when revising as finding the form
or shape of their argument. Although the metaphors vary, the experienced writers often use
structural expressions such as “finding a framework,” “a pattern,” or “a design” for their argu-
ment. When questioned about this emphasis, the experienced writers responded that since
their first drafts are usually scattered attempts to define their territory, their objective in the sec-
ond draft is to begin observing general patterns of development and deciding what should be
included and what excluded. One writer explained, “I have learned from experience that I need
to keep writing a first draft until I figure out what I want to say. Then in a second draft, I begin
to see the structure of an argument and how all the various sub-arguments which are buried
beneath the surface of all those sentences are related.” What is described here is a process
in which the writer is both agent and vehicle. “Writing,” says Barthes, unlike speech, “develops
like a seed, not a line,”8 and like a seed it confuses beginning and end, conception and produc-
tion. Thus, the experienced writers say their drafts are “not determined by time,” that rewriting
is a “constant process,” that they feel as if (they) “can go on forever.” Revising confuses the
beginning and end, the agent and vehicle; it confuses, in order to find, the line of argument.
After a concern for form, the experienced writers have a second objective: a concern for
their readership. In this way, “production” precedes “conception.” The experienced writers
imagine a reader (reading their product) whose existence and whose expectations influ-
ence their revision process. They have abstracted the standards of a reader and this reader
seems to be partially a reflection of themselves and functions as a critical and productive
collaborator—a collaborator who has yet to love their work. The anticipation of a reader’s
judgment causes a feeling of dissonance when the writer recognizes incongruities between
intention and execution, and requires these writers to make revisions on all levels. Such
a reader gives them just what the students lacked: new eyes to “re-view” their work. The
experienced writers believe that they have learned the causes and conditions, the product,
which will influence their reader, and their revision strategies are geared towards creating
these causes and conditions. They demonstrate a complex understanding of which exam-
ples, sentences, or phrases should be included or excluded. For example, one experienced
writer decided to delete public examples and add private examples when writing about the
energy crisis because “private examples would be less controversial and thus more persua-
sive.” Another writer revised his transitional sentences because “some kinds of transitions
116 Nancy Sommers
are more easily recognized as transitions than others.” These examples represent the type of
strategic attempts these experienced writers use to manipulate the conventions of discourse
in order to communicate to their reader.
But these revision strategies are a process of more than communication; they are part
of the process of discovering meaning altogether. Here we can see the importance of dis-
sonance; at the heart of revision is the process by which writers recognize and resolve the
dissonance they sense in their writing. Ferdinand de Saussure has argued that meaning
is differential or “diacritical,” based on differences between terms rather than “essential” or
inherent qualities of terms. “Phonemes,” he said, “are characterized not, as one might think,
by their own positive quality but simply by the fact that they are distinct.”9 In fact, Saussure
bases his entire Course in General Linguistics on these differences, and such differences
are dissonant; like musical dissonances which gain their significance from their relationship
to the “key” of the composition, which itself is determined by the whole language, specific
language (parole) gains its meaning from the system of language (langue) of which it is a
manifestation and part. The musical composition—a “composition” of parts—creates its “key”
as in an overall structure which determines the value (meaning) of its parts. The analogy with
music is readily seen in the compositions of experienced writers: both sorts of composition
are based precisely on those structures experienced writers seek in their writing. It is this
complicated relationship between the parts and the whole in the work of experienced writers
which destroys the linear model; writing cannot develop “like a line” because each addition
or deletion is a reordering of the whole. Explicating Saussure, Jonathan Culler asserts that
“meaning depends on difference of meaning.”10 But student writers constantly struggle to
bring their essays into congruence with a predefined meaning. The experienced writers do
the opposite: they seek to discover (to create) meaning in the engagement with their writing,
in revision. They seek to emphasize and exploit the lack of clarity, the differences of mean-
ing, the dissonance that writing as opposed to speech allows in the possibility of revision.
Writing has spatial and temporal features not apparent in speech—words are recorded in
space and fixed in time—which is why writing is susceptible to reordering and later addition.
Such features make possible the dissonance that both provokes revision and promises, from
itself, new meaning.
For the experienced writers the heaviest concentration of changes is on the sentence
level, and the changes are predominantly by addition and deletion. But, unlike the students,
experienced writers make changes on all levels and use all revision operations. Moreover,
the operations the students fail to use—reordering and addition—seem to require a theory
of the revision process as a totality—a theory which, in fact, encompasses the whole of the
composition. Unlike the students, the experienced writers possess a non-linear theory in
which a sense of the whole writing both precedes and grows out of an examination of the
parts. As we saw, one writer said he needed “a first draft to figure out what to say,” and
“a second draft to see the structure of an argument buried beneath the surface.” Such a
“theory” is both theoretical and strategical; once again, strategy and theory are conflated in
ways that are literally impossible for the linear model. Writing appears to be more like a seed
than a line.
Two elements of the experienced writers’ theory of the revision process are the adoption of
a holistic perspective and the perception that revision is a recursive process. The writers ask:
what does my essay as a whole need for form, balance, rhythm, or communication. Details are
added, dropped, substituted, or reordered according to their sense of what the essay needs
Revision Strategies 117
for emphasis and proportion. This sense, however, is constantly in flux as ideas are developed
and modified; it is constantly “re-viewed” in relation to the parts. As their ideas change, revision
becomes an attempt to make their writing consonant with that changing vision.
The experienced writers see their revision process as a recursive process—a process
with significant recurring activities—with different levels of attention and different agenda for
each cycle. During the first revision cycle their attention is primarily directed towards narrow-
ing the topic and delimiting their ideas. At this point, they are not as concerned as they are
later about vocabulary and style. The experienced writers explained that they get closer to
their meaning by not limiting themselves too early to lexical concerns. As one writer com-
mented to explain her revision process, a comment inspired by the summer 1977 New York
power failure: “I feel like Con Edison cutting off certain states to keep the generators going. In
first and second drafts, I try to cut off as much as I can of my editing generator, and in a third
draft, I try to cut off some of my idea generators, so I can make sure that I will actually fin-
ish the essay.” Although the experienced writers describe their revision process as a series
of different levels or cycles, it is inaccurate to assume that they have only one objective for
each cycle and that each cycle can be defined by a different objective. The same objectives
and sub-processes are present in each cycle, but in different proportions. Even though these
experienced writers place the predominant weight upon finding the form of their argument
during the first cycle, other concerns exist as well. Conversely, during the later cycles, when
the experienced writers’ primary attention is focused upon stylistic concerns, they are still
attuned, although in a reduced way, to the form of the argument. Since writers are limited
in what they can attend to during each cycle (understandings are temporal), revision strate-
gies help balance competing demands on attention. Thus, writers can concentrate on more
than one objective at a time by developing strategies to sort out and organize their different
concerns in successive cycles of revision.
It is a sense of writing as discovery—a repeated process of beginning over again, start-
ing out new—that the students failed to have. I have used the notion of dissonance because
such dissonance, the incongruities between intention and execution, governs both writing
and meaning. Students do not see the incongruities. They need to rely on their own internal-
ized sense of good writing and to see their writing with their “own” eyes. Seeing in revision—
seeing beyond hearing—is at the root of the word revision and the process itself; current dicta
on revising blind our students to what is actually involved in revision. In fact, they blind them
to what constitutes good writing altogether. Good writing disturbs: it creates dissonance.
Students need to seek the dissonance of discovery, utilizing in their writing, as the experi-
enced writers do, the very difference between writing and speech—the possibility of revision.
Acknowledgment
The author wishes to express her gratitude to Professor William Smith, University of
Pittsburgh, for his vital assistance with the research reported in this article and to Patrick
Hays, her husband, for extensive discussions and critical editorial help.
Notes
1 D. Gordon Rohman and Albert O. Wlecke, “Pre-writing: The Construction and Application of Models
for Concept Formation in Writing,” Cooperative Research Project No. 2174, U.S. Office of Education,
Department of Health, Education, and Welfare; James Britton, Anthony Burgess, Nancy Martin,
118 Nancy Sommers
Alex McLeod, Harold Rosen, The Development of Writing Abilities (11–18) (London: Macmillan
Education, 1975).
2 Britton is following Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” in T. A. Sebeok, Style in Language
(Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1960).
3 For an extended discussion of this issue see Nancy Sommers, “The Need for Theory in Composition
Research,” College Composition and Communication. 30 (February, 1979), 46–69.
4 Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 27.
5 Roland Barthes, “Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers,” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1977), pp. 190–191.
6 “Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers,” p. 190.
7 Nancy Sommers and Ronald Schleifer, “Means and Ends: Some Assumptions of Student Writers,”
Composition and Teaching, II (in press).
8 Writing Degree Zero in Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette Lavers and
Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), p. 20.
9 Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New York, 1966), p. 119.
10 Jonathan Culler, Saussure (Penguin Modern Masters Series; London: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 70.
4 Audiences
Irene L. Clark
Every time we open the pages of another piece of writing, we are embarked on a new adven-
ture in which we become a new person . . . we are recreated by the language.
(Gibson, 1950, pp. 265–269)
“Audience” is an unstable referent, a floating signifier. The term can refer to a construct
in the writer’s mind—the “imagined,” “intended,” or “invented” audience. Or it can
refer to a textual presence—the audience “implied” by textual cues or “inscribed” in the
text. Audiences can also refer to “real” people—the actual readers who exist either apart
from and prior to the text (as “addressed” readers) or those who exist as part of the com-
munity in which the text is produced.
In addition, insights associated with new media have further complicated the definition
because multimedia essays are more participatory, collaborative, and distributed. Recent
scholarship in new media has called attention to the blurring of boundaries between audience
and creators, the difficulty of knowing who one’s audience actually is, and issues involv-
ing intellectual property and shared knowledge, among others. How, then, should teachers
address the concept of audience in an undergraduate writing class? This chapter discusses
varying perspectives and controversies associated with audience, examines how the concept
of audience has been complicated by new media, discusses the issue of envisioning an audi-
ence when writing an essay for a standardized test, and suggests possibilities for addressing
audience in the writing class.
Perspectives on Audience
Audience has been a significant component of rhetoric since classical times. Plato, in the
Phaedrus (370 bce), asserted that the rhetorician should adapt a speech to the characteris-
tics of an audience, classifying “the type of speech appropriate to each type of soul” (1952,
p. 147). Aristotle also conceived of audience in terms of actual “hearers” of persuasive dis-
course. In Book II of the Rhetoric (1991), Aristotle discussed the ways a speaker might adapt
his discourse to various audiences, categorizing audiences according to their time in life
(youth, age, the prime of life, etc.) and discussing various appeals by means of which a rhetor
could be persuasive. This rhetorical model, as Kirsch and Roen (1990) have pointed out, rests
on several assumptions: that the audience is known, the values and needs of the audience can
be identified, and the audience is separate from the discourse and its social context. Although
potentially applicable to oral communication (as when giving a speech to a particular club or
professional group), the notion that an audience is completely knowable does not transfer eas-
ily to written discourse, in which an audience is often completely removed in both time and
space from the writer, and this is particularly the case with the use of new media. From the
perspective of the Composition class, this model characterizes a rhetorical interaction as mov-
ing in only one direction, from the rhetor (the speaker or writer) to the audience or reader.
The writer, according to this model, is conceived of as a sender and the audience as merely
a receiver and it is now recognized that the audience has a significant impact on the sender.
Nevertheless, insights into audience from classical rhetoric remain relevant, in particular
Aristotle’s discussion of three persuasive appeals: pathos, the appeal to the emotions of the
audience, ethos, the appeal to the credibility of the speaker, and logos, the appeal to logic and
reason. Familiarizing students with these appeals can help them consider what is likely to have
an impact on an audience. But in presenting these appeals in the classroom, it is important that
students not only know the definitions, but also understand how they work so that they can
use them in their own writing. In order for an appeal to be effective, “it must focus the audi-
ence’s attention, push the counterarguments into the background, and encourage the audience
members to play along for a while” (Killingsworth, 2005, p. 36). Killingsworth maintained
that the word “attention” here is key, pertinent to whatever medium is being used because
“the root of the word attention—‘to attend’—literally means to listen” (p. 36). “Listening” for
Aristotle’s audience meant an audience that was physically present and could actually hear what
was being said. For 21st-century audiences “listening” or “attending” can occur in cyberspace.
Rediscovering Audience
Mary Jo Reiff (2004), in an overview of perspectives on audience that are relevant for the
teaching of writing, noted that after Aristotle, attention to audience diminished, although it
was revived in the 18th century in its association with psychology. However, 19th-century
rhetoric did not emphasize audience, focusing instead on formal features of language such as
Audiences 121
style and correctness. The 20th century, then, “rediscovered” rhetoric, and with the redis-
covery came renewed recognition of the writer–audience relationship in constructing an
effective text. Redefining rhetoric more broadly as “the use of language as a symbolic means
of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols,” Kenneth Burke, in
The Philosophy of Literary Form (1973, p. 43), revived the importance of audience in commu-
nication, as did Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca in The New Rhetoric: A Treatise
on Argument (1958). These texts affirmed the classical view of audience as existing outside
the discourse, and the Composition textbooks of the 1970s and 1980s, reflecting this view,
emphasized the importance of knowing the characteristics of particular audiences in terms
of their “educational and social backgrounds, how old they are, what kind of work they do,
and whether they are, on the whole, liberal or conservative about religion, sex and politics”
(Hairston, 1978, pp. 107–108, quoted in Reiff, 2004, p. 17). This approach to audience was
essentially demographic, the assumption being that if a writer understood the external charac-
teristics of an audience, such as education, occupation, or religious belief, he or she would be
able to persuade that audience more effectively. Similar to Aristotle’s perspective, this concept
of audience presumes that the audience consists of real people whose ideas and values can be
known and understood by a writer.
Cognitive Perspectives
The cognitive perspective on audience, building on the work of cognitive theorists such as
Jean Piaget (The Language and Thought of the Child, 1926/1959) and Lev Vygotsky (Thought
and Language, 1934/1962), viewed the ability to understand audience as a mark of cognitive
maturity. They maintained that a writer’s ability to consider the ideas and views of others—
that is, to move beyond the egocentricity of early childhood—reflected a more developed
form of thinking. Piaget’s work discussed various stages in cognitive development, showing
that younger children are less able to consider a listener’s point of view than older ones, and
in a related approach, Vygotsky used the term “inner speech” to refer to the uncontextualized
transformation of thought into language. Vygotsky contrasted the difference between an audi-
ence for speech with the audience for writing, noting that the task of writing for an unknown
abstract audience is a more complex task than that of a speaker addressing listeners who
are physically present. Vygotsky’s concept of “inner speech” influenced the work of Linda
Flower, whose cognitive perspective on writing was very important in the late 1970s and
1980s. In “Writer-Based Prose: A Cognitive Basis for Problems in Writing” (1979), Flower
used the term “egocentric or writer-based prose” to characterize writing that does not con-
sider audience, and “reader-based prose” to characterize writing that does. Writer-based prose
often omits contextual information or elaboration that an audience would need or includes
information that an audience would not be able to understand without further explanation.
The idea of writer-based versus reader-based prose is a useful one to address in a writing
class because it helps students understand that the first drafts of all writers, even experienced
and accomplished writers, may be characterized by writer-based prose. First drafts often con-
tain initial thoughts about a topic, and it is only when the draft has been written that a writer
may be able to consider the needs of an audience and add necessary explanation, elaboration,
or examples. In fact, Peter Elbow (1987), in “Closing My Eyes as I Speak: An Argument for
Ignoring Audience,” maintained that first drafts should ignore audience altogether. This “weak
writing,” Elbow argued, “can help us in the end to better writing than we would have writ-
ten if we’d kept readers in mind from the start” (p. 50). Some audiences may be inviting or
enabling; others may be inhibiting. If writers are too aware of such an audience, they may
experience writer’s block. Therefore, it can be liberating for writers to forget about audience
altogether during the writing of a first draft.
122 Irene L. Clark
The addressed audience, the actual or intended readers of a discourse, exists outside of
the text. Writers may analyze these readers’ needs, anticipate their biases, even defer to
their wishes. But it is only through the text, through language, that writers embody or
give life to their conception of the reader. In so doing, they do not so much create a role
for the reader—a phrase which implies that the writer somehow creates a mold to which
the reader adjusts—as invoke it.
(p. 169)
Citing the example of a student who wishes to persuade her neighbors that a proposed home
for mentally disabled adults would not be a disaster for the neighborhood, Ede and Lunsford
pointed out that the student must not only analyze the real audience—that is, not only know
demographic factors such as age, race, and class—but also assess how much the real audience
actually knows about mental disability, in particular, what fears the subject might raise and
what values might be used in making an appeal to change the audience’s beliefs or attitudes.
But beyond learning as much as possible about the real audience and tailoring the text to
suit the needs of that real audience, the student might also invite that audience to see itself
in an especially admirable light, that is, to create a role for that audience as enlightened and
humanitarian; an audience who would be inclined to behave charitably once it was properly
informed. Ede and Lunsford also pointed out that writers play the additionally creative roles
as the readers of their own writing, testing the effectiveness of the cues within the text dur-
ing rereading. They maintained that “it is the writer who, as writer and reader of his or her
own text, one guided by a sense of purpose and by the particularities of a specific rhetorical
situation, establishes the range of potential roles an audience may play” (Ede & Lunsford,
1984, p. 166).
This dual concept of real and created audience was further problematized by Barbara
Tomlinson (1990), in “Ong May Be Wrong: Negotiating with Non-fictional Readers.”
Tomlinson agreed that writers must both address actual readers as well as invoke fuller rep-
resentations of audiences, but she emphasized that writers must first consider real readers on
whom we depend for esteem and approval. “It is only because we have those idiosyncratic,
124 Irene L. Clark
individual readers that we can ever learn to generalize about readers, to fictionalize our audi-
ences effectively,” Tomlinson observed. “These are the readers we learn to generalize from”
(p. 88). This idea that the fictionalized audience derives from one that a writer has had
acquaintance with was supported by Jack Selzer (2000), who noted that “like the intended
reader . . . and like other fictional characters, narratees and implied readers can be based on
real people, can be idealizations of real people, or can be pure creations” (p. 78). More con-
crete is the term “informed reader,” suggested by Stanley Fish (1980), denoting “neither
an abstraction nor an actual living reader but a hybrid—a real reader (me) who does every-
thing within his power to make himself informed” (p. 49). The informed reader is both the
communal reader of the discourse community and an individual real reader who is actively
engaged in understanding the text.
Mary Jo Reiff (1996) similarly endorsed the idea of multiple audiences, arguing that a writ-
er’s “invoked” audience is shaped by participation in a particular community. That commu-
nity may be horizontal—a community of peers who share an equal status—as when students
write for one another—or vertical, as when a text is intended for someone in a position of
authority, such as the teacher. Reiff also points out that in the workplace, a text may involve
primary and secondary audiences. She cites the example of a graphic designer in an advertising
firm who believes “that the department is losing some important clients due to the use of out-
dated equipment.” He therefore writes to a middle-level manager, suggesting the purchase of
new equipment. In this case, the manager is the “immediate” or primary audience. However,
the manager cannot authorize large expenditures and must recommend the idea to her boss,
who becomes the “secondary” audience (Reiff, 1996, p. 415).
For Discussion
In small groups, create a scenario in which someone has to address a primary and sec-
ondary audience. In what way are these audiences different? How would you be able
to juggle the text to have on impact on both of these audiences?
If you go to the Web with a question and get thousands of “hits” in answer to
it . . . shouldn’t that answer be considered as common knowledge that doesn’t need to
be cited? And even if we answer “no” to that question, which one of the thousands of
sources should be the one to be cited?
(p. 62)
What makes the differences between effective communication and mere wasted
effort . . . is something I shall call the rhetorical stance, a stance which depends on dis-
covering and maintaining in any writing situation a proper balance among the three ele-
ments that are at work in any communicative effort, the available arguments about the
subject itself, the interests and peculiarities of the audience, and the voice, the implied
character, of the speaker.
(pp. 139–145)
126 Irene L. Clark
What is happening?
What happened?
What happens?
What may happen?
To give an example, suppose you were standing in the post office with a friend, comment-
ing on how long the lines were. As you observed the lines, you would not be very distant
from your subject matter—that is, the experience of standing in the line. Later on, you might
recall those lines in narrative form to another friend, a process that would require you to
select and incorporate details of the experience from memory. Still later, recalling those lines,
you might write a report in expository form about the line at the post office, a process that
would involve further generalization and abstraction, and then, months or years later, you
might use that experience of waiting in line and other experiences occurring since then to
argue a position about those long lines, a process that would involve still greater abstraction
and generalization.
In terms of the “I–you” relation, Moffett defines degrees of distance not between the
writer and the subject, but, rather, between the writer and the audience. Students might
begin by writing for themselves and then move beyond to write for increasingly abstract
audiences, from the known to the unknown. Moffett maintains that an effective writing cur-
riculum would enable students to write about “what is happening” for a variety of audiences,
from recreating an experience for oneself, to narrating the experience to a close friend, to
writing formally about the experience for a public audience whom the writer does not know.
Moffett’s curriculum, then, is based on a “universe of discourse,” which moves the student
from concrete experience to abstract idea, and from the self to the world. The teacher’s role
within this universe is to construct writing assignments that enable students to move in this
progression and to gain consciousness of how different audiences require different conceptual
and textual strategies.
Audiences 127
Academic writing tasks are tests and students understand this. They ask themselves, “what
does the teacher want?” and they view their audience as the person who wields the corrective
pen and assigns the grade.
College writing assignments, however, are not intended to teach students to write directly
to their teacher. Rather, their goal is to enable students to construct discourse for a wider
academic audience and to master the text genres that such audiences expect. Therefore,
although the teacher is a significant actual reader, he or she serves as a representative of the audi-
ence toward which the writing is oriented. Before the Internet enabled students to write for
a wider audience, college writing assignments required students to “pretend” that they were
writing for a more encompassing, general audience and to address their discourse toward that
audience even though the only “reader” of the discourse was usually the teacher.
Actually, as Paretti (2009) pointed out, “the teacher is always the wrong audience with the
wrong needs and the wrong goals”:
For example, a letter to the editor submitted only to a Composition instructor for a grade
would be “inauthentic” because the stated purpose (to express one’s views to a newspaper
audience) and the actual purpose (to have one’s writing ability evaluated) do not match.
(p. 173)
Moreover, no matter what audience they are supposed to be writing for, students know
“that they are always writing for the teacher, and that the teacher who is grading them has
expectations, standards, and preferences that may or may not overlap with those they will find
elsewhere” (p. 176).
128 Irene L. Clark
However, if students think of audience solely in terms of their teacher, the nature of
the discourse instantly changes. Sometimes, students may omit necessary explanations,
definitions, or support, because they assume, quite reasonably, that the teacher is already
familiar with the topic and, therefore, does not need such information. In fact, in some
instances, students may actually address the teacher directly, almost as if they were writing
personal letters instead of formal essays. One of my students, for example, began his paper
as follows:
My paper is about how the traditional family will not be a workable social entity in the
twenty-first century. When we discussed Stephanie Coontz’s book in class, it showed
that the idea of the ideal traditional family is only a myth.
Other problems associated with students’ obliviousness to audience are the assumption of
an inappropriate tone or, when students write about controversial topics, the presentation
of only one side of an issue. Seemingly insensible to the rhetorical goals of college writing,
students may write blatantly opinionated, aggressive, or poorly reasoned diatribes on the
topic, rather than an appropriately thoughtful, reasoned response. They don’t seem to realize
that an outrageous or insulting statement such as “Anyone who believes this is just a racist,”
or “Women are naturally inferior to men,” might have a negative, rather than a persuasive,
effect on a reader. Of course, if a student wrote a blatantly offensive statement on a blog, the
outraged responses of the wider audience would immediately indicate its effect.
Actually, as Joseph Harris has observed in Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts (2006),
although writing is often depicted as a conversation, “academic writing is almost always
intended to persuade a third reader” (p. 36):
One scholar will criticize the work of another less in the hope of having her rival recant
than in persuading other readers to see the good sense of her (rather than his) views. Even
an indignant author writing to protest a wrong-headed review of his latest book addresses
his letter “To the Editor.”
(p. 36)
Understanding the role of audience in the production of discourse, then, means that stu-
dents need to choose a discoursal role that is appropriate for the intended audience and the
genre for which the text is written, which requires them to anticipate as much as possible
who would be likely to read that genre. A posting on a classroom blog will be read by stu-
dents in that class; but it is also possible that others beyond the class will read it as well. The
potential of new media to expand the audience has the advantage of involving students in
a wider community, but it also makes it impossible for them to envision an audience with
the same precision one might have had in the past. In the context of academic writing,
then, it is useful to imagine a range of possible readers and construct a text with that range
in mind.
1 It helps students understand that the teacher is not the only audience for an assigned essay.
2 It serves as a heuristic to generate ideas.
3 Because it fosters respect for an audience’s humanity and opinions, it helps students
understand that an essay is not simply a vehicle for the writer to express his or her own
ideas, but, rather, that its goal is for the writer to engage in a cooperative activity with
the reader. In this context, rhetoric is conceived of as inherently social.
4 It enables students to distinguish when it is appropriate to confront an opponent directly
and when it is appropriate to strive for change through mutual acceptance and under-
standing by each party of the other’s views.
5 It helps students determine which cues in their own text are likely to be effective in
addressing their created audience.
When students create their characters and attempt to imitate these characters’ voices in writ-
ing, they gain a more immediate sense of their potential audience and a greater insight into
the audience’s beliefs, attitudes, and values. Such understanding enables students to become
sensitive to when such an audience would experience a sense of threat and anticipate poten-
tial areas of conflict. It also helps students understand the complexity of the issues involved.
Working with dialogue also has the advantage of tapping into students’ skills at speaking and
listening, which are often better developed than their writing skills. Students can, thus, use
their knowledge of what is appropriate in oral discourse to detect what may be inappropriate
in their writing. The inappropriateness of statements such as “this idea is just ridiculous” or
“that idea is just crazy” or “anyone who believes that is just a racist” is more easily discerned
if students imagine themselves actually saying them to real people; they are better able to gage
the effect of extreme statements on the persuasiveness of their papers. The term “audience,”
then, becomes something real for them, not just an abstract concept.
The following section includes an exercise based on the idea of fictionalizing an audience.
I suggest that you work through this exercise yourself and also adapt it for your students.
1 What is this person’s name, age, and profession? Describe this person’s physical appearance.
2 What is this person’s current attitude toward this topic?
3 How much does this person know about the topic?
4 Describe this person’s value system.
5 How does this person’s value system influence his or her attitude toward the topic?
6 What aspect of the topic does this character find most important?
7 What aspect of the topic does this character find most disturbing?
130 Irene L. Clark
Writing a Dialogue
To utilize dialogue in the exploration of a topic, recall the character you created through the
above “character prompts.” Then, assume that after listening to the character you have imag-
ined, you decide to enter the discussion and engage in a dialogue with him or her. Script this
exchange in a dialogue of one to two pages, remembering that both participants should be
presented as polite and intelligent people. In this interchange, no one should make outrageous
or insulting statements and no one should win. The aim is to generate an exchange of ideas,
not to score points over an adversary.
How do you (or your students) feel about the issue of school uniforms? Were you (or
your students) required to wear a uniform in school? If so, how did you (or they) feel
about it? Do you perhaps have children of your own who are required to wear a uni-
form to school? If so, are you in favor of such a policy? If not, do you wish they had
such a requirement?
Choose a position in this controversy and write a dialogue between yourself and
either Principal Blair or President Woodson discussing this issue.
Other possibilities: start a blog on the topic of school uniforms or locate one on the
Internet and summarize the discussion.
novice writers need to experience the satisfactions and conflicts of reader response—both
the satisfaction that comes from having successfully shaped the reader’s understanding and
experience, and the conflict that arises when a concept that seemed clear to the writer
baffles the reader, when a phrase which held special meaning for the writer evokes no
response, or when an omitted detail—clear enough in the writer’s mind—causes the reader
to stumble.
(p. 181)
This emphasis on writing as social interaction is made apparent when students write for one
another in a classroom chat room, such as Canvas, and is greatly expanded when students post
ideas on a blog.
In terms of classroom pedagogy, a particularly useful means of categorizing different types
of writer–audience relationship was presented by Ryder, Vander Lei, and Roen (1999), who
based their distinction on whether a writer is writing solely for oneself, for an actual person
or persons, or for a third party. These distinctions were explained as follows:
The student who writes to express herself might imagine that she is in a monadic writ-
ing situation. She is both the writer and the audience; no one else need be involved.
A second writing/speaking situation is dyadic. Such cases, where the writer/speaker is
addressing a particular person, are often seen as the most important kinds of persuasion
because of the relationship between the author/speaker and reader/listener . . . . A third
option is a triadic situation. Here, the author/speaker is one of two opponents before an
audience. We see this happen during public debates, when two candidates spar before a
crowd. The two are not trying to persuade each other; rather, each is trying to persuade
the audience, the third party.
(p. 55)
Ryder, Vander Lei, and Roen claimed that the triadic situation is the one that is most suited
to college writing assignments, and that it is, therefore, important for teachers to articulate
their expectations in their assignments, because students will otherwise assume a dyadic rela-
tionship between student and teacher. Persuasive topics, they suggest, forefront the impor-
tance of audience and lend themselves to audience analysis more effectively than other types
of writing assignments.
132 Irene L. Clark
Audience and the Expanded Discourse Community
Another perspective on how writers and audience interact with one another can be obtained
through the concept of discourse community. Discourse communities consist of members
who share language, values, generic conventions, and a set of expectations of the require-
ments for an effective text. Lawyers, English teachers, and doctors all belong to different
discourse communities and each adheres to different ideas about how a text should be writ-
ten. Thus, if a student wishes to become an attorney, he or she will have to learn how to
write and “sound like” an attorney. Otherwise, that person will always be perceived as an
outsider, and his or her opinion will not be considered credible. Bennet Rafoth (1988) sug-
gested that the term “discourse community” may be more helpful for students because it is
more encompassing than the term “audience.” Rafoth noted that “discourse community”
more effectively captures:
the language phenomena that relate writers, readers, and texts. Whereas the audience
metaphor tends naturally to represent readers or listeners as primary, and to admit writ-
ers and texts only as derivatives, discourse community admits writers, readers and texts
all together. Instead of forcing the question “Who is the audience for this writer or this
text” . . . discourse community directs attention to the contexts that give rise to a text,
including the range of conventions that govern different kinds of writing.
(p. 132)
The results of this study indicated that the essays for which students addressed audience before
and during revision were rated the highest, suggesting that an audience analysis guide sheet
can be an effective intervention tool for student writers. The worksheet that follows can be
used for this purpose, even when students are using new media.
Peer Feedback
Peer feedback is one of the most useful strategies I know of for helping students gain awareness
of audience, one that lends itself easily to online exchange of papers through class discussion
lists or Canvas. Students can also bring in several hard copies of their first (not rough!) draft and
devote class time for peer review. Wherever the peer review workshop takes place, however,
it is crucial to distribute a list of specific questions; otherwise, students are likely either to focus
on stylistic or grammatical concerns or simply to offer praise (It flows. I can relate to it. It
speaks to me.). The questions you hand out or post can be tailored to the particular assignment
or can be sufficiently general to apply to many different assignments. Ryder, Vander Lei, and
Roen (1999) offer the following set of questions to structure a peer response session:
I’ll tell you two things I’ve done here at NYU with the writing my students do for me.
One, I assign them to write for each other. So they think, “My peers are going to read
this and also my professor is going to read this.” You’d think they’d be more concerned
about me reading it, but the quality goes up when they know their friends are going to
read it.
The other thing I do, with some of their stuff, is publish it online. I took a whole
bunch of papers by my students from a class we did on the effect of the Internet on
the 2008 Presidential election, and I just put them in a big folder and put them online.
People’s reaction to this was: “Oh, I may actually be communicating something; I’d bet-
ter get it together here.”
(Keen, 2010)
Audiences 137
Audience awareness is a crucial component of learning to write. Helping students understand
multiple notions of audience, incorporating the concept of audience into writing assignments,
and spending time in class examining audience cues in texts will enable students to write for
a broad range of readers in both their educational and professional lives. I suggest that it be
discussed frequently in class both in the context of print and new media texts.
(continued)
138 Irene L. Clark
(continued)
Kirsch, G., & Roen, D. H. (1990). A sense of audience in written communication. Newbury Park, CA:
Sage Publications.
This collection consists of 16 essays on the subject of audience, ten concerned with the history
and theory of audience as a rhetorical concern and six discussing empirical studies.
Kroll, B. M. (1984, May). Writing for readers: Three perspectives on audience. College Composition
and Communication, 35: 172–185.
Kroll presents three conceptions of audience that have influenced Composition teaching: the
rhetorical, the informational, and the social. The article also raises issues about whether the
effectiveness of a text is more fully connected to genre and convention than to social knowledge.
Long, R. C. (1980, May). Writer–audience relationships. CCC, 31: 221–226.
Long distinguishes readers from audience, noting that audience exists within the text as well as
external to it.
Park, D. B. (1982). The meanings of audience. College English, 44: 246–257.
Park advocates the importance of the created rather than real audience.The question to ask is not
“Who is my audience?” but, rather, “Who do I want my audience to be?”
Porter, J. E. (1992). Audience and rhetoric: An archeological composition of the discourse community.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Porter surveys conceptions of audience from Aristotle through the new rhetoric, discussing a
number of theoretical positions that impact audience, such as reader-response criticism and social
constructionism. His focus tends to be on social constructionist perspectives in which the audi-
ence collaborates with the writer in composing a text.
Powell, B., Kara P. A., & Borton, S. (2011). Interaction of author, audience, and purpose in
multimodal texts: Students’ discovery of their role as composer. Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric,
Technology, and Pedagogy, 15(2).
Reiff, M. J. (2004). Approaches to audience: An overview of the major perspectives. Superior, WI: Parlay
Press.
As its title indicates, this book provides an overview of major perspectives on audience: rhetori-
cal, cognitive, textual, contextual, and social constructionist. The book concludes with a chapter
that advocates the value of acknowledging multiple audiences.
Rossen-Knill, D. F. (2013). Refining the given-New expectation for classroom use: A lesson in the
importance of audience. Journal of Teaching Writing, 28(1): 31–51.
Discussing the effectiveness of the given-new principle in sentence level revision, this article
argues that the importance of this principle varies with audience, purpose, and genre.
Shilb, J. (2007). Rhetorical refusals: Defying audiences’ expectations. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois
University Press.
This book defines “rhetorical refusal” as an act of speaking or writing in which the rhetor refuses
to do what the audience considers rhetorically normal. Analysis of how such refusals function is
applied to several case studies.
Weiser, M. E., Fehler, B. M., & Gonzales, A. M. (Eds.). (2009). Engaging audience: Writing in an age
of new literacies. Urbana, IL: NCTE.
This excellent collection of essays brings together theorists and practitioners to examine the
concept of audience from multiple perspectives. It begins with Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford’s
seminal essay, “Audience Addressed, Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition
Theory and Pedagogy,” followed by two additional articles by these authors. Subsequent articles
draw from a variety of fields: communication, history, professional writing, and new media stud-
ies, all building on and engaging with the work of Lunsford and Ede.
Wilson, W. D. (1981). Readers in texts. PMLA, 96: 848–863.
Wilson isolates three distinct kinds of reading presences: the real reader, the implied reader, and
the characterized reader.
Audiences 139
References
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Reading
Closing My Eyes as I Speak
An Argument for Ignoring Audience
Peter Elbow
Very often people don’t listen to you when you speak to them. It’s only when you talk to yourself
that they prick up their ears.
John Ashbery
When I am talking to a person or a group and struggling to find words or thoughts, I often
find myself involuntarily closing my eyes as I speak. I realize now that this behavior is an
instinctive attempt to blot out awareness of audience when I need all my concentration for
just trying to figure out or express what I want to say. Because the audience is so imperiously
present in a speaking situation, my instinct reacts with this active attempt to avoid audience
awareness. This behavior—in a sense impolite or anti-social—is not so uncommon. Even
when we write, alone in a room to an absent audience, there are occasions when we are
struggling to figure something out and need to push aside awareness of those absent read-
ers. As Donald Murray puts it, “My sense of audience is so strong that I have to suppress my
conscious awareness of audience to hear what the text demands” (Berkenkotter and Murray
171). In recognition of how pervasive the role of audience is in writing, I write to celebrate the
benefits of ignoring audience.1
It will be clear that my argument for writing without audience awareness is not meant to
undermine the many good reasons for writing with audience awareness some of the time.
(For example, that we are liable to neglect audience because we write in solitude; that young
people often need more practice in taking into account points of view different from their own;
and that students often have an impoverished sense of writing as communication because
they have only written in a school setting to teachers.) Indeed I would claim some part in
these arguments for audience awareness—which now seem to be getting out of hand.
I start with a limited claim: even though ignoring audience will usually lead to weak writing
at first—to what Linda Flower calls “writer-based prose,” this weak writing can help us in the
end to better writing than we would have written if we’d kept readers in mind from the start.
Then I will make a more ambitious claim: writer-based prose is sometimes better than reader-
based prose. Finally I will explore some of the theory underlying these issues of audience.
A Limited Claim
It’s not that writers should never think about their audience. It’s a question of when. An audi-
ence is a field of force. The closer we come—the more we think about these readers—the
stronger the pull they exert on the contents of our minds. The practical question, then, is
always whether a particular audience functions as a helpful field of force or one that confuses
or inhibits us.
Some audiences, for example, are inviting or enabling. When we think about them as we
write, we think of more and better things to say—and what we think somehow arrives more
142 Peter Elbow
coherently structured than usual. It’s like talking to the perfect listener; we feel smart and
come up with ideas we didn’t know we had. Such audiences are helpful to keep in mind right
from the start.
Other audiences, however, are powerfully inhibiting—so much so, in certain cases, that
awareness of them as we write blocks writing altogether. There are certain people who always
make us feel dumb when we try to speak to them: we can’t find words or thoughts. As soon as
we get out of their presence, all the things we wanted to say pop back into our minds. Here is
a student telling what happens when she tries to follow the traditional advice about audience:
You know ____ [author of a text] tells us to pay attention to the audience that will be
reading our papers, and I gave that a try. I ended up without putting a word on paper
until I decided the hell with____; I’m going to write to who I damn well want to; otherwise
I can hardly write at all.
Admittedly, there are some occasions when we benefit from keeping a threatening audience
in mind from the start. We’ve been putting off writing that letter to that person who intimidates
us. When we finally sit down and write to them—walk right up to them, as it were, and look
them in the eye—we may manage to stand up to the threat and grasp the nettle and thereby
find just what we need to write.
Most commonly, however, the effect of audience awareness is somewhere between
the two extremes: the awareness disturbs or disrupts our writing and thinking without com-
pletely blocking it. For example, when we have to write to someone we find intimidating (and
of course students often perceive teachers as intimidating), we often start thinking wholly
defensively. As we write down each thought or sentence, our mind fills with thoughts of how
the intended reader will criticize or object to it. So we try to qualify or soften what we’ve just
written—or write out some answer to a possible objection. Our writing becomes tangled.
Sometimes we get so tied in knots that we cannot even figure out what we think. We may
not realize how often audience awareness has this effect on our students when we don’t see
the writing processes behind their papers: we just see texts that are either tangled or empty.
Another example. When we have to write to readers with whom we have an awkward
relationship, we often start beating around the bush and feeling shy or scared, or start to
write in a stilted, overly careful style or voice. (Think about the cute, too-clever style of many
memos we get in our departmental mailboxes—the awkward self-consciousness academics
experience when writing to other academics.) When students are asked to write to readers
they have not met or cannot imagine, such as “the general reader” or “the educated public,”
they often find nothing to say except clichés they know they don’t even quite believe.
When we realize that an audience is somehow confusing or inhibiting us, the solution is
fairly obvious. We can ignore that audience altogether during the early stages of writing and
direct our words only to ourselves or to no one in particular—or even to the “wrong” audi-
ence, that is, to an inviting audience of trusted friends or allies. This strategy often dissipates
the confusion; the clenched, defensive discourse starts to run clear. Putting audience out of
mind is of course a traditional practice; serious writers have long used private journals for
early explorations of feeling, thinking, or language. But many writing teachers seem to think
that students can get along without the private writing serious writers find so crucial—or even
that students will benefit from keeping their audience in mind for the whole time. Things often
don’t work out that way.
Closing My Eyes as I Speak 143
After we have figured out our thinking in copious exploratory or draft writing—perhaps
finding the right voice or stance as well—then we can follow the traditional rhetorical advice:
think about readers and revise carefully to adjust our words and thoughts to our intended
audience. For a particular audience it may even turn out that we need to disguise our point
of view. But it’s hard to disguise something while engaged in trying to figure it out. As writers,
then, we need to learn when to think about audience and when to put readers out of mind.
Many people are too quick to see Flower’s “writer-based prose” as an analysis of what’s
wrong with this type of writing and miss the substantial degree to which she was celebrating
a natural, and indeed developmentally enabling, response to cognitive overload. What she
doesn’t say, however, despite her emphasis on planning and conscious control in the writ-
ing process, is that we can teach students to notice when audience awareness is getting in
their way—and when this happens, consciously to put aside the needs of readers for a while.
She seems to assume that when an overload occurs, the writer-based gear will, as it were,
automatically kick into action to relieve it. In truth, of course, writers often persist in using a
malfunctioning reader-based gear despite the overload—thereby mangling their language or
thinking. Though Flower likes to rap the knuckles of people who suggest a “correct” or “natu-
ral” order for steps in the writing process, she implies such an order here: when attention to
audience causes an overload, start out by ignoring them while you attend to your thinking;
after you work out your thinking, turn your attention to audience.
Thus if we ignore audience while writing on a topic about which we are not expert or about
which our thinking is still evolving, we are likely to produce exploratory writing that is unclear
to anyone else—perhaps even inconsistent or a complete mess. Yet by doing this explora-
tory “swamp work” in conditions of safety, we can often coax our thinking through a process
of new discovery and development. In this way we can end up with something better than we
could have produced if we’d tried to write to our audience all along. In short, ignoring audi-
ence can lead to worse drafts but better revisions. (Because we are professionals and adults,
we often write in the role of expert: we may know what we think without new exploratory
writing; we may even be able to speak confidently to critical readers. But students seldom
experience this confident professional stance in their writing. And think how much richer our
writing would be if we defined ourselves as inexpert and allowed ourselves private writing for
new explorations of those views we are allegedly sure of.)
Notice then that two pieties of composition theory are often in conflict:
1 Think about audience as you write (this stemming from the classical rhetorical tradition).
2 Use writing for making new meaning, not just transmitting old meanings already worked
out (this stemming from the newer epistemic tradition I associate with Ann Berthoff’s
classic explorations).
It’s often difficult to work out new meaning while thinking about readers.
[Melville] was a real American in that he always felt his audience in front of him. But
when he ceases to be American, when he forgets all audience, and gives us his sheer
apprehension of the world, then he is wonderful, his book [Moby Dick] commands a still-
ness in the soul, an awe.
(158)
What most readers value in really excellent writing is not prose that is right for readers but
prose that is right for thinking, right for language, or right for the subject being written about.
Closing My Eyes as I Speak 145
If, in addition, it is clear and well suited to readers, we appreciate that. Indeed we feel
insulted if the writer did not somehow try to make the writing available to us before delivering
it. But if it succeeds at being really true to language and thinking and “things,” we are willing
to put up with much difficulty as readers:
[G]ood writing is not always or necessarily an adaptation to communal norms (in the
Fish/Bruffee sense) but may be an attempt to construct (and instruct) a reader capable
of reading the text in question. The literary history of the “difficult” work—from Mallarmé
to Pound, Zukofsky, Olson, etc.—seems to say that much of what we value in writing
we’ve had to learn to value by learning how to read it.
(Trimbur)
1 That the text doesn’t work for readers because it is too much oriented to the writer’s point
of view?
2 Or that the writer was not thinking about readers as she wrote, although the text may
work for readers?
In order to do justice to the reality and complexity of what actually happens in both writers
and readers, I was going to suggest four terms for the four conditions listed above, but I
gradually realized that things are even too complex for that. We really need to ask about
146 Peter Elbow
what’s going on in three dimensions—in the writer, in the reader, and in the text—and realize
that the answers can occur in virtually any combination:
And Chomsky:
It’s interesting to see how poets come together with philosophers on this point—and
even with mathematicians. All are emphasizing the “poetic” function of language in its
literal sense—“poesis” as “making.” They describe their writing process as more like
“getting something right” or even “solving a problem” for its own sake than as communi-
cating with readers or addressing an audience. The task is not to satisfy readers but to
satisfy the rules of the system: “[T]he writer is not thinking of a reader at all; he makes it
‘clear’ as a contract with language.”
(Goodman 164)
Shall we conclude, then, that solving an equation or working out a piece of symbolic logic
is at the opposite end of the spectrum from communicating with readers or addressing an
audience? No. To draw that conclusion would be to fall again into a one-sided position.
Sometimes people write mathematics for an audience, sometimes not. The central point in
this essay is that we cannot answer audience questions in an a priori fashion based on the
“nature” of discourse or of language or of cognition—only in terms of the different uses or
purposes to which humans put discourse, language, or cognition on different occasions. If
most people have a restricted repertoire of uses for writing—if most people use writing only
to send messages to readers, that’s no argument for constricting the definition of writing. It’s
an argument for helping people expand their repertoire of uses.
The value of learning to ignore audience while writing, then, is the value of learning to cul-
tivate the private dimension: the value of writing in order to make meaning to oneself, not just
to others. This involves learning to free oneself (to some extent, anyway) from the enormous
power exerted by society and others, to unhook oneself from external prompts and social
stimuli. We’ve grown accustomed to theorists and writing teachers puritanically stressing the
problem of writing: the tendency to neglect the needs of readers because we usually write
in solitude. But let’s also celebrate this same feature of writing as one of its glories: writing
invites disengagement too, the inward turn of mind, and the dialogue with self. Though writ-
ing is deeply social and though we usually help things by enhancing its social dimension,
writing is also the mode of discourse best suited to helping us develop the reflective and
private dimension of our mental lives.
[B]y ignoring audience in the conventional sense, we return to it in another sense. What
I get from Vygotsky and Bakhtin is the notion that audience is not really out there at
all but is in fact “always already” (to use that poststructuralist mannerism . . .) inside,
Closing My Eyes as I Speak 151
interiorized in the conflicting languages of others—parents, former teachers, peers, pro-
spective readers, whomever—that writers have to negotiate to write, and that we do
negotiate when we write whether we’re aware of it or not. The audience we’ve got to
satisfy in order to feel good about our writing is as much in the past as in the present or
future. But we experience it (it’s so internalized) as ourselves.
(Trimbur)
(Ken Bruffee likes to quote from Frost: “ ‘Men work together, . . . /Whether they work together
or apart’ ” [“The Tuft of Flowers”]). Or—putting it slightly differently—when I engage in what
seems like private non-audience-directed writing, I am really engaged in communication with
the “audience of self.” For the self is multiple, not single, and discourse to self is communica-
tion from one entity to another. As Feldman argues, “The self functions as audience in much
the same way that others do” (290).
Suppose I accept this theory that all discourse is really social—including what I’ve been
calling “private writing” or writing I don’t intend to show to any reader. Suppose I agree that
all language is essentially communication directed toward an audience—whether some past
internalized voice or (what may be the same thing) some aspect of the self. What would this
theory say to my interest in “private writing”?
The theory would seem to destroy my main argument. It would tell me that there’s no such
thing as “private writing”; it’s impossible not to address audience; there are no vacations from
audience. But the theory might try to console me by saying not to worry, because we don’t
need vacations from audience. Addressing audience is as easy, natural, and unaware as
breathing—and we’ve been at it since the cradle. Even young, unskilled writers are already
expert at addressing audiences.
But if we look closely we can see that in fact this theory doesn’t touch my central
practical argument. For even if all discourse is naturally addressed to some audience, it’s
not naturally addressed to the right audience—the living readers we are actually trying
to reach. Indeed the pervasiveness of past audiences in our heads is one more reason
for the difficulty of reaching present audiences with our texts. Thus even if I concede the
theoretical point, there still remains an enormous practical and phenomenological differ-
ence between writing “public” words for others to read and writing “private” words for no
one to read.
Even if “private writing” is “deep down” social, the fact remains that, as we engage in it, we
don’t have to worry about whether it works on readers or even makes sense. We can refrain
from doing all the things that audience-awareness advocates advise us to do (“keeping our
audience in mind as we write” and trying to “decenter”). Therefore this social-discourse the-
ory doesn’t undermine the benefits of “private writing” and thus provides no support at all for
the traditional rhetorical advice that we should “always try to think about (intended) audience
as we write.”
In fact this social-discourse theory reinforces two subsidiary arguments I have been mak-
ing. First, even if there is no getting away from some audience, we can get relief from an
inhibiting audience by writing to a more inviting one. Second, audience problems don’t come
only from actual audiences but also from phantom “audiences in the head” (Elbow, Writing
with Power 186ff.). Once we learn how to be more aware of the effects of both external and
internal readers and how to direct our words elsewhere, we can get out of the shadow even
of a troublesome phantom reader.
152 Peter Elbow
And even if all our discourse is directed to or shaped by past audiences or voices, it
doesn’t follow that our discourse is well directed to or successfully shaped for those audi-
ences or voices. Small children direct much talk to others, but that doesn’t mean they always
suit their talk to others. They often fail. When adults discover that a piece of their writing has
been “heavily shaped” by some audience, this is bad news as much as good: often the writ-
ing is crippled by defensive moves that try to fend off criticism from this reader.
As teachers, particularly, we need to distinguish and emphasize “private writing” in order
to teach it, to teach that crucial cognitive capacity to engage in extended and productive
thinking that doesn’t depend on audience prompts or social stimuli. It’s sad to see so many
students who can reply to live voices but cannot engage in productive dialogue with voices
in their heads. Such students often lose interest in an issue that had intrigued them—just
because they don’t find other people who are interested in talking about it and haven’t learned
to talk reflectively to themselves about it.
For these reasons, then, I believe my main argument holds force even if I accept the the-
ory that all discourse is social. But, perhaps more tentatively, I resist this theory. I don’t know
all the data from developmental linguistics, but I cannot help suspecting that babies engage
in some private poesis—or “play-language”—some private babbling in addition to social bab-
bling. Of course Vygotsky must be right when he points to so much social language in chil-
dren, but can we really trust him when he denies all private or non-social language (which
Piaget and Chomsky see)? I am always suspicious when someone argues for the total non-
existence of a certain kind of behavior or event. Such an argument is almost invariably an act
of definitional aggrandizement, not empirical searching. To say that all language is social is
to flop over into the opposite one-sidedness that we need Vygotsky’s model to save us from.
And even if all language is originally social, Vygotsky himself emphasizes how “inner
speech” becomes more individuated and private as the child matures. “[E]gocentric speech
is relatively accessible in three-year-olds but quite inscrutable in seven-year-olds: the older
the child, the more thoroughly has his thought become inner speech” (Emerson 254; see
also Vygotsky 134). “The inner speech of the adult represents his ‘thinking for himself’ rather
than social adaptation . . . Out of context, it would be incomprehensible to others because it
omits to mention what is obvious to the ‘speaker’ ” (Vygotsky 18).
I also resist the theory that all private writing is really communication with the “audience
of self.” (“When we represent the objects of our thought in language, we intend to make use
of these representations at a later time . . . [T]he speaker-self must have audience directed
intentions toward a listener-self” [Feldman 289].) Of course private language often is a com-
munication with the audience of self:
−− When we make a shopping list. (It’s obvious when we can’t decipher that third item that
we’re confronting failed communication with the self.)
−− When we make a rough draft for ourselves but not for others’ eyes. Here we are seek-
ing to clarify our thinking with the leverage that comes from standing outside and read-
ing our own utterance as audience—experiencing our discourse as receiver instead of
as sender.
−− When we experience ourselves as slightly split. Sometimes we experience ourselves as
witness to ourselves and hear our own words from the outside—sometimes with great
detachment, as on some occasions of pressure or stress.
But there are other times when private language is not communication with audience of self:
Closing My Eyes as I Speak 153
−− Freewriting to no one: for the sake of self but not to the self. The goal is not to com-
municate but to follow a train of thinking or feeling to see where it leads. In doing this
kind of freewriting (and many people have not learned it), you don’t particularly plan to
come back and read what you’ve written. You just write along and the written product
falls away to be ignored, while only the “real product”—any new perceptions, thoughts,
or feelings produced in the mind by the freewriting—is saved and looked at again. (It’s
not that you don’t experience your words at all but you experience them only as speaker,
sender, or emitter—not as receiver or audience. To say that’s the same as being audi-
ence is denying the very distinction between ‘speaker’ and ‘audience.’)
As this kind of freewriting actually works, it often leads to writing we look at. That is,
we freewrite along to no one, following discourse in hopes of getting somewhere, and
then at a certain point we often sense that we have gotten somewhere: we can tell (but
not because we stop and read) that what we are now writing seems new or intriguing
or important. At this point we may stop writing; or we may keep on writing, but in a new
audience-relationship, realizing that we will come back to this passage and read it as
audience. Or we may take a new sheet (symbolizing the new audience-relationship) and
try to write out for ourselves what’s interesting.
−− Writing as exorcism is a more extreme example of private writing not for the audience
of self. Some people have learned to write in order to get rid of thoughts or feelings. By
freewriting what’s obsessively going round and round in our head we can finally let it go
and move on.
I am suggesting that some people (and especially poets and freewriters) engage in a kind
of discourse that Feldman, defending what she calls a “communication-intention” view, has
never learned and thus has a hard time imagining and understanding. Instead of always
using language in an audience-directed fashion for the sake of communication, these writers
unleash language for its own sake and let it function a bit on its own, without much intention
and without much need for communication, to see where it leads—and thereby end up with
some intentions and potential communications they didn’t have before.
It’s hard to turn off the audience of self in writing—and thus hard to imagine writing to no
one (just as it’s hard to turn off the audience of outside readers when writing an audience-
directed piece). Consider “invisible writing” as an intriguing technique that helps you become
less of an audience of self for your writing. Invisible writing prevents you from seeing what
you have written: you write on a computer with the screen turned down, or you write with
a spent ball-point pen on paper with carbon paper and another sheet underneath. Invisible
writing tends to get people not only to write faster than they normally do, but often better (see
Blau). I mean to be tentative about this slippery issue of whether we can really stop being
audience to our own discourse, but I cannot help drawing the following conclusion: just as
in freewriting, suppressing the other as audience tends to enhance quantity and sometimes
even quality of writing; so in invisible writing, suppressing the self as audience tends to
enhance quantity and sometimes even quality.
Contraries in Teaching
So what does all this mean for teaching? It means that we are stuck with two contrary tasks.
On the one hand, we need to help our students enhance the social dimension of writing: to
learn to be more aware of audience, to decenter better and learn to fit their discourse better
154 Peter Elbow
to the needs of readers. Yet it is every bit as important to help them learn the private dimen-
sion of writing: to learn to be less aware of audience, to put audience needs aside, to use
discourse in the desert island mode. And if we are trying to advance contraries, we must be
prepared for paradoxes.
For instance, if we emphasize the social dimension in our teaching (for example, by
getting students to write to each other, to read and comment on each others’ writing in
pairs and groups, and by staging public discussions and even debates on the topics they
are to write about), we will obviously help the social, public, communicative dimension of
writing—help students experience writing not just as jumping through hoops for a grade
but rather as taking part in the life of a community of discourse. But “social discourse” can
also help private writing by getting students sufficiently involved or invested in an issue
so that they finally want to carry on producing discourse alone and in private—and for
themselves.
Correlatively, if we emphasize the private dimension in our teaching (for example, by
using lots of private exploratory writing, freewriting, and journal writing and by helping stu-
dents realize that of course they may need practice with this “easy” mode of discourse before
they can use it fruitfully), we will obviously help students learn to write better reflectively for
themselves without the need for others to interact with. Yet this private discourse can also
help public, social writing—help students finally feel full enough of their own thoughts to have
some genuine desire to tell them to others. Students often feel they “don’t have anything
to say” until they finally succeed in engaging themselves in private desert island writing for
themselves alone.
Another paradox: whether we want to teach greater audience awareness or the ability to
ignore audience, we must help students learn not only to “try harder” but also to “just relax.”
That is, sometimes students fail to produce reader-based prose because they don’t try hard
enough to think about audience needs. But sometimes the problem is cured if they just relax
and write to people—as though in a letter or in talking to a trusted adult. By unclenching, they
effortlessly call on social-discourse skills of immense sophistication. Sometimes, indeed, the
problem is cured if the student simply writes in a more social setting—in a classroom where
it is habitual to share lots of writing. Similarly, sometimes students can’t produce sustained
private discourse because they don’t try hard enough to keep the pen moving and forget
about readers. They must persist and doggedly push aside those feelings of, “My head is
empty, I have run out of anything to say.” But sometimes what they need to learn through all
that persistence is how to relax and let go—to unclench.
As teachers, we need to think about what it means to be an audience rather than just
be a teacher, critic, assessor, or editor. If our only response is to tell students what’s
strong, what’s weak, and how to improve it (diagnosis, assessment, and advice), we actu-
ally undermine their sense of writing as a social act. We reinforce their sense that writ-
ing means doing school exercises, producing for authorities what they already know—not
actually trying to say things to readers. To help students experience us as audience rather
than as assessment machines, it helps to respond by “replying” (as in a letter) rather than
always “giving feedback.”
Paradoxically enough, one of the best ways teachers can help students learn to turn off
audience awareness and write in the desert island mode—to turn off the babble of outside
voices in the head and listen better to quiet inner voices—is to be a special kind of pri-
vate audience to them, to be a reader who nurtures by trusting and believing in the writer.
Closing My Eyes as I Speak 155
Britton has drawn attention to the importance of teacher as “trusted adult” for school children
(67–68). No one can be good at private, reflective writing without some confidence and trust
in self. A nurturing reader can give a writer a kind of permission to forget about other read-
ers or to be one’s own reader. I have benefitted from this special kind of audience and have
seen it prove useful to others. When I had a teacher who believed in me, who was interested
in me and interested in what I had to say, I wrote well. When I had a teacher who thought I
was naive, dumb, silly, and in need of being “straightened out,” I wrote badly and sometimes
couldn’t write at all. Here is an interestingly paradoxical instance of the social-to-private prin-
ciple from Vygotsky and Meade: we learn to listen better and more trustingly to ourselves
through interaction with trusting others.
Look for a moment at lyric poets as paradigm writers (instead of seing them as aberrant),
and see how they heighten both the public and private dimensions of writing. Bakhtin says
that lyric poetry implies “the absolute certainty of the listener’s sympathy” (113). I think it’s
more helpful to say that lyric poets learn to create more-than-usual privacy in which to write
for themselves—and then they turn around and let others overhear. Notice how poets tend to
argue for the importance of no-audience writing, yet they are especially gifted at being public
about what they produce in private. Poets are revealers—sometimes even grandstanders
or showoffs. Poets illustrate the need for opposite or paradoxical or double audience skills:
on the one hand, the ability to be private and solitary and tune out others—to write only for
oneself and not give a damn about readers, yet on the other hand, the ability to be more than
usually interested in audience and even to be a ham.
If writers really need these two audience skills, notice how bad most conventional school-
ing is on both counts. Schools offer virtually no privacy for writing: everything students write
is collected and read by a teacher, a situation so ingrained students will tend to complain
if you don’t collect and read every word they write. Yet on the other hand, schools charac-
teristically offer little or no social dimension for writing. It is only the teacher who reads, and
students seldom feel that in giving their writing to a teacher they are actually communicating
something they really want to say to a real person. Notice how often they are happy to turn
in to teachers something perfunctory and fake that they would be embarrassed to show to
classmates. Often they feel shocked and insulted if we want to distribute to classmates the
assigned writing they hand in to us. (I think of Richard Wright’s realization that the naked
white prostitutes didn’t bother to cover themselves when he brought them coffee as a black
bellboy because they didn’t really think of him as a man or even a person.) Thus the con-
ventional school setting for writing tends to be the least private and the least public—when
what students need, like all of us, is practice in writing that is the most private and also the
most public.
1 Seek ways to heighten both the public and private dimensions of writing. (For activities,
see the previous section.)
2 When working on important audience-directed writing, we must try to emphasize audi-
ence awareness sometimes. A useful rule of thumb is to start by putting the readers in
156 Peter Elbow
mind and carry on as long as things go well. If difficulties arise, try putting readers out of
mind and write either to no audience, to self, or to an inviting audience. Finally, always
revise with readers in mind. (Here’s another occasion when orthodox advice about writ-
ing is wrong—but turns out right if applied to revising.)
3 Seek ways to heighten awareness of one’s writing process (through process writing and
discussion) to get better at taking control and deciding when to keep readers in mind and
when to ignore them. Learn to discriminate factors like these:
(a) The writing task. Is this piece of writing really for an audience? More often than we
realize, it is not. It is a draft that only we will see, though the final version will be for
an audience; or exploratory writing for figuring something out; or some kind of per-
sonal private writing meant only for ourselves.
(b) Actual readers. When we put them in mind, are we helped or hindered?
(c) One’s own temperament. Am I the sort of person who tends to think of what to say
and how to say it when I keep readers in mind? Or someone (as I am) who needs
long stretches of forgetting all about readers?
(d) Has some powerful “audience-in-the-head” tricked me into talking to it when I’m
really trying to talk to someone else—distorting new business into old business?
(I may be an inviting teacher-audience to my students, but they may not be able to
pick up a pen without falling under the spell of a former, intimidating teacher.)
(e) Is double audience getting in my way? When I write a memo or report, I prob-
ably have to suit it not only to my “target audience” but also to some colleagues or
supervisor. When I write something for publication, it must be right for readers, but it
won’t be published unless it is also right for the editors—and if it’s a book it won’t be
much read unless it’s right for reviewers. Children’s stories won’t be bought unless
they are right for editors and reviewers and parents. We often tell students to write
to a particular “real-life” audience—or to peers in the class—but of course they are
also writing for us as graders. (This problem is more common as more teachers get
interested in audience and suggest “second” audiences.)
(f) Is teacher-audience getting in the way of my students’ writing? As teachers we must
often read in an odd fashion: in stacks of 25 or 50 pieces all on the same topic; on
topics we know better than the writer; not for pleasure or learning but to grade or find
problems (see Elbow, Writing with Power 216–36).
To list all these audience pitfalls is to show again the need for thinking about audience needs
yet also the need for vacations from readers to think in peace.
Note
1 There are many different entities called audience: (a) The actual readers to whom the text will
be given; (b) the writer’s conception of those readers—which may be mistaken (see Ong; Park;
Ede and Lunsford); (c) the audience that the text implies—which may be different still (see Booth);
(d) the discourse community or even genre addressed or implied by the text (see Walzer); (e)
ghost or phantom “readers in the head” that the writer may unconsciously address or try to please
(see Elbow, Writing with Power 186ff. Classically, this is a powerful former teacher. Often such an
audience is so ghostly as not to show up as actually “implied” by the text). For the essay I am writ-
ing here, these differences don’t much matter: I’m celebrating the ability to put aside the needs or
Closing My Eyes as I Speak 157
demands of any or all of these audiences. I recognize, however, that we sometimes cannot fight
our way free of unconscious or tacit audiences (as in b or e above) unless we bring them to greater
conscious awareness.
Works Cited
Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Discourse in Life and Discourse in Poetry.” Appendix. Freudianism: A Marxist Critique.
By V. N. Volosinov. Trans. I. R. Titunik. Ed. Neal H. Bruss. New York: Academic, 1976. (Holquist’s
attribution of this work to Bakhtin is generally accepted.)
Berkenkotter, Carol, and Donald Murray. “Decisions and Revisions: The Planning Strategies of a
Publishing Writer and the Response of Being a Rat—or Being Protocoled.” College Composition
and Communication 34 (1983): 156–72.
Blau, Sheridan. “Invisible Writing.” College Composition and Communication 34 (1983): 297–312.
Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1961.
Britton, James. The Development of Writing Abilities, 11–18. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1977.
Bruffee, Kenneth A. “Liberal Education and the Social Justification of Belief.” Liberal Education 68
(1982): 95–114.
Bruner, Jerome. Beyond the Information Given: Studies in the Psychology of Knowing. Ed. Jeremy
Anglin. New York: Norton, 1973.
––—.On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand. Expanded ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1979.
Chomsky, Noam. Reflections on Language. New York: Random, 1975.
Cicotello, David M. “The Art of Writing: An Interview with William Stafford.” College Composition and
Communication 34 (1983): 173–77.
Clarke, Jennifer, and Peter Elbow. “Desert Island Discourse: On the Benefits of Ignoring Audience.” The
Journal Book. Ed. Toby Fulwiler. Montclair, NJ: Boynton, 1987.
Cooper, Anthony Ashley, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury. Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times,
Etc. Ed. John M. Robertson. 2 vols. Gloucester, MA: Smith, 1963.
Ede, Lisa, and Andrea Lunsford. “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in
Composition Theory and Pedagogy.” College Composition and Communication 35 (1984): 140–54.
Elbow, Peter. Writing with Power. New York: Oxford UP, 1981.
––—. Writing Without Teachers. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.
Emerson, Caryl. “The Outer Word and Inner Speech: Bakhtin, Vygotsky, and the Internalization of
Language.” Critical Inquiry 10 (1983): 245–64.
Feldman, Carol Fleisher. “Two Functions of Language.” Harvard Education Review 47 (1977):
282–93.
Flower, Linda. “Writer-Based Prose: A Cognitive Basis for Problems in Writing,” College English 41
(1979): 19–37.
Goodman, Paul. Speaking and Language: Defense of Poetry. New York: Random, 1972.
Griffin, Susan. “The Internal Voices of Invention: Shaftesbury’s Soliloquy.” Unpublished. 1986.
Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature. Garden City: Doubleday, 1951.
Ong, Walter. “The Writer’s Audience Is Always a Fiction.” PMLA 90 (1975): 9–21.
Park, Douglas B. “The Meanings of ‘Audience’ .” College English 44 (1982): 247–57.
Perl, Sondra. “Guidelines for Composing.” Appendix A. Through Teachers’ Eyes: Portraits of Writing
Teachers at Work. By Sondra Perl and Nancy Wilson. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1986.
Progoff, Ira. At A Journal Workshop. New York: Dialogue, 1975.
Shaughnessy, Mina. Errors and Expectations: A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing. New York:
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Trimbur, John. Letter to the author. September 1985.
––—. “Beyond Cognition: Voices in Inner Speech.” Forthcoming in Rhetoric Review.
158 Peter Elbow
Vygotsky, L. S. Thought and Language. Trans. and ed. E. Hanfmann and G. Vakar. 1934. Cambridge:
MIT P, 1962.
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Wright, Richard. Black Boy. New York: Harper, 1945.
I benefited from much help from audiences in writing various drafts of this piece. I am grateful
to Jennifer Clarke, with whom I wrote a collaborative piece containing a case study on this
subject. I am also grateful for extensive feedback from Pat Belanoff, Paul Connolly, Sheryl
Fontaine, John Trimbur, and members of the Martha’s Vineyard Summer Writing Seminar.
5 Genre, Transfer, and Related Issues
Irene L. Clark
I first became aware of how the concept of genre can help students at various levels engage with
writing tasks more successfully when I was teaching a course at the University of Utrecht in
the Netherlands. The primary objective of the course was to help Ph.D. students in the field of
geography use their dissertation research to write potentially publishable articles in English, and
because these students were all high achievers academically and spoke English quite well, I did
not expect that the task would be daunting for them. However, after receiving their first drafts,
I was surprised to discover that many students had experienced considerable difficulty when
they attempted to write an article, not because of poor language skills, and not because they
didn’t know the subject matter, but because they were unfamiliar with the “genre” of scholar-
ship in the social sciences. Of course, in their dissertation research, they had read many scholarly
articles; nevertheless, they lacked analytic strategies for understanding the genre in terms of situ-
ation, purpose, audience, rhetorical structure, and style. Coincidentally, at that time, I became
acquainted with genre theory, initially, with the work of John Swales (1990), who discussed
the rhetorical “moves” in academic writing, and when I explained the concept of genre to my
students and helped them apply it to their own work, their writing improved remarkably. Since
that time, I have used genre theory in all my classes to help students fulfill the expectations of
various writing tasks, and it continues to be beneficial to my own writing as well.
Chapter Overview
This chapter will discuss how the concept of genre has been reconceptualized in Writing
Studies and explain its importance in helping students fulfill the expectations of writing
assignments more effectively, not only in a Composition course, but also in other venues,
both academic and professional. The chapter will also include topics that are often discussed
in the context of genre, such as the relationship between genre and identity, the issue of trans-
fer, and the role of threshold concepts in facilitating transfer. It will also address controversies
associated with genre—the issue of whether genre can be taught explicitly, the question con-
cerning which genres should be taught in writing classes, the relationship between genre and
creativity, and the possibilities for transfer between print and new media genres.
Although as Pare and Smart (1994) point out, genres often have “repeated patterns in the struc-
ture, rhetorical moves, and style of texts” (p. 147) genres are not simply forms. As Medway
and Freedman explain, regularities in form develop from the situation, or as Bazerman (1997)
states, “Genres are not just forms. Genres are forms of life.” They are “the familiar places we
go to create intelligible communicative action with each other and the guideposts we use to
explore the unfamiliar” (p. 19).
Genre Scholarship
An important goal of this chapter is to suggest possibilities for helping both students and
teachers acquire genre awareness, a topic that will be discussed later in this chapter. But genre
scholarship has also been directed toward issues that extend beyond Composition pedagogy.
A significant scholarly concern has been with the potential ideological and cultural aspects of
genre, particularly with issues of power and identity. Other scholarship has focused on the
application of genre theory to specific “real-world” genres, such as lab reports or tax forms,
and more recently with the issue of transfer—that is, the extent to which genre awareness can
enable the transfer of learning from one genre to another.
The longer you work with genre, the more it reveals and the more it connects with—
perhaps because genre is at a central nexus of human sense-making, where typifica-
tion meets utterance in pursuit of human action. To communicate effectively we need
to know what kind of situation we are in, what kinds of things are being said, and
what kinds of things we want to accomplish. . . . Many aspects of communication, social
arrangements, and human meaning-making are packaged in genre recognition.
(p. xi)
Genres then can have an impact on who you become, or as Bazerman (2002) more playfully
phrases it, “If you hang around the race track long enough, you become one of those race
track characters” (p. 14)—using their language and perhaps adopting their values.
Many genre scholars, noting the interaction between genre and identity, have raised
ethical questions about the effect of various academic and professional genres on previously
marginalized or underprivileged groups. Because genres can influence identity, conflict can
occur when the cultural values associated with a genre differ from those of students’ home
cultures. Pare (2002) recounts a situation in which Inuit social workers, who value close
familial, informal relationships, are required to imitate the more technical, bureaucratic
164 Irene L. Clark
conventions of the social work profession. As Bawarshi (2000) noted in his discussion of
the “genre function,” genres exert an influence over readers and writers, causing them to
behave or “perform” in a particular way, influencing how they act and think—potentially
generating change in who they become or want to be—possibly alienating them from their
own cultures.
1 Clear evidence that the writer(s) have been persistent, open-minded, and disciplined in
study.
2 Dominance of reason over emotion or sensual perception.
3 An imagined reader who is coolly rational, reading for information, and intending to
formulate a reasoned response.
Actually, these criteria are similar to a statement by Peter Elbow (1991) about the value of
teaching what he refers to as “academic writing in general,” which he characterized as:
the giving of reasons and evidence rather than just opinions, feelings, experiences: being
clear about claims and assertions rather than just employing or insinuating; getting think-
ing to stand on its own two feet rather than leaning on the authority of who advances it
or the fit with who hears it. In describing academic discourse in this general way, surely
I am describing a major goal of literacy, broadly defined. Are we not engaged in schools
and colleges in trying to teach students to produce reasons and evidence which hold up
on their own rather than just in terms of the tastes or prejudices of readers or how attrac-
tively they are packaged?
(p. 140)
Genre,Transfer, and Related Issues 165
Elbow’s definition implied that students are more likely to acquire academic literacy through
exposure to argumentation.
Elbow’s definition of academic literacy and the criteria noted by Thaiss and Zawacki
suggest the importance of a type of discourse that is associated with the academy, and it is
the perspective of this book that a genre that includes these criteria is useful for students to
understand and be able to produce. Nevertheless, it is important to consider the viewpoints of
those who consider academic writing as inherently elitist, because it endorses a particular set
of values that may be alien to those who come from a working-class background or another
culture. If we require students to write in an established academic genre that is associated
with particular attitudes, beliefs and values, are we engaging in a form of colonization? Can
students become proficient in an academic genre without necessarily embracing the values
associated with that genre?
This perspective views the teaching of academic writing as a means of colonizing marginal-
ized groups, and the writing class therefore becomes a scene in which students are required
to change their identity. “You must think and write like us,” is the approach that is used,
according to this narrative. “Otherwise you cannot succeed.”
Certainly, this concern is worth considering. Given what is now understood about genre,
we acknowledge that academic writing is not simply a particular form. It is based on a way
of thinking, incorporates particular ideologies and values, and influences not only people’s
actions but also people’s identities. Are we, as educators, in our desire to help students suc-
ceed, actually squelching students’ cultural identities?
1 Select a genre (or two, if you wish to compare one with the other) and analyze it for
what it tells us about the people and/or culture or community who use it and the
situation to which it responds. Your thesis for this assignment, then, will be a claim about
what a particular genre tells us about how people respond to and experience a particular situation.
You may select any written genre that interests you, although you should not
choose a broad topic about which many books have been written (such as novels
or plays). Some examples might be greeting cards, letters of recommendation, per-
sonal letters, billboards, and the like. Whichever genre you use, you should make
sure that you describe what the genre is, paying special attention to its features
(physical and textual), who uses it, and when and why it is used. Here are some
questions to consider:
The accomplishment of school genres is achieved without either the writers or those
eliciting the writing being able to articulate the sophisticated rules that underlie them.
These rules are complex, nuanced, variable, context-specific, and as yet unamenable to
complete reconstruction even by skilled researchers.
(pp. 130–131)
Only in the disciplinary classroom, an environment that provides a rich context of reading,
lecture, and discussion, does Freedman perceive that students can acquire the necessary “felt
sense” of the genre that will yield successful writing.
Freedman argued that people acquire genres below the conscious level, and therefore,
the teaching of explicit features of a genre, modeling, or a focus on particular strategies for
learning to write in that genre are unlikely to be helpful for students. In “Learning to Write
Again,” she advocated an “implicit pedagogical model” that involves the following:
1 The learners approach the task with a “dimly felt sense of the new genre they are
attempting.”
2 They begin composing by focusing on the specific content to be embodied in this genre.
3 In the course of the composing, this “dimly felt sense” of the genre is both formulated
and modified by the act of composing.
4 On the basis of external feedback (the grade assigned), the learners either confirm or
modify their map of the genre (1987, p. 102).
The idea that explicit teaching is both desirable and possible, however, also has its advocates.
Responding to Freedman, Williams and Colomb (1993) supported the explicit teaching of
genre because “what you don’t know won’t help you,” and Swales (1990), one of the most
widely known of the early genre theorists, applied genre theory to what he referred to as the
168 Irene L. Clark
characteristic “moves” within a scientific article. Working in the area of ESP (English for
Special Purposes), Swales defined genre primarily by its common communicative purposes,
arguing that a genre-centered approach to teaching would enable students to understand why
a particular genre had acquired its characteristic features and ultimately help them to create
that genre more successfully.
Many working-class, migrant and Aboriginal children have been systematically barred
from competence with those texts, knowledges, and “genres” that enable access to social
and material resources. The culprits, they argue, are not limited to traditional pedagogies
that disregard children’s cultural and linguistic resources and set out to assimilate them
into the fictions of mainstream culture. But the problem is also located in progressive
“process” and “child-centered” approaches that appear to “value differences” but in so
doing leave social relations of inequity fundamentally unquestioned.
(p. vii)
Contributors to Cope and Kalantzis’s book The Powers of Literacy: A Genre Approach to Teaching
Writing, which was intended to explain the Australian genre approach to non-Australians,
maintained that the “progressivist” stress on text ownership and personal voice and the cor-
responding reluctance of teachers to intervene directly in changing students’ texts had, ironi-
cally, promoted a situation in which only the brightest middle-class children, who are already
familiar with the genres of privilege, would be able to learn what is needed for social, and,
ultimately, economic success. Noting that “by the 1980’s it was clear that . . . the new pro-
gressivist curriculum was not producing any noticeable improvement in patterns of educa-
tional attainment” (Cope & Kalantzis, 1993, p. 1), these critics also pointed out that such a
curriculum “encourages students to produce texts in a limited range of written genres, mostly
personalised recounts” (p. 6).
A key point in the Australian perspective on genre was that school genres should be taught
more explicitly, and that a more directive approach is not incompatible with helping students
acquire a workable writing process. In fact, it may yield more fruitful results in terms of help-
ing students master unfamiliar genres. The rationale was explained as follows:
For those outside the discourses and cultures of certain realms of power and access, acquir-
ing these discourses requires explicit explanation: the ways in which the “hows” of text
structure produce the “whys” of social effect. If you live with the “hows”—if you have
a seventh sense of how the “hows” do their social job by virtue of having been brought
up with those discourses—then they will come to you more or less “naturally.” Students
from historically marginalised groups, however, need explicit teaching more than stu-
dents who seem destined for a comfortable ride into the genres and cultures of power.
(Cope & Kalantzis, 1993, p. 8)
Genre,Transfer, and Related Issues 169
To help these marginalized groups, the Australian School of genre, explored in The Powers of
Literacy, edited by Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, advocated the following principles:
•• Genres of writing are identifiable and fixed and boundaries can be drawn around them.
•• Genres ought to be consciously chosen by writers and their writing should conform to
the particular genre’s structure.
•• Structures of genres ought to be taught to pupils so that they will model their writing on
the genre structure.
•• There is too much emphasis on narrative forms in primary school and this is poor prepa-
ration for working in expository modes in secondary school, especially because such
modes are characterized by an impersonal, neutral tone not provided for in most primary
school narrative.
Two more recent publications that also advocate the explicit teaching of genre are J. R.
Martin and David Rose’s book Genre Relations: Mapping Culture (2008) and Mary Macken-
Horarik’s “Something to Shoot For: A Systemic Functional Approach to teaching Genre in
Secondary School Science” (2002). Martin and Rose presented an overview of a scaffolded
curriculum and staged genre-based pedagogy; Macken-Horarik presented what she referred
to as the “teaching-learning cycle,” which consists of three stages: modeling, joint negotia-
tion of text in which teachers and learners work together, and an independent construction
of text, in which learners work independently (p. 26).
I invite them to write as though they are a central speaker at the center of the universe—
rather than feeling, as they often do, that they must summarize what others have said and
only make modest rejoinders from the edge of the conversation.
(p. 80)
Elbow emphasized that for students to be writers (rather than academics), they must write
about something that they know better than the teacher, and that “something” is usually
their own experience. Otherwise, they are writing as test-takers, not as writers. For Elbow,
the writing of first-person narrative is empowering, celebrating a world approached from a
private perspective.
Others, of course, have disagreed. In a published interchange with Peter Elbow, David
Bartholomae (1995) argued that academic writing, not narrative, is the real work of the
university; if the goal is to help students understand how power, tradition, and authority are
transmitted, then we must ask students to do what academics do—work with the past; work
with key texts; work with others’ terms; and struggle with the problems of quotation, cita-
tion, and paraphrase. Bartholomae maintained that although many students will not feel the
pleasure of power of authorship unless we provide them with opportunities to write in the
first person, they will ultimately need to engage in “critical writing,” which, he maintained,
is “at the heart of academic writing.”
Robert Connors and Mike Rose assumed a middle position between those of Elbow and
Bartholomae. Connors (1987) traced the question of what students are supposed to know and
write about from classical times until the present, showing that there have always been two
positions on the subject. In the ancient world, lines of argument were all impersonal, “the
idea being that until a speaker had established his own ethos, usually through community ser-
vice or previous rhetorical success, his own experiences were not important to the discourse”
(p. 167). “Ancient rhetoric was a public discipline,” Connors (1987) pointed out, “devoted to
examining and arguing questions that could be shared by all members of the polity” (p. 167).
He noted that proofs of argument were impersonal and that “to argue from personal opinion
was both hubristic and stupid” (p. 167). This was a perspective on rhetoric that persisted up
until the middle of the 19th century—when interest in impersonal abstract topics was replaced
by a strong emphasis on personal experience, novelty, and the use of the senses. Connors
noted that recent history of rhetoric has been characterized by a revival of the “romantic”
notion of authorship, exemplified in the work of Peter Elbow, Ken Macrorie, and James
Britton, and that the controversy over what sort of writing should be taught in school, “hon-
est personal writing” or “writing that gets the world’s work done,” has yet to be resolved.
Addressing this question, Mike Rose, whose internationally known books, Lives on the
Boundary and Possible Lives, discussed the needs of at-risk students in the context of the writing
Genre,Transfer, and Related Issues 171
genres privileged in college writing classes. In “Remedial Writing Courses: A Critique and a
Proposal,” Rose argued personal topics are not necessarily more relevant than academic ones
and that some students, particularly those from minority cultures, “might not feel comfortable
revealing highly personal experiences” (1983, p. 113). Rose also problematized the notion
of “authenticity” that is often associated with expressivist writing, questioning whether per-
sonal genres are any more “authentic” than non-personal ones. Moreover, in the context of
remedial writing courses—which frequently assign fairly simple topics to put students at ease
and help them avoid error—Rose observed that such assignments do not prepare students for
their “university lives” (p. 110). He advocated a remedial curriculum that “slowly but stead-
ily and systematically introduce[s] remedial writers to transactional/expositional academic
discourse” (p. 112), the genre that students will need to be familiar with as they proceed in
their academic and professional careers.
Both sides of this debate have merit, and I have come to endorse a middle position. I
agree with Rose and others that to be successful in many academic and professional venues,
students ultimately have to be able to write a text that argues a main point or thesis and to
support that thesis with appropriate evidence. However, I also recognize the effect of having
students write literacy narratives (see Chapter 6) because they often generate students’ interest
in writing, enabling them to become aware of their own literacy history and motivating them
to work on their writing. I also use narrative to introduce students to a topic in a writing
assignment. When students explore their previous acquaintance with a topic, they are able
to access prior knowledge and beliefs, insights that can help them develop ideas and discover
what additional information they need.
Compare the perspectives in each essay. Then write an essay that addresses the follow-
ing question:
To what extent should the personal essay be included in the freshman writing class?
Where there is style, there is genre. The transfer of style from one genre to another not
only alters the way a style sounds under conditions of a genre unnatural to it but also
violates or renews the given genre.
(p. 66)
This idea that genre awareness facilitates rather than constrains creativity was implicit in
Bishop’s criticism of how academic writing is presented in the writing classroom. Bishop
(1997) noted that writing teachers tend to accept only one rigidly defined genre of writing
from their students, even though their own scholarship utilizes “alternative styles, mixed gen-
res, co-authored texts” (p. 5). Referring to teachers who do not encourage experimentation
with genre as “discourse autocrats” (p. 5), Bishop argued that excellence in writing occurs
when resources from one genre are superimposed on another and pointed out that scholars in
Composition have recently learned to broaden their writing and thinking so that “thesis and
data driven work now thrives side by side with narrative and metaphor-rich investigations”
(p. 4). Good writing is characterized by both “control and carnival,” Bishop maintained;
moreover, it is important for Composition teachers to rethink “the ways we teach conven-
tion making and convention breaking in first-year writing classrooms” (p. 4). And such a
rethinking, Bishop argued, requires understanding of genre.
In fact, a study in creativity by Clark, Hale, and Neff-Lippmann (2010) indicated that
the definition of creativity varies a great deal according to the depth of understanding one
has with a genre. On the basis of questionnaires that were administered to lower-division
students, upper-division students, and faculty, Clark, Hale, and Lippman found that notions
of creativity held by students changed as they gained expertise within a field, becoming more
similar to perspectives expressed by faculty. Lower-division students tended to view creativ-
ity as tied to external stylistic features of a text, such as an exciting or thought-provoking
introduction or the use of imaginative metaphors; they did not see creativity as a way of
Genre,Transfer, and Related Issues 173
making “new” meaning within a disciplinary community. These students had only vague
notions of “genre awareness” but because they wanted to be creative, they tended to add
creativity in the only way they knew how: as an add-on. In contrast, juniors and seniors,
more deeply involved in their majors, had a different understanding of the relationship
between creativity and genre, understanding it not as a stylistic add-on, but as growing out
of connections among ideas—framing an interesting research question, presenting a good
argument, or thinking “outside the box.” Their perspectives were close to those expressed
by faculty, who viewed creativity as closely linked to immersion in a field and aligned with
genre expectations.
The conclusions of the Clark, Hale, and Neff-Lippman study were as follows:
Genre Awareness
The issue of how a first-year writing class can prepare students to engage with writing in
other classes has generated interest in helping students acquire “genre awareness” (Devitt, 2007,
p. 225) —that is—to understand texts in terms of genre, to view texts in terms of their rhe-
torical and social purpose(s), and to recognize how various elements of texts derive from their
rhetorical function. Presumably, this insight will enable students to abstract principles from
one rhetorical situation and apply them to other situations—that is, to transfer knowledge
from one genre to another.
Genre awareness and its association with transfer is quite different from the explicit teaching
of a particular genre. Explicit teaching involves instructing students to write in a prescribed
way, a sort of “do it like this” approach that can be formulaic and often omits analysis
of underlying rhetorical and ideological elements. In contrast, when students acquire genre
awareness, they are not only learning the genre, but they are also gaining insight into how the
genre fulfills a rhetorical purpose and how its various components, the writer, the intended
reader, and the text itself, are informed by that purpose. Explicit teaching of a genre may
enable students to create a text that imitates its form and style—sometimes quite successfully.
But without genre awareness, they will not understand how the text “works” to fulfill its
purpose, and when they encounter a new genre in another course, they may lack the tools
to work with it effectively. Explicit teaching focuses on “how” to write a particular genre.
Genre awareness focuses on “why” the genre is constructed the way it is.
a teaching approach that uses higher-level abstractions and specific examples in combination
will be more effective in promoting transfer-of-learning than will either method alone.
Most cognitive psychologists now agree that generalized, decontextualized knowledge
176 Irene L. Clark
and specialized, context-dependent knowledge are intertwined, differing not so much in
character as in degree. According to this perspective, general knowledge and specialized
knowledge arise from the same pool of memories, the same set of learning experiences.
(p. 364, emphasis in original)
Foertsch maintained that it is valuable to “teach developing writers generic principles as well
as strategies for transferring and generalizing their knowledge when faced with new tasks”
(p. 370), allowing students to apply “high road” or abstract principles to new problems (see
Perkins & Salomon, 1988, p. 6). Wardle, in fact, cited several pedagogical approaches that can
generate this type of awareness: These included:
•• Explicitly abstracting principles from a situation (Gick & Holyoak, 1983, cited in Wardle,
2009, p. 771).
•• Self-reflection—asking subjects not simply to apply a strategy but to monitor their own
thinking processes (Belmont, Butterfield, & Ferretti, 1982, cited in Wardle, 2009, p. 771).
•• Mindfulness—defined as “a generalized state of alertness to the activities one is engaged
in and to one’s surroundings, in contrast with a passive reactive mode in which cogni-
tions, behaviors and other responses unfold automatically” (Perkins & Salomon, 1988,
p. 19, cited in Wardle, 2009, p. 771).
Wardle’s precepts suggest that “transfer isn’t so much an instructional learning technique as
a way of thinking, perceiving and processing information” (Haskell 23)—in essence, it is a
practice of paying thoughtful attention that can enable students to examine unfamiliar genres
more insightfully and adapt what they know more successfully.
1 Transformative
A threshold concept is transformative because it involves a “conceptual shift in the
learner” (Cousin, 2010, p. 2). Cousin cites the example of a student of architecture who
begins to think less like a student and more like an actual architect.
2 Irreversible
Cousin maintains that a threshold concept is irreversible because once a learner knows
or understands, he or she is unlikely to forget it. An example in algebra is the idea that
letters can be used to stand for numbers.
3 Integrative
This term refers to how a threshold concept allows the learner to make connections
that were hitherto hidden from their view. Things start to click into place. An example
in Writing Studies is what occurs when students learn that different disciplines value dif-
ferent genres.
4 Bounded
This term refers to the borders between one threshold concept and another. According
to Cousin, interdisciplinary subjects are likely to have complex boundaries.
5 Troublesome
According to Perkins (2006), threshold concepts are likely to involve “troublesome
knowledge” (p. 7) because new information sometimes seems counterintuitive. As an
example, when students in a first-year college class discover that not all school essays have
five paragraphs, they may find that realization “troublesome.”
Liminality
Another characteristic of a threshold concept is what Meyers and Land (2006) refer to as “limi-
nality,” which refers to a transitional, in-between space—where one understands the concept,
but then, a bit later, one does not, or “Now I have it. Now I don’t.” In the context of a first-
year writing class, the state of liminality can cause students a great deal of anxiety, and according
to Cousin (2010), “Common ways in which students try to overcome “their state of liminality
is through quasi-plagiarism, plagiarism, or mimicry.” To help students move through this state
of liminality, Cousin urges teachers to encourage students to discuss their difficulties and give
them “full permission to flounder, fail and forget” (p. 3). This recommendation is in accord
with the student centered approach to learning that is endorsed by Writing Studies pedagogy.
In addition to the five concepts discussed above, a book titled, Naming What We Know:
Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies (Adler-Kassner & Wardle, 2015) discusses other threshold
concepts, all of which can be useful in helping students deepen their understanding of writing
and transfer that understanding to other writing venues.
Genre,Transfer, and Related Issues 179
Creative Nonfiction
In some academic writing scenes, teachers and scholars have focused on “creative nonfic-
tion,” a genre that combines the scholarly rigor and public concerns of academic writing with
the energy and personal involvement of personal narrative. Because this genre often utilizes
first-person perspectives as a means of developing a topic, creative nonfiction enables students
to include relevant personal experience and opinion within an academic context. An advo-
cate of introducing creative nonfiction to the Composition class, Wendy Bishop (1997) noted
that many of the journal articles in Rhetoric and Composition now include personal opinion
and examples based on lived experience, allowing the writer to move back and forth between
an informal, casual tone to the more formal, depersonalized tone associated with academic
discourse. As rigid standards for academic writing are being examined, the text strategies asso-
ciated with creative nonfiction are appearing with increasing frequency in the writing class.
Literary Genres
In a thought-provoking article, Devitt (2000) called for rhetorical and literary genre theorists
to recognize commonalities. Whereas literary genres tended to be regarded as a static catego-
rization of textual features, recent concern with the “interactive nature of textual meaning”
suggests that both rhetorical and literary genres “can be defined as a dynamic concept created
through the interaction of writers, readers, past texts, and contexts” (p. 699). Devitt sug-
gested that genre provides an important approach for examining all kinds of texts, because,
as Derrida (1980) maintained, “every text participates in one or several genres, there is no
genreless text; there is always a genre and genres, yet such participation never amounts to
belonging” (p. 65). Similarly, Marjorie Perloff (1989), addressing the question of whether
genre is a necessary term in a postmodern world, observed that “even as we pronounce on
the ‘irrelevance’ of genre in a time of postmodern openness, inclusiveness, and flexibility, we
are all the while applying generic markers to the subjects of our discussion” (pp. 5–6).
Genre,Transfer, and Related Issues 181
Terms Associated with Genre
Bawarshi and Reiff’s book Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research and Pedagogy
(2010) concludes with a detailed glossary of terms associated with the concept of genre. For
the purposes of this book, however, I will refer only to terms that are particularly relevant for
teaching college Composition.
Antecedent Genres. These are genres of the past that often influence a rhetorical response. The
term is associated with Jamieson’s article, “Antecedent Genre as Rhetorical Constraint” (1975),
which discusses several instances in which antecedent genres imposed inappropriate responses.
Antecedent genres can help students learn new genres, but sometimes they may lead students
in an inappropriate direction. Students’ tendency to cling to the five-paragraph essay in all aca-
demic contexts is an example of how an antecedent genre can impose an incorrect response.
Discourse Community. The term “discourse” refers to all kinds of communication, and a dis-
course community refers to the people who utilize a particular type of discourse to achieve com-
mon goals. Swales (1990) found that a discourse community utilizes genres to achieve those goals
and that membership in a discourse community is strongly connected to a member’s familiarity
and expertise with these genres.
Exigence. A term associated with Lloyd Bitzer’s article, “The Rhetorical Situation” (1968),
which refers to a problem, situation, or need that can be impacted or changed in some way
through writing. Bitzer used the word “exigence” to refer to a defect, an obstacle, or “some-
thing that is other than it should be.” In discovering a topic for writing, students should be
encouraged to locate an exigence.
Genre Awareness. A pedagogical approach that aims to foster a critical understanding of
genres, in terms of both their rhetorical purposes and ideological effects. Genre awareness
focuses on developing insight into how a genre functions. It is not the same as explicitly
teaching a particular genre.
Pedagogical Memory. The term “pedagogical memory” derives from a research study con-
ducted at UC Irvine by Susan Jarratt and her colleagues. The study involved interviews with
students several semesters after they had completed a first-year writing course to determine
the extent to which they were able to transfer what they had learned to other writing tasks.
What Jarratt discovered through the interviews is that although many students across the
disciplines had “internalized the idea of writing as a process and a mode of learning . . . even
the most successful . . . lacked fluency in basic writing terminology” (Jarratt, Mack, Sartor,
& Watson, 2009, p. 48). On the basis of this study, the authors recommend helping students
translate discourse about writing from one site to another.
Rhetoric. The term “rhetoric” refers to the effective use of language to persuade, inform,
or educate. Although people sometimes use the term to mean words that mean nothing, as
in “that is just rhetoric,” ancient Greek philosophers considered it a serious form of com-
munication that is oriented toward influencing an audience. Helping students understand the
importance of rhetoric is essential to enabling them to write effectively, both academically
and professionally.
The Rhetorical Situation. Lloyd Bitzer defined a rhetorical situation as “a complex of per-
sons, events, objects, and relations presenting an actual or potential exigence which can be
completely or partially removed if discourse, introduced into the situation, can so constrain
human decision or action as to bring about the significant modification of the exigence”
(p. 18). The recognition of a rhetorical situation can enable students to develop ideas for writ-
ing, helping them understand how the writer, audience, context, and purpose can be utilized
in addressing it effectively.
Uptake. The term “uptake” was originally associated with speech act theory, referring
to how an act or a statement can result in a subsequent action. For example, the statement
182 Irene L. Clark
“it is hot in here” may be said in order to get someone to get someone to open a window.
Extending the concept, Anne Freadman (1994) maintained that genres can be defined by the
uptake they generate, that uptakes are learned, and that appropriate uptakes are necessary for
membership in a discourse community. In the context of teaching writing, a writing assign-
ment prompt generates a particular uptake in the form of an academic essay, and the ability
to respond appropriately is associated with academic success.
(continued)
184 Irene L. Clark
(continued)
Genre and Multimedia
Beach, R., Anson, C., Breuch, L. K., & Swiss, T. (2009). Teaching writing using blogs, wikis, and other
digital tools. Norwood, MA: Christopher-Gordon.
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Note
1 The relationship between genre and identity is explored in further detail in
Clark, I. (2016). Genre, identity and the brain: Insights from neuropsychology. Journal of General
Education, 65(1): 1–19.
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Clifton Justice, who is now a lecturer at California State University, Channel Islands, wrote
this essay when he was an undergraduate student at California State University, Northridge.
Clifton had had previous experience in fundraising, and his essay shows how his knowledge
of the fundraising genre enable him to raise funds successfully.
Essay
Clifton Justice
Rebecca Nowacek, in her 2009 paper, “Why Is Being Interdisciplinary so Very Hard to Do?
Thoughts on the Perils and Promise of Interdisciplinary Pedagogy,” suggests that instructors
can highlight disciplinary differences in genre expectations as a way to help students under-
stand writing more deeply. In this paper, Nowacek describes her observations of a writing-
intensive, team-taught general education course composed of three overlapping course
units, each drawing on one of three disciplines: literature, history, or religion. She noted that
the three disciplinary instructors thought that they were assigning the same genre, an essay,
but had very different views on what an essay should do, or indeed, what it meant to have
a thesis. Furthermore, she observed that students noticed this issue, and that instructors,
when called upon to respond, tended to focus on “emphasizing similarity, [and] eliding differ-
ence” (p. 505). Drawing on cultural-historical-activity theory (Engeström, 1987; Roth & Lee,
2007; Russell, 1995), she analyzes the reasons for the disagreement, and the “double binds”
that the students found themselves in when they could not resolve the conflicts. She further
explores how the instructors might have responded. In the end, she says:
Both students and instructors, I argue, must negotiate double binds placed upon them
when various disciplines conflict. These double binds can limit and constrain the work of
individuals, but if made an object of reflection, the double bind can also facilitate higher-
order thinking about disciplines and the role of writing within them.
(p. 494)
When I discovered this paper, I responded strongly to the idea of eliding differences. I—once
an assistant professor specializing in cellular immunology and now an immunologist working
as a “writing in the disciplines” (WID) specialist within a writing program—have, for four years
running, co-taught a biology laboratory course with Cheeptip Benyajati, a faculty member in
the biology department. We initially planned to co-teach every writing instruction session but
emphasized to ourselves and to the students that she would maintain responsibility for biol-
ogy content questions, while I would focus on attention to writing principles. However, this
plan was complicated by my years as a practicing biologist; I frequently found myself speak-
ing with biology insider knowledge in response to student questions, and Tip encouraged this
tendency, arguing that it helped model scientific discussion. Furthermore, when I did speak
as a biologist, she sometimes disagreed and asked questions—and I found myself almost
reflexively trying to claim that we were in agreement. In short, I was “emphasizing similarity”
and “eliding differences.”
Furthermore, I noticed that we didn’t disagree about writing principles or, as Tip said,
about “what it means to do good science”; we had similar epistemological orientations. Nor
did we disagree about the essentials of the genre we asked them to use: the Introduction-
Methods-Result-Discussion (IMRD) research article, or the rhetorical moves (Swales,
1990, 2004) within this structure. Instead, I thought our choices might be traced to subtle
“Emphasizing Similarity” 191
differences in rhetorical exigencies and conventions typical of particular sub-disciplinary
communities (Thaiss & Zawacki, 2006); although we are both biologists, molecular biolo-
gists and cellular immunologists are somewhat different. While there could of course be
other reasons than disciplinary specialization for our disagreement, this line of reason-
ing got me thinking: could our experience, combined with Nowacek’s suggestions about
creating opportunities for reflections on differences, point at a way of emphasizing genre
flexibility and the ways that different disciplinary sub-communities use the genre within a
scientific discipline?
Put more broadly, might Nowacek’s suggestion be applicable even when the instructors
are from the same discipline? In the rest of this essay, I will attempt to answer this ques-
tion, drawing on both published literature and our own experience, and argue that widely
disparate disciplines are not necessary to set up conflicts that can be made the object of
reflection. Professors within a discipline may well have areas of disagreement within a
single genre that can be exploited. If made the focus of reflection and discussion, these
differences can help faculty members to make explicit their implicit knowledge of com-
munication within their specialty areas (Becher & Trowler, 2001; Berkenkotter & Huckin,
1995b; Duff, 2010; Prior, 1995, 1998; Russell, 1995) and relate communicative choices to
disciplinary rhetorical exigencies. In addition, they can help students to understand what it
means to be a part of a wide-ranging discipline containing several areas of specialization
and subtly different types of writing tasks, as well as to see how disciplines, and the rhetori-
cal situations and choices associated with them, change over time (Bazerman, 1984, 1988;
Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995a; Vande Kopple, 2000). This approach should help students
see genres not as static recipes, but as tools that both shape researchers and are shaped
by researchers in response to evolving needs (Bazerman, 1988; Berkenkotter & Huckin,
1993; Prior, 1998).
Drawing on multiple previous corpus analyses, Swales (1990) argued that research arti-
cles across a great range of disciplines could be characterized in terms of a limited num-
ber of canonical rhetorical moves. Initially, this idea was best elaborated with respect to
Introductions, using the Create-A-Research-Space (CARS) series of rhetorical moves
(p. 141). Move 1 is used in “establishing territory”; move 2 in “establishing a niche”; and
move 3 in “occupying a niche.” Within the moves, there are further canonical “step” choices;
for instance, an author “establishing territory” might do so by “claiming centrality” or “making
topic generalizations.” Introductions can use simple M1-M2-M3 structure (Swales, 1990), or
cycle, as in M1-M2-M1-M3 (Swales, 2004). This initial framework inspired Swales and others
to codify a similar series of moves for the methods, results, and discussion sections, as well
as to examine variation within those sections. The outcomes of these analyses suggest that
both disciplines and sub-disciplines make recognizable choices in all of these areas, in ways
that reflect their rhetorical needs.
Swales (1990) summarized broad disciplinary differences in the introductions, noting that
the move 1, step 1 option of “establishing centrality” (p. 141) is less common in the hard sci-
ences. The tendency to outline purposes versus principal results, to explain the importance
of the findings, or road-map the paper (move 3) also varies by discipline. In addition to these
disciplinary differences, several studies suggest recognizable differences in sub-disciplines.
Samraj (2002, 2005) found that writers in two sub-disciplines of biology make different step
choices within the M1-M2-M3 structure, as do writers in three engineering sub-disciplines
(Kanoksilapatham, 2012). Similarly, Ozturk (2007) showed that two applied linguistics sub-
disciplines chose different move cycling patterns. In all cases, the authors argued that the
stereotypical differences were related to underlying differences in the sub-disciplines’ Biglan
classifications.
Swales (2004) noted that the biggest disciplinary differences appear in the methods and
results sections. Methods sections contain very “clipped” descriptions in hard fields with well-
established methodology, but use an “elaborated” version in softer fields with more variation
(p. 220). Similarly, in the results sections, writers in disciplines in which the methodologies
and interpretational methods are not well-established are more prone to use persuasive
moves to justify their choices. And while all writers review their findings and integrate them
into the larger field in the discussion section, the amount of self-promotion varies widely by
discipline. Kanoksilapatham (2012) also codified rhetorical move and step choices in the
methods, results, and discussion sections within three engineering sub-disciplines and found
recognizable sub-disciplinary differences in all three sections.
Drawing on a decade of his own work, as well as earlier work by Swales (1990), Hyland
(2005) proposed that interactions with the audience can be mediated by two classes of
linguistic resources: stance and engagement features. Stance refers to the ways in which
“writers present themselves and convey their judgments, opinions, and commitments,”
while engagement refers to the ways in which writers “acknowledge and connect to others”
(p. 176). Engagement strategies are those that include the reader in some way, and are
designed to “meet readers’ expectations of inclusion and disciplinary solidarity” or to “rhe-
torically position the audience” (p. 182). Stance markers include hedges, boosters, attitude
194 Katherine L. Schaefer
markers, and self-mention; engagement markers include reader pronouns, personal asides,
appeals to shared knowledge, directives, and questions.
Using this classification scheme, Hyland (2005) examined research articles from eight dis-
ciplines, two of which were sub-disciplines of a larger engineering discipline. Hyland found that
the hard disciplines had a lower level of both stance and engagement markers than the soft
disciplines. Hedges were the most frequently used stance resource in all disciplines, but the
soft disciplines used nearly twice as many. Hyland speculated that these differences reflect
variation in the degree to which a discipline has agreed-upon ways of making claims; when
the criteria for acceptance are less clear, it pays to hedge and also to try to use engagement
markers to persuade through “sympathetic understanding, promoting tolerance in readers
through an ethical rather than a cognitive progression” (p. 187). Notably, electrical engineer-
ing and mechanical engineering writing showed differences in both stance and engagement
markers, suggesting that even disciplines that are in roughly the same space on the hard/soft
and pure/applied axes may have cultures and needs that promote different choices.
During our PhD work, both Tip and I were pure molecular biologists; post-PhD, I switched to
cellular immunology. These two fields share a common hard epistemology, and have con-
siderable overlap in experimental techniques and some specialist journals. However, they
differ in the fundamental problems being studied, some of the methodologies and specialist
journals, the funding mechanisms, the speed of the research, and the histories of their fields
(Levin, 2006), as well as in their position on the pure/applied scale (my approach to cellular
immunology, at least, was well into the applied realm).
Our course served juniors and seniors with a declared biology major, many of whom go on
to health-professions or graduate schools. The biology major at our small R1 university encom-
passes six different specialist tracks (e.g., biochemistry, ecology and evolution, etc.), and this
course could be used to partially satisfy the requirement for laboratory research for three of the
six tracks. Many, but not all, of the students had prior or concurrent experience doing independ-
ent research in some aspect of biology or an allied discipline like epidemiology or chemistry.
This course included writing for both “writing-to-learn” and “learning-to-write” (Russell, 2002,
p. 311) purposes. We hoped that by writing, students would explore the underlying scientific
concepts more deeply; we also wanted them to learn to communicate the process of science
using a widely-accepted genre: the research article. In the instructions for their three research
“Emphasizing Similarity” 195
write-ups, we explicitly asked the students to write as if they were writing a scientific research
article, and our explanations, while they did not explicitly use Swales’ (1990) terminology,
heavily reflected his concepts of rhetorical moves within an Intro-Methods-Results-Discussion
(IMRD) structure. For instance, while we did not use the words rhetorical move we did tell
students that, in the introduction, the first paragraph gives background (a.k.a. move 1); the
second identifies a question or gap in the literature (move 2); and the third provides a preview
of the paper (move 3). We asked for an elaborated methods style; similarly, in the results, we
asked students to outline their methodology and interpret their findings, as generally happens
in disciplines with sufficient heterogeneity to make this necessary (Swales, 2004).
We offered writing instruction in the form of three genre analysis-based workshops with
peer discussion. The first workshop focused on figures and figure legends, as these were
the fundamental reporting units from each laboratory session. The second, in preparation for
writing the first full laboratory report, involved discussing the reasons for the IMRD structure,
as well as identifying key rhetorical moves in one sample paper. The third focused on identi-
fying rhetorical moves within all IMRD sections in multiple papers, and integrating what stu-
dents discovered with comments that teaching assistants (acting as disciplinary insiders) had
made on the student lab reports. All workshops drew on examples from a four-paper sample
paper set, picked with several ideas in mind. First, the paper set represented the depart-
mental discourse community; it contained papers from three biology department professors
(including Tip) and one from me. In addition, the set contained necessary background knowl-
edge about procedures, materials, and methods. Finally, the papers were meant to serve as
general models for the type of report the students were writing, and also contain examples
of specialized types of writing tasks (e.g., derivation of equations). All papers were published
between 1997 and 2001 (Benyajati et al., 1997; Culver & Noller, 1999; Schaefer & McClure,
1997; Sia, Dominska, Stefanovic, & Petes, 2001).
Figure legends in scientific research articles convey a great deal of critical information in a
small space. Ideally, a disciplinary insider should be able to understand the paper’s important
information just based on the visual elements in a figure and the associated figure legends,
without recourse to the larger text.
Tip (Benyajati, 2012) wrote explicit instructions on how to write the figure legend titles:
A descriptive title that refers to the general type of experiment done. This should give
the reader a good idea of the experiment and the technique, but not the details (e.g.:
“Restriction digest analysis of TOP transformants on an agarose gel,” NOT “2% agarose
gel run at 100V”). (p. 10)
This style has two key elements, as executed in most research papers: (1) focus on the
methodology, not the result and (2) a sentence fragment form.
When I saw this instruction, I didn’t question it. It seemed reasonable, as I had indeed writ-
ten (in 1997) figure legend titles in this form and the sample paper set contained one of my
papers written with that style. However, I was also aware that alternatives existed; in papers
that I published after 1997, I used a different form: one that emphasizes the experimental
logic and conclusion of the experiment and is formed as a complete sentence.
196 Katherine L. Schaefer
The difference is illustrated below, in an excerpt of figure legends taken from a paper that
Tip wrote (Benyajati et al., 1997):
Figure 3: GAGA-519 and GAGA-581 factors bind a single GAGA sequence forming
multiple-related nucleoprotein complexes.
Figure 2 is a clear example of the first methodological type; it focuses on the technique
(italicized) and does not contain information about the results of that analysis. In contrast,
figure 3 is in conclusion style; while it hints about the method (something about binding and
complexes), it primarily states a conclusion, expressed as a complete sentence: factors bind,
forming complexes.
While I didn’t question the instructions, I did notice that I tended to have off-the-cuff
answers to student questions that took the conclusion style; I would almost always answer in
a complete sentence, as in “Western blot analysis shows protein expression.” But rather than
explore this issue, I simply corrected myself and moved on, even though the excerpt above
suggests that there might be considerable variation in this choice, even within a single paper.
What was going on? I initially assumed that this was a sub-disciplinary matter, because I
had used the experimental focus form exclusively in my two papers that I had written as a
molecular biologist; a scant two years later, as an immunologist, six of my eight figure leg-
ends were in conclusion style. My idea was further supported by an analysis of the sample
paper set—all from molecular biologists—that we gave the students to analyze. In those four
papers, with twenty experimental figure legends, only two were of the conclusion style, and
three of the four papers in the set had no conclusion-style legends.
However, while my hunch was not unreasonable, I could imagine other possible fac-
tors, including publication date, the author’s home country, the difficulty of encapsulating the
whole take-home message, the ease with which the author thinks the audience can identify
the take-home message, the sub-disciplinary experimental logic, and individual stylistic pref-
erence. To my knowledge, a corpus analysis of figure legend choices has not yet been done
in any discipline, so it was hard to say if disciplines or sub-disciplines make recognizably
different choices in these areas. Thus, I did a rudimentary analysis of these two extremes
in figure legend title formats. (It is not my intention here to do a formal corpus analysis but
simply to reflect on a major source of variation that I was able to easily pick out.)
I analyzed figure legend titles from Nucleic Acids Research (NAR) and from the Journal
of Immunology (JI). Both journals are well-regarded specialist journals for, respectively, the
molecular biology and immunology communities. In order to examine trends over time, I
month-and-year-matched both my and Tip’s sample paper set papers in both journals, as
well as examining the most recent issue. I then collated all of the figure legends, excluding
purely schematic (data-free) figures, and identified those with titles in the conclusion-style
complete sentence format, asking a scientist colleague to randomly spot-check five percent
of my assignments (we scored the same way one hundred percent of the time). The results
are shown in Table I:
This analysis suggested that my hunch was correct: there are sub-disciplinary differences
in the tendency to express the figure legend title as a complete, conclusion-style sentence.
However, it also appears that this tendency has been increasing over time in both commu-
nities and that there can be significant variation even within a paper. While there are sub-
disciplinary factors affecting the choice, there are clearly additional ones.
“Emphasizing Similarity” 197
Table I Both publication year and journal affect likelihood of expressing the figure legend as a
complete sentence.
Journal Year Volume (Issue) No. Papers No. Legends % C Form % Papers with
Legends 100% C Style
All data-driven articles (excluding commentary, summary, and reviews) appearing within the print volume were ana-
lyzed; figure (but not table) legends were included if they contained data (schematic figures excluded). C style refers
to a conclusion style, with subject and verb.
When I showed Tip this analysis, she noted that she had expected the trend toward
conclusion-style legends in both sub-disciplines. Her explanation—one that I agree with—
was that this preference reflects the increasing speed of scientific research in all biology
sub-disciplines. When readers have to get through a lot, it speeds processing if the author
states the result right up front. Similarly, the rapid growth of research techniques, even within
a specialty area, necessitates helping the readership draw conclusions, as the author can’t
be sure that the reader is familiar with any particular technique. She also noted that competi-
tion for funding has increased over time, making it more desirable to describe each finding
as an exciting conclusion. To explain the fact that, despite the overall increase, NAR writers
still use fewer conclusion-style legend titles than JI writers, she suggested that the NAR
community has a more constrained set of techniques, and possibly less competitive funding
sources, perhaps reducing the need for clearly stated (and exciting) conclusions.
Tip’s analysis is highly congruent with Berkenkotter and Huckin’s (1995a) analysis of how
physicists and biologists read and write IMRD research articles: as a search for “news value”
(p. 28). They found that experienced scientists reading in their specialty area first scanned
for important new information, by reading the title, abstract, and results sections (including
figures and tables). They further argue, based on an analysis of the evolution of elements
within the IMRD structure over time, that writers—under pressure from an ever-increasing
volume of scientific knowledge as well as real promotional needs related to funding—have
made changes to the form that help readers perform this scanning function and see the
information as newsworthy. These changes include more informative titles, addition and then
expansion of the abstract, sub-headers, and a statement of results at the end of the introduc-
tion. While their analysis did not extend to figure legend titles, the increasing trend toward
providing a complete sentence mini-summary in the figure legend title can easily be seen
as part of the adaptation to pressures for newsworthiness (one that seems to have gained
speed after 1995).
It is clear that our difference of opinion—and, as is clear after our discussions, the dispar-
ity between our instructions and the way we ourselves read and write research articles—
were interesting from a rhetorical point of view, and we were probably doing the students a
disservice by not exploring the difference. Not only were students seeing this sort of variation
in one of the papers that we provided as a model, but they were additionally almost certainly
198 Katherine L. Schaefer
seeing similar variation in papers they were reading for other classes or their independent
research projects. Our choice, both to codify and to fail to follow up on a difference in choices
that I was clearly finding difficult to suppress, may well have confused the students (although
I don’t have that information). In addition, we had in effect treated genres as static, rather
than fluid (Ramanathan & Kaplan, 2000; Smit, 2004) and missed an opportunity to discuss
how the field and affiliated writing choices had changed over time (Bazerman, 1984, 1988;
Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995a; Vande Kopple, 2000). We also missed the opportunity to dis-
cuss how sub-disciplinary specialties may have different rhetorical needs and conventions/
preferences that reflect those needs.
Titles in scientific research articles are also key elements, as readers frequently decide on
the basis of the title and the abstract whether it is worthwhile to read the paper (Berkenkotter
& Huckin, 1995a; Hyland, 2003). We said that the title should be “brief and informative”—and
interpreted that instruction differently.
Our differences stemmed from unexpected results. The students were trying a new system
for cloning a gene and expressing the protein, and the instructors did not know in advance
if this approach would work. As it turned out, parts of it did, and parts of it didn’t. The stu-
dents then wanted to know how to represent this complicated situation in the title. The most
informative answer is that part A worked but part B didn’t, and I first advocated saying pre-
cisely that. However, Tip quickly brought up a complication: today, there is a clear preference
for “positive results,” or results that confirm one’s expectation or hypothesis (Fanelli, 2012,
p. 891). In addition, most scientists find reports of methods more interesting if the method
actually works, as they want to know about possible improvements to their own methodol-
ogy. Thus, Tip argued that students should make a hedged claim that emphasized the posi-
tive but with limits: the first part worked, while the second part worked minimally.
Once again, I found myself emphasizing agreement. We agreed that titles should be
informative, and also that you should make the best possible case for something being inter-
esting, and I emphasized that common ground. However, we didn’t have the deeper conver-
sation about when one might want to admit that something didn’t work. When we discussed it
later, it turned out that one consideration involved the difference between my and Tip’s views
on what genre and purposes the student laboratory reports were approximating. Were they
approaching a very technical methods research paper (my thought), in which case it might
be appropriate to say that something didn’t work in order to save others from trying the same
approach? Or were they approximating a research paper (her thought)—a paper that reports
only after all difficulties have been ironed out?
In effect, this disagreement stemmed from a common issue in assignment design that
we had not made explicit for the students. The lab report is frequently an artificial genre that
reflects an attempt to teach at least two skills simultaneously during a laboratory course: the
basics of the research report genre and the use of disciplinary technical protocols. It thus
suffers from a serious internal complication: it uses the structure of a genuine research report
while asking students to report on work that differs significantly from true investigation, in that
it focuses on successfully replicating accepted knowledge and/or techniques (Moskovitz &
Kellogg, 2011). This issue leads to at least two complexities. First, it makes for difficulties in
writing the introduction, as the normal progression from known information to the question
at hand requires that students pretend that the question has not already been answered.
“Emphasizing Similarity” 199
Second, it can confuse students about the true nature of research, as they are asked to
evaluate their work on how well they replicated others’ work, rather than finding and integrat-
ing something new.
We attempted to address at least the first issue by incorporating a relative unknown that
is common in science: would the new system that has worked for similar tasks work in this
particular situation? However, this choice created a new problem, as we continued to ask
the students to write their introductory material as if they were framing a question about the
biological process at hand rather than the technical details necessary to explore the bio-
logical process. The lab report instructions had, as Russell & Yañez (2003) put it, “strategic
ambiguity” about this complication (p. 342), and students duly queried us. We helped them
bridge the difference by instructing them to frame their question/purpose in these terms: “as
a first step toward answering the interesting biological question, we need to first determine
whether we can experimentally express the protein.” However, this solution did not answer
the question of which overlapping activity system with different motives they belonged to:
one interested in technical details, or one interested in the biological process—and in fact
could not, as we wanted them to be interested in both.
This reflection highlights the difficulties inherent in what Wardle (2009) calls “mutt genres”
(p.765), or genres that use the forms that are authentic discursive tools in some activity sys-
tems but that fail to match the object and motives of the actual student activity system. By
failing to follow up on our differences about titles, we missed an opportunity to discuss our
mixed purposes and the difficulties inherent in the lab report genre, as well as how, in other
situations, the same set of experiments could belong to two different activity systems, and
thus be presented differently.
In addition, sub-disciplinary preferences for self-promotion may also have played a role in
Tip’s greater tendency to accentuate the positive. In a context when positive results are more
highly valued, the desire to frame one’s work in terms of the parts that worked is part of the
promotional picture. Hyland (2003) noted disciplinary differences in the tendency to cite one’s
own work (a form of self-promotion). Similarly, Swales (2004) and Kanoksilapatham (2012)
outlined disciplinary and sub-disciplinary preferences for explicitly promoting the importance
of the work in the discussion sections. In addition, Fanelli (2010) directly addressed the
question of disciplinary tendency to report a positive result, showing that the predisposition to
report positive results correlates with one’s position on the hard/soft and pure/applied axes.
Additionally, in a comparison of four different biology sub-disciplines (Fanelli, 2010, 2012),
she found important sub-disciplinary differences, although the magnitude of the difference
depended on which time period she examined. In papers from 1990–2007, immunologists
tended to be less likely to report positive results than molecular biologists (mirroring my
preference); however, in papers from 2000–2007, immunologists were more likely to report
positive results.
Taking all of this into account, Tip and I may be reflecting our different opinions about
the particular activity system under consideration, our sub-disciplinary biases, or perhaps
the age at which we first learned to write fluently as members of a scientific community.
We might be also reflecting individual attitudes toward publication and self-promotion; many
reviewers over the course of my career have said that I am too blunt. The truth may in fact
be “all of the above.” Regardless of the precise reasons, it is clear that, as with the figure
legend situation, I lost the opportunity to engage my collaborator in a discussion that might
show students how writing choices are driven by many interacting factors including rhetorical
situation, sub-disciplinary norms, and individual preferences.
200 Katherine L. Schaefer
Engineering Teachable Moments
These examples show that my initial hunch contained elements of truth—sub-disciplinary
expectations probably did influence our choices—but was incomplete in that it underesti-
mated the effect of many other rhetorical considerations. What it really showed me was the
importance of exploring and articulating the reasons for one’s writing choices and sharing
those reasons with students.
How might professors engage in this process and harness difference when teaching?
I offer some suggestions to choose from that are probably most applicable to upper-level
or capstone courses. These draw heavily on Bawarshi & Reiff’s (2010) genre analysis rec-
ommendations, with an increased focus on designing the genre set and discussion of the
rhetorical situation to highlight systematic sub-disciplinary differences, as well as on Thaiss
& Zawacki’s (2006) suggestions for making clear how classroom writing instructions reflect
academic, disciplinary, sub-disciplinary, institutional, and personal exigencies.
During preparation:
1 Examine genre variations within your discipline. Actively look for areas of disagreement
within your discipline. Compare your writing and your colleague’s, and discuss: how
are your writing choices different from your colleagues’? To what do you attribute this
difference? Examine the instructions for authors from journals that you publish in, and
compare to the instructions in your colleagues’ journals. What can this tell you about
the relationship between sub-discipline and genre usage? Consider whether or how to
include this knowledge in your teaching. For instance, can you represent different sub-
disciplines through readings or explicit mentions during activities?
2 Explore how rhetorical purpose changes the basic genre forms. Actively consider
how the rhetorical purpose affects form. For instance, a research article meant to
highlight a minor improvement in methodology can be very different from one meant
to answer to a gap in the literature. If your writing assignment only approximates a
specialist genre, consider how the approximation will affect rhetorical choices within
the genre, or how you might achieve the same learning goals with a more authentic
writing task (Bean, 2011).
While teaching:
3 Assign explicit rhetorical genre analysis. Before the first draft of your writing assignment,
ask students to do genre analysis (Swales 1990, 2004) and compare their analyses with
their peers’. (This would have made sense as preparation for our second workshop
on the IMRD structure, and might have made the third workshop unnecessary.) Resist
the urge to assign samples that fit some mental ideal and instead actively look for dif-
ferences to explore. If your course includes papers from a wide time period, consider
having students explore differences over time. If it includes a range of sub-disciplines,
select journals representing these overlapping specialties, give students a little informa-
tion about the areas, and then ask them to see if they can identify which elements seem
to be common and which vary depending on sub-discipline. This approach, growing
out of the extensive body of literature on genre analysis, is a potential point of contact
with first-year composition (FYC), especially if FYC has been taught with a comparative
genre analysis approach (Wolfe, Olson, & Wilder, 2014).
“Emphasizing Similarity” 201
4 Assign reflection about how choice relates to discipline or sub-discipline. If students
originally write the report targeted to a particular disciplinary or sub-disciplinary commu-
nity, have them include a reflection describing what they learned during genre analysis
about the (sub-)disciplinary community to which it was targeted, and what rhetorical
choices they made within the overall framework to appeal to the community’s particular
needs and values. Or, ask students to re-write part of the report as if they were members
of a second sub-discipline, and then have them reflect on what choices they had to make
to appeal to the second audience.
5 Map the discipline and its communicative practices. If your departmental curriculum or
course draws on multiple sub-disciplines, consider mapping the sub-disciplines for the
student. Then ask them to reflect on the reading and writing tasks that they have been
asked to do in other courses and note whether they can identify any sub-disciplinary dif-
ferences. While this activity could take place as an extended discussion over a semes-
ter, using a writing-about-writing approach similar to one that might take place in a FYC
course (Downs & Wardle, 2007), it could also work as a single workshop, especially if
students are asked to do some genre analysis in preparation.
6 Embrace disagreement. If you are team-teaching, allow time to explore any differences
that the students notice. In addition, encourage students to reflect on places where your
suggestions sound contrary to something they have heard before. By all means, high-
light any underlying areas of agree-ment—but don’t “elide difference.” Instead, explore
the reasons for the difference, and try to articulate reasons that link to the rhetorical
needs of the particular community in a particular time.
The above suggestions focus on what an individual instructor can do or what WID specialists
might offer workshops on doing. It is also important to consider how these elements fit in with
the overall curriculum. Student writers develop over their four years in college, and writing
instruction—both at the level of FYC and in disciplinary writing—must consider how to facili-
tate writing transfer, or the ability to take skills from FYC and use them to develop greater
facility with disciplinary writing (Beaufort, 2007; Bergmann & Zepernick, 2007; Driscoll, 2011;
Nowacek, 2011; Wardle, 2009).
Based on the increasing recognition that students are having difficulty with transfer, the
past decade has seen an increasing number of calls for development of vertical curricula
for writing (Beaufort, 2007; Hall, 2006; Jamieson, 2009; Melzer, 2014; Miles et al., 2008;
Rhoades & Carroll, 2012; Smit, 2004; Yancey, Robertson, & Taczak, 2014). A vertical (or
integrated or connected) curriculum considers what disciplinary reading and writing skills are
desirable or required by graduation, and then designs a series of courses, starting with FYC
and extending into the disciplines. Ideally, these courses should fully integrate the disciplinary
content, sequence writing tasks appropriately, use consistent terminology for writing skills,
and integrate metacognitive thinking about writing as well as peer feedback (Melzer, 2014).
While this is still an ideal rather than a widespread, fully integrated practice, some
aspects of my experience may be applicable to the emerging design of such curricula. In
particular, disciplinary departments might consider how different sub-disciplines are rep-
resented in their department and how the writing tasks and conventions differ within those
sub-disciplines. Using this information, they can organize some writing instruction around
discovering these differences and developing facility with discovering when one has entered
a new disciplinary sub-community.
202 Katherine L. Schaefer
Acknowledgments
First, I want to thank my colleague and co-teacher, Dr. Cheeptip Benyajati, for many happy
years teaching and learning together, as well as for her ideas that went into this paper and
her thoughtful commentary on multiple drafts. I also thank Dr. Alexander Rosenberg for spot-
checking the figure legend identifications and Drs. Jacqueline Cason, Rachel Lee, Sarah
Perrault, Kathryn Phillips, and Deborah Rossen-Knill for helpful discussions and suggestions
while I was developing this paper.
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Reading
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vidual use.
6 Reading/Writing Connections
Irene L. Clark
Although it is now generally recognized that writing courses are important for most college
students, the idea that reading and writing are interconnected is not as widely understood. An
assumption is that college students already know how to read because they learned (or should
have learned) to “read” in high school. And then there are those who question why reading
should be taught in a course that is primarily concerned with the teaching of writing.
These perspectives are understandable. When the subject of reading instruction is men-
tioned, people usually think about when they learned to read, probably in elementary school.
They may remember that they often read aloud, either to the teacher or in a group, feeling
proud of their new accomplishment, or maybe worrying about making a mistake. They recall
colorful illustrations, spelling words to be memorized—perhaps smiley faces stamped on a
worksheet. Reading, for most people, means being able to pronounce or decode words on a
page, “extracting information from text” (Gibson and Levin, p. 5), or as “comprehension,”
the term used by Frank Smith in Understanding Reading (6th ed.) (2004). These perspectives
consider reading primarily in terms of imparting information from the text to the reader and
that reading ability means being able to understand what the author of the text intended the
text to mean.
Gaining information from a text and being able to comprehend what one reads are, of
course, important elements of reading and many students do acquire this ability in high
school. However, it is also the case that reading, even in terms of the definitions cited above,
can be a problem for many students, even those who are considered well prepared for col-
lege level work. Readings assigned in college courses are usually longer and more complex
than many students have previously encountered. Moreover, the interconnections between
reading and writing are not often addressed in high school. As a result, many college students
struggle with assigned readings, and sometimes avoid completing them. Professors teaching
courses across the curriculum complain that students either do not read well enough to com-
plete assigned reading adequately or simply refuse to do it. As the director of the Composition
Program, I receive frequent complaints about students’ inability to engage successfully with
assigned reading.
Nevertheless, although in the field of Writing Studies, many books and articles have been
published that are concerned with students’ difficulty with writing, comparatively few have
discussed the topic of reading. During the 1980s and 1990s, there was a limited spurt of articles
and books that did address reading, emphasizing that reading involved a great deal more than
being able to pronounce words on a page. The work of Frank Smith emphasized that written
language makes sense only when readers can relate it to what they already know or to what
readers want to know, and several publications during this time did discuss its interconnection
206 Irene L. Clark
with writing. But then interest seems to have waned. In fact, the first two editions of Concepts
in Composition, although they acknowledged that reading, like writing, is a process, and briefly
discussed critical and rhetorical reading, did not include a chapter that focused specifically on
reading. Neither edition discussed reading either theoretically or pedagogically, nor did either
one explore the interconnection between reading and writing, or suggest classroom strategies
for helping students engage with assigned readings more effectively. As David Jolliffe (2007)
observed, “reading as a concept is largely absent from the theory and practice of college com-
position” (p. 473). “Students have to read in college composition, but rarely does anyone tell
them why or how they should read” (p. 474).
Jolliffe pointed out that “the days are past when students could write all their composi-
tions solely on the basis of their own ideas, observations, and experiences without referring
to texts” (p. 471), but many students are poorly prepared for engaging meaningfully with
those texts. In fact, according to data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress
(NAEP) reading scores have dropped for high school students (p. 471). Jolliffe noted that
although it would be desirable for students to have had experience in high school learning
to read non-fiction texts critically and carefully, many of them have not had reading instruc-
tion for many years. Reading, he pointed out, is often presented as “a search-and-capture
strategy,” an exercise in which the author’s meaning is a fixed entity that the students are
somehow unable to “get” (p. 474). Jolliffe’s 2007 review of several texts concerned with
reading affirmed that reading, as a topic for scholarly discussion, had been neglected in recent
Composition scholarship.
Recently, however, almost eleven years after Jolliffe’s review, “reading” has re-emerged as
an important issue in the field of Writing Studies, raising important questions for those of us
who teach writing. These include the following:
Chapter Overview
This chapter will discuss the complex topic of incorporating reading into first-year
Composition. Although it cannot include the tremendous amount of scholarship concerned
Reading/Writing Connections 207
with reading as it has been addressed in various disciplines, such as Education, Psychology,
or Linguistics, the chapter will emphasize how reading can and should be used in the teach-
ing of writing, and toward that goal, it will summarize some of the most important ideas and
controversies that have been addressed in recent scholarship, suggest possibilities for helping
students become more mindful of how they read, and present strategies that writing instruc-
tors can incorporate into their classroom teaching.
1 Are you someone for whom reading is a pleasure? What sort of texts do you especially
like to read?
2 Do you consider yourself a competent reader? What does “competence” in reading mean
to you?
3 When you are assigned reading in various courses, what strategies or approaches do you use?
4 How well do these strategies and approaches work for you? If you are, or plan to be, a
teacher, do you think it would be useful to share them with your students?
5 How do you think reading should be incorporated into a course that is primarily con-
cerned with writing?
These are questions that you can use to gain insight into your own reading process and can
also be used in classes you teach.
A teacher has assigned students some reading material for homework—an article, a chap-
ter, a story, a webtext. When they show up in class, they’re supposed to be prepared to
discuss the reading or apply it during an activity the teacher has set up. Valiantly, the
teacher struggles to draw out the students’ reading knowledge. . . .But nothing happens.
The students sit mutely, hoping the awkward silence will pass quickly and that, as usual,
the teacher will end up telling them all the things they were supposed to figure out and
discuss on their own.
(p. 21)
208 Irene L. Clark
Unfortunately, this has become a familiar scene, which raises the question of why Writing
Studies scholars have not devoted more attention to helping students learn to read college
texts more effectively. In her discussion of this question, Ellen Carillo maintained that this
lack of attention to reading has its roots in the past, when Composition was establishing
itself as a discipline and identified itself primarily with writing, not reading, which presum-
ably was the responsibility of literary studies or education. The focus on personal writing,
self-actualization, the importance of helping students find their authentic “voice,” or the
prevalence of what Beth Neman (1995) referred to as the “affect-centered classroom,” one
that “defines the purpose of the Composition class solely in terms of the personal develop-
ment of the learner” (p. 6), may also have contributed to the lack of attention to reading
in the Composition course. In addition, according to Carillo, the focus on social/cultural/
political issues in the writing class, which increasingly addressed issues of race, ethnicity, gen-
der, sexual identity, and immigration left little classroom time for helping students develop
effective reading strategies. Teachers spent a great deal of time discussing ideas in the readings,
rather than on helping students learn how to read actively or adapt what they have read into
their own writing.
During the 1980s and 1990s, there was a burst of publications concerned with reading,
some of them journal articles, others collections of essays. According to Carillo’s excellent
overview of how reading was addressed in Writing Studies scholarship, the year 1980 was
a significant year, in that it marked the publication of “Charles Bazerman’s groundbreaking
article ‘A Relationship Between Reading and Writing: The Conversation Model,’” which
encouraged instructors to “consider each piece of writing as a contribution to an on-going
written conversation” (p. 657). Bazerman’s essay (1980) apparently generated renewed inter-
est in how reading should be integrated into writing classes.
Another explanation for the interest in reading during the 1980s and 1990s, which was
suggested by Salvatori and Donahue (2012), is that the development of reader-response theo-
ries which became prominent at that time, focused theoretical attention “from what texts
mean to how readers make them mean” (p. 202). Whereas previously the focus was essen-
tially on authorial intention, reader-response theory fostered understanding of how readers
influence the meaning of a text. “Thanks to readers, texts snap into life. Without readers, texts are
inert, expressionless, empty, mute” (Salvatori and Donahue, 2012, p. 202). In other words,
scholars understood that the meaning of a text is not fixed; it is, at least to some extent, deter-
mined by readers, a perspective that focused attention on reading.
In addition, during the 1980s and 1990s, insights from the fields of Psychology and
Education appeared in publications concerned with reading. Frank Smith’s Understanding
Reading: A Psycholinguistic Analysis of Reading and Learning to Read (1994), originally published
in 1971, discussed various theories of reading derived from the fields of Linguistics, psychol-
ogy, and physiology. Smith maintained that in order to teach reading, teachers must become
familiar with research from these fields. In another theoretical text, Kenneth Goodman’s On
Reading (1996) described reading as a “psycholinguistic guessing game” that requires readers
to predict what comes next in a text. Goodman’s work emphasized that reading is not a mat-
ter of recognizing letters and words, but rather involves the construction of meaning.
Early reading scholarship raised a number of relevant issues, many of which are discussed
in Carillo’s recent book, Securing a Place for Reading in Composition: The Importance of Teaching
for Transfer (2015) which provides an excellent historical overview of articles concerned
with reading/writing connections that were published in the major Writing Studies journals,
such as College English and College Composition and Communication and several essay collec-
tions that addressed reading-writing connections from both theoretical and practical per-
spectives. These include Understanding Readers’ Understanding: Theory and Practice (Robert J.
Tierney, Patricia L. Anders, & Judy Nichols Mitchell, eds, (1987): New York, Routledge) or
Reading/Writing Connections 209
Bruce T. Petersen’s edited collection titled Convergence:s Transactions in Reading and Writing
(ed. NCTE, Urbana 1986), both of which are still useful for preparing teachers today.
Tierney and Leys’s response to the first question was inconclusive. They cited a number of
studies showing that “reading and writing appear to be either strongly or weakly related for
some individuals, depending on the measures which are employed to assess reading and writing
performance” (p. 17), and they noted other factors such as instructional history, opportunities
to read and write, and attitudinal factors that are also important. In their response to the second
question, Tierney and Leys argued for involving students in what they refer to as a “rich writing
curriculum” (p. 19) and for the interconnection between reading and writing. “Students who
write frequently and discuss their writing,” they maintained, “will approach reading with what
might be termed the ‘eye of a writer’” (p. 19)—perhaps an unsurprising observation, but, nev-
ertheless, one that remains important for teachers to address in a writing class. Moreover, their
research also indicated that the relationship was reciprocal—that reading influences writing and
that writing influences reading. They noted that “students of all ages exhibited evidence of
acquiring rhetorical knowledge from their reading” (pp. 19–20), and that “students will initiate
writing in a certain genre or write a certain report, or use an alternative format based on what
they have read” (p. 22). This latter observation is particularly relevant for how writing is often
approached in courses focused primarily on literature. Students read stories and novels, but are
asked to write analyses or arguments; genres with which they are unfamiliar. In fact, students
sometimes refer to non-fiction essays as “stories” and when asked to write an analysis, they have
no idea what that genre is intended to do. Their essays, then, often consist merely of plot sum-
maries (this also happens when students are asked to analyze a film). It seems self-evident that
when students are familiar with a particular genre, they are better prepared to think in terms
of that genre and are more likely to be able to write in that genre. The problem is that in high
school English classes, students primarily read literature and write literary analyses. Then they
come to college, read non-fiction texts, and are assigned to write argumentative essays!
Tierney and Leys’s observations concerning the interconnection between reading and
writing is similar to the “conversational model,” discussed by Bazerman (1980), who argued
that “the connection between what a person reads and what that person then writes is so
obvious as to be truistic” (p. 656). Similarly, in a later article (1985), in which Bazerman stud-
ied the reading of physicists, he similarly argued that reading and writing within a particular
discipline or field is shaped by an understanding of the schema and genres of the field.
Another term used to characterize the relationship between authorship and reading that
was used during the 1980s and 1990s is the “constructivist model,” which is explored in the
work of Stuart Greene (1993). A constructivist approach focuses on how “a sense of author-
ship can motivate and influence reading” (p. 33)—that is, “readers use what they know
together with textual cues to organize meaning in a text” (p. 33). Greene pointed out that
successful authors read the writing of others as a means of adapting rhetorical techniques that
they might be able to use in their own writing. The phrase Greene used is “mining texts,”
210 Irene L. Clark
which, he maintained, can be useful to teach student writers. This idea of reading like a writer
was also discussed in Charles Moran’s chapter “Reading like a Writer” (1990), which focuses
on helping students figure out the rhetorical choices writers make.
Mindful Reading
The recent work of Ellen C. Carillo (2015), using a cognitively based approach, advocates
what she refers to as “mindful” reading. Mindful reading, as defined by Carillo, involves a
metacognitive approach to reading that enables students to become “knowledgeable, deliberate,
and reflective [italics in original] about how they read” (p. 117). Carillo explains that “the term
‘mindful,’ when modifying reading, describes a particular stance on the part of the reader,
one that is characterized by intentional awareness of and attention to the present moment
its context and one’s perspective” (p. 118). How to implement “mindful reading” into the
writing class is further explored in Carillo’s most recent text, A Writer’s Guide to Mindful
Reading (2017). The book offers a number of suggestions to help students read “mindfully,”
among them, paying attention to genre, which enables a reader to decide the type of text
being read—informational or literary, a play, a newspaper, a blog, etc. and becoming aware of
what she refers to as “schemas,” which she defines as “elements or frameworks that structure
or impact how you read” (p. 11). Carillo explains that “schemas depend upon readers draw-
ing on prior knowledge and experiences to help understand what and how the text means,”
enabling a reader to “become more aware of how reading works” in order to make “reading
more productive” (p. 11) and comprehensible. An example that Carillio cites is when some-
one reads a story that begins, “Once upon a time.” That familiar beginning enables a reader
to access prior knowledge and predict the elements in the text—the prince and princess, per-
haps a dragon, and a happily ever after ending. Carillo’s text includes many helpful ideas for
incorporating reading into a writing class and is available at https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/
books/mindful/front.pdf.
Critical Reading
The rhetorical philosopher Wayne C. Booth, in Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent
(1974) asks the question, “When should I change my mind?” a question that in the context
of today’s information overload might also be phrased, “How can I know what to believe?”
or “How can I know when an idea is worth considering?” In writing classes, the term “criti-
cal reading” refers to the process of reading that involves carefully considering and evaluat-
ing the reading in terms of its strengths and weaknesses and the extent to which you find it
worthwhile. Because some students, particularly those just entering a college or university,
may think that whatever is printed either in hard copy or online, must be true, it is important
to provide students with strategies for reading critically.
To help students become critical readers, a useful strategy is to explain the importance of
finding out as much as possible about a text, including its purpose (why it was written), main
Reading/Writing Connections 213
point or claim, the evidence used (fact or opinion?), the logical connections between the
claim and the evidence, and the nature of the text itself in terms of genre (a scholarly article?
a newspaper? a website?). It is also important for students to investigate the qualifications of
the author, if possible (academic or professional qualifications? An established expert in his or
her field? Someone with an obvious agenda?).
Another useful direction for helping students read a text critically is for them to consider
what they already know about a topic. The questions below can generate reflection that can
generate critical awareness:
It is also useful for students to think about what they already believe about the topic addressed
in the text, considering their own family and cultural background, and world view. Many
textbooks intended for students in writing classes include chapters concerned with critical
reading (see Irene L. Clark, 2012), which includes a chapter titled “Engaging with Ideas: A
Three-Pass Approach to Critical Reading.”
As David Bartholomae argued more recently, mastering academic discourse is “more a mat-
ter of imitation or parody than a matter of invention or discovery,” and as Edward Corbett
maintained 50 years ago, it is the internalization of structures that unlocks our powers and sets
us free to be creative, original, and ultimately effective. Imitate that you may be different”
(Corbett 190).
Imitation is also consistent with more recent social approaches to Composition, which
have shown that we gain from interaction with other texts, people, and environments. One
might look to Bakhtin, who states that “the word in language is always half someone else’s.
Everything we speak or write is in some sense an imitation, a transformation of what others
say, do, or write.” Moving into the arena of form and structure and its relationship to genre,
Richard Coe argues that generic forms are factors in the creative processes of speaking and
writing. A consistent approach must take into account how speakers’ and writers’ individual
creative processes are influenced and socialized by their awareness of genres both as available
strategies and as reader expectations (p. 183).
In a study I conducted recently, several experienced writing instructors developed
classroom materials concerned with imitation, modeling, and genre awareness which they
then incorporated into their classes. Some of the materials were derived from the scant
suggestions provided in Composition textbooks (not many, and most concerned only
with sentence structure or use of adjectives or active verbs to develop style), and some
were created directly by the instructors—in fact, several instructors “confessed” that they
had been using imitation and modeling already and were pleased to have been given
“permission” to do so. The project also involved surveys distributed both to students and
instructors, who also wrote reflections in which they discussed the value of this approach
to writing instruction.
Overall, the instructors in the project indicated that they were pleased that they had
incorporated these approaches into their curriculum. Many of them reported that their
students’ papers were “discernibly better once they had seen models, particularly in organi-
zation, scope, in-text citations, and the Works Cited page.” They all felt that the approach
was not only helpful, but necessary if the student had not written that type of essay before.
A few expressed concern that some of the less able students imitated the models too
closely. However, my perspective on this is that even when students adhere too closely
to a model, instructors can use that example as a “teachable moment,” showing students
how exact their imitation was and then having them alter and change what they produced.
Questions to discuss would include how much change would be appropriate or how much
change would require other changes. Imitation in this case would generate discussion and
awareness—certainly useful for helping students understand the genres they are being asked
to produce.
Students’ reflections all indicated enthusiasm for this approach. Some said that imitating
a model enabled them to learn a variety of organizational strategies as well as possibilities for
stylistic variation. Many indicated that their writing had improved as a result of this approach
and that they felt less anxious when they are assigned writing in other classes.
Learning Disabilities
In considering how to address reading in a writing class, it is important to be aware that a
number of college students may have learning disabilities that can interfere with their abil-
ity to read assigned texts effectively. Some of these students may be sitting in your own
classroom, hoping that they will be able to manage—or that you won’t notice. Although in
the past, most students with disabilities tended not to enroll in post-secondary institutions,
increased insight into how to help students with learning disabilities and legislation such as
Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Americans with Disabilities Act of
1990, which assured children with disabilities the right to public education at the K-12 level,
has resulted in an increasing number of students with disabilities of various types sitting in
college classrooms (7–9% in four-year colleges, substantially higher in two-year colleges),
figures that are probably higher because “many students choose not to self-identify for fear
of stigma” (Lewiecki-Wilson and Brenda Ho Brueggemann, Eds., Disability and the Teaching
of Writing. 2008. p. 2).
It is therefore important to find out as much as possible about your students’ backgrounds,
asking questions tactfully so as not to make students feel uncomfortable. Although some stu-
dents will inform you without hesitation that they have been diagnosed with dyslexia and are
therefore entitled to additional time on tests and perhaps to specialized tutoring, others may
find it awkward to talk about problems they may have had with reading and may still have.
A delicate approach is therefore recommended, emphasizing that students are more likely to
benefit from available services when they understand that having difficulty with reading does
not mean that they are unintelligent, lazy, or unmotivated. Many of these students may have
had negative school experiences that can generate anxiety even when the teacher is sympa-
thetic and the classroom environment is nurturing.
To help students with disabilities engage with reading assigned in your course, it is impor-
tant to find out where to send them for help. Most colleges and universities have facilities
on campus that provide support, such as an office of disability services where disabilities of
various kinds can be diagnosed and treated. Students with documented disabilities are often
entitled to assistance, such as extra time to complete writing assignments or exams, or extra
tutoring. As a writing teacher (or a student), it is important to know about available services
and encourage students to make use of them.
To summarize the major ideas concerned with reading-writing connections discussed in
this chapter: it is important for students to become aware of the interconnections between
reading and writing and understand that reading as a writer is different from general reading
to gain information or for pleasure. When you assign a reading in a writing class, it is useful to
explain to students why you have assigned it and how it relates to other aspects of your course
(to imitate its moves or style? to provide content?). It is also useful to show students how to
Reading/Writing Connections 217
read and annotate a text—highlighting significant passages, interacting with the text in the
margins, gaining an overview of the text, versus reading it closely, depending on the purpose
of the reading. Students can also be encouraged to keep a reading journal, documenting the
various practices and strategies they use when they read. Assigning reading in a writing course
means teaching students to read mindfully, focusing on the rhetorical and stylistic choices a
writer has made, the goal being to adapt those choices in one’s own writing. When students
understand that writing and reading are interconnected, both their writing and reading abili-
ties will improve and their anxiety level will decrease.
Online Reading
Cetrone, S. Winthrop Professor Uses Kindle to Spark New Age of Learning: But Response to e-Reader
Lukewarm. McClatchy—Tribune Business News, ProQuest, 5 Oct. 2009.
In this article, writer Shawn Cetrone discusses both the potential, and the pitfalls, that come with hav-
ing college students utilize e-readers for their studies. Initially, the e-readers are met with resistance,
as Cetrone relays the information he’s gathered from Professor Mark Herring, an instructor that has
utilized school funds to implement and promote the use of e-readers on campus. However, some of
the students participating in the study feel that the reader is highly beneficial: One student articulates,
“It’s a hard disk drive with a screen that offers the possibility to read whatever you want whenever
you want. It consumes less paper. It’s where we’re going” (p. 1). Ted Humphrey, the organizer of
the study, asserts that once student familiarize themselves with the device, it will become an asset to
their reading.
Griffin, J., & Minter, D. (2013). The Rise of the Online Writing Classroom: Reflecting on the Material
Conditions of College Composition Teaching. CCC, 65(1): 140–161.
Griffin and Minter discuss both the benefits, and the burdens, of the use of technology in the online
writing course as it relates to student learning. They place emphasis on how certain online classrooms,
depending on how technology is utilized, can either improve, or weaken the student’s capacity to read
and write. With regard to the improvement of reading in the online writing class, they noted a study
that showed success when the student was able to provide their own reading materials for discussion.
In addition, the authors provide research that depicts the inconsistencies between the face-to-face, and
220 Irene L. Clark
online course ‘literacy load.’ This workload was almost three times higher in the online course, which
prompts the authors to recommend a re-analysis of how professors assign their reading, as well as, advo-
cating for more online resources to help students with their reading and writing.
Discussion Questions
1 Is it better for students to read and write what they want to read and write, or is it
better for them to read and write what the teacher wants them to read and write?
2 Do you think it is a good idea to create peer group discussions in which students
with a higher degree of reading would be paired with those of lower skill?
3 How do you feel, as either a student or a teacher, about allowing students to pro-
vide their own reading materials for a discussion, analysis, or even an essay assign-
ment? What are some potential benefits and downfalls of utilizing this method?
4 Why do you think that students often do not complete assigned reading? To what
extent should we reward and/or punish students that do/don’t do the assigned
reading?
5 What are some of the potential benefits of utilizing e-texts/e-readers in your own
classrooms with regards to critical reading? With its compact design, and ease of
accessibility, do you feel that e-readers could make reading in the writing class an
easier task for students? Why, or why not?
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St. Martin’s.
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Pearson Longman.
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Reading
Motivation and Connection
Teaching Reading (and Writing) in the Composition Classroom
Michael Bunn
Many college students see writing courses as a chore—a hurdle on the track toward gradu-
ation. At the same time, many of these students recognize the value of writing and learning
to write. In extensive interviews conducted with Harvard students in the 1990s, Richard Light
found that “[o]f all skills students say they want to strengthen, writing is mentioned three
times more than any other. Most know they will be asked to write an enormous amount at col-
lege. Most expect this to continue after they graduate” (54). Around the same time, Thomas
Hilgers and his colleagues interviewed students enrolled in upper-division writing-intensive
classes in their majors at a large state university and discovered that these students valued
assigned writing tasks for various reasons, most notably as an opportunity to “pursue per-
sonal goals” such as “satisfying a burning curiosity about a particular topic” or as a form of
“preparation for postcollege employment” (Hilgers, Hussey, and Stitt-Bergh 330–32).
In her 2009 book, The College Fear Factor, Rebecca D. Cox draws on five years of inter-
views and observations at community colleges to demonstrate that many of the students
she observed value writing and writing classes even if they don’t enjoy them. Cox writes that
“the distinction between getting an education and enjoying it emerged as a basic theme for
the vast majority of students,” and among the evidence she offers is the following passage
from Joy, who Cox claims “drew an explicit distinction between learning from the class and
enjoying it”:
This class, I would say, is an excellent class. I think it’s a necessary class that all stu-
dents should have as a freshman, because it prepares you for writing papers in all dif-
ferent classes . . . It is a necessary evil, pretty much, because I don’t know anybody who
likes this class, but it is necessary if you want to be successful in your other classes with
the papers that you have to write. So I like the class on a learning standpoint.
On a fun standpoint, I hate it.
(53)
The students Cox followed placed a high value on writing and learning to write, even though
at times they may have hated it from a “fun standpoint.”
In a 2007 study of composition courses conducted at Purdue University aimed at better
understanding the extent to which students transfer knowledge from one context to another,
Dana Driscoll found that many students—including “students who are not in humanities-
based majors but instead from majors across the curriculum”—not only value writing but
also may “share some of our most basic philosophies about writing—that is, that writing is
a lifelong skill and that practice with writing is the best way to improve” (89). Driscoll found
that many students entered their composition courses already “positive about the value of
their writing course,” particularly in terms of how the work of those courses might be useful
beyond college.
Whether writing is perceived as the opportunity to investigate a topic of personal interest or
viewed primarily as a “necessary evil” to help with future coursework and career aspirations,
Motivation and Connection 223
there is little doubt that many students— whether enrolled in prestigious liberal arts institu-
tions, large state universities, or community colleges—value writing and learning to write.
But what about reading?
While many students enrolled in composition courses seem to recognize the value of
learning to write, it’s unclear whether students experience this same level of motivation
toward assigned course reading. As Jeanne Henry notes of her own experiences of teaching
reading at the collegiate level, “My freshmen were very much able to read; they were simply
disinclined to read” (64, emphasis in original). David Jolliffe and Allison Harl make a similar
point regarding their research on student reading at the University of Arkansas: “In short, we
discovered students who were extremely engaged with their reading, but not with the read-
ing their classes required” (600). Thus a pressing question for writing instructors is, how can
we teach reading in ways that motivate students to engage with assigned course reading?
Further, how can we draw upon students’ own recognition of the importance of writing as a
way to motivate them to read in our classes?
Over the past two decades, a handful of scholar-practitioners have explored the role that
reading plays in both collegiate writing courses and composition scholarship.1 Particularly
useful are the ways that these scholars present rationales for including reading instruc-
tion in writing courses (Helmers; Horning; Salvatori), suggest reasons that reading isn’t
being adequately addressed within the field (Harkin; Morrow), articulate challenges that
instructors—including graduate instructors—might face when trying to teach reading in the
writing classroom (Adler-Kassner and Estrem; Carillo; Ettari and Easterling; Tetreault and
Center), explore approaches to reading promoted in composition textbooks (Huffman),
and provide an example of how researchers might utilize qualitative methods to explore
the issue of reading (Jolliffe and Harl).
What this article adds to this growing body of research is attention to some of the ways
that instructors theorize and teach reading-writing connections in composition courses and
how such theorization and teaching practices may affect students’ motivation to complete
assigned reading. As Linda Adler-Kassner and Heidi Estrem note, “Studies that focus on
the contexts that instructors create for students’ reading . . . are few and far between” (36,
emphasis in original). This article is intended to help fill that gap. Examining the ways that
writing instructors think about and teach reading—how they perceive connections between
the processes of reading and writing and attempt to teach those connections to students—
provides a more complete picture of what is happening in composition classrooms. These
findings can also inform the important discussions we need to be having about which
approaches to teaching reading will motivate students to engage with assigned texts and
help them to read and write better.
I recently conducted qualitative research at the University of Michigan in order to examine
some of the ways that instructors theorize and teach reading in composition courses and to
better understand how students perceive and respond to assigned course reading. An online
224 Michael Bunn
survey (Appendix A) was sent to instructors who were teaching, or had taught, first-year
writing at the university, presenting them with a range of questions about the ways they theo-
rize and teach reading. In total, 114 instructors were invited to complete the online survey;
these instructors were all graduate students or lecturers teaching for the English Department
Writing Program (EDWP) during the semester of data collection, and each of these instruc-
tors had taught at least one section of first-year writing in the past or were doing so at the
time of the survey. The response rate was exactly 50 percent—57 of the 114 instructors
invited to complete the online survey did so.
This article puts instructor survey and interview responses in conversation with
student survey responses to shed some light on how both instructors and stu-
dents think about reading as it operates in the writing classroom.
Next, interviews were conducted with 8 instructors who were teaching first-year writing at
the time of our interview and who indicated on their survey that they would be willing to speak
with me. Five of the interviewees were graduate student instructors (2 studying literature, 2
studying English and education, and 1 studying linguistics), and 2 were full-time faculty lec-
turers (who had all earned M.F.A. degrees in creative writing from the university).
After holding these interviews, I observed 4 of these interviewed instructors’ classrooms
during two different class sessions. In each of these four courses a four-question survey
(Appendix B) was distributed to students asking for their views on the reading that they were
doing for the course. In total, I received survey responses from all 66 students present dur-
ing the four class sessions—17 students each in three of the courses and 15 students in the
other. Though students were given the option to decline the survey, none did so.
This article puts instructor survey and interview responses in conversation with student
survey responses to shed some light on how both instructors and students think about
reading as it operates in the writing classroom. Specifically, the article addresses four
related questions:
More fully understanding the ways that instructors theorize and teach reading-writing con-
nections is important because, as my findings suggest, explicitly teaching such connections
can influence the extent to which students find course reading valuable and can affect their
motivation to complete assigned reading.
In the remainder of this article I discuss a few lessons we can learn and conclusions we
might draw about teaching reading based on my research findings. I begin by proposing
Motivation and Connection 225
a definition of reading that emphasizes the cooperation between readers and writers and
stresses the importance of conceptualizing reading and writing as connected processes.
I then examine the extent to which participating instructors at the University of Michigan
theorize reading and writing as connected activities and document the ways they do (and
don’t) teach such connections to students. I supplement this section with responses from
the student surveys to reveal whether teaching reading-writing connections explicitly seems
to have any effect on student motivation to read. Next, I present and discuss the method
of teaching reading-writing connections mentioned most often by instructors at Michigan:
assigning model texts with the hope that students will read to identify particular techniques
to try out in their own writing or read to recognize genre conventions. I conclude the article
by offering a few suggestions for ways instructors might teach reading-writing connections
effectively in composition courses.
Yes 25
Absolutely 15
Of course 6
Yes (or absolutely), but . . . 4
Definitely 2
Certainly 1
It is a fact, not a belief 1
They are fundamentally the same act 1
Often, but not always 1
As this distribution indicates, only 5 instructors express any form of reservation or qualify
their answer in any way. For example, 2 of those instructors make a point to note that it s not
always the case that good readers are good writers, and vice versa:
Yes. But I have also seen struggling readers write wonderful things and struggling writers
read and interpret challenging text.
Yes. They influence each other recursively. However, in my personal life, there are people
who challenge this belief for me . . . people I know who write very well, but don’t read
much . . .
This type of qualification doesn’t really challenge the idea that reading and writing are con-
nected, but offers a useful reminder that, in the words of 1 of these 5 instructors, it’s not
always an exact “one-to-one ratio.”
While all 56 of the participating instructors express the belief that reading and
writing are connected activities (with 5 offering some form of qualification), this
belief doesn’t always translate into pedagogy.
While all 56 of the participating instructors express the belief that reading and writing are
connected activities (with 5 offering some form of qualification), this belief doesn’t always
translate into pedagogy. In response to the question How (if at all) do you teach a con-
nection between reading and writing to students in first-year writing? 10 instructors report
that they don’t explicitly teach those connections to students. This survey question elicited
responses such as the following:
I don’t draw connections explicitly, but I constantly tell them that the best way to improve
their writing in a given genre is to read a lot in that genre.
I’m not sure I teach that connection explicitly, though I believe the connection is made
obvious by writing assignments and studies of texts.
Motivation and Connection 227
I’m not sure that it’s something I teach directly. This may be a fault on my part. Instead of
telling them the connection is important, I assume they already know or they’ll see the
connection as we work toward reading texts objectively.
A sentiment expressed in these responses is that instructors don’t need to teach reading-
writing connections explicitly or that such connections are already clear to students. As one
instructor claims:
This connection is not something necessary to parse. First of all, the students real-
ize that by reading and questioning texts, they will better engage in analysis which will
directly translate into their own writing.
This instructor’s response not only assumes that students will automatically recognize how
certain reading practices influence their writing, but also that such reading practices “directly
translate” to student writing—both without any intervention on the part of instructors.
Another instructor discusses the assumption that students will automatically recognize
connections between course reading assignments and course writing assignments. During
our interview, Sally, a graduate student studying English and education, elaborated on this
assumption: “I assumed today, since we’re talking about narrative and they’re going to be
writing narratives, I assumed that [a connection between the course reading and course writ-
ing assignments] was evident. But I think we assume a lot of things, and shouldn’t.”3
Sally: The reading, I believe, should always tie into what we’re doing.
MB: And when you say “what we’re doing” you mean the writing assignments?
Sally: The writing assignments. I don’t think that I always make that explicit to the stu-
dents? . . . I think earlier on I made it more explicit, but I think that that’s something
that I should continue to make explicit.
MB: Why? Why do you think that’s worth doing or important?
Sally: . . . Well, one: Buy-in. . . I mean student motivation, and in terms of doing the read-
ing, they can understand why it’s valuable because I’ve made that explicit to them.
It’s not valuable just because I’ve told them to do it. It’s valuable because it’s going
to be applied.
In other words, students don’t have to settle for the instructor’s suggestion that reading is
worthwhile. When reading-writing connections are made clear, students see that the reading
they do will “be applied” in their writing; this helps them “buy in” to the work of the course.
Sally’s view that students may be more motivated to complete assigned reading if they
recognize how that reading relates to their writing is supported by the survey responses of
several students. In response to the question Are you motivated to read for this course?
Why or why not? 5 students specifically mentioned being motivated to read because the
228 Michael Bunn
reading helped them with their writing assignments, while 9 other students mentioned that
they weren’t motivated to read because the texts seemed unrelated to the rest of the course.
The following excerpts convey the range of those responses:
Yes, I am motivated [to read] because all of the readings relate very directly to the essays
that we are assigned.
Yes, because I believe the readings really help me with writing my own paper . . .
I am not motivated to read for the course because I feel the reading does not relate to what
we talk about in class. It does not help me improve my writing so I am not interested in it.
I sometimes know that the reading will not connect to the class, which makes it harder
for me to focus and concentrate on the reading.
I am not motivated to read for this course because the readings are unrelated to what we
are writing about.
These responses suggest that the degree to which students are motivated to read assigned
texts is influenced by whether or not they perceive connections between that reading and
other aspects of the course, especially their writing assignments. Such motivation is cru-
cial, for as Jill Fitzgerald, professor of literacy at the University of North Carolina, explains,
“People must feel some urge, some motivation, some reason to read or write. If there is no
urge, there is no reading and writing” (84). John Guthrie and Allan Wigfield, faculty members
at the University of Maryland College of Education whose research focuses on motivation,
make a similar point, that “a person reads a word or comprehends a text not only because
she can do it, but because she is motivated to do it” (404).
I ask students to pay attention to various techniques utilized by the authors and “steal”
the ones they find helpful for their own writing.
I ask them to engage with the texts they read by responding to them in writing (chal-
lenging them, asking questions, etc.) and then to pull out strategies to use in their
own writing.
We ask a lot of questions of texts that are relevant to the essay they are in the process of
writing to help them ask questions from which they can write. I also focus heavily on the
structure and rhetorical approaches used in the published essays we read, pointing out
that these are models for them to use in their own essays.
We’ll examine the strategies used in introductions and conclusions in the published
texts to get students thinking about what strategies they may want to use in their essay.
Students should use the published readings as models, essentially looking for things
they appreciate and want to use in their own work.
In each of these responses the instructor describes using model texts to demonstrate strate-
gies and structural techniques that students can adopt in their own writing. The idea is that
students will recognize elements to which they responded as a reader and use these ele-
ments in their own assigned writings.
Sally presents a specific classroom activity intended to encourage students to read for
what they can use in their own writing:
[W]e’ve been sort of informally keeping a personal style journal where after we read a
text and we’ve examined it for structure and we’ve looked at the argument, we also talk
about the aesthetic piece. What did they notice that they like, and what can they take
from that text to try out in their own writing?
So, if we found a really good example of a parallel sentence, if they have never tried
that before, then they make a note of it and they’ve got it in the text so that they can refer
back to it.
230 Michael Bunn
This exercise prompts students to read with an eye toward their own writing by locating spe-
cific strategies and techniques that they intend to use and reinforces the idea that both texts
and reading serve purposes beyond the transmission of content.
Another instructor describes in a survey response how he or she encourages students to
reflect upon the specific ways that they imitate assigned texts:
I have students analyze claims, evidence, organization, metaphors, and language in arti-
cles we read. I encourage them to adopt one or two strategies in their papers using imita-
tion in their writing. I ask them to try to make it seamless (to not let me see it). However,
I ask them to write a submission note about their writing process, and in this, they are
invited to explain how they mimicked a writer we have read and what the experience felt
like as well as if they believe the result is rhetorically effective.
By requiring students to reflect on their adoption of techniques and strategies they locate in
the model text and compose a submission note in which they assess the effectiveness of
this borrowing, this instructor prompts students to identify and consider direct connections
between their course reading and writing.6 The submission note and student paper serve as
tangible proof that the reading done for the course has influenced the student’s writing.
The other primary reason that instructors offer for assigning model texts is that they want
to provide students with an example of a genre in which the students will eventually be asked
to write.7 This use of model texts asks students to look at the overall structure of the text or
the conventions associated with a particular genre, rather than focus on individual writerly
techniques and strategies that they can adopt, as we see in the following two examples from
the instructors’ surveys:
Instructors assign these texts intending for students to read them as models of genre, but
it remains unclear whether instructors are actually teaching students how to do this. While
the majority of instructors who report assigning model texts so that students can adopt tech-
niques and strategies mention taking time in class to show students how to read for them,
this is not the case for most of the instructors who reported assigning model texts as exam-
ples of genre. This is a potential disconnect in the course: instructors want students to read
for genre conventions but fail to explain this to students or teach them how to do it.
During our interview, Don, a full-time lecturer, noted that this is a potential problem
because students don’t necessarily know how to read for genre conventions or how to use
the texts to improve their own writing:
It can’t be like whoa, look at these four models. Let’s just do what they’re doing. They
can’t really—can’t really see what’s happening in those pieces. I think they see an ana-
lytical essay and like—I use the word analytical essay because you know it is a kind of
Motivation and Connection 231
genre. You know but to them it’s totally not a genre, and I think they’re kind of blind to
most of what is happening.
Don suggests that students are ill-equipped to use model texts effectively on their own. This
view is confirmed by at least one student who explained in a survey response, “I am not very
motivated to read for this course because I never really know what to look for in the read-
ing.” If instructors can teach students how to read and use model texts, they may be able to
combat this sort of lack of motivation on the part of students. It’s not enough to merely assign
certain kinds of texts. After conducting his own study of student writers using model texts,
Peter Smagorinsky reached a similar conclusion, warning, “Simply reading a model piece
of writing . . . is insufficient to teach young writers how to produce compositions . . . most
novices need more direct instruction” (174).
Tawnya: For both of the papers they’ve done so far, I’ve given them readings that do what
I’m asking them to do, with the hopes that when they sit down . . . they can reread
it and say “Okay, how can I use this as a template for my writing?”
MB: And when you say “ask them to do,” you mean readings that are demonstrating a
genre or something?
Tawnya: Right, so the first one was a descriptive analysis, and the second one was the
review, due tomorrow. And then for the third one as well, which is more of a
standard argumentative paper, I will do the same, so that they can use it as a
template . . .
By encouraging students to use these texts as models and read with an eye toward their
own eventual writing—to read them as examples of the specific genre in which they will be
writing—Tawnya helps students to connect the assigned reading to their writing tasks.
By encouraging students to use these texts as models and read with an eye
toward their own eventual writing—to read them as examples of the specific genre
in which they will be writing—Tawnya helps students to connect the assigned
reading to their writing tasks.
Her belief that reading in this way helps students improve their writing is a belief shared
by many of her students. In response to the question Do you find the reading that you do for
this course helpful in improving your writing? Tawnya had the highest total number (14) and
percentage (82 percent) of students who said yes. The following three responses represent
232 Michael Bunn
how nearly every student in her class mentioned the benefit of reading texts that serve as
models for their writing assignments:
The readings are useful because they typically display the style of writing that needs to
be utilized in the upcoming paper. For example: in preparation for writing a critique of a
live performance, we will read different styles of critiques from various periodicals.
The reading done for this class is helpful because it usually relates to a paper we are
going to write. This makes the process of writing papers easier by giving students
a reference.
Yes, I do because the readings we do are often the same as the paper we are writing.
When we discuss the readings we look at things they have done well and we might want
to do in our papers.
This third comment suggests that at least some of the students in Tawnya’s course are
developing their understanding of specific writerly strategies and techniques in addition to
understanding genre conventions: they are locating things in the assigned texts that the
author has “done well” and that they “might want to do” in their papers.
A key to Tawnya’s success is that beyond simply assigning models of specific genres, she
talks with students about how they should be reading the model texts. Tawnya’s students get
direct instruction in how to read model texts for both writerly strategies they can adopt and
for genre conventions.8 While observing Tawnya’s course, I witnessed this kind of explicit
instruction first-hand. Tawnya initiated discussion of the assigned essay by telling students,
“I thought maybe we could go through this part-by-part and talk about . . . [how] he is doing
an analysis and his use of detail, his ability to state his thesis and what he’s thinking. It should
hopefully help you.” She then directed the students to reread the first paragraph. When they
were finished, she asked the class, “What did you think of this introduction? Why was it either
effective or ineffective at pulling you in as a reader?”
Throughout the discussion that ensued, Tawnya pushed the students to explain in specific
detail why they did or didn’t find the introduction effective. She also led students to examine
some of the specific choices the author had made. For example, she asked the class to con-
sider the pros and cons of only discussing two areas of the country in an essay dealing with
the polarization of America. Two students offered responses to her question:
I thought the pros were because he only focused on two places he could go into more
in-depth analysis of the places, but because he only focused on two places, while maybe
fundamentally red and blue states are still there, there are still differences everywhere.
So if he wanted to make a more specific essay he should focus on those two, but if he
wanted to get a really good grasp of the difference between red and blue he should have
covered more ground.
I think it works for his purposes because these places are so polar opposite.
Both of these students responded insightfully to the author’s strategy of only covering two
locations in the essay, particularly the first student who offered an alternative strategy that the
author might have used (as well as a rationale for that alternative). In proposing an alternative
strategy for composing the essay, this student displays the kind of understanding about writing
strategy that can develop when instructors take the time to teach students to read in this way.
Motivation and Connection 233
A bit later in the same discussion, Tawnya asked the students to look at a specific meta-
phor operating in the text and told them that they too could use a metaphor to help structure
their next paper: “This is another kind of strategy you can use in papers is coming up with
a metaphor that describes what you’re trying to say. So you analyze your performance,
and then you come up with a clever way of expressing it to your audience.” With this move,
Tawnya directs students’ attention to a specific technique operating in the model text and
tells them explicitly that they can make a similar move in their own writing. It’s difficult to
imagine a more straightforward way of connecting the reading and writing that students do.
“Let’s say we were going to bring you to campus and arrange for you to speak
with all of our writing instructors. What would you tell them? What would you say
that could help us improve the ways we teach reading?”
Conclusion
A few weeks after I finished analyzing my data, I had the opportunity talk about my research
with the director of writing from another midwestern university and one of his faculty col-
leagues. As I told them about my findings and about the apparent need for instructors to
teach reading-writing connections explicitly, his colleague looked over at me and asked,
“Let’s say we were going to bring you to campus and arrange for you to speak with all of our
writing instructors. What would you tell them? What would you say that could help us improve
the ways we teach reading?”
There are several suggestions I would like to make to a room full of writing instructors
about how to teach reading. Here is where I might start:
•• I’d think about the extent to which and the ways in which I perceive reading and writing
to be connected activities. This pedagogical awareness can help me to design a course
in which the reading and writing assignments build upon and reinforce each other. It’s
clear from the interviews with instructors at Michigan and from several years of work-
ing with new writing instructors at three different institutions that many instructors begin
designing their course by first selecting the texts to be read, often with little consideration
for how those texts connect to course writing assignments.
234 Michael Bunn
Selecting the readings first—independent of the course writing tasks—makes it far
harder for us to conceive of how the reading and writing tasks connect and increases
the likelihood that they won’t connect. If instead we select readings and design writing
prompts simultaneously, there is a far greater chance that we will be aware of connec-
tions between the two and be able to articulate those connections to students.
•• I’d talk with students during class about the connections between assignments. Students
indicated in their survey responses that they were more or less motivated to read
assigned texts depending upon whether they viewed that reading as relevant to their
writing assignments. This simple step to explain the scaffolding we’ve done can help
generate motivation on the part of students to complete assigned reading and can help
them to understand that reading and writing are connected activities.
•• Assigning students to read model texts isn’t enough; students usually don’t know how
to read for writerly techniques or for genre conventions on their own. We must teach
students how to read model texts in ways that will inform the eventual writing that they
will do and teach them to read in ways that help them to develop their understanding of
writerly strategies and techniques and that help them to identify genre conventions so
that they are better prepared to write in those genres.
Teaching reading in terms of its connections to writing can motivate students to read and
increase the likelihood that they find success in both activities. It can lead students to value
reading as an integral aspect of learning to write. It can help students develop their understand-
ing of writerly strategies and techniques. Most of us firmly believe that reading improves writ-
ing. Let’s make sure that we are teaching reading in ways that make this happen for students.
Notes
1 The topic of reading has received increased attention in the past few years. In 2009, the journal Open
Words: Access and English Studies devoted its entire spring issue to articles exploring college-level
reading—including some discussion of reading’s place within collegiate writing courses. In 2010, the
journal Reader: Essays in Reader-Oriented Theory, Criticism, and Pedagogy devoted its fall issue to
exploring disciplinary ways of teaching reading, including attention to some of the ways that read-
ing is taught in composition. Most recently, at the 2012 Conference on College Composition and
Communication in St. Louis, a new annual Special Interest Group dedicated to exploring “The Role of
Reading in Composition Studies” met for the first time.
2 Kathleen McCormick prefers an “interactive” model of reading that she believes stresses that “first,
both readers and texts contribute to the reading process and second, that both texts and readers
are themselves ideologically situated” (69). However, I prefer Nystrand’s description of reading as a
“negotiation” over other conceptions of reading, including Louise Rosenblatts’ notion of “transaction,”
because negotiation—more than any other term—implies the degree of cooperation and even com-
promise needed for writers and readers to make meaning effectively from a text. Negotiation implies
that two parties—in this case the writer and reader—are approaching the enterprise with the mutual
goal of creating meaning.
3 All instructor and student names are pseudonyms.
4 This emphasis on model texts maybe common at other institutions as well. While conducting a com-
prehensive study of writing in the undergraduate curriculum at the University of Pittsburgh, David
Bartholomae and Beth Matway found a similar use of model texts among faculty from a variety of dis-
ciplines: “Many of those interviewed use models in their teaching—either examples of student papers
or examples of professional writing—in order to give students a point of reference for genre, format,
and style.”
5 Although they don’t specifically mention the use of model texts, Linda Adler-Kassner and Heidi Estrem
found that writing instructors at Eastern Michigan University had “three relatively clear purposes for
reading within the program. Content-based reading . . . asks students to summarize and interpret, to
consider connections between ideas, and to use reading to develop ideas. Process-based reading
focuses on the work of the writer/researcher, scrutinizing the text to look at the decisions made by the
writer in the process of textual production as a possible model for students’ own writing/research work.
Structure-based reading asks students to focus on the conventions reflected in and used to shape
content; the emphasis is on developing genre awareness so that student writers can make conscious
decisions about how to use different genres and conventions, and can make conscious choices about
how, when, or whether to use them” (40–41). The second two of these purposes—process-based
and structure-based reading—seem nearly identical to the two primary ways that instructors partici-
pating in my research describe wanting students to read in conjunction with model texts.
6 These submission notes are similar to Jeffrey Sommers’s “student-teacher memos’ in that they are
each “intended to take both student and teacher behind the paper, into the composing process which
produced the draft” (77). Sommers asks students to submit a memo with each writing assignment
236 Michael Bunn
aimed at helping students to “describe and comment on their composing processes” (78). This sur-
veyed instructor’s “submission note” may actually do more, however, to help students connect the
process of reading with the process of writing, since Sommers’s questions focus almost exclusively
on writing and the student’s written text.
7 Throughout this article I use the term genre to indicate a category or type of text (e.g., a review, an
opinion column, an argumentative essay) in the traditional literary sense. While I’m aware that other
conceptions of genre transcend this limited conception and construct genre as a way to define various
situations and social actions, it’s clear that instructor participants (such as Don) were using the term
exclusively to indicate forms and types of writing.
8 Although Tawnya shows that these two uses of model texts—as providing techniques to adopt and as
examples of genre—aren’t mutually exclusive, nearly every instructor who mentions using model texts
refers to either one use or the other, but not both.
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Michael Bunn
Michael Bunn is a full-time faculty member in the University of Southern California Writing
Program and co-founder of the CCCC Special Interest Group “The Role of Reading in
Composition Studies.”
7 Assessment
Issues and Controversies
Julie Neff-Lippman
Writing Assessment should place priority on the improvement of teaching and learning.
(NCTE-WPA White Paper 2009)
While I was working on this chapter, I attended a dinner party with a group of faculty
members from Latin American studies, Asian studies, history, biology, classics, and political
science. When I mentioned writing assessment, eyes glazed over, but when I became specific
about placement and exit exams, labor grading, and indirect writing assessment, the table
erupted in heated conversation. Later I realized the arguments about writing assessment at
dinner reflected the debates that are going on in colleges and universities across the country.
The controversies are not new. In Reframing Writing Assessment (2010), Kassner and O’Neill
explain that assessing writing whether within a classroom, a department, or an entire univer-
sity system is constant, complex, political, and fraught with controversy.
Chapter Overview
Whether assessment is occurring in the classroom or on a programmatic scale, whether it
involves the work of an individual or the entire campus, whether it is low stakes or high,
evaluation of student writing continues to present administrators and teachers of writing
with a plethora of challenges. Assessment is a complex (Sommers, 2006) and often political
topic (Poe, Inoue, & Elliot, 2018) that has been debated at every level from the individual
classroom to state legislatures. This chapter will provide a review of the language of writing
assessment in historical and programmatic contexts as a way of understanding current contro-
versies. It will provide strategies for helping teachers of writing assess and respond to student
writing and will present best practices and alternatives to traditional summative assessment
connected with grading.
Reflection to assess prior knowledge and experience:
1 Write a reflection on your experiences with assessment. Have you ever been part of
program-wide writing assessment or assessment for placement purposes? If so, please
describe the assessment as you experienced it. What was your attitude toward it? Did it
have consequences for you? In the end, how did you feel about the assessment and your
involvement in it? Please discuss your reflection with your writing group or class.
2 Consider the writing you have done that has been turned in for a grade and your
instructor’s response to it. Did you feel that you received an adequate response? Did
you feel encouraged? Discouraged? Was the assessment useful? In your view, were you
treated fairly?
3 If you have had the opportunity to respond to the writing of others, what issues did you
struggle with? Share your response with the class.
Assessment 239
Writing Assessment: An Overview
•• accessible
•• stated clearly
•• broad based
•• engaging, but not so emotional that students lose control of their writing
•• encouraging of the type of writing sought by the curriculum (Wolcott, 1998, pp. 24–25).
While these are useful goals for creating essay prompts, they are not easily attained if we
consider the many kinds of difference that students bring to any testing prompt—ethnicity,
gender, religion, culture, disability, and economic disparity.
PORTFOLIOS
In the late 1980s, in answer to the problems with direct assessment and to reflect changing
theory and research in the field of composition, portfolios became an increasingly common
assessment tool (Yancey, 1999, p. 485) and have continued to be important in the 21st cen-
tury. Portfolios are a collection of student work, paper, or digital, chosen by the student at
the end of a course or at the end of a college career and are used for both large-scale and
classroom assessment. Many instructors regularly use portfolios to build assessment into their
classroom practices. Portfolio assessment responds to the need for the generation of ideas and
thoughtful revision over time and allows the student to choose what goes into the portfo-
lio. In addition to the content of the portfolio, the student usually writes a reflective piece,
making the portfolio even more effective because it involves students in their own learning
(Yancey, 1992). Ed White (2005) argued that we regard the reflective piece as a central piece
of portfolio scoring, asking students to use their reflective essay to make an argument for why
their selections for the portfolio meet the goals for the course. A portfolio can play an impor-
tant role in helping students take responsibility for their own writing and learning, something
that is important to student growth (Huot, 2002). Increasingly, colleges use portfolios to
showcase student work. Many universities, such as Virginia Tech, have put resources into the
development of e-portfolios across the curriculum, encouraging the use of e-portfolios within
departments or schools (Zaldivar, 2010). Other schools (University of Georgia and Portland
State University) use e-portfolios to provide assessment data that are deep and complex and
can be useful for multiple constituencies (Yancey, Cambridge, & Cambridge, 2009). Because
Assessment 243
they may include a range of products including performances, artistic compositions, and
evidence of proficiency in foreign languages, electronic portfolios go far beyond tests in dem-
onstrating a student’s learning or programmatic accomplishments. In addition, the portfolios
involve students in significant self-reflection that can be carried across the curriculum and
extended throughout the student’s college career (Yancey, Cambridge, & Cambridge, 2009).
While portfolios are unlikely to replace testing completely, they solve many of the problems
related to writing assessment. E-portfolios are likely to become increasingly popular as a tool
for promoting student learning (Yancey, Cambridge, & Cambridge, 2009).
Many instructors find the portfolio the ideal assessment tool because it allows them to act
as “coaches,” rather than judges. Blind scoring of portfolios produces results that can pro-
vide assessment information to the student, the teacher, and the institution. But some critics
question the reliability of portfolios. Pointing to the number of times a paper can be revised
before it goes into the portfolio, they claim it is often impossible to determine how compe-
tent the student writer is or how much help a student has received during the revision process
(Wolcott, 1998, p. 52). Within individual classrooms or programs, critics note that some stu-
dents do not take early assignments seriously because they know they will have opportunities
for revision later in the course. Critics also note that portfolio scores because of the number of
variables cannot provide useful programmatic information or statistics that can be compared
from year to year or across campuses. Portfolios are useful as summative assessment at the end
of a course or college career, but not useful for placement because most students coming into
college have not yet created a portfolio of their written work. As a campus-wide initiative,
the implementation of portfolio writing assessment takes vision, commitment, and finesse.
Despite the criticisms, most compositionists believe the benefits of portfolios far outweigh
the problems: portfolios are valid because they measure students’ ability to write and revise
in a rhetorical setting, they involve student choice and reflection, and they are authentic—that
is, the assessment, as much as possible, occurs in a meaningful, real-life context. Supporters
of portfolios believe that the validity of portfolio assessment and the student involvement in
it outweigh the reliability problems. With appropriate safeguards, the advantages of portfolios
for students and stakeholders far outweigh the risks and provide a balance between process
and product.
Scoring
Whether the assessment is being done through evaluating timed writing samples or portfolios,
the texts will go through a process called scoring. The two most common kinds of scoring
are holistic and multiple-trait scoring( sometimes referred to as analytical scoring). Which
method is chosen will be dependent on the situation and goals of the assessment. Holistic
scoring sees the whole as greater than the sum of its parts (Myers, 1980, p. 1). John Mellon
in The National Assessment and the Teaching of English (1975) and Charles Cooper (1977, p. 19)
in Evaluating Writing: Describing, Measuring, Judging have found holistic scoring to be a reliable
244 Julie Neff-Lippman
way to measure writing samples when well-trained readers from similar backgrounds use it
to evaluate student writing. Holistic scoring may be the best method for scoring because it is
valid and reliable and requires each scorer to look at the essay or portfolio as a whole (White,
1994, 2000; Wolcott, 1998).
But Liz Hamp-Lyons (2016) argues we should consider multiple-traits scoring, which looks
at particular aspects of a text, as a more nuanced alternative to holistic scoring. For instance,
using multiple-trait scoring, a paper may score a 5 for a strong argument, a 3 for organization,
a 5 for use of sources, and a 2 for syntax and grammar. The paper would receive a score that
is a total of these numbers; in this case, the score would be 15 out of 20 points. The choice of
scoring method will be dependent on the situation and goals of the assessment. While holistic
scoring works well in certain instances, it does not always fit the goal of the assessment.
Ideally, scoring is done by the instructors who teach within the program (Yancey, 1992).
Many (White, 1994; Wolcott, 1998) believe that the scorers must develop their own rubric
for the assessment to be successful. Others have argued that if the group agrees to the rubric,
the scoring can proceed with equal success (Cooper, 1977). Whether the rubric is developed
by the group or not, all the scorers must agree to the rubric and the criteria that characterize
papers at each level. Before beginning holistic scoring, scorers are trained in a norming session
to apply the rubric to a variety of papers. Norming sessions are often difficult and intense,
but if the norming has been successful, the scorers will be able to rate the students’ work reli-
ably (White, 2002). The reliability of raters’ scores can be checked through a process called
inter-rater reliability. Mixed among the papers being assessed are “sample” papers. If each team
gives those papers the same score, inter-rater reliability has been achieved and the scoring is
consistent and reliable. If inter-rater scores do not correspond within acceptable limits, raters
must go back to norming to resolve disagreements.
Programmatic Assessment
Over the last 50 years in many universities, the focus of large-scale assessment has shifted from
the individual learner to the program (Yancey, 1999). Measuring how well the program is
working, programmatic assessment focuses on the outcomes that the program can demonstrate
rather than on the accomplishments of the individual student. For example, over the past
19 years, the University of Puget Sound has been using “folders” with random sampling to
gather information for programmatic assessment. Faculty, from across the disciplines, score
the writing samples to measure the success of the writing program, rather than the writing
development of individual students. The study produces statistical results which have been
enhanced by student questionnaires and focus groups. The assessment provides quantitative
and qualitative data about the writing program that can be used to adjust the program and
provide information about the writing program for faculty, administrators, and accreditors.
Yancey (1999) has challenged us to think about how programmatic assessment can be used to
help the individual as well as the institution.
Outcomes Assessment
Outcomes assessment, an increasingly popular term in political and educational circles, has
also influenced how writing teachers think about assessment. William Spady (1994) defined
outcomes assessment in the following way: “Outcomes are high-quality, culminating demon-
strations of significant learning in context” (p. 18). Outcomes, based on clearly defined goals
at the beginning of a course or an educational experience, measure students’ achievement of
the goals at the end of the course or a college career.
Assessment is often political and contentious because the stakeholders, those who have an
interest in assessment, have agendas that are sometimes at odds. For some, using assessment
to create equality of opportunity for all students is of primary importance (Poe, Inoue, &
Elliot, 2018.) Others favor assessment that is reliable, valid, and authentic with outcomes
that can be shown in tables and graphs and compared among campuses and over time. For
others, the cost of writing assessment is primary. Students want assessment that is fair and not
too time-consuming. Legislators and members of State Boards of Education want to see that
their investment in education is paying off in terms of improved scores and graduation rates.
With so many people having competing agendas, the challenge with any kind of assessment is
bringing together all the stakeholders to develop a plan that instructors, students, administra-
tors, community groups, and state legislators can all agree on (Banta, 2002; Wolcott, 1998).
Adler-Kassner and Harrington (2010) call for a new era of responsibility that includes three
components: “Identifying and working from principle and best practice, building alliances
with others, and engaging in (and assessing) shared actions based on common interest” (p. 86).
Asian Families
The environment in which family live and the culture that surrounds them play a large
role in establish parental beliefs, child rearing goals, parenting methods, thus, parenting
styles and attitudes can vary widely between cultures. For this reason, it is important
to look at underlying family value when studying and evaluating parenting measures
in different cultures. For instance, Asian American culture define love differently than
Western culture, and therefore the two tend to show warmth and affection in differ-
ent way (Van Campen & Russell, 2010, p. 1). There are two main style of parenting:
authoritative and authoritarian. Authoritative parenting is a firm and warm parenting
style, which is associated with intimate parent-child relations and positive child out-
come. Authoritarian parenting, on the other hand, is define by strict and restrictive
parental control and lack of warmth, and is typically associated with higher parent-child
conflict and negative youth behaviors. But interesting, these negative consequences of
authoritarian parenting techniques are mostly seen only in Western cultures. (Choi,
Kim, Kim, & Park, 2013, p. 20). Asian American parenting is often seen as over con-
trolling and harsh, but when looked at in terms of Asian family values and cultural
beliefs, rather than Western conjectures of valid parenting, it is supportive, loving, and
wholly effective.
Asian families tend to emphasize interdependence, conformity to the group, emo-
tional self-control, and humility (Choi, Kim, Kim, & Park, 2013, p. 22). At first glance,
Asian American parents seem more controlling over children and seem to show less
warmth, but Asian American children do just as well as their European counterparts –
they do well in school and succeed in life. For example, my brother is in medical
school. To Asian families, being a strict authority figure is a necessary and key role for
parents. Many Asian American parents are strict in an attempt to protect children, and
not inhibit them. Because control and warmth are defined differently by Asian cultures,
authoritarian parenting holds a different meaning as well (Van Campen & Russell,
2010, p. 2).
Chinese parenting practices are based upon two principles: Chiao Shun, and Guan
(Van Campen & Russell, 2010, p. 2). Chiao Shun means to train, and Guan means to
govern and to love. So Asian parents who wish to train and govern their children are
often highly involved in their children’s lives. Chinese parent is expected to teach
children how to maintain harmony with others, and this means limiting emotional
expression. In many Chinese societies, emotional expression is considered harmful to
one’s health and relationships, and children are encouraged to avoid it (Van Campen
& Russell, 2010, p. 2). Another method found in Asian parenting is corporal pun-
ishment. This practice is difficult to maintain for families that immigrate to Western
cultures, however.
In contrast with Asian American parents’ display of affection, Western parental
support tend to be much more physical, verbal, and emotional; it typically includes a
lot of hugging, kissing, and praising (Lieber, 2015). A prevalent parenting technique
(continued)
250 Julie Neff-Lippman
(continued)
in Western cultures is a style that is referred to as “material parenting.” Material par-
enting involves dangling rewards in front of kids and then taking them away for pun-
ishment (Lieber, 2015). Studies have found that there may be a connection between
raising kids using material parenting and materialism in kids when they grow up. Past
research has tied materialism to gambling, debt, marriage conflict, and decreased hap-
piness (Lieber, 2015).
Most mainstream ideas in the U.S. about parenting and parent-child relationships
are based upon Western culture. This is not surprising, given that this is all that we
know and surrounds us, but turning to these assumptions when looking at parenting
styles in other cultures tend to lead to unfair and inaccurate stereotyping. Many dif-
ferent parenting styles are good and correct and effective, and there is no one right
way to raise a child.
References
Biggs, S. N., Pizzorno,V. A., van den Heuvel, C. J., Kennedy, J. D., Martin, A. J., & Lushington, K.
(2010). Differences in parental attitudes toward sleep and associations with sleep-wake patterns
in Caucasian and Southeast Asian school-aged children in Australia. Behavioral Sleep Medicine,
8(4): 207–218. doi:10.1080/15402002.2010.509197
Choi, Y., Kim, Y. S., Kim, S. Y., & Park, I. J. K. (2013). Is Asian American parenting control-
ling and harsh? Empirical testing of relationships between Korean American and Western
parenting measures. Asian American Journal of Psychology, 4(1): 19–29. doi:10.1037/a00
31220
Lieber, R. (2015, January 8).The risk of “material parenting.” The New York Times. Retrieved from
http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/08/the-risk-of-material-parenting
Van Campen, K. S., & Russell, S. T. (2010). Cultural differences in parenting practices: What Asian
American families can teach us. Frances McClelland Institute for Children, Youth, and Families
Research Link, 2(1), Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona.
Many instructors have had the experience of spending considerable time writing com-
ments and grading papers only to have students glance at the grade and throw the paper in
the trash on the way out the door. Spending more time on comments during the formative
stage of assessment, thus shifting the burden of comments to an earlier stage of the writing
process, is likely to be more useful for students and less frustrating for the instructor. It also
gives students a good reason to take comments seriously.
For responding to student papers, some instructors have found technology to be helpful.
As technological possibilities grow, we can expect to find it playing an even greater role in
classroom assessment. Below are a few of the technologies you might find useful.
1 Voice-activated software such as JING, which is free and downloadable. JING allows the
instructor to speak to the student while highlighting places in the text.
2 A recorded response to the paper that the student can play on a computer or phone.
3 Word-processing programs that allow instructors to cut and paste advice and then cus-
tomize it for the individual student—commercial products like Emarking Assistant and
Rubric-O-Matic can be used with Word.
4 Text expansion software that eliminates the need to write out phrases and whole sen-
tences that the writer often uses (Cordell, 2010; Williams, 2010).
Some instructors wonder about using machine scoring of essays. Because of the complexity of
responding to students and their writing (Sommers, 2006), it is unlikely that we will be able
to rely entirely on machine-generated responses to papers. As Richard Haswell (2006) and
others (Brent & Townsend, 2006) have speculated, if we thought machines could do the job
effectively, we might think about turning our assessing of writing over to them. But even if
they could handle the complexities of reading the papers, it is unlikely they would be able to
consider the complexities of the individual writer and the classroom context.
252 Julie Neff-Lippman
Summative Responses
Whether through individual or group assignments or portfolios at the end of the term,
instructors engage in some form of summative assessment. While Sommers (1982) examined
the responses of instructors to first and second drafts, Donald Daiker (1989) looked at the
proportion of negative to positive comments on student papers that are turned in for a final
grade. In a study at Miami University, 24 faculty marked the same essay. Of the 378 mark-
ings, 89.4% were negative; only 40 or 10.6% were positive (Daiker, 1983). Interestingly, in
the Daiker study the faculty that was scoring the papers had been told that they should bal-
ance positive and negative comments. Similar studies (Dragga, 1986; Harris 1977) have had
similar results: Harris looked at responses of 36 high school English teachers and found 40%
of end-paper comments were positive; only 0.007% of marginal comments were positive.
These studies were done several decades ago, but there is little evidence that the relationship
between positive and negative comments has changed in significant ways.
A Paper
•• Answers a question at issue and provides a thesis that helps organize the paper.
•• Has a strong sense of the audience and purpose.
•• Has an introduction that provides adequate context and identifies a problem.
•• Makes excellent use of sources for analysis, discussion, and development.
•• Has a title that anticipates the essay.
Assessment 253
•• Has paragraphs that have a central idea and purpose related to the thesis.
•• Has smooth transitions between paragraphs, which clarify reasoning.
•• Is untroubled by numerous spelling, punctuation, and syntax errors.
•• Correctly uses the MLA format for citation of sources.
B Paper
•• Has a thesis, which helps organize the paper.
•• Makes use of sources for analysis, discussion, and clarity.
•• Has an imprecise sense of audience and/or appropriate tone.
•• Has a title that relates to the content of the paper.
•• Has paragraphs that have a central idea and purpose.
•• Has some sense of transition or development from paragraph to paragraph.
•• Is untroubled by numerous spelling, punctuation, and syntax errors.
•• Correctly uses the MLA format for citation of sources.
C Paper
•• Has a purpose but is not organized around a thesis or a question at issue.
•• Has not provided adequate context or identified a problem in the introduction.
•• Provides some evidence and analysis, but it is not always tied to the thesis.
•• Has no title or uses the paper assignment as the title.
•• Has paragraphs that have a discernible purpose.
•• Has spelling, punctuation, and syntax errors.
•• Provides some consistent form of documentation of sources.
D Paper
•• Purpose is not clear and does not have an adequate thesis or question.
•• Evidence and analysis are weak or non-existent.
•• Has a significant number of paragraphs that are confused by lack of purpose, contra-
dictory ideas.
•• Has no title.
•• Has a significant number of spelling, punctuation, and syntax errors.
•• Has little or no documentation.
F Paper (Fail)
•• Has no discernible purpose, question, or thesis.
•• Discussion rambles from topic to topic and paragraphs are without purpose.
•• Has little relevant evidence and is not tied to the thesis.
•• Has no title.
•• Is plagued by spelling, punctuation, and syntax errors.
•• Has little or no documentation.
3 Share your scores on the papers with other in your group and then with the class.
Record your scores on the board. Discuss the variations in your scoring and recon-
cile the differences.
4 Adjust the scoring rubric for an assignment you’re working on. Score your paper.
What insights have you gained? Reflect in writing on those insights.
1. Experiencing Life
Blake’s time was one of great change. People had many challenges as they went about their lives.
Blake wants to write about people and their challenges in his poems. He writes many many poems
and most of them moved people. One poem that I thought was interesting and enjoyable was “The
Clod and the Pebble.”
In his poem, Black has many thoughts about love. I don’t think he was talking about romantic
love though. The clod is ugly but he is still happy. But the clod can not protect itself from the cattle
who tromp along, sometimes tromping on the clod. Even so he has a bright outlook on life and a
warm heart. He is also innocent.
The pebble is the opposite of the clod. It is beautiful. It sits in the water, and sings. But the
song doesn’t sound like much it doesn’t sound like the beautiful song of the clod because the pebble
has a hard heart. The pebble has had experience and that makes him unhappy.
This demonstrates that the clod is full of love and the pebble is not. The love idea relates to
the Bible where it says that: “Love does not delight in evil but rejoices in the truth.” The clod
represents truth because it is happy. The pebble represents “sin” because it is unhappy.
William Blake does an excellent job of bring together the ideas of innocence and experience
especially in this poem.
2.The Clod and the Pebble: The Marriage of Innocence and Experience
All throughout his Songs of Innocence and of Experience, William Blake makes comparisons
between the naiveté and goodness of youth and the cynicism and pain of age. Many of his innocence
poems have parallel lyrics of experience, showing the two sides of the same social or political coin. It
is through these comparisons that Blake seeks to compare the harsh realities that come with age and
with the clear, unsullied ideals of youth. Yet a few of his poems attempt to contain both aspects of life,
exposing innocence and experience within the same context and effectively linking the two. In “The
Clod & the Pebble,” Blake discusses the Christian virtue love, first ideally and then pessimistically.
(continued)
256 Julie Neff-Lippman
(continued)
The Clod of Clay represents all that is rough on the edges, still moldable, and unaffected by
life and time. Not only does the Clod express its joy and love, it does so in song, with the happi-
ness and melody of an unharmed innocence. At the same time, the Clod is not impressive to look
at; one must truly look deep to find any beauty in a piece of clay. But appearance is not the goal
of the Clod. Instead, its focus is upon pleasing those around it, making any attempt possible to
create a “Heaven in Hell’s despair” (ln 4). Although recognizing the sadness, pain, and death of
hell, The Clod does not give up hope that, with enough love, the despair of hell can be changed
into the hope of heaven. The Clod is idealistic, optimistic, and most of all selfless. It seeks to
exemplify the principles of 1 Corinthians 13, specifically the phrases “It is not self-seeking” (vs
5). The Clod has not been hardened by sin, by pain, by experience of any kind. Yet the Clod is
also easily moved—quickly “trodden with the cattle’s feet” (ln 6). It has not yet built any sort of
protective shell and is, therefore, quite susceptible to any outside force. The cattle of the world have
every power to move the Clod because it does not suspect any interference and cannot protect itself.
The Pebble of the brook is clearly the opposite of the Clod. The Pebble, hard, smooth, and
immutable, warbles out its tuneless words of woe. As the Clod looked rugged and ugly on the
outside so the Pebble, refined by the constant stream of water, shines and glistens. It looks beautiful
on the outside, but has nothing of softness or warmth on the inside. As the Clod sought to make a
heaven out of hell, so the Pebble manages to create a hell despite the power and existence of heaven.
Hurt and used by the experiences of coming of age, the Pebble is selfish and egocentric. It directly
opposes 1 Corinthians 13, not just in seeking its own delight but also in taking joy in the pain of
another (1 Cor. 13:6 says that “Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.”) The
Pebble has become hard and cold by sin, pain, and experience, but it has also somewhat established
itself. Constantly opposing the water of the brook the Pebble has learned to rely upon itself. It
remains where it is, despite the continual pressure to submit to the power of the water. As time
has pressed forward, the Pebble has learned to stand on its own, to be only mildly affected by the
things of life, to look at life through tainted eyes.
Most of Blakes’ poetry only focuses upon one aspect of existence—either the ideal or the reality.
In “The Clod & the Pebble,” Blake effectively sets the two extremes against each other to truly
bring out their opposites. By doing so, he has in many ways summed up the who effect of the rest of
his work on innocence and experience and, consequently, the futility of either perspective. To look
at life as the Clod would, without defense or protection is just as meaningless as taking the Pebble’s
hardened and unloving perspective. It must be, then, that reality is a focus of the two extremes.
Evaluation Criteria Group Member: Group Member: Group Member: Group Member:
Ingmar Marina Oscar Jarome
Attends group meetings
regularly and arrives on time
Contributes meaningfully to
group discussions
(continued)
258 Julie Neff-Lippman
(continued)
Evaluation Criteria Group Member: Group Member: Group Member: Group Member:
Ingmar Marina Oscar Jarome
Completes group assignments
on time
Prepares work in a quality
manner
Demonstrates a cooperative and
supportive attitude
Contributes significantly to the
success of the project
TOTALS
Adapted from a peer evaluation form developed at Johns Hopkins University (October 2006)
Carnegie Mellon (19 August 2018).
Assessing student writing is a complicated task that has become increasingly complex as
we learn more about the teaching of writing and the assessment of it. No one wants to do
assessment (Yancey & Huot, 1997); however, if we can tie assessment more closely to our
pedagogical goals, we are likely to find it more rewarding and productive (Huot, 2002).
When instructors develop a clear approach for assessment, share it with students, and tie it to
the goals of the course, good assessment can improve student writing and learning. Whether
assessment is summative assessment conducted system-wide or formative assessment con-
ducted in the classroom, assessment should be an integral part of teaching and learning.
Those who believe that student writing becomes worse every year (something I hear regu-
larly on my campus) have something in common with Harvard professors of the 19th century
(Huot, 2002). These same colleagues mark every error, rewrite whole sentences throughout
the paper, and cite pages in the handbook, expecting these marks will make students eager to
revise. Generally, none of these happen to be true.
Here are a few principles that grow out of the research and have been borne out in practice
by legions of us who teach writing. Of course, all these need to be offered in the context of
the classroom (Mathison, Fife & O’Neill, 2001; Sommers, 1982).
1 Less is more (Haswell, 1983). Pick out two or three of the sentence-level problems that
are most likely to obscure clear communication. Mark them in a few places throughout
the text or mark them in a single paragraph and give the student a brief specific explana-
tion. For the next paper, pick another two or three errors.
2 Do not rewrite the paper sentence by sentence. See above.
3 Do not use lines, circles, or other marks that students will see as vague (Sommers, 1982).
4 If a concept has been presented in class, comment specifically when you see it used cor-
rectly or incorrectly referring the student to a handbook or to the class notes. Put the
comments in the context of the class (Sommers, 2010).
5 Use specific positive comments to reinforce things the writer has done well (Daiker,
1989).
6 Insist that students use a spell check and/or grammar check on their computers.
(Surprisingly, some students just don’t bother unless it is a requirement.)
Conclusion
Assessing student writing is a complicated task that has become increasingly complex as we
learn more about the teaching of writing and the assessment of it. No one wants to do assess-
ment (Yancey & Huot, 1997); however, if we can tie assessment more closely to our peda-
gogical goals, we are likely to find it more rewarding and productive (Huot, 2002). When
instructors develop a clear approach for assessment, share it with students, and tie it to the
goals of the course, good assessment can improve student writing and learning.
Whether assessment is summative assessment conducted system-wide or formative
assessment conducted in the classroom, assessment should be an integral part of teaching
and learning.
Assessment 261
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Reading
Across the Drafts
Nancy Sommers
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
For the past thirty years, I have been a teacher of writing—work that I love, especially teach-
ing first-year students. I have always been curious about the ways in which students read
and interpret my comments—why they find some responses useful, others distracting, and
how these comments work together with the lessons of the classroom. In 1982, I published
an article in CCC on this very topic, but rereading this essay twenty-four years later, I feel the
absence of any “real” students who, through voice, expertise, and years of being responded
to, could offer their teachers valuable lessons. In returning to a topic that has captured my
imagination for over a quarter of a century, I’m also returning to a topic that is part of our col-
lective imagination, with so much scholarly attention paid to it that if you search “responding
to student writing” on Google, you arrive in 2.7 seconds at the first of about 230,000 entries
(Harvey 44).1 Our collective interest in responding, I suspect, is deeply professional and
personal. We feel a weighty responsibility when we respond to our students’ words, knowing
that we, too, have received comments that have given us hope—and sometimes made us
despair—in our abilities as writers. The words teachers scribbled on our papers, inscribed
in memory, are often the same words we scribble in the margins or at the bottom of our
own students’ pages—well-intended, most often written with great care, though sometimes
carelessly, often caffeine-induced, usually late at night. These words, we hope, our students
will take with them as they move from our class to the next, from one paper assignment to
another, across the drafts. We don’t take this responsibility lightly. The work of entering into
our students’ minds and composing humane, thoughtful, even inspiring responses is serious
business. Given the enormous amount of time it takes to comment fairly upon a single paper,
let alone twenty or thirty, we often wonder whether our students actually read our comments
and what, if anything, they take from them.
As I look back across a quarter of a century of my own drafts, I remember that my first
impulse when researching the topic of response was to imagine a hierarchy of effective
and ineffective comments that could be isolated, identified, even memorized by new writing
teachers. I quickly learned the limits of such research when I tried to separate comments
from the context in which they were written—that is, the language established in the class-
room. There is a story behind each effective comment that animates it for a student, making
it more than mere marks on a page. But in our professional literature about responding, we
too often neglect the role of the student in this transaction, and the vital partnership between
teacher and student, by focusing, almost exclusively, on the role of the teacher. We offer pre-
scriptions to new teachers that imply a hierarchy of comments: offering praise, for instance,
is more constructive than criticism; posing questions is better than issuing commands; and
using green or blue ink is always preferable to red.
The new perspective I bring to this topic today comes from the Harvard Study of
Undergraduate Writing, which followed four hundred students for four years to see college
writing through their eyes. With the leisurely perspective of time, and with the collection of
over six hundred pounds of student writing, five hundred hours of taped interviews, and
266 Nancy Sommers
countless megabytes of survey data, my fellow researchers and I have witnessed the wide
range of comments that students receive, not just in one course or from one teacher, but over
four years and across the disciplines.2 To see these comments through the eyes of college
students is a kaleidoscopic experience: papers never returned; papers returned with bewil-
dering hieroglyphics—dots, check marks, squiggly or straight lines; papers with responses
that treat students like apprentice scholars, engaging with their ideas, seriously and thought-
fully. That students might benefit from a decoding ring to determine whether the check marks
and squiggles are a good or bad thing will not surprise us. That students might find com-
ments useful throughout the process—before and between drafts, not just at the end—will
also not surprise us. What did surprise us, though, is the role feedback plays in the complex
story of why some students prosper as college writers while others lag.3
It would be comforting to think that those fortunate students who receive the most use-
ful comments make the greatest leaps in writing development. And it would be equally
comforting to think we could link the lack of writing development to a student’s score-
card of useful and useless comments. But in the matter of writing development, nothing is
straightforward. The movement from first-year writing to senior, from novice to expert, if it
happens at all, looks more like one step forward, two steps back, isolated progress within
paragraphs, one compositional element mastered while other elements fall away. For some
students, progress is uneven but continuous. Other students stall and become stuck writ-
ing the same kind of formulaic paper, again and again, no matter what assignment they
receive. We wondered—would more or better comments have made a difference to these
stalled writers? And what relationship could we perceive between those who progressed as
writers and the comments they received?
A quarter of a century ago, I wouldn’t have known how to ask such questions, let alone
answer them. At that point, I focused entirely upon comments written in first-year composition
courses to prompt revisions. And I concluded, “We do not know in any definitive way what
constitutes thoughtful commentary or what effect, if any, our comments have on helping our
students become more effective writers” (148). In the Harvard Study, though, we looked at
all comments students received over four years. Outside the first-year or upper-division writ-
ing courses, we learned, students rarely receive writing instruction and are rarely required
to revise. Consequently, instructors’ comments on final drafts take on an even greater role;
they often become the only place for writing instruction. After following four hundred students
for four years, I now challenge my earlier conclusion by arguing that feedback plays a lead-
ing role in undergraduate writing development when, but only when, students and teachers
create a partnership through feedback—a transaction in which teachers engage with their
students by treating them as apprentice scholars, offering honest critique paired with instruc-
tion. The role of the student in this exchange is to be open to an instructor’s comments,
reading and hearing their responses not as personal attacks or as isolated moments in a
college writing career but, rather, as instructive and portable words to take with them to the
next assignment, across the drafts.
Colleges have great expectations for their students. But if we understand how slow writ-
ing development is—that is, how long it takes to learn how to write a college paper, to
have something to say to a reader who wants to hear it—we become rather humble about
the enterprise of commenting. If our comments move students forward as writers, they do
so because such comments resonate with some aspect of their writing that our students
are already thinking about. As we learned from the students we followed, most comments,
Across the Drafts 267
unfortunately, do not move students forward as writers because they underwhelm or over-
whelm them, going unread and unused. As one student suggested, “Too often comments
are written to the paper, not to the student.” The underwhelming comments look a lot like
check marks and squiggles, or papers returned with the most cryptic of comments like “B+;
your style needs improvement; otherwise, a good treatment of the topic.” The overwhelming
comments assume too much on the part of a student, as if instructors imagine their job is to
comment on every compositional element all at once, and as if they believe that pointing out
such errors will prevent students from ever making them again.
What emerged in every conversation we had with students about their college writing is
the power of feedback, its absence or presence, to shape their writing experiences. As one
student told me, “Without a reader, the whole process is diminished.” That students care
deeply about the comments they receive was revealed in our survey of four hundred stu-
dents, who were asked as juniors to offer one piece of advice to improve writing instruction
at Harvard. Overwhelmingly—almost 90 percent—they responded: urge faculty to give more
specific comments. And when we asked students each year to describe their best writing
experiences, two overriding characteristics emerged: the opportunity to write about some-
thing that matters to the student, and the opportunity to engage with an instructor through
feedback. What became clear from students’ testimonials is that feedback plays a much
larger role than we might expect from mere words scribbled in the margins or at the end
of a paper; feedback plays an important social role, especially in large lecture classes, to
help students feel less anonymous and to give them a sense of academic belonging. As we
learned from the students we followed, it isn’t just that without a reader “the whole process
is diminished”; rather, it is with a thoughtful reader that the whole process is enriched, deep-
ened, and inscribed in memory.
One might easily imagine that this partnership around feedback is so valuable to students
because it affirms them as writers. And, yes, affirmation is often the end result, but a key
finding is that constructive criticism, more than encouraging praise, often pushes students
forward with their writing; constructive criticism more than praise reveals instructors’ invest-
ments in their students’ untapped potential. In the case of praise, the messages it contains—
you belong at this college; you are not the admissions committee’s one mistake—are vitally
important to propel first-year students forward with their writing and to inspire them to work
harder. But over a college career, when such praise is not paired with constructive criti-
cism, when it doesn’t involve a back-and-forth exchange between student and teacher, writer
and reader, it has the opposite effect. Instead, undeserved praise neglects to offer students
an incentive to improve, nor does it provide any alternative approaches for future papers.
Students who repeatedly receive comments from their instructors such as “I have nothing to
say about this well-written paper,” often stall as writers because they are never asked to do
anything differently, never shown what skills they need to develop, nor are they engaged in
a dialogue that challenges their own thinking.
The surprise was watching so many students make great leaps in their writing develop-
ment after receiving what they identified as tough and honest assessment of their work. For
one student, Ellery, the harsh critique he received as a junior was the only thing that could
shake him from his glibness. His political science instructor wrote: “Ellery, this is supposed
to be an essay, not a rush-hour radio talk show. What you write is a good piece of entertain-
ment, but it is not the kind of writing that goes under the label of academic.” Though blunt,
this response was written not as a pronouncement, but in the context of a lengthy comment
268 Nancy Sommers
in which the instructor engaged with Ellery and his ideas. She goes on to model the kind of
questions he might have asked and to model the way in which skeptical readers might look
at the same evidence. Although tough in her assessment, Ellery’s instructor treated him as a
colleague, someone capable of great things, even if not yet achieved. This kind of intellectual
partnership created through feedback showed Ellery that he was part of an academic com-
munity, made up of thinkers sorting out ideas, arguing with each other, and questioning each
other’s thinking. Criticism is not enough; like praise, it has to be paired with instruction. But
in the call and response of feedback, when instructors model for their students a live, listen-
ing person, they offer students an image of a reader at the other end of the writing process,
someone willing to listen and comment, critically yet constructively.
The success of this partnership has as much to do with students’ willingness to hear and
accept honest assessment of their work as it does with instructors’ willingness to offer such
responses. Ellery, for instance, received honest assessments of his writing in his first and
second years, but these assessments didn’t help him become a stronger writer because he
dismissed these responses as his instructors’ idiosyncrasies. Or, in the case of Jackson,
another student in our study, who, when asked as a junior how he might use his instructors’
comments in future assignments, responded: “I don’t think I can use these comments since
each paper is a different assignment and a different kind of paper to work through.” Jackson
intuited the great challenge of undergraduate writing: to move from discipline to discipline,
writing about Confucius in a philosophy course one semester, a Haydn piano sonata in a
music course the next. But on another level, Jackson’s observation makes clear that it will
be difficult for him to apply even the best comments to future writing assignments since he
believes that each essay assignment is defined by its topic, a discrete unit. In Jackson’s view
of writing, comments are tailored to each essay but also isolated from all other essays, and
their purpose is, simply, to show students what they did wrong on a particular assignment.
We learn from Jackson’s undergraduate writing career that part of becoming a good writer
involves learning to receive criticism, both in understanding what an instructor intends and
in the practical sense of knowing how to put that advice into effect in other courses and con-
texts. Jackson is correct that his essay on Confucius is a text onto itself, but part of Jackson’s
stasis as a writer stems from his belief that there is no continuity from one assignment to
another. Because he sees no way to transport lessons from one paper to the next, he reads
his instructors’ comments as isolated moments in his college writing career, not as bridges
between assignments. Even the best, most thoughtful comments will not move students like
Jackson forward as writers.
But for any writer learning how to receive and accept critique, how to read comments not
as judgment about one’s limitations as a human being, or about one’s failings as a writer,
is not simple, especially for beginners who are quick to dismiss or deflect feedback. For
first-year students, feedback is monumental, their most personal, most intimate and direct
interaction with their college writing culture. And feedback comes, implicitly or explicitly, with
messages of hope or despair about who they are and who they might become as students.
While one student will respond, “My greatest reaction to all that red ink is gratitude,” another
first-year will shrug and say, “I guess all these comments mean he didn’t really like my
paper.” Or, if a first-year student believes, as one told me, that the purpose of her composi-
tion course was to teach her how to “write quickly, adequately, and painlessly,” we under-
stand why such an attitude might prevent her from being open to comments that ask her to
slow down, read texts closely and carefully, and, in a word, change. The differences among
Across the Drafts 269
first-year students, we found, are less about ability and more about an openness and recep-
tivity to comments, a way of seeing their writing experiences as something under their con-
trol, not random and outside of themselves. We found that one of the important predictors of
undergraduate writing development is a first-year student’s willingness to accept and benefit
from feedback, to see it as instruction, not merely as judgment.
At its best, feedback comes out of an exchange in which instructors explain to their stu-
dents what is expected of them as college writers, and students are open to learning about
these expectations. By giving students a generalized sense of the expectations of academic
writing, teaching one lesson at a time, and not overwhelming them by asking them to improve
all aspects of their writing at once, instructors show their students how to do something differ-
ently the next time. The comments that students identify as the most helpful are responses
that straddle the present world of the paper at hand with a glance to the next paper, articulat-
ing one lesson for the future. Consider, for instance, the feedback Louisa, another student in
our study, received in response to her weak thesis and introduction. Here is her instructor’s
comment: “Louisa, a technique that can work well for opening a paper is to begin with an
intriguing detail, especially one you find difficult to account for. Beginning in this manner not
only draws in your reader, but also forces you as a writer to grapple with a troubling aspect
of the text, which can often be a key aspect that you had previously set aside. This, in turn,
can focus your thesis and argument.”
As a sophomore, Louisa had complained in an interview: “It’s tough getting better as a
writer when nobody is showing you how.” But as a junior, she was fortunate to work with an
instructor who didn’t assume that she arrived in his class as a fully formed writer. Instead,
the instructor treated Louisa as an apprentice, an evolving writer. The tone of his comment
is phrased, respectfully, as a writing lesson on how to arrive at a thesis, and how to engage
a reader with an arguable claim. By giving Louisa a generalized sense of what academic
writing calls for—write about what you don’t understand; those things you have dismissed
might be more important than you first imagined; start with details because they engage
readers—Louisa’s instructor composes his comment to offer a bridge for her to cross to
future writing assignments. We concluded that when students have been taken seriously as
apprentice writers, when instructors model the role of an attentive reader, such comments
function to anchor students in their academic lives and, ultimately, make a vast difference in
their college writing.
Writing development is painstakingly slow because academic writing is not a mother
tongue; its conventions require instruction and practice, years of imitation and experimenta-
tion in rehearsing other people’s arguments before being able to articulate one’s own. The
conclusion from the Harvard Study is that feedback shapes the way students learn to write,
but feedback alone, even the best feedback, doesn’t move students forward as writers if
they are not open to its instruction and critique, or if they don’t understand how to use their
instructors’ comments as bridges to future writing assignments. For students to improve as
writers, a number of factors are necessary: in addition to honest comments, they need plenty
of opportunities to practice writing throughout their college careers, not merely in one course
or in one year, and plenty of opportunities to receive writing instruction in and beyond the first
year, especially instruction in one discipline’s method.
Feedback is rooted in the partnership between student and teacher, and as in any rela-
tionship, it develops its own language and meaning. That this relationship provides students
their most direct contact with their college writing culture seems simple enough. But what
270 Nancy Sommers
isn’t simple is the profound influence the relationship created through feedback has, not
only upon students’ writing development, but also upon students’ sense of themselves as
thinkers. When students receive feedback telling them they have “great insights” that their
instructors have “never seen the topic discussed this way before,” or that there might be “a
whole level of other questions” for them to imagine, students understand that their teachers
view them as people “with things to say,” thinkers capable of insight and asking other levels
of questions. Or, when a student tells us that he will always hear his instructor’s voice telling
him to change his ideas, revise his thinking, it is not just the instructor’s words the student
hears and carries with him across the drafts; it is also the instructor’s belief in the student as
a thinker, someone capable of doing good work, even if as a first-year student he is not yet
accomplishing it. When students respond to feedback as an invitation to contribute some-
thing of their own to an academic conversation, they do so because students imagine their
instructors as readers waiting to learn from their contributions, not readers waiting to report
what they’ve done wrong on a given paper.
I once read a definition of a “true gift” not just as a possession passed from giver to receiver
but, rather, something that is kept in motion, moving back and forth between giver and receiver,
and outward into the world. One college senior, reflecting on the role of feedback in his under-
graduate writing career, told me about such a gift: “If I bumped into one of my professors twenty
years from now, I would know what this professor thought of my work; our minds connected
at this juncture of my paper, and I will always be indebted.” The word indebted caught me off
guard. Indebtedness, after all, carries with it a connotation of obligation, of being beholden.
But indebtedness also carries with it a feeling of appreciation and gratitude, a legacy of con-
nectedness. And indebtedness goes two ways, like any bridge. As teachers, we respond to
our students’ great insights because we are grateful for the insights they have given us. And
in encouraging our students to imagine other levels of questions, we, too, are inspired to think
more widely and deeply. Feedback doesn’t need to be monumental, but its influence often is.
As our students teach us, their papers don’t end when they turn them in for a grade, nor
do our comments end when we write them. The partnership between writer and reader,
between student and teacher, creates something new—a collection of ideas that are larger
than the paper itself, ideas milling around, moving forth into the world, across the drafts.
Acknowledgments
As I worked through the various drafts of this essay, I have been fortunate to receive com-
ments from wise colleagues and friends. I would like to acknowledge the enormous contribu-
tions of the following colleagues to my own thinking about this topic: Joshua Alper, David
Bartholomae, Patricia Bellanca, Faye Halpern, Gordon Harvey, Karen Heath, Jim Herron,
Tom Jehn, Suzanne Lane, Soo La Kim, Emily O’Brien, Stuart Pizer, Maxine Rodburg, Jane
Rosenzweig, Susanna Ryan, Laura Saltz, Mimi Schwartz, Dawn Skorczewski, Stephen
Sutherland, Kerry Walk, and Suzanne Young.
Notes
1 A rich and abundant literature exists on the topic of responding to student writing. In particular, I would
mention the important work of Chris Anson, Lil Brannon and Cy Knoblauch, Summer Smith, Richard
Straub and Ronald Lunsford, and Kathleen Blake Yancey.
2 To learn more about the Harvard Study of Undergraduate Writing, see www.fas.harvard.edu/~expos.
To date, scholars in our field—Marilyn Sternglass, Anne Herrington, Marcia Curtis, Lee Ann Carroll,
Across the Drafts 271
and Jenn Fishman, Andrea Lunsford and colleagues have demonstrated the value of longitudinal
studies to provide a wider perspective than research focused upon one college course or one under-
graduate year.
3 To bring the voices of undergraduates into a larger pedagogical discussion about responding, my col-
league, Jane Rosenzweig, and I created a film, Across the Drafts: Students and Teachers Talk about
Feedback. In this film, we follow one student, Jon Stona, and his writing teacher, Tom Jehn, as they
move through the process of composing the last assignment in Jon’s first-year writing course. The film
also features a wide range of students, first-years through seniors, as well as their professors, speak-
ing about the challenges and rewards of receiving and giving feedback. The film can be viewed on the
Harvard Study Web site,www.fas.harvard.edu/~expos. Copies of the film can be obtained by writing to
wrstudy@fas. harvard.edu.
Works Cited
Anson, Chris M. “Response Styles and Ways of Knowing.” Writing and Response: Theory, Practice,
and Research. Ed. Chris M. Anson. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1989. 332–66.
Brannon, Lil, and C. H. Knoblauch. “On Students’ Rights to Their Own Texts: A Model of Teacher
Response.” College Composition and Communication 33.2 (1982): 157–66.
Carroll, Lee Ann. Rehearsing New Roles: How College Students Develop as Writers. Carbondale, IL:
Southern Illinois University Press, 2002.
Fishman, Jenn, et al. “Performing Writing, Performing Literacy.” College Composition and Communication
57.2 (2005): 224–52.
Harvey, Gordon. “Repetitive Strain: The Injuries of Responding to Student Writing.” ADE Bulletin
134–135 (Spring-Fall 2003): 43–48.
Herrington, Anne J., and Marcia Curtis. Persons in Process: Four Stories of Writing and Personal
Development in College. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2000.
Smith, Summer. “The Genre of the End Comment: Conventions in Teacher Response to Student
Writing.” College Composition and Communication 48.2 (1997): 249–68.
Sommers, Nancy. “Responding to Student Writing.” College Composition and Communication 33.2
(1982): 148–56.
Sternglass, Marilyn S. Time to Know Them: A Longitudinal Study of Writing and Learning at the College
Level. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1997.
Straub, Richard, and Ronald F. Lunsford. Twelve Readers Reading: Responding to College Student
Writing. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 1995.
Yancey, Kathleen Blake. “Looking Back as We Look Forward: Historicizing Writing Assessment.”
College Composition and Communication 50.3 (1999): 483–503.
8 Teaching Multilingual Students in a
Composition Class
Olga Griswold and John Edlund
Second language writing is uniquely situated at the intersection of second language studies and
composition studies. . . . both disciplines have a lot to offer each other.
(Leki 1997)
It was the beginning of the fall term, and, about three weeks into it, a new composition
instructor stopped by his senior colleague’s office for some advice. The new instructor was
facing a quandary. He had a significant number of multilingual students in his class for whom
English was not a native language, and while they placed in his course according to the uni-
versity’s procedures and policies, their written performance differed quite a bit—both rhe-
torically and linguistically—from that of their monolingual classmates.
The instructor, although a talented, well-prepared, and eager teacher, did not feel confi-
dent that he could address the needs of these students within the constraints of his curriculum
and expertise. Many of the multilingual students did not possess an intuitive sense of what
sounded right or wrong in English in the same way as their monolingual peers did, and the
instructor himself did not have the background to provide grammar explanations beyond reli-
ance on native-speaker intuition. It was also hard for him to find time for grammar instruc-
tion in an already intensive curriculum, especially when such instruction seemed ostensibly
unnecessary for the monolingual English writers in his class. Correcting the non-native errors
on a one-by-one basis turned out to be futile since it took a lot of the instructor’s time, but
the students did not appear to grasp the underlying causes for the corrections and made the
same errors again on the next assignment. Moreover, many of his multilingual students strug-
gled with organizing their essays in a manner expected by an average American reader. In
the words of the instructor: “The ideas are there, but they don’t always follow one another
in a logical way, and sometimes it is difficult to make out what the student is trying to say.”1
The instructor wanted to help all of his students become successful and confident writers, but
he was stumped for effective pedagogical approaches that he believed would work for his
linguistically diverse class.
This problem is not unusual for college composition instructors encountering for the first
time students for whom English is not a primary language. In the situation that opens this
chapter, the more experienced colleague was able to provide the new instructor with some
pedagogical suggestions that proved effective, and we will discuss these suggestions later in
this chapter. But before we do so, we will address several ideas associated with the theo-
retical underpinnings of second language acquisition and intercultural rhetoric that will help
mainstream composition instructors understand where their multilingual students are coming
from as English users and as academic writers. We will then outline some strategies in lan-
guage development that can be successfully incorporated into and complement the teaching
of writing in classes consisting either fully of speakers of English as an additional language or
combining both monolingual and bilingual English users.
Teaching Multilingual Students 273
More than 20 years ago, Silva, Leki, and Carson (1997) published a poignant and per-
suasive article, drawing attention to the separation of the theoretical frameworks between
composition and second language studies. The authors argued that both disciplines had a lot
to contribute to each other, yet the transfer of knowledge between them tended to go only
in one direction. While the field of second language (L2) writing drew on the insights from
both second language acquisition (SLA) and composition research, the teaching of writing
in mainstream classrooms gave little consideration to non-Western rhetorical patterns and
traditions, to writing in languages other than English, and to writing by individuals for whom
English was an additional language.
The tendency for many a decade was either to relegate students with a primary language
other than English to ESL classes regardless of their educational background and their lin-
guistic and cultural identities, or to treat non-Western (or merely non-American) patterns of
writing and the less-than-native command of grammar as deficiencies needing remediation.
Unfortunately, the situation has not changed significantly for the better since the publication
of Siva et al.’s (1997) article, yet the number of students for whom English is an additional
language in first-year composition (FYC) classes is growing (Roberge, Siegel, & Harklau,
2009; Institute of International Education, 2017). It is, therefore, vital that all composition
instructors, not just ESL ones, be prepared to understand and work with students from diverse
linguistic and cultural backgrounds (Matsuda, 2006).
There are two strong reasons why mainstream composition teachers should be interested
in L2 writing research. First, multilingual students are already in mainstream composition
classes (Di Gennaro, 2008; Doolan, 2017; Griswold, 2017; Matsuda, 2006; Roberge, Siegal,
& Harklau, 2009), and it is incumbent upon every instructor to create the same productive
learning opportunities for them as are created for monolingual English speakers. And second,
without theory, research, and experience from the field of second language acquisition, main-
stream composition is too provincial, basing grand claims on monolingual and monocultural
evidence (Matsuda, 2006; Silva et al., 1997). Our goal in this chapter is to share research and
pedagogical strategies that can help instructors like the one whose story opens this chapter
create a productive learning environment for multilingual students in mainstream composi-
tion classes.
•• Early bilinguals, either born in the U.S. or raised in the country from an early age, who
are products of English-medium K-12 education, but whose exposure to English may
not extend much beyond the school walls.
•• Late bilinguals who immigrate to the U.S. in middle or high school and complete their
secondary schooling through the medium of the English language and in the American
educational system. They usually, although not always, possess at least some formal
schooling in their native language prior to settling in the U.S.
•• International students who are educated at the secondary level in their native country
through the medium of their native language, and who learn English as an academic
subject, much as typical American student may learn French or German in high school.
What these students will know about English and what they can do with it will vary depend-
ing on where and how they learned the language, so let us briefly discuss the skill sets and
knowledge, both implicit and explicit, that we can expect from each group.
Yet because these structures, erroneous from the native-speaker perspective, are part of their
internal linguistic competence, many early bilinguals cannot perceive the difference between
grammatical and ungrammatical utterances. In other words, sentences that a monolingual
speaker will find odd-sounding (i.e. ungrammatical) may sound perfectly acceptable to an early
bilingual with non-native procedural knowledge of the language. Nor do such early bilinguals
possess the metalanguage commonly taught in traditional ESL classrooms, so they cannot rely
on explicit grammatical rules to detect and correct their own errors (Foin & Lange, 2007).
The following paragraph comes from the data collected for a recent study on verb control
in essays of developmental college-level writers (Griswold, 2017)5. The passage was written
by a student who attended American schools from preschool on. She self-identified as a native
speaker of both English and Spanish. She had never participated in a Bilingual Education
program or was enrolled in an English Language Development (ELD) class, and she claimed
English as her strongest academic language:
Teaching Multilingual Students 277
The most memorable event in my life was going to Wal [sic] Disney and Universal
Studios at Orlando, Florida. I would never forget the amazing rides and food. In fact, I
was seventeen years old and I went during winter break in my junior year of high school.
I had a blast with my brother and sister. Never did I thought I would be going to the
happiest place on earth. I still remember the two theme parks that was my favorite
which were Epcot and Harry Potter world. Epcot was a fun and adventures park
because it had different kinds of countries to visit. My favorite was Germany, France,
Mexico, and Japan. It was great to look at the cultural events such as trying out their food
and looking at the environment. The second place I did like was going to Harry Potter
Land which made me realized how lucky I am to go to Universal Studios with my
family. This theme park was a great experience with thrilling roller coasters and tasteful
food. I even got try “butter beer” and “pumpkin juice” which I thought butter beer
was disgusting but I liked pumpkin juice better. This place I would never forget the
detail of the shops. Such as the candy store, and the wands shop. In the end, I had a
great journey and memories with my family from visiting a amazing place ever and I
would not mind coming back again.
As evident from the passage, in addition to the typical problems in punctuation, spell-
ing, and somewhat inaccurate word choice that many composition instructors see in the
writing of their monolingual students as well, this learner also exhibits difficulties with verb
tense, subject–verb agreement, word forms, comparatives, and the overall sentence structure.
However, many errors here become evident primarily in writing. If delivered orally, espe-
cially in the locally spoken dialect of English, the passage might seem fluent and even accu-
rate, but merely conversational rather than academic. Most of the errors result from writing
the words as they are heard, with non-salient phonological features either omitted (such as
the “t” in “Walt Disney,” an additional syllable in the word “adventurous” that may be elided
in colloquial speech, resulting in “adventures,” or the infinitival particle “to” between “got”
and “try”) or unnecessarily tacked on (such as double-marking of past tense in “never did I
thought” or inflecting the infinitive for past tense after a causal verb in “made me realized”).
Rhetorically speaking, the paragraph is organized according to the American academic
writing conventions, with a topic sentence, a reasonable amount of detail, mostly appropriate
cohesive devices, and a relevant concluding sentence. The language also includes highly cultur-
ally idiomatic expressions such as “I had a blast” and “the happiest place on earth.” This passage
is rather representative of the writing of early U.S.-educated bilinguals in FYC classrooms.
Early U.S. bilinguals rarely self-identify as non-native speakers of English. Therefore, they
are unlikely to even consider enrolling in classes designed for non-native speakers, especially
those overtly labeled as ESL. If they are administratively placed into such classes, early bilin-
guals will resist the placement vigorously. Indeed, being directed to take an ESL class clashes
with their sense of identity and is often damaging from both social and pedagogical perspec-
tives (Chiang & Schmida, 1999). Classes explicitly designed for non-native speakers often rely
on pedagogy that assumes prior explicit knowledge of grammatical rules that these students
do not usually possess. Their linguistic and educational needs, therefore, must be met in the
mainstream composition classes—a task accomplishable with an instructor willing to incor-
porate language development into the teaching of writing.
•• Incorrect use of verb tenses (e.g. the ubiquitous use of progressive participles or infini-
tives regardless of the contextually required tense and aspect inflection)
•• Omission of articles or other determiners
•• Misuse of different parts of speech (e.g. adjectives instead of nouns and vice versa)
•• Wrong word order
Teaching Multilingual Students 279
•• Pluralization of non-count and collective nouns
•• Pronominal reference
•• Complementation and predication
•• Passivization of intransitive verbs (e.g. “this was happened to me . . .”)
•• Misuses of prepositions
•• Non-idiomatic expressions (i.e. grammatically accurate, but atypical of the local dialect
of English)
Second, depending on her country of origin and the level of prior formal schooling, she
may have had ESL grammar-based classes before migrating to the U.S. (Frodesen, 2009).
Moreover, as a late arrival, she was probably classified as an English Language Learner (ELL)
and placed in ELD classes in the U.S. for at least one academic year or longer. These two edu-
cational experiences have possibly provided her with some metalanguage that can help her
identify and correct her grammatical errors if attention is drawn to them. Yet due to being a
post-critical period learner and having had limited explicit ESL instruction, she will probably
produce a larger number of typical ESL errors than an early bilingual.
Aware of her non-nativeness, this student may be more accepting of the “ESL” label than
an early bilingual, although she is still unlikely to be thrilled about it due to the stigma asso-
ciated with it (Marshall, 2009; Talmy, 2009; Vollmer, 2000). She is tired of being classified
“ELL/ELD” and may resist enrollment in classes designed for ESL learners even when they
are available (Ortheimer-Hooper, 2008). Therefore, it is especially important for her compo-
sition instructor to be able to provide the linguistic support that she needs without impinging
on her sense of identity and language ownership.
The following passage is quite characteristic of U.S.-educated late bilinguals. It was written
by a student who self-identified as a native speaker of Korean and a Korean-dominant writer.
She entered the U.S. educational system in 8th grade, was classified as an ELD student for 1
year and then transitioned to the “mainstream.” She considered herself to be fluent in English
and highly acculturated both to the society in general and to the schooling traditions in the
country, yet she noted that she she still struggled with English vocabulary.
The most memorable event in my life happened when I was 10 years old. I was at school
playing with my friends. And suddenly I felt stomachache. It was so hurt that I couldn’t
even cry. I went to nurse’s office and tryed to contact with my parents. In there I
fainted. When I woke up I was at a hospital waiting to take surgery. All of my families
were there holding my hands and prayed for me. Later doctors coming and took me to
surgery room. Since I was little I thought I would never see my family so I said Good
bye to family and it was really great that I could be a member of this family. Suddenly
all the nurses, doctors, and my parents started laugh. After surgery I woke up from
sleeping and I was so thankful that I could live with my family again. Even though it
was really simple and easy surgery this memory is clearly on my mind. This event is
so memorable because every time I remember this event, I always thank to God that
I can live and giving me the most precious people as my family.
Like the writing from an early bilingual quoted above, this passage demonstrates a fairly firm
control of the narrative rhetorical organization expected in an American classroom. It has a
topic sentence, some narrative detail, even if some of it is still left to the reader’s inference,
and a fitting concluding sentence. At the same time, the paragraph also displays difficulties
with verb forms, passive voice, the (non)-use of articles with count nouns, misuse of preposi-
tions, problems with pronominal reference and comparative structures, and non-idiomatic
language use. Unlike the errors of an early bilingual student, most of these errors cannot be
280 Olga Griswold and John Edlund
attributed to slight deviations from monolingual intuitions due to mishearing a non-salient
inflection here and there. Rather, they reflect a still developing interlanguage system in which
the internal rules of linguistic structure have not yet approached those of General American
English. If delivered orally, this passage is unlikely to sound merely colloquial to an average
English speaker. The morphological, syntactic, and lexical errors in it resemble those of a
traditional ESL learner more than those of an early bilingual.
International Students
The last group of non-native speakers of English we are going to discuss is that of inter-
national students. These students enter the U.S. educational system at the college or post-
graduate level. They typically possess high levels of formal education and literacy in L1,
and they have studied English for many years as a school subject (Reid, 2006). Unlike most
U.S.-educated bilinguals, then, these students will have received formal instruction in English
vocabulary, grammar and morphology. They usually possess extensive declarative knowledge
of grammatical and morphological rules and substantial metalanguage to talk about them
(Reid, 2006).
Their procedural knowledge of the language, however, i.e. the ability to apply the rules
without conscious thought in the process of oral and written communication, will vary
widely. Despite the fact that these students typically begin the study of English some time
in elementary school and, therefore, within the bounds of the critical period, their ultimate
proficiency depends to a great degree on the amount of input and practice they receive using
English. The latter is contingent on their access to competent teachers, learning materials,
and the communicative use of the language. Unlike their U.S.-educated peers, who spend
multiple hours per day immersed in English-medium communication at school and outside
of it, international students may be exposed to the use of English for only five or six hours per
week, and even that is not always in a communicative environment.
Moreover, their motivation to acquire English will vary tremendously based on individual
goals, abilities, and opportunities to learn, as well as on cultural perceptions of what it means
to know a foreign language well. In many cultures, the ability to speak the language fluently
is valued, and it will drive the students to try and gain communicative proficiency. In others,
the ability to achieve high scores on grammar tests will be valued more, thus leading the stu-
dents to focus on the isolated study of grammatical rules. Although communicative language
instruction with adequate focus on form is gradually gaining footing across the world, it is
still fairly common for international students to have learned English in classrooms where
grammar was taught in isolation from actually speaking or writing in order to communicate
meaning, and vocabulary learning largely consisted of memorizing word lists with transla-
tions. A typical international student, therefore, may be able define a linguistic concept or to
explain a rule of English grammar, but will still have difficulties in applying the rule when
writing or speaking.
From the point of view of academic writing, international students are most likely to be
influenced by the rhetorical patterns of their native cultures. After all, they have spent years
and years learning how to write well in their L1s. But while writing well in their native
language and scholarly environment is not going to be absolutely alien in the American
educational setting (Connor, 2018; Matsuda, 2006; Kilpatrick, 1997), it can be sufficiently
different to result in an essay perceived by an average American reader as possibly unfocused,
repetitive, overly flowery, circuitous, lacking in crucial details, etc.
So, what kinds of knowledge and skills does an international student bring to an FYC
classroom? Unlike his U.S.-educated bilingual counterparts, he probably comes from a
rather privileged socioeconomic background, which is what allows him to attend a foreign
Teaching Multilingual Students 281
university at a significant financial cost. He is also probably well educated at the secondary
level in his native country and through the medium of his L1. To be admitted to a U.S. uni-
versity, he not only had to demonstrate high levels of academic achievement at the secondary
level, but also to take a test of English proficiency—usually either TOEFL (Test of English as
a Foreign Language) or IELTS (International English Language Testing System)—and earn a
score demonstrating, at the minimum, an intermediate level of English competence. In other
words, he is a reasonably skilled, although not necessarily fluent or grammatically accurate,
user of English. He can understand rather complex language most of the time, especially if the
topic or the subject is familiar, and the material is presented in writing. But he still tends to
produce significant errors and inaccuracies in speech and writing, and he may have difficulties
understanding the spoken language around him, both in class and in informal settings.
Because he learned English as a school subject from academic, or literary, or non-authentic
texts7, his vocabulary may be both limited and overly formal at the same time. He will tend to
rely on his L1 quite a lot, frequently first thinking about the topic or assignment in his L1 and
then translating the thoughts or even the physical text initially written in L1 into L2 (El-daly,
2012). He will use a translation dictionary when he lacks vocabulary in English to express his
complex ideas and, as a result may use words that do not necessarily fit the context8.
Additionally, our international student may not possess a strong sense of register. Register,
in linguistics, refers to the variation in the formality of style, grammar, and vocabulary depend-
ing on the social context and purpose. Academic papers, for example, require a more formal
register than a blog post or a tweet, and the same can be said about the difference between
a college lecture and a chat with a friend. The international student is likely to have expe-
rienced English use only in formal contexts in his home country, and when, upon arrival at
a U.S. university, he begins acquiring new vocabulary from interaction with other students,
he may not be able to quickly learn the difference between what counts as informal usage
or even slang, and what counts as appropriate for the academic genre. Terenin (2015), for
example, cites an advanced ESL student writing a formal academic paper and using the term
“kicked the bucket” to refer to the death of a literary character. In this way, an international
student is going to differ significantly from resident bilinguals.
The following passage is a representative sample of writing by an international student. It
was produced by a native speaker of Arabic who formally studied EFL in his home country
beginning in first grade and through high school. He noted, however, that his primary and
secondary teachers focused on speaking and listening skills and devoted little attention to aca-
demic writing. He first began learning to write more than a sentence or a word list in English
while studying at an IEP (Intensive English Program) in the U.S., where he had spent a year
before entering the university as a matriculated student.
Family has a huge part in our life and how we live it. My family members are so close to
each other and we stand by them in the good times and the worst. My worst feir is to
be apart from my family, so when I decided to study abroad it was so hard. I will neve
forget the day that I left my family at the airport.
I was 18 years old when I came to USA for studying. It was so hard to pack every
thing that belong to me, my room became empty of my thing. I felt so sad to see
my room because it felt like I was not their at all.
The most devastating thing is to say goodbye to my friend and family. My heart was
so broken for the though that I will not be living with them and sharing everything.
In the airport my family start crying so hard that we could not stop because it is more
than just getting in the plane.
I will never forget this day because it had change my hole life. also it the day
which I left my family being so sad over me.
282 Olga Griswold and John Edlund
In terms of grammatical control, this essay is similar to that of a late U.S. bilingual quoted
above. It has similar errors in spelling, verb tense, pronominal reference, preposition use, and
the inflection of nouns and verbs. Rhetorically, this essay is not particularly different from
those written by U.S. educated bilinguals and quoted above, at least on the surface. It contains
a premise (i.e. the importance of family) supported throughout the essay (i.e. the emotional
impact of separating from one’s family) and a conclusion reiterating the premise. Yet, it does
display slight influences from Arabic rhetorical traditions, in particular, the frequent repetition
of the key words (e.g. family) and concepts (e.g. sadness of separation) in order to establish
parallelism important for the presentation of the argument in Arabic writing (Van De Wege,
2013). Moreover, it focuses on the emotional impact of the events rather than on the narra-
tion called for in the prompt. Even the chronology—i.e. packing the belongings, going to the
airport, getting on the plane—is couched in emotional terms. The student, therefore, appears
to talk “around the topic” rather than to narrate the events. This feature has been noted as
typical of Arabic writers in English (Abu Rass, 2015).
A composition instructor working with international students in her classroom must be,
therefore, prepared to recognize the potential inclusion of non-Western or non-American
rhetorical patterns in academic writing in English and to help the students expand their rhe-
torical repertoires by acquiring the patterns they are not yet fully familiar with, i.e. the pat-
terns expected of them in the American tertiary educational system.
Intercultural Rhetoric
Our students’ cultural backgrounds influence everything from conceptions of audience to
organizational patterns they apply to a written text, to the attitudes towards knowledge, to
their view of what constitutes a well-written sentence (Connor, 1996; 2018; Silva et al.,
1997). What the students have learned about being a good writer or orator in their primary
culture and language will find a reflection in their English-medium writing. The field of inter-
cultural rhetoric, previously known as contrastive rhetoric, allows us to examine the influence
of native language, culture, and education on the production of texts in L2 (Connor, 2018)
The field was essentially invented by Robert Kaplan in a 1966 article titled “Cultural
Thought Patterns in Intercultural Education.” He later expanded the concept in a 1972
book titled The Anatomy of Rhetoric: Prolegomena to a Functional Theory of Rhetoric: Essays for
Teachers. In both works, Kaplan analyzes numerous examples of non-native students’ writing
in English, and represents his findings as a series of five simple diagrams. These diagrams are
not reproduced here because although these “squiggles” have provoked both interest and
controversy, we have found that once people see them they tend to remember the squiggles
and forget the caveats. It is enough to say that “Semitic” writing is represented by a series of
parallel lines with dotted connections, “Oriental” by a spiral, “Romance” by a crooked single
line, and “Slavic” by a similar crooked, but dotted, line. The English pattern is represented
as a single, direct, and vertical line. The squiggles have been criticized as simplistic, both in
the patterns they represent and in breadth of their categories. Even Kaplan, responding to this
criticism, acknowledged, “It is probably true that, in the first blush of discovery, I overstated
both the difference and my case” (Connor & Kaplan, 1987, p. 9).
Intercultural rhetoric deals with organizational patterns, stylistic preferences (especially
in terms of subordination and coordination), and other conventional aspects of specific
genres, viewed across cultures. In general, this research contrasts American English rhe-
torical patterns with those of a second culture. This research is complex and difficult to
do, because to be credible the researcher must be fluent in both languages and cultures,
or have access to bilingual, bicultural informants, and any insights gained by research into
the patterns of one culture are unlikely to be applicable to another. In most cases, it would
be unreasonable to expect composition teachers to be familiar with the rhetorical patterns
of every culture they might deal with. Why then, is intercultural rhetoric important to
composition teachers?
Intercultural rhetoric can help explain the following situation, described by a Chinese-
speaking student in her Writing Proficiency Exam:
My friend and I read an article. Although my English-speaking friend thought it was very good con-
vincing article, I, on the other hand, did not agree with him. What I thought was that it was very
pushing one way argument. . . . Most of native-speaker agreed with him. Some foreigner agreed
with him, some agreed with me . . . all Asian who have strong Asian background agreed with me.
286 Olga Griswold and John Edlund
This writer has conducted her own survey research on an important issue in intercultural
rhetoric and found American patterns to be one-sided and narrow from an Asian point of
view. Many non-native speakers would agree with her.
Kaplan says in his original article, “One should not judge the construction of a composi-
tion merely by the standards of a rhetoric which one takes for granted” (1966, p. 34). In
other words, an essay that appears to be illogical or incoherent by American standards may
be well crafted by the standards of another culture. This is not to say that the non-American
pattern should simply be accepted as a cultural difference, but it is also clear that calling the
paper “illogical” or “incoherent” probably won’t help the student improve. A student is not
a blank slate or an empty vessel, and a writing teacher must be prepared to help integrate
new learning with what has been learned before. In the case of a student for whom English
is an additional language, what has been learned previously may be very different from what
American teachers expect.
Kaplan (2001) notes that “genres are nothing more nor less than conventional solutions
to recurring communication problems” (p. xi). The problem for students and teachers arises
when two cultures have conflicting solutions. In discussing the pedagogical issues raised by
intercultural rhetoric, this chapter will focus first on Japanese patterns. Again, the most impor-
tant concept for the composition teacher is the idea that there are different patterns, and that
they may be influencing the writing of your students.
The term jo ha kyu was originally used to name the three movements of music accom-
panying traditional Japanese Court dances, bugaku. Later, this idea was adapted for the
method of dramatizing nô drama (creating dynamic movement, expression, or emphasis).
Applied to the design of a written composition, it is considered as follows:
<jo> Beginning. An introductory part or opening section.
<ha> The portion which makes the center of a composition. A development part on
a main subject.
<kyu> Ending of a composition. The conclusion. (Ema, 1981, p. 294–295, [translated
by Miri Park from the Japanese original]).
Takemata (1976) defines the ten section in a slightly different way: “At the point where
this development is finished, turn the idea to a subtheme where there is a connection, but
not a directly connected association [to the major theme]” (as cited in Hinds, 1983, p. 80).
Takemata also points out that a Japanese ketsu “need not be decisive [danteiteki]. All it needs
to do is to indicate a doubt or ask a question” (Hinds, 1976, p. 26–27).
The ki-shô-ten-ketsu pattern can be seen as roughly analogous to the five-paragraph essay
formula in English, and is often used for short essays and academic paper writing. Sometimes,
it has even directly compared to the American five-paragraph essay. However, the ten and
ketsu sections are especially problematic for English readers. Hinds points out that:
In ten, an abrupt shift takes place in which information only indirectly relevant to the
major point is brought up with minimal syntactic marking. This obviously causes prob-
lems for English readers who do not expect “digressions” and “unrelated information”
to come up suddenly. . . . In ketsu, the major difficulty involves the Japanese definition
of this term and the difference between that and the English definition of “conclusion.”
(1982, p. 80)
Intermediate Japanese ESL students who are new to writing in English tend to produce four-
paragraph essays in which the third paragraph seems to be entirely off-topic. Japanese readers
who know this pattern expect the third section to make some kind of turn away from the
topic; American readers are confused; and American instructors are likely to ask, “How does
this relate to your topic?” or “What’s your point?”
288 Olga Griswold and John Edlund
For example, a Japanese graduate student recently came to see John Edlund because he
was having trouble passing the university’s writing proficiency test. He said that the writing
center tutors told him that his problem was not grammatical errors, but, rather, that he kept
going off the topic. We talked about this ki-shô-ten-ketsu pattern, and Edlund explained that
American readers have trouble following the ten section. He asked if the student could simply
leave that section out. The student understood what Edlund was saying, but he did not seem
to think he could leave one section out. However, reflecting on this problem in this way may
lead to adoption of more American patterns.
Japanese rhetorical patterns are influenced by earlier Chinese patterns. Kaplan found that
some Korean and Chinese writing is marked by what may be called an “approach by indirec-
tion.” In this kind of writing, the development of the paragraph may be said to be turning in
circles around the subject, showing it from a variety of tangential views, but never looking at
the subject directly. Things are developed in terms of what they are not, rather than in terms
of what they are (Kaplan, 1966).
Kaplan also found that Chinese students writing in English were influenced by the Chinese
eight-legged essay, the required form for the civil service exam from the middle of the 15th
century to the early 20th. Cai (1993) says that the eight-legged essay is still a powerful organ-
izing principle for many Chinese students and that a newer, four-part model, qi-cheng-jun-he,
is commonly used to organize paragraphs. Qi prepares the reader for the topic, cheng intro-
duces and develops the topic, jun turns to a seemingly unrelated subject, and he sums up the
paragraph. In Cai’s example, the qi section states that we learn about ourselves from songs
and stories, the cheng section notes that we “realize” or understand ourselves and mutually
understand people through books and the jun section names places where we learn and use
literacy, and also interact with others, but does not directly mention literacy or books. The
he section, what an English reader might call the “topic sentence,” appears at the end of
the paragraph: “Hence, literacy is not an ornament, but a necessity” (Cai, 1993, as cited in
Connor, 1996, p. 39).
Hinds (1990) demonstrates that writing in Japanese, Chinese, Thai, and Korean follows an
organizational pattern he calls “quasi-inductive.” Generally, writing in English is deductive,
with the thesis at the beginning. If the thesis is not at the beginning, readers expect an inductive
pattern, with the thesis at the end. Instead, in this pattern, the thesis is implied or buried in the
passage, involving what Hinds calls “a delayed introduction of purpose.” Hinds (1990) says:
Seen in this light, we must recognize that the traditional distinction that English-speaking
readers make between deductive and inductive writing styles is inappropriate to the writ-
ing of some non-native authors. We may more appropriately characterize this writing
as quasi-inductive, recognizing that this technique has as its purpose the task of getting
readers to think for themselves, to consider the observations made, and to draw their own
conclusions. The task of the writer, then, is not necessarily to convince, although it is
clear that such authors have their own opinions. Rather, the task is to stimulate the reader
into contemplating an issue or issues that might not have been previously considered.
(p. 42)
relied heavily on synonyms to unify their compositions, a skill that is emphasized and
taught explicitly in the schools in Mexico. Their basic strategy was to state an idea, place
a comma, and then repeat the same idea using a synonym, the same word, or a semanti-
cally related word (collocation) to create a build-up effect. This building on an idea was
emphasized many times via the use of hyperbole. Thus, the result was a repetition of the
same idea several times within a run-on sentence, each repetition becoming more fancy
or formal.
(p. 421)
Note that this pattern was explicitly taught by the Mexican teachers.
The compositions also differed in the representation of logical relationships. Anglo-
American students most often used enumeration of ideas, represented by such connectors as
first, second, then, and finally. On the other hand, the Spanish compositions were organized via
additive or explicative relationships, in which the writer states an idea and adds restatements
and explanations for why he or she believes it.
Perhaps the most important feature of the Spanish compositions was that they had many
more deviations in their logical development, in some cases complete breaks in the connec-
tion between one idea and the next. As Montaño-Harmon explained:
These deviations were conscious deviations, which are part of the discourse pattern of
Mexican Spanish, for the writer was aware that he/she had gone off the topic and would
often use transitional words or phrases to return to the previous idea before the deviation.
(p. 422)
The Anglo-American students, if they deviated from the topic, did so unconsciously, without
transitional phrases.
On the other hand, the writing of Mexican-American, or Chicano, students was unlike
that of any of the other groups. These students “exhibited composition problems due to a
clash between a non-standard dialect of English, Chicano English—used for oral, informal
interaction with peers—and the standard/academic English” (p. 419). They did not exhibit
Spanish language interference problems.
Conclusions
The concepts outlined in this chapter have strong implications for how composition instruc-
tors should be working with writers for whom English is an additional language. The approach
to teaching multilingual and multicultural writers should balance rhetorical instruction with
language development activities. The atmosphere in the classroom should be positive and
comfortable, open to cultural differences, and there should be numerous opportunities for
real communication. Feedback on the writing should include selective and focused attention
294 Olga Griswold and John Edlund
to those linguistic problems that affect the meaning and clarity of the message the most, or
those that are persistent and repetitive. The responsibility for correcting the errors should
rest on the students so as to foster their acquisition of the structures they are struggling with.
The rhetorical expectations of English speakers, and the organizational patterns of aca-
demic genres such as the college essay, research essays, reports, memos, and letters, may have
to be explicitly taught, especially to international students. However, instructors should use
care when presenting formulaic approaches such as the five-paragraph essay, because students
may overgeneralize the formula to inappropriate genres, and may become so reliant on the
formula that they are unable to grow as writers.
In the long run, it is best that an ESL writing class be taught by an instructor who is pro-
fessionally well versed in SLA and rhetorical theories, pedagogical grammar, intercultural
rhetoric, and the pedagogies of literacy development. But with the growing and extremely
diverse population of students for whom English is an additional language, we hope that the
material presented here will provide initial help to instructors who suddenly find a significant
number of non-native English speakers in their otherwise “mainstream” composition classes.
Notes
1 We urge the reader to note that this was an informally expressed personal perspective of an instructor
who had not yet at the time experienced working with multilingual writers and was just beginning
to develop interest in intercultural rhetoric and SLA. The authors of this chapter in no way mean to
imply that non-Western or non-American patterns are illogical or inferior to Western ones. Rather,
we argue that the logic and cultural traditions that underlie the writing of multilingual writers need
to be recognized and incorporated into writing instruction.
2 While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss the causes of such dramatic variations in the
vocabulary size estimates, suffice it to say for the present that they depend on the operationalization
of the definitions of both “word” and what it means to know a word. Some estimates, for example,
count such lexical items “buy,” “buyer,” and “buying” as three separate words (e.g. Carroll, Davis, &
Richman, 1971) while others consider them variations of the same word. Similarly, knowing a word
may range from being able to vaguely recognize its general meaning from context in a given text
to having a full grasp of the word’s phonology, morphology, syntactic roles, meaning, orthography,
and appropriateness in a variety of pragmatic contexts and genres and being able to use it accurately
in one’s own speech and writing. Vocabulary sizes differ greatly even among monolingual native
speakers, frequently dependent on the amount of reading an individual does and his or her level of
education (see, for example, Stanovich, 1986).
3 Or any other of the several hundred languages spoken in the U.S. by immigrants and their descen-
dants in large and small cultural communities.
4 Maturational constraints on the acquisition of linguistic structure become more observable beginning
at about the age of 10 or 11, even though not all learners are going to display their effects this early
(Ferris, 2009; Newport & Johnson, 1989).
5 As part of the study, students in several Basic Writing classes in college were asked to write a narrative
essay on the following prompt: Write about the most memorable day or event in your life. How old
were you when it happened? Describe what happened and who was there. Explain why this day or
event is especially memorable to you. Use specific details.You have 30 minutes to write your essay.
6 The term interlanguage refers to the idiosyncratic linguistic system internally possessed by a learner
of an additional language. This system tends to combine the features of both L1 and L2 grammars
as well as developmental features typical of L2 learners regardless of the age or native language. The
interlanguage system is in constant flux and development until it stabilizes and becomes ostensibly
impervious to change regardless of instruction (Selinker, 1972).This stabilization can occur at any age
or any stage of L2 development.
7 Texts written specifically for ESL learners and available in ESL textbooks and other school materials.
8 One rather vivid example of this comes from Griswold’s experience in teaching ESL and Academic
Writing to international students at the university level. One of her advanced students in a composi-
tion class wrote that she “repented” a recent trivial purchase.When Griswold asked her why she chose
this particular word, generally associated in English with significant wrongdoing or even religious sin,
not casual shopping, the student said that she looked it up in a translation dictionary, and it seemed
like a nice formal word to use.
9 Students of different linguistic backgrounds often have L1-specific problems with relative clauses.
Slavic and Spanish speakers, for example, tend to use the relative pronoun “which” regardless of the
animacy of the referent (e.g. “*the protesters which gathered at the Capitol”). Arabic speakers are apt
to use a resumptive pronoun (e.g. “*the article which I read it,”) and Korean and Japanese speakers
often avoid the use of relative clauses altogether, thus missing out on a useful linguistic resource for
conveying complex meanings.
296 Olga Griswold and John Edlund
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Associated Reading
Ferris, D. (2016). Promoting grammar and language development in the writing class: why, what, how,
and when. In E. Hinkel (Ed.), Teaching English grammar to speakers of other languages, pp. 222–245.
New York: Routledge.
Reading
Promoting Grammar and Language Development
in the Writing Class
Why, What, How, and When
Dana R. Ferris
No one would dispute that all writing involves language. Every sentence or even part of a
sentence we write requires choices—about what words we will use, what the structure of the
phrases and the sentence will be, how we will order and emphasize information within that
sentence, and how we will connect ideas within and across different sentences and parts of
the text.
With this truth in mind, it is perhaps surprising that the notion of grammar instruction
and language development in the context of a writing class is highly controversial within
applied linguistics and especially composition studies. Because of the uncertain (or even
dispreferred) status of grammar in the writing class, writing instructors often do not receive
adequate (or any) training in English grammar, linguistics, and/or pedagogical grammar. In
turn, grammar in the writing class is often addressed haphazardly or neglected entirely. This
is more than a missed opportunity for student writers. It is counterproductive to their develop-
ment as writers and productive users of English as a second/other language.
This chapter takes the position that language development and grammar instruction in
particular should and can be effectively accomplished within a second language (L2) writing
class (or a mixed writing class that includes English learners). Because of the controversy
already noted, we begin by discussing the why of developing grammar knowledge within the
context of writing instruction. We then move to the what: With all of the competing concerns
of writing instruction (content, process, rhetoric, etc.), how can a teacher choose from the
many elements of English language on which to focus? We will spend the most time and
space on the crucial question of how instructors can successfully provide language instruc-
tion to student writers, and we will tie it all together with a consideration of when, within a
crowded writing class syllabus, a teacher might incorporate language-focused work. The
goal of this chapter is that teachers will walk away with a range of tools and options that could
be applied to a wide variety of pedagogical contexts.
Every writing class is different. L2 students come with varying knowledge bases that depend
upon their L1 background (and its similarity to or distance from English), their L2 proficiency
levels, and their educational pathways (i.e., whether they have encountered formal English
grammar instruction in their previous exposure to English). Teachers should not simply open
a grammar textbook or writing handbook and teach through it. They must discover what that
particular group of students knows and what they need most at that point in their develop-
ment as L2 learners and writers.
Teachers should conduct two distinct types of needs analysis with regard to grammar for
L2 writers. First, they should collect and analyze an early writing sample to assess strengths,
weaknesses, and patterns of error for individual students and for the whole class. Instructors
can do this analysis themselves, but it can be very time-consuming. For many classes, the
procedure shown in Table 1 should work nearly as well.
Error analysis should also be ongoing, as teachers should hope and expect that their
students will show progress with some patterns of error as the term goes on. Instructors
Table 1 Suggested Procedures for Preliminary Error Analysis (adapted from Ferris and Hedgcock
2014: 314–315; and Ferris 2014: xviii–xix)
1 Preselect particular errors on which to focus (e.g., verbs, plurals, articles, word choice, punctuation,
etc.). Pick enough error types to get a good picture of student needs but not so many that the task
will be overwhelming for you or the students.
2 Go through the writing samples and mark (highlight, circle, or underline) all instances of errors in
the categories you have chosen.
3 Return the papers to the students in class, and briefly go over a brief explanation of the error
categories you marked, with examples of each type.
4 Ask the students to go through their texts, numbering each marked error and trying to categorize
it. They can ask classmates or the teacher for help if they’re confused about a particular error(s).
Have them record their findings in an error chart you create for the activity.
5 Ask them to identify, below the chart, three patterns of errors they noticed most frequently when
they were completing the exercise.
6 Collect the exercise, spot-check the students’ work for accuracy, and record the information (make
a spreadsheet or take copies of the exercise) for individual students and compile findings for the
whole class. Now you have a fairly good sense of what the class as a whole might benefit from in
terms of in-class instruction and of what individualized feedback each student might need.
7 Share the whole-class findings with the students so that they understand why you will focus more
on certain issues than others for in-class work.
306 Dana R. Ferris
can also conduct an analysis of common class errors every time they grade or respond to
a particular set of student papers, turning patterns and student examples into a quick and
contextualized mini lesson based on the students’ own recent work.
Another useful tool for needs analysis is students’ own self-reported areas of strength
and weakness, as well as their preferences and views regarding error feedback and their
awareness of their own existing self-editing strategies. Questionnaires such as those shown
in Ferris and Roberts (2001: 181–183) or in Ferris (2014: xiii–xvi) can be very informative
for teachers and enlightening to students themselves, if they have never looked at their own
language knowledge so analytically before. These two types of data—error analysis of an
early writing sample and self-reports of grammar knowledge—not only can help teachers to
focus their efforts most successfully but also can facilitate student cooperation, if they feel
that instructors’ grammar instruction and feedback choices are rooted in thoughtful consid-
eration of how their time would be best spent.
Most writing classes include some sort of reading component, or at least they should—
students need content to write about, and they benefit from authentic models for both rhetori-
cal and linguistic analysis. However, teachers will often stop at having students consider only
the content (main ideas and details) of assigned texts, and this is a missed opportunity. Once
students have read the text with comprehension and critically analyzed it, the teacher can
then lead the class a step further and have them consider the language choices made by the
author. Depending upon the text and the teacher’s goals for the lesson, the class might focus
on vocabulary (e.g., adjectives or modal auxiliaries) used to convey a specific emotion or
argument, on ways in which punctuation and sentence structure communicate with a target
audience, or they might simply examine target linguistic structures (e.g., verb tense usage
or article vs. zero-article noun phrases) in authentic written prose. Such language lessons
have the benefit of being authentic (based on real texts the students have already engaged
with) and naturally integrated with other course content. Stand-alone grammar lessons in
writing courses often are less engaging because they are not connected to anything else the
class is doing, but if language analysis activities are instead directly tied to course readings,
they will have added face validity for students. Table 2 shows language samples from one
authentic text (Reilly 2012) and points out different elements of the language used and how
it deviated from formal academic conventions while clearly conveying the author’s message.
Such analysis could be applied to any class text a teacher is using with students.
A third suggestion for narrowing the universe of English structures on which to focus comes
from considering the actual writing tasks students are being asked to accomplish. For exam-
ple, if students are being asked to write papers that include material from other sources,
it makes sense to provide instruction on paraphrase, summary, and quotation—both what
those techniques accomplish in a text as well as the syntax and punctuation choices associ-
ated with them. Similarly, in some disciplines, ideas written by other authors are conveyed
in the “literary present” tense (“As Shakespeare says in Romeo and Juliet. . .”), while in
others, such as the social sciences, the work of other authors is described using the past
tense (“Krashen noted in his landmark 1982 book that . . .”). Narrative writing, which can
Promoting Grammar and Language Development 307
Table 2 Sample Language Analysis Activity Based on Authentic Text (from Reilly (2012))
•• How Reilly’s repeated use of the same sentence frame (“What a_____ I was”) helps to express his
overall meaning.
•• Why Reilly turned the sentence “Jealous egghead, I thought” around, instead of the more
conventional “I thought he was a jealous egghead.”
•• Why Reilly flouted typical writing rules about avoiding contractions and sentence fragments.
•• Why Reilly repeated “I hope . . .” several times in a row. (Isn’t sentence variety supposed to be a
virtue?)
Example 1
Peer Editing Exercise as a Mini Lesson Application
Instructions: Exchange papers with a partner. Mark (circle, underline, or highlight) each example
you find of present tense, past tense, or present perfect tense (ignore other verb tenses and
forms for now). Then complete the following chart. If you find any errors in verb tense, do not
correct them, but you can discuss them with your partner in a few minutes.
Example 2
Peer Editing of Almost Final Paper Draft
Instructions: Exchange papers with another member of your writing group
1 Read the paper carefully for any problems with:
2 Do not “rewrite” words, phrases, or sentences simply to improve “style.” Focus on actual errors.
3 If you find errors, mark them as follows:*
*These instructions assume that students are using computers for the peer editing task, but they can be adapted for
pen-and-paper activities as well.
navigate, well designed, and appropriate for students’ proficiency levels and needs may
result in more frustration than assistance for them.
Having discussed some pitfalls or common errors to avoid in facilitating language devel-
opment for L2 writers, we now turn to more successful approaches. These can be divided
into three general categories: instruction through in-class mini lessons, self-directed lan-
guage study, and corrective feedback.
Mini lessons on salient language points can be an appropriate way to integrate grammar,
vocabulary, mechanics, or strategy instruction into a writing class without putting such
310 Dana R. Ferris
language concerns out of balance with other writing course priorities. As their name implies,
mini lessons should he brief and narrowly focused, not taking up too much class time and
not trying to cover too much in one chunk of instruction (for more complex structures, a series
of connected mini lessons may work well). The teacher may also want to build in homework
either before or after the mini lesson so that additional analysis or practice can occur without
taking over the entire in-class lesson.
Topics for Mini Lessons. Nearly any language-related topic can be addressed in the
mini lesson format—vocabulary, self-editing strategies, punctuation, or grammar (see Ferris
2014 for examples). The teacher should consider the suggestions in the previous section of
this chapter (the “what” of language development in the writing class) to identify possible mini
lesson topics for a particular class. These mini lessons can also include the “common errors”
lesson referred to in the previous section (for an example used in a writing class, see Ferris
and Hedgcock 2014, Appendix 9: 350–351).
Format of Mini Lessons. I recommend the following elements for class mini lessons,
usually but not necessarily in this order:
• Discovery: Analysis activities to elicit students’ prior knowledge about the structure or
focus to be discussed in the mini lesson.
• Explanation: Brief, clearly focused instruction on the structure/rules/topic under consid-
eration, with on-point and straightforward examples.
• Practice: Opportunities to practice the rules/strategics described in the mini lesson with
language samples (e.g., sentences or paragraphs, with or without errors) and/or with
texts that students find themselves (e.g., a newspaper article online if they have com-
puter access).
• Application: Focused activities that require students to apply the concepts presented in
the mini lesson to their own writing—either a paper they are currently working on or one
they wrote recently.
I have noted that unfocused referrals to self-study materials can be an ineffective approach
to language development for L2 writers. However, in combination with other approaches,
some self-directed language study can be useful, motivating, and empowering for student
writers. Self-study has two major advantages over whole-class instruction: (1) Students
can choose to work on topics/issues that they are interested in and/or have problems with,
which reflects the reality that in any given class, students will not all have the same needs.
(2) Students can work at their own pace, choosing to move on quickly if they feel comfort-
able with a topic or structure or slowing down to investigate it more deeply if they are con-
fused. Self-study activities can include individual study of specific grammar/mechanics topics
Promoting Grammar and Language Development 311
(e.g., sentence boundaries, verb tenses, apostrophes, etc.). Self-directed vocabulary learn-
ing (vocabulary journals, collocations journals), or analysis of stylistic choices made by other
authors in assigned or self-selected reading texts. They can be assigned for homework and/
or extra credit and can be graded on timely, good faith completion. To be most successful,
self-study activities should include the following components:
• Initial diagnostic activities in which the student and/or the teacher can assess possible
topics/issues for the student to work on during the course (a diagnostic error analysis
and/or grammar knowledge questionnaire, as described in the “what” section).
• Clear structure for the assignment, including models (e.g., of a vocabulary journal entry
or a style analysis entry).
• Recommended resources (what the student might use for grammar self-study, what the
student might read for vocabulary learning or style analysis).
• Regular checkpoints to avoid procrastination or loss of focus (reasonable due dates, in-
class sharing of questions or insights from self-study).
• Reflection, especially at the end of the project, about what the student has gained from
self-study and what they might continue working on in the future.
Appendix B to this chapter shows one example of a language self-study project assigned in
a first-year composition course (a mixed class including both L1 and L2 English writers). This
could be adapted as needed/desired for a variety of class contexts.
Corrective Feedback
Providing instruction and self-study opportunities does not remove the need for L2 writers
to receive focused corrective feedback (CF) on errors they make, particularly if they are
persistent, patterned errors and/or if the errors interfere with overall comprehensibility of the
message (see Bitchener and Ferris 2012; Ferris 2011; Hendrickson 1980). Written CF has
been an extremely controversial topic in L2 writing, and space docs not permit a thorough
discussion of it here, so I will simply summarize the following suggestions or principles from
existing research on CF (for a more elaborated version of this list with additional citations,
see also Ferris and Hedgcock 2014: 283):
• Existing research suggests that CF, if provided effectively, can help student writers to
both revise existing texts and carry over to new texts.
• Focused CF (on selected patterns of error) is more effective than unfocused CF (on
anything that happens to catch a teacher, tutor, or peer editor’s eye).
• Indirect CF (in which the teacher/editor points out errors but does not correct them) may
be more effective in the long run for writing development than direct CF (in which the edi-
tor makes the correction), but there may be legitimate roles for direct CF as well (more
efficient, more informative for idiomatic errors such as preposition usage).
• Some sort of explanation of error patterns (error codes, rule reminders in the margins,
summary comments in an end note) is probably more helpful than simply circling or
highlighting an error without an explanation.
• Some categories of error are more responsive to written CF than others; for more com-
plex errors, a one-on-one conference may be needed.
• Students should be required/directed to apply, analyze, and reflect on CF they have
received so that the feedback isn’t wasted or ignored.
312 Dana R. Ferris
These guidelines for effective CF apply whether the feedback provider is the teacher, a
tutor or consultant in a writing center, or a peer editor (see the preceding discussion about
more/less effective approaches to in-class peer editing workshops). The point here is that
CF can and should be part of an overall approach to language development in an L2 writing
class, but it should neither be the only approach (because students can benefit from focused
instruction and from self-study) nor abandoned entirely (because students can benefit from
targeted feedback on their own work).
“Dynamic” Written CF. One specific application of CF combines the goals of self-study
and CF in an integrated approach. This approach, developed by faculty members at Brigham
Young University, includes the following components:
1 Students regularly produce a short timed-writing sample (5–10 minutes each time),
based on an accessible prompt.
2 The teacher marks it immediately (before next class) using a list of preestablished error
codes.
3 Students correct the marked errors (in the next class or for homework) and chart their
error patterns. (The teacher may require several revisions/resubmissions as needed.)
4 The process is repeated regularly throughout the course.
This approach is dynamic because it shifts from student to student and over time. It also has
the advantage of being frequent and manageable for both instructor and students, provid-
ing more consistent feedback and revision opportunities on shorter pieces of texts. It also
promotes mindfulness in students (because they are directed to focus regularly on specific
language issues and to chart their progress) that can carry over to longer writing projects and
promote language acquisition. Preliminary research (see Evans, Hartshorn, McCollum, and
Wolfersberger 2010; Hartshorn, Evans, Merrill, Sudweeks, Strong-Krause, and Anderson
2010) suggests that students benefit from this approach, and anecdotal reports from teach-
ers and students at BYU and at my own institution (which adopted it program-wide in 2013)
attest to its popularity with many/most students in L2 writing classes.
To summarize this section, instructors wishing to provide integrated opportunities for lan-
guage development in their writing classes should consider a combination of approaches, from
language mini lessons that address the needs of the whole class, to guided self-study oppor-
tunities, to well designed CF given to students about their own writing. This combination pro-
vides students with the right mix of teacher expertise, specific feedback on areas in their own
writing on which they need to focus, and autonomy for/responsibility over their own learning.
1 When a new writing assignment is being presented and discussed (to present possible
vocabulary and grammar structures that may be salient for the task and genre).
2 When the class is discussing assigned readings (to “exploit” the language features of the
text, as discussed in the “what” section).
3 When students are in the final stages of editing a paper (a mini lesson on a key language
point followed by a peer editing activity and self-editing exercises).
4 When the instructor has finished grading or responding to a class set of papers and deliv-
ers a “common errors” mini lesson based upon patterns observed in the students’ texts.
In addition to these naturally recurring points in the life cycle of a writing course, the teacher
may also want to build in an early class activity in which students’ individual and collective
needs are diagnosed (as discussed), as well as an end-of-course activity in which students
reflect on the various language development activities they have completed and talk about
where they have made progress and where they still need to focus attention in the future. An
early mini lesson (in conjunction with the first major paper) on strategies for proofreading and
self-editing writing may be appropriate for most classes, as well.
Because the instructor may not know until the class begins exactly what mini lessons
and workshops might be most needed for a particular group of students, it might be benefi-
cial to simply note “Language Focus TBD [to be determined]” at strategic points (as previ-
ously outlined) on the syllabus, explaining to the students at the course outset that topics for
grammar and language instruction will be decided based upon demonstrated class needs.
Students will likely appreciate this thoughtful, contextualized approach, as opposed to the
typical march through the handbook/grammar book (whether or not the topics all relate to
their current needs) that they may have experienced.
Conclusion
Language development in the writing class is challenging for teachers to envision and imple-
ment, which explains why, too often, such instruction is either delivered haphazardly or
ignored altogether. I hope that the opening section of this chapter has provided some clear
arguments for why it is important that teachers effectively integrate language development
with other course goals for L2 writers—and that the subsequent sections have provided some
practical guidance as to how to proceed in doing so. Teachers who follow the suggestions
in this chapter may be pleasantly surprised to find that their students respond positively to
thoughtfully selected, well-integrated language focus activities and that they themselves feel
more satisfied about their efforts in instruction and feedback. Language is an inevitable and
inextricable part of writing; to neglect it in instruction is to deliver only part of a writing class.
Discussion Questions
1 Before reading this chapter, did you believe that “bottom–up instruction” (on grammar
and vocabulary) was a necessary and important component of an L2 writing class or
that it was an inappropriate focus for a writing class? Has your thinking changed or been
strengthened after reading this chapter?
314 Dana R. Ferris
2 In the “what” section of this chapter, it is suggested that teachers “exploit” the language
of assigned readings, anticipate the language elicited by different writing tasks, and use
these analyses to plan targeted, contextualized language lessons for their students.
Practice this principle by examining a sample reading (e.g., from an L2 textbook or
from a current newspaper article) and listing interesting features of how language is
used that could potentially be discussed with a class of students. Also, if you can obtain
one or more authentic writing assignments/prompts, try to imagine what kinds of lan-
guage (reporting verbs, passive voice, use of quotations, key vocabulary, etc.) might
be required to respond effectively to that writing task. If you are reading this book in a
methods class, discuss your findings with your classmates and instructor.
3 Another suggestion was to analyze student papers written at the beginning of a writing
class to get a sense for individual and class error patterns. Obtain a set of 5–10 L2 stu-
dent papers written to the same prompt in the same class. Follow the suggestions for
error analysis provided in Table 1, and create a list of 3–5 error patterns that seem to
be consistent across the set of papers. If these were your students, on what language
features would you focus (for instruction and/or feedback) in this class? How might you
approach the issues you noted, considering the various suggestions in this chapter (e.g.,
through mini lessons, self-study, feedback, or some combination)?
4 Considering your findings in questions 2 and/or 3, pick a topic for a possible class mini
lesson for a writing class—based upon student needs (as seen in the error analysis) or
on the language features modeled in a reading text or required by a writing class. What
ideas do you have for designing a mini lesson on this topic?
5 Beyond mini lessons, the chapter also suggests that the teacher should utilize language
self-study activities and provide corrective feedback (written, oral, and in peer/self-editing
workshops). What is your reaction to these suggestions? What do you like about them?
What are your concerns, as a prospective or current teacher of L2 writers?
Essential Readings
Connors, R. (2003). Grammar in American college composition: An historical overview. In L. Ede &
A. A. Lunsford (Eds.), Selected essays of Robert J. Connors (pp. 117–138). Boston, MA: Bedford/
St. Martin’s.
Ferris, D. (2011). Treatment of error in second language student writing (2nd ed.). Ann Arbor, MI:
University of Michigan Press.
Hartshorn, J. K., Evans, N. E., Merrill, P. F,Sudweeks, R. R., Strong-Krause, D., & Anderson, N. J. (2010).
The effects of dynamic corrective feedback on ESL writing accuracy. TESOL Quarterly, 44, 84–109.
MacDonald.S. P. (2007). The erasure of language. College Composition and Communication, 58, 585–625.
Matsuda, P. K. (2012). Let’s face it: Language issues and the writing program administrator. WPA:
Writing Program Administration, 36(1), 141–163.
Zimmerman, C. B. (2008). Word knowledge: A vocabulary teacher’s handbook. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
References
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Communication, 53, 33–64.
Bitchener, J., & Ferris, D. (2012). Written corrective feedback in second language acquisition and
writing. New York: Routledge.
Promoting Grammar and Language Development 315
Brannon. L., & Knoblauch, C. H. (1982). On students’ rights to their own texts: A model of teacher
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Connors, R., & Lunsford, A. A. (1988). Frequency of formal errors in current college writing, or Ma and
Pa Kettle do research. College Composition and Communication, 39, 395–409.
Evans, N., Hartshorn, J., McCollum. R., & Wolfersberger, M. (2010). Contextualizing corrective feed-
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Ferris, D. R. (2014). Language power: Tutorials for writers. Boston, MA: Bedford St. Martin’s.
Ferris, D. R., & Hedgcock, J. S. (2014). Teaching L2 composition: Purpose, process, and practice (3rd
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Ferris, D. R., & Roberts, B. J. (2001). Error feedback in L2 writing classes: How explicit does it need to
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Hairston, M. (1981). Not all errors are created equal: Nonacademic readers in the professions respond
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Lunsford, A. A., & Lunsford, K. J. (2008). “Mistakes are a fact of life”: A national comparative study.
College Composition and Communication, 59,781–806.
Reilly, R. (2012). The sins of the father. Available online at http://espn.go.com/espn/story/_/id/8162972/
joe-paterno-true-legacy
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9 Language, Linguistic Diversity,
and Writing
Sharon Klein
In the published version of his presidential address (Rickford 2016), John Rickford provided
this piece from Ferdinand de Saussure, a major figure in the history of contemporary linguis-
tics, as one of his epigraphs. I believe it is fitting for us, here, as well.
Finally, of what use is linguistics? . . . in the lives of individuals and societies, speech (sic)
is more important than anything else. That linguistics should continue to be the preroga-
tive of a few specialists would be unthinkable—everyone is concerned with it in one way
or another. But . . . there is no other field in which so many absurd notions, prejudices,
mirages and fictions have sprung up. . . . the task of the linguist is . . . to dispel them as
best he (sic) can.’
(Ferdinand de Saussure 1966 [1916], p. 71)
1 Introduction2
Linguistic diversity is universal; we need look no farther beyond whatever group of people we’re
with (arguably, even when we’re alone) to encounter language or linguistic differences. No two
people speak the same language (and many argue we each control more than “one,” even when
we believe we’re monolingual). All too often, the differences across the languages that individu-
als speak become barriers. Or even weapons. Language can be a club, in both senses.
The way we talk about language and about language differences plays a significant role in
our dealings with one another and with the different languages we speak. We should not be
surprised. J. L. Austin (1962) introduced the label “speech act,” and in a letter to the Leveson
Commission’s deliberation on an issue related to language in the public sphere, Rae Langton
(2014) highlighted the power of language with a reference to Austin, noting that saying
something is, in fact, doing something3 (p. 1). It seems important to remember this—that
language does not only provide the means for representing and externalizing thought—which
it most certainly (and fundamentally) does. It also “does things.” Some of what our language
does—what we do with our language—can be injurious, as we also know. What we as teach-
ers “do” in our classrooms—with and to language—affects every student there. And every
student there has (at least one) language, at once similar to and different from the language(s)
of classmates and from both our own and the language(s) of printed texts. How we under-
stand and discuss these differences matters.
This chapter, as its title notes, addresses three areas: language, linguistic diversity, and writing—
more narrowly, the implications of how we understand critical aspects of the first two for
composition classrooms. In its pages we address issues associated with defining language itself,
and we consider a small sample of the range of linguistic diversity that we encounter, and
should not fail to make note of. We also address the ways in which we talk about language:
the language we use in describing our own and others’ languages. And in this context, as
318 Sharon Klein
we speak to readers who are preparing to work with—to teach—student writers, the chapter
turns its attention in particular (but not exclusively) to such educational settings. It is here, for
example, that observations about the language we use to talk about language are crucial. They
are crucial because, as language serves to represent our thought, our language about language
reveals much about how we think about it, and, also, again, because the language about lan-
guage we use can be damaging. It can even silence our students by undermining their own
languages, and, thus, their access to representing and externalizing their thought. If these rea-
sons were not enough, talking about linguistic diversity and language itself seems fundamental
to any interesting, much less effective, discussion of text—whether we’re considering how to
compose them, how to read them, or how to critically evaluate them.
3 About Language
You’ll notice that the simple rearrangement of the three elements in the strings triggers re-
analysis, and moving the definite article9 the in (1.c.) does so further. All of this you were
fairly immediately aware of, and immediately—automatically—responded to the demand for
mental restructuring, even if it took you a moment to restructure—and, we might add, you
read these strings, you did not hear them, which involved another unconscious and automatic
step (your having learned to read, and your being proficient readers, yields that automaticity)10
and access to an additional system. While we effortlessly interpret such strings—even put them
into service in larger contexts and know where any one of them could not fit e.g., ∗I think you
should the ship sinks,11 it is unlikely that a typical speaker could describe the linguistic knowl-
edge they’d deployed in that instant to distinguish among the strings and make the additional
judgment. So, our inherently human “knowledge” is (before any study of linguistics) beyond
our reach of awareness; we refer to that knowledge as “tacit” or “implicit”—not unlike our
knowledge of how we walk (absent itself of any formal instruction in the anatomy and physi-
ology of kinesiology).
Language is not only inherently human, it is also uniquely so. No other animal develops
this particular system, even with extended instruction, but certainly not without it, as human
infants do spontaneously12 (Anderson, 2004). We turn now to a bit about how linguistic
research generally thinks about language. But it’s worth repeating that our discussion of what
language is (at least what linguists generally mean when we say that word)—what insights
the focused study of language have contributed—is in the service of how to interlace these
insights with an understanding of linguistic diversity and in turn, the relationship of all of this
to making what happens in composition classrooms most beneficial (and what the goals might
themselves be in such classrooms) for the students inhabiting them.
3.1.2 Grammar
Grammar has achieved a vertiginous depth of complexity as both a word and term. We men-
tion, of course, Hartwell’s (1985) extensive discussion of at least five of its senses at that time,14
to which Martha Kolln forcefully added what she argued was a distinct notion, triggering a
documented debate, and contributing to the ongoing challenge of weaving notions of gram-
mar into writing instruction. But even the debate itself narrowed the meaning of grammar
at work in writing instruction to the reference of the term syntax in linguistics, namely the
knowledge speakers have of sentence structure. Writing is most certainly dependent on our
individual knowledge of sentence structure and its role in both contributing to meaning and
challenging readers.
In linguistics, the term, grammar refers to the knowledge of I-language that any given speaker
internalizes. This is roughly Hartwell’s “Grammar 1.” And while syntax (more precisely than
our reference above, syntax refers to the knowledge any speaker of a language internalizes of
how phrases, clauses, and sentences are structured, and how meanings are ascribed to these
structures) is certainly a significant component, it is not the only component of such knowl-
edge, of a grammar. Syntax interfaces with phonology15—required for the externalizing of
this knowledge—as well as with semantics, which determines how words, and often phrases,
and clauses, as well, work to represent meaning. How these systems interact with the more
general communicative contexts in which speakers find themselves is addressed by the field of
Language, Linguistic Diversity, and Writing 323
linguistic pragmatics, a field that also plays a significant role in elucidating the sorts of expecta-
tions about what texts’ forms mean that readers bring to them, how these expectations affect
interpretation, and what aspiring writers should know about them. What we have just out-
lined: a linguistic account of what comprises any speaker’s I-language, their individual, inter-
nal linguistic system, corresponds, again roughly, to Hartwell’s “Grammar 2.” So, there is a
duality of the term—even in linguistics—as it refers at once to the tacit knowledge a speaker
has internalized (I-language) and the linguistic account(s) and model(s) of this knowledge.
Ignoring for a moment that the proximity of (3) to (2) might have tempted you to presume
that they might (still) somehow be connected to a/the group of researchers pair (which makes us
aware of how we interpret pronouns), consider the difference between (3a) and (3b), which
differ in their use of absent—one as an adjective and the other, as a verb. How does that dif-
ference affect how you read (or what you “read into”) the sentences?
Try to construct three other sets of sentences that reflect structural differences and discuss
with others the differences in interpretation that the sentences’ respective structures are likely
to trigger, whether they do, and what might be at work.
In the exercise you have just completed, the connections between structure and the
meaning(s) it conveys are relatively apparent. But, this sort of experience is typically not
the focus of grammatical study in writing classrooms. Rather, its focus is on a particular set
of conventions for sentence structure to which a presumed linguistic community holds its
writers, and deviations from this set are referred to as errors.16 These conventions provide for
discussion of usage—a decidedly E-language construct, as we have noted. The objective of
grammatical study, then, is to show students what such deviations are and (presumably) how
to avoid them. Notoriously, this approach has a history of sustained failure, but that is the
history we have.
When some attention was paid to approaches that some might refer to as “stylistic,” that
is, approaches that provided aspiring writers with access to various ways of manipulating sen-
tences, there was some success with attention to the pieces of sentences—both with explicit
grammatical (actually linguistic, in this case: Bateman and Zidonis 1966 and see also Zibroski
201617) terminology, and without. Success was measured in terms of the extent to which
324 Sharon Klein
students’ subsequent writing made fruitful use of the more elaborated sentences. Included
in the latter (i.e., devoid of linguistic instruction) were sentence imitation (Corbett 1963),
whose pedagogy invoked the classical tradition, not of copying, but of composing sentences
from models in context), combining sentences (Daiker et al. 1978 and Morenberg et al. 1978,
and what its developer (Christensen 1963) referred to as “Generative Rhetoric,” a method
which provided simple clauses to which student writers were guided toward adding vari-
ous sorts of phrasal and clausal modifiers and studying the rhetorical effect of such structur-
ings, and combining sentences (Daiker et al. 1978 and Morenberg et al. 1978, for example).
Experimentation provided significant evidence that these approaches enriched students’ “syn-
tactic maturity;” they worked.
In “The erasure of the sentence,” Connors (2000) both carefully documents and evinces
bemusement at the overwhelming rejection of these pedagogies, particularly sentence com-
bining, which had taken hold during the last third of the 20th century, but was included in
the rejection into the turn of the millennium. This rejection, moreover, included not just
the pedagogies, but also the research regarding them and attesting to their effectiveness. In
fact, what developed into an argument against them was the perceived “scientistic” nature of
both the pedagogy and the research supporting it Connors (pp. 118–122). Writing—as the
process methodology was moving in—was not a science. This reaction, and the turn away
from sentences culminated in the virtual disappearance of these sorts of approaches—at least
in most writing classes seeing themselves as outside of the “creative writing” areas18—in other
words, in most “composition” classes.
The appearance of the first edition of Graff and Birkenstein’s They Say I Say in 2006 (now
in its 4th edition, 2018) reignited (or reflected already renewed, or quietly undaunted) inter-
est in the sentence (but, for some critique of at least early versions of Graff and Berkenstein,
see Lancaster, 2016) and Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences appeared that same year. But there is
a difference between these and the efforts of that last third of the 20th century. Those efforts
provided apprentice writers with the experiences that seems analogous to those a musical
student has with scales and related exercises. Neither experience is tied to any particular com-
positions (of musical units or words and sentences), but both have the capacity to trigger an
awareness of how the medium works, and how phrases (and clauses) can combine.
In a footnote, Connors (fn. 4, p. 123) cites an essay by William Strong, which appeared
in Daiker, Kerek, and Morenberg (1985), a collection of papers and talks where members of
the opposition to sentence combining, who argued that it was disconnected from rhetoric
and was not “natural” (compositionists including Peter Elbow and Donald Murray) and those
who had developed, implemented, and tested the model came together, or attempted to. In
“How Sentence Combining Works,” Strong points out that sentence combining “requires
human beings to pay attention to their own interaction with sentences,” and that it “often
serves as a springboard for writing tasks.” It involves students in the language they’re using,
and, he argued, his “hunch” was that “the language in sentence combining often triggers
metalinguistic thinking beyond its own discursive content . . . sentence combining helps stu-
dents transfer power from oral language performance to writing.” They are “attending to
discourse” in large measure because they are constructing small pieces of it (Strong, p. 350.).
It is tempting to speculate that these sorts of exercises (including Corbett, Christensen, and
Daiker et al.) brought students closer to an awareness of their own I-languages in ways that
were unblurred by the static of E-language perspectives.
Before we move away from grammar, a topic, in any case, that is addressed in the chapter
preceding this one, it seems only fair to acknowledge that even (or especially) the theory of
grammar (“Grammar 2”) best suited to model human linguistic knowledge (“Grammar 1”)
and to provide the framework for studying that is not a universally agreed-upon choice. The
grammatical framework that seems to be favored by compositionists in this area is that associ-
ated with M. A. K. Halliday, notably systemic functional linguistics (SFL). We will spend a
Language, Linguistic Diversity, and Writing 325
few words here outlining the differences, insofar as that is possible. SFL, as its name implies,
looks at language through a functional lens, concerned with how language functions in social
contexts to achieve the goals that speakers may have, notably creating and communicat-
ing meanings. One major working assumption is that speakers construct meanings through
choices they make—choices of words and phrases—that will function in various ways to
convey meanings. This focus on choice highlights what is referred to as the paradigmatic
axis—will a speaker select a definite or indefinite article (the vs. a), for example, or a pronomi-
nal subject, or a fully fleshed-out nominal, on the one hand (4a-b) or one of the two verbs
indicated on the other (4c, shun vs. love):
Thus it is the notions of function, interlaced with the overarching role of choice, with lan-
guage providing the repertoire of choices19 in the service of making or affecting meaning,
that are primary.
4 Linguistic Diversity
4.1.1 Dialect
There are words and terms that we regularly deploy with little thought toward their “actual”20
reference and sense. Until someone asks. The terms dialect and language are prominent in this
regard. Many introductory linguistic texts have foundered on the shoals of trying to make
a linguistic argument for the distinction. And of course, as we have seen and will continue
to see, the word language itself has a complex and often murky range of referents and senses,
even within the territory of linguistics (large itself), but certainly beyond it. But, as our con-
versations about language ideologies (complemented by the parallel reading) should reflect,
discussion of these—including language—provides the space to build the connections between
sociolinguistic insights (including those that shed light on our tangled attachment to the
notions of E-language) and our understanding of the human language faculty underlying any
I-language. So, we will turn back to the early mid-20th century (But we can look even far-
ther back for such insights, see the first chapters of Ferrers Howell’s translation of Dante, De
Vulgari Eloquentia) for this first insight). Chomsky (1986) observed that “A standard remark in
introductory linguistics classes is that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy” (p. 15),
an observation which, in his mention of it, Chomsky attributes to Max Weinreich,21 whose
descriptive and sociolinguistic work focused on Yiddish, and who is considered one of the
early 20th century patriarchs of sociolinguistics.
326 Sharon Klein
We wish the observation were actually more standard in introductory texts, but the one
we discuss here is exemplary in this regard. Akmajian et al. discuss dialect at length, but do
refer to Weinreich and his insight (providing it as it was in the original Yiddish) in a detailed
“Special Topic” section. (pp. 291–292) But noteworthy for us is the following, where
Akmajian et al. consider “mutual intelligibility,” a criterion typically exploited for referring to
two linguistic entities as dialects rather than languages, in the context of a discussion of French
(which has E-language status, regardless of the actual range of “Frenches” we can identify)
and Swiss German (which has this E-language name, but itself is somewhere in-between the
definitional spaces. . .a Prattian 1991 Contact Zone?). Akmajian et al. write: “. . . one could
say that Swiss German and French are ‘mutually intelligible.’ Clearly, ‘mutual intelligibility’ has
more to do with the competence of speakers than it has to do with languages being mutually intelligible”
(p. 264, italics mine). It is important to note that competence itself is used in Akmajian et al.
in its technical sense, as Chomsky (1965) introduced it, to refer specifically to the tacit and
implicit linguistic knowledge that a speaker has internalized. In that sense, with the added
emphasis on the knowledge being internal and individual, I-language has supplanted compe-
tence). Thus, Akmajian et al. are pointing out that the feature of mutual intelligibility in rela-
tion to the use of these linguistic systems is a function of individual knowledge (I-language),
not of anything called “French” or “Swiss German.” We may repeat this assertion, but it
deserves some mention here. What we do with language depends crucially on I-language.
How we typically think about and refer to language is related to and a function of E-language.
In their discussion, Akmajian et al. make it clear that even in general usage, the word dialect
is fraught in many ways. Referring to a linguistic entity as a dialect certainly does not confer
status. On the contrary, being referred to as a dialect is typically considered a demotion for
a linguistic system, unless a system with dialect status “earns” the companion label “stand-
ard,” itself an issue for us. In other words, prestige dialect and standard dialect are infused with
status not because they’re dialects, but because they are positively marked dialects. Nor does
the term dialect have any consistent content, as dialects are “never purely regional, or purely
social, or purely ethnic,” despite these being used definitionally, since “regional, social, and
ethnic factors combine and intersect in various ways” as they’re put into service in the identi-
fication of dialects (p. 262). And in case we needed more evidence of the largely sociopolitical
dimensions that define the terms language and dialect, the E-languages Serbian and Croatian
exist as a function of the dissolution of Yugoslavia (itself of course having been a construct of
the 20th century), as they were—admittedly edgily (with the Serbs and Croats using distinct
writing systems)—a single E-language, Serbo-Croatian. There are many other such examples
readers may already know or certainly can discover.
I have this program in Detroit at the Malcolm X Academy, where I deal with seventh
and eighth grade young males, you know, they’re all strutting, and they’re all real nation-
alistic, and I always have to tell them I’m saying “wider” communication not “whiter”
communication. I’m saying wider, so we can talk outside the “hood.”
(Smitherman 1996, pp. 22–23)
She had attributed the term “language of wider communication” to Joshua Fishman, who
referred to such as “the language that helps people communicate in a broad spectrum out-
side their own particular sphere, outside their own particular community” (Smitherman
1996, p. 22). The question becomes, of course, who decides what that “wider” language is.
In answer to this question, some linguists (including Charity Hudley and Mallinson in
Understanding Language Variation in US Schools) have chosen to use, with emphasis, the suffix
–ize along with standard, because standardized:
makes the parallel that just as specific types of knowledge are valued on standardized
tests, so, too are specific types of language valued within the educational system. Using
the term standardized English also reflects the important reality that powerful people
and institutions, including the media, are involved in decisions about when and how to
standardize English.
(p. 12)
As part of the discussion, Charity Hudley and Mallinson cite Bonfiglio (2002) who has
explicitly made the case that the selection of forms of American English more like those in
the upper middle west (rather than varieties identified with certain urban areas, e.g., Boston
330 Sharon Klein
or New York City, which are arguably more cosmopolitan—that being a potentially desir-
able feature) as more standard are related to issues of racialization. They also cite Suzanne
Romaine’s introduction to sociolinguistics (Romaine 2000), which observes that “[s]tand-
ardization is not an inherent, but rather an acquired or deliberately and artificially imposed
characteristic (p. 87).”
What is also worth noting here (although this does take us a bit ahead of ourselves),
is that many who are “native” speakers of “the language of wider communication,” but
are not proficient speakers of African American Language (as Smitherman’s students are)
have, nonetheless, appropriated a range of elements from the language, as the videos
Talking Black in America and The E-Word reflect (and as both the videos and Rickford
(2016) make clear, these speakers of “the language of wider communication” seek out
elements of AAL, finding the language very communicative, while standardizing efforts
to continue to derogate it.
EAE, “Edited American English” is a label—the one label—that has specifically to do
with text, and it is discussed at length in the extended conversation about Students’ Rights to
their Own Language (SRTOL) in the special issue of College Composition and Communication.
This discussion raises a number of issues about the expectations of writing instruction
related to linguistic diversity (in this document, because it was the Conference on College
Composition and Communication (CCCC) and the NCTE who collaborated, the discus-
sion is directed toward K-12, rather than post-secondary settings), and, as Watson and
Shapiro discuss as well, arrived early to (and even initiated some of) the conversation ques-
tioning mythologies of aspirational linguistic homogeneity and standard language. The arena
of written language seems to provide a much less permeable framework of standardization,
but it also allows us a telling insight into the infrastructure of that framework. As Milroy and
Milroy (2012) have taught us, and as Linn (2013) as well as Watson and Shapiro remind us,
the idea of a standard language is precisely that—an idea. This is true even when language
academies exist and persist.23 Language as individuals speak it changes.24 And we’ve noted
that in the 14th century, Dante understood this perfectly.
We affirm the students’ right to their own patterns and varieties of language—the
dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they find their own identity
and style. Language scholars long ago denied that the myth of a standard American
dialect has any validity. The claim that any one dialect is unacceptable amounts to
an attempt of one social group to exert its dominance over another. Such a claim
leads to false advice to speakers and writers, and immoral advice for humans. A
nation proud of its diverse heritage and its cultural and racial variety will preserve its
heritage of dialects. We affirm strongly that teachers must have the experiences and
training that will enable them to respect diversity and uphold the right of students
to their own language.
(Larson 1974)
In their book also, Charity Hudley and Mallinson (2011) list “Seven Privileges of
Standardized English” (p. 36), reproduced here:
Language, Linguistic Diversity, and Writing 331
1 Standardized English-speaking students can usually be assured that the newspapers,
magazines, books, and other media they encounter at school will be in the type of
English they are already familiar with.
2 Standardized English-speaking students can usually be assured that they will not be
mocked or teased for how they pronounce their words.
3 Standardized English-speaking students can usually be assured that they will not be
thought of as being less intelligent because of how they talk.
4 Standardized English-speaking students can usually be assured that standardized test
instructions and materials will be written in English they are already familiar with.
5 Standardized English-speaking students can usually be assured that most of their
educators will communicate with them in the type of English the students are
already familiar with.
6 Standardized English-speaking students can usually be assured that the way they talk
will not be the subject of jokes or belittling in mainstream TV shows or movies.
7 Standardized English-speaking students can usually be assured that their pronun-
ciation, intonation, and sentence structure will not interfere with their ability to
be assessed accurately, to interact with authority figures, or, later in life, to obtain
housing and be hired for a job.
How do these two pieces align with one another? What aspects related to language and
standardization can you find that are consistent across the two. What aspects related to
attitudes seem to diverge? How might one reconcile these? If the notion of standard is,
as many argue, imagined and inconsistent, what exactly is privileged?
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would capture the language’s status as a distinct system, the names for the African American
Language(s) forced it into being a type of English, on the one hand, and also labeled it as “a
vernacular” on the other. This was wholly undescriptive; all spoken languages are, by defi-
nition, vernacular. It functioned, as a label, to subtly derogate the language. Such has been
the case with many Creoles. But the development of forms of African American spoken
language(s) are closely related to the variety of languages that the enslaved Africans arrived
with, and these languages, having mixed themselves during the Middle Passage voyages, also
mixed with the Englishes spoken by the White Anglo plantation owners, foremen, other
indentured servants, and, it is speculated, some indigenous peoples, as well.
Twice in the 20th century, the damage to children’s education that the failure to recognize
the status of African American Language as just that caused, became a topic of focus. The first
of these involved African American parents in Ann Arbor, Michigan whose children, attend-
ing the Martin Luther King, Jr. Elementary School, simply were not being understood by the
teachers because the teachers, as they were predominantly White, knew little or nothing of
ENGLISH
USA CANADA
BRITISH ISLES
Anglophone Francophone
Canadian Canadian Irish Scootish
English
Midwest Welsh
NE Coast
California
Southern Puerto Rico FAR-EAST
INDIA-PAKISTAN
W Indian
Am Samoa
New Guinea
Anglophone
S Africa FV
Australia
New Zealand
Language at Large
Akmajian,A., Farmer,A. K., Bickmore, L., Demers R.A., & Harnish, R. M. (2017) Linguistics:An intro-
duction to language and communication (7th ed.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. An up-to-date, com-
prehensive, and accessible textbook introducing students to the linguistic treatment of language.
Bonvillain, N. (2013). Language, culture and communication (7th ed.). New York: Pearson. A text with
a more anthropological focus, describing a range of communicative systems across the world’s
languages (including politeness and face-saving systems).
Pinker, S. (1994). The language instinct. New York: Harper Collins. An engaging introduction to
language.
Tortora, C. (2018) Understanding sentence structure: An introduction to English syntax. Hoboken, NJ:
John Wiley & Sons. This is an introduction to the study of sentence structure and is at once
comprehensive and very accessible (welcoming readers “with open arms”), moving step-by-
step, as Tortora designed the text not only for use in a classroom, but also explicitly for “Do
It Yourselfers.” Anyone who is contemplating working with students who will be writing in
Englishes, as an instructor, mentor, or tutor, should have a working knowledge of how our
knowledge of sentence structure is described.Tortora’s perspectives:“I take sentence structure to
be a product of the human mind,” that “the existing regional and sociolinguistic variation dictate
that each reader will have a different understanding of what is possible and what is not possible
in their own English” (pp. xii–xiii), and that syntax—sentence structure—” is an object of scien-
tific inquiry” are consistent with the view of “how language works” that has informed our work
with literature treating language, languaging, linguistic diversity, and the teaching of writing.
Linguistic Ideas
Anderson, S. R. (2010) Languages: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. An
excellent and comprehensive, as well as accessibly brief, look at issues about languages, with
some attention to language and its nature as well. A fine discussion of sign languages is provided,
as are some insights about variation across the world’s documented spoken languages (known
as linguistic typology) and how to resolve such diversity with the unity of human language.
Baker, M. C. (2001). The atoms of language. New York: Basic Books. Recommended for the first
chapters, as the book quickly becomes fairly technical. But these chapters discuss the intrigu-
ing issue of the Navajo code.
Jackendoff, R. (1994). Patterns in the mind: Language and human nature. New York: Basic Books. A
short and readable introduction to the perspective the field of linguistics has regarding human
language and its nature, responding to the question “What does human nature have to be like
in order to account for the fact that we can all speak and understand a language?” (pp. 5, 159).
Predating the introduction of the terms I-language and E-language, it is situated nonetheless
in the theoretical framework yielding them. The book also looks at the human non-language
mental systems of visual perception, music, and thought.
Language, Linguistic Diversity, and Writing 341
McWhorter, J. (2012) What language is (And what it isn’t and what it could be). New York: Avery
(Penguin).
Napoli, D. J., & Schoenfeld,V. L. (2010) Language matters: A guide to everyday questions about language
(2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Websites
The Alliance for Linguistic Diversity: The Endangered Languages Project.
http://endangeredlanguages.com
International Year of Indigenous Languages (IYIL).
https://en.iyil2019.org
The LingSpace interview with Anne Charity Hudley (a prominent sociolinguist who studies and
addresses issues of language discrimination in educational contexts and beyond).
www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKjrnrsiKv4&feature=youtu.be
TheLingSpace interview with Sali Tagliamonte (sociolinguist who studies the language of various
groups of teenagers).
www.youtube.com/watch?v=tapgQNcKuFo
Omniglot (for examples of languages’ writing systems, and the iterations of the first sentence of
the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights in languages that can be used in the
relevant “For Writing and Discussion” experience).
www.omniglot.com and in particular [https://omniglot.com/udhr/index.htm]
Bilingualism Matters.
www.bilingualism-matters.ppls.ed.ac.uk
Yale Grammatical Diversity Project.
https://ygdp.yale.edu. An excellent description of a range of syntactic diversity across Englishes
spoken largely across North America. In addition to describing these linguistic forms, the site
provides an instructive glossary of terms and an illuminating FAQ section considering a range
of topics and issues we’ve touched on here.
The Transnational Composition Group (The Conference on College Composition and
Communication group’s public presence on Facebook, with relevant discussion regarding
issues addressed in this chapter and beyond).
www.facebook.com/groups/transnationalwriting/about
Videos
Anderson, S. R.Video lecture “The place of human language in the animal world.”
https://mediaserver.unige.ch/play/90552
(continued)
342 Sharon Klein
(continued)
We Still Live Here: Âs Nutayuneân.
https://itvs.org/films/we-still-live-here.This documentary is excellent on multiple levels, not the
least of which is its cinematic quality. But its content is revelatory, telling not only the story of
the rejuvenation of the Algonquin language of Wampanaugh, the language spoken by the peo-
ple whom the Plymouth Rock pilgrims first encountered, were helped by, and who provided
the wherewithall for the “first Thanksgiving,” and then who nearly perished, along with their
language, as a result of the systematic settler and colonial policies.
Speaking in Tongues.
http://speakingintonguesfilm.info. An excellent documentary addressing successful dual-language
immersion programs
John Rickford’s presidential address to the LSA (Rickford 2016).
www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMMxufNN4pg&feature=youtu.be
The E-word.
https://ewordfilm.com
Talking Black in America.
www.talkingblackinamerica.org
Two excellent videos treating and contextualizing the African American Language(s) in the USA.The
first also addresses the 1996 Oakland “controversy” regarding how most successfully to address
the language(s) and students speaking them in classroom settings. The second also highlights,
threading it through the video itself, the history and linguistic foundations of the language(s).
Podcasts
The World in Words.
www.pri.org/categories/world-words
A site with selected podcasts from The World in Words relevant to the topics in this chapter.
www.pri.org/search/node?search_api_views_fulltext=language%20diversity&f%5B0%5D=field_
ref_program%3A65995
Lexicon Valley.
McWhorter, J. “The Blaccsent: What does it mean to sound Black?” Lexicon Valley, Episode No.
84 May 3, 2016.
www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2016/05/blaccent_is_there_such_a_thing_as_
sounding_black.html
Note: There are three articles in the “References” section that I recommend to readers who are
preparing to teach writing—in any setting. In particular, the papers are recommended both
for their comprehensive treatments of their respective areas and for their informative historical
perspectives. Their sources are detailed below, so I will only list them (alphabetically) briefly
with the minimal citations, author and date.
Connors (2000).
Horner and Trimbur (2002).
Valdés (1992).
Notes
1 The two parenthetical instances of sic have to do first with the reference to speech as “more important
than anything else.”We would, of course, replace speech with language, in the context of what we have
recognized about sign languages. And the second refers to the recognition that he would be replaced.
Perhaps even with they. Speech acts both.
2 Because this chapter addresses issues of linguistic diversity (and its corollary, linguistic discrimina-
tion), all words deployed as labels for linguistic, ethnic, or cultural communities will be recognized
as “proper nouns” (i.e., names), and thus will appear in the text with uppercase letters, regardless of
their use in other semantic contexts, when they are not functioning as names.
Language, Linguistic Diversity, and Writing 343
3 In fact, it was Stanley (2015, fn 15, p. 306 who called the Langton piece to my attention)
4 This is a rather popular example, used frequently to encourage speakers to consider the depth of the
tradition of language prejudice (Wolfram and Reaser 2015).
5 In a postscript to his text, Bailey invokes the term shibboleth himself, as he describes the dramatic
changes to English in the 19th century. An instructive description:
6 We will use the word language throughout to refer both to what are conventionally accorded such
status and to what have traditionally been (and in many cases continue to be) referred to as dialects.
In the discussion about dialect and language in Section 4, the rationale underlying this choice should
become clearer to readers.
7 Of note: Ethnologue (Simons and Fenning 2018) avers that of the (its) documented 7,097 “living
languages” of the world, 3,909 of them have writing systems. However, there are no figures regarding
how many speakers of languages with them have access to these writing systems or use them.
8 We will number what we use as linguistic examples—pieces of language we discuss or refer to.
9 Some terms we will define, and others, such as “definite article,” we will not. That does not mean
that these terms don’t require some attention—it’s not clear what ‘definite’ means in the term, and
understanding how such elements as a(n) and the function in most dialects of American English
seems critical for instructors whose goal it is to help students use the tools of language to construct
meaningful and rhetorically effective sentences. One grammar book in particular appears in the
bibliography (van Gelderen 2010). Its explanations are clear, accessible, and linguistically consistent.
10 The topic of reading itself, and the observation that, unlike language, access to print is learned, as we
have noted, fills its own volumes, but is an important area for aspiring compositionists. Approachable
and well-researched overviews can be found in Wolf 2016 (although Wolf 2007 is a fine read as well).
11 The asterisk (*) is used in linguistics to indicate that any speaker of most dialects of English would
unhesitatingly find the so-marked string distinctly unacceptable, being ready to claim that “it’d never
happen,” or “it’d never occur,” or that it sounds “just totally weird.” These are all desirable responses
and the absence of any hesitation is crucial.These are not examples that typical speakers would want
to look up in a usage book. Linguists depend on these judgments to reveal speakers’ knowledge—
and therefore to shed light on the validity of linguists’ account of this knowledge.We will see further
on that the asterisk is put into service elsewhere, as well.
12 Looking at the word infant in the same sort of dictionary recommended in the “For Discussion and
Writing” exercises, you’ll discover something interesting about it in the context of language. And it
is important to remember that this inescapable observation about the uniqueness of human language
should not be interpreted as an impugning of non-human animals. Anderson’s (2004) discussion
of animal cognition makes this abundantly clear, and we should note that beyond our observation
about other animals, short of the tale P.L.Travers (1934) weaves, human infants show no capacity for
developing or learning the systems other animals use effortlessly to communicate.
13 The word intensional comes from logic, and here, roughly refers to our capacity to use language referentially.
14 Which, Hartwell acknowledges, moves on from a platform provided by W. Nelson Francis’s work in 1954.
15 We will continue to make certain that any discussion about linguistic phenomena related to under-
standing the nature of linguistic knowledge and the human language faculty itself applies at once
to both spoken and signed languages, as the distinction in these modalities does not affect the
understanding that they are both human languages. Phonology, which of course carries the Greek
root phon- related to sound, has been divested of that connection, with the term having to do with
the study of the nature of the system occupied with externalizing language, and dealing with the
structure and arrangements of the minimal non-meaning bearing elements. Whether the system is
visual/manual or aural/oral, it addresses the character of this system.
344 Sharon Klein
16 This point is one to remember, particularly when we look in more detail in Section 4 at the idea of
a standard. Ultimately, the outlines of the elusive standard are defined by what is not in it. The focus
is on what count as errors, and the consequent proscription of them is what begins to give shape, if
not substance, to the so-called standard.
17 Zebroski (2016) discusses the largely forgotten Bateman and Zidonis studies, which investigated
teaching students how to analyze sentences in ways for which the introduction of generative gram-
mar had provided. The studies found:
that when teachers and students systematically investigate and theorize language, in an authen-
tic way (which means there is no pre-formed answer), drawing on work in the disciplines but
also work that is local and lively, and then connect it to writing, there is marked improvement
in the quality of writing.
Zebroski notes that writing disciplines “took little notice of this finding. . .,” (p. 269) and that unfor-
tunately, what note was taken missed the point. The success of Bateman and Zidonis’s work argued
that inquiring about language—the linguistic perspective—brought students closer to language, and
again, as we noted in the context of William Strong’s discussion of sentence combining is likely to
have triggered the sort of metalinguistic awareness that provides for a relationship with language that
in turn, strengthens one’s relationship to writing and provides, in turn, for its development.
18 Creative writers continued to attend to sentences (see Ostrom et al., and Queneau, for example)
19 By necessity, the representation of these fundamental tenets of SFL is simplified—arguably over-
simplified. The notion of choice, for example, works not only for categories such as those here, but
also for tense and voice, for example, and for units that shape discourse as well—choosing proposi-
tions or interrogatives, or voice (active vs. passive) and mood, for example.
20 The word actual is in quotation marks here, because, as we should remember—and observe—the ref-
erents and senses of words change, both across generations and even within them. A recent example
(where “recent” refers to “in the vicinity of the publication date of this text”), the change in the
meaning of the –ly adverb literally suffices on a few counts. As readers may know (or have learned),
the meaning of that word seems to have changed. It is frequently deployed as hyperbole to mean
figuratively, e.g., I’ve literally told you a thousand times. . .. And, as Merriam Webster, in their Words At
Play site’s discussion of responses to their definitions of the word teaches us, this deployment is, in
fact, not nearly as new as those who object to it believe. This interlude touches on aspects of how
words come to mean as well as (often received and unexamined) notions of correctness, which
require sustained attention and inquiry, some of which we attempt to provide.
21 The instructive quip itself first occurred in Yiddish, in Weinreich’s paper detailing the talk (both in
Yiddish) about the early post-WWII challenges for Yiddish and Jewish culture, where Weinreich
cites a member of the audience at the talk whom he credits with the observation. Yiddish itself
danced along the constructed “language–dialect continuum,” long dismissed as a dialect of German,
until the post-WWII wish to distance this language from German influenced some of the scholar-
ship regarding its history. A parallel Sephardic language is Ladino—also frequently referred to in
dialect terms as Judeo-Spanish
22 It seems important to note that the recently deployed Common Core State Standards for the
English Language Arts (CCSS-ELA) feature a strand labeled “Language” (one along with three
others: Reading, Writing, and Speaking and Listening). The Language strand begins with this label:
“Conventions of Standard English,” and the first two anchor standards (the general wording for a
given standard across K-12) are as follows: “(1) Demonstrate command of the conventions of stan-
dard English grammar and usage when writing or speaking;” and (2) “Demonstrate command of the
conventions of standard English capitalization, punctuation, and spelling when writing.”
23 The Académie Française is a prime example, established in the mid-17th century, and, with minor
interruptions, still active. An important note, here, as well, is that standardization—mythological as
it is—is distinct from the decision to adopt an “official language.” A language may be designated
an official language—typically for sociopolitical reasons—and however that language evolves, any
attempts to constrain this notwithstanding, it is the official language. Such a status, because the offi-
cial language(s)—many nation-states recognize more than one language as official—will constitute
the language(s) used educationally.
24 Recall that we use the term ‘speak’ generally for both aural/oral and visual/manual languages.
25 Reputedly, the term translanguage and translanguaging was first used in the context of a particular peda-
gogy in Wales associated with the use of two languages, alternating them systematically in the classroom.
Language, Linguistic Diversity, and Writing 345
The references for translanguaging have changed significantly, and although the term is used in educa-
tional contexts, it does not describe the Welsh (or any specific) pedagogical design (Lewis et al. 2012).
26 The 2018 films BlacKKKlansman and Sorry to Bother You have, along with other popular culture
ventures (e.g., the HBO series Insecure), raised the issue of “sounding White,” and sounding (authen-
tically) Black (K. Austin Collins 2018 and Giorgis 2018), while linguists such as John McWhorter
had already been addressing the converse, sounding Black (McWhorter 2016, 2017, and Smith,
Jamil 2017). It is interesting that both issues are from the perspective of African American spoken
language, and it seems relevant to look at how popular culture both represents and considers the
phenomenon of what is fundamentally “crossing” in Rampton’s 1995a and 1995b context.
27 In their excellent book, Language Matters (Napoli and Lee-Schoenfeld 2010), note that concepts
exist independently of the languages that represent them (“language is like a hanger that we put
our thoughts on,” p. 59), and that, for example, while English has no word equivalent to the Italian
scaramanzia, the concept it encodes is well known to many English speakers, being a form of magical
thinking that has us declaring the worst possible outcome for some concern in order to preempt that
very outcome. And conversely, Italian has no single word corresponding to one of the core meanings
of privacy, but Napoli and Lee-Schoenfeld note that “Italians close the door when they use a public
bathroom, they do not have sexual relations in public places, and they do not ask personal questions
of people they are not intimate with” (p. 54).
28 Including disenfranchised indigenous populations (such as a number of American Indian nations,
about which the Makepeace film, We Still Live Here: Âs Nutayuneân is critically informative), immi-
grant populations even now, and other minoritized groups: White Appalachian speakers, African
American speakers, and Latinx speakers, to name a few is why this chapter exists, and why for
example, the work of the Alliance for Linguistic Diversity’s Endangered Language Project is vital.
Linguistic discrimination contributes substantially to the loss of languages in a variety of settings.
29 As others do, we should also note the legacy of Anzaldúa’s (1987) extension of the notion of borders
to several conceptual arenas. For anyone reading this chapter, her most critical piece in the context
of language in that work, is, of course, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue.”
30 The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS), an online linguistic resource that linguists respect,
lists and locates a major selection of the world’s recognized and described Creoles and Pidgins, and
Wikipedia lists many of these as well, with both providing links to more detailed descriptions.These
“lists” are, of course, not exhaustive and in both cases the brief description of Creole is not fully con-
sistent with the most recent and very highly valued work of Michel DeGraff (whose specialization
is Haitian Creole, and whose work, as well as focusing on the linguistic foundations for redefining
Creoles and their development, has centered on issues of education and language in the context of
the failure of institutions to recognize either the language status of Haitian Creole or its crucial role
in children’s educational success).
31 It is of note that the Vice President of India, in office at this chapter’s writing,Venkaiah Naidur in a
speech on September 14th 2018, referred to English as “an illness left behind by the British.”
32 In contrast, a language such Mandarin, notable for its non-dependence on inflectional morphology,
is not referred to as “simplified.” Non-Creole languages that do not involve inflectional morphology
(that is, word-attached elements that may mark tense, aspect, number, person, or gender, for exam-
ple) are referred to as “analytic” or “isolating” terms in linguistics that describe the predominant sorts
of inflectional systems in a language.
33 This usage of “code switching” with this reference involved some appropriation itself. Linguists
had identified interlanguage conversational practices that bilingual and multilingual speakers would
engage in while in conversation (Ellen Woolford 1983 and then Ellen Prince and Susan Pintzuk
1984). The activity involved the use of words, as well as word-internal elements (the latter being
called “code mixing”) from one language or the other in single sentences or phrases. Of interest
was what speakers did and did not do; linguists wanted to discover the constraints on what could be
replaced and where such replacements could and could not occur. After Wheeler and Swords (2006),
however, new terminology was needed, and Young provided us with “code meshing,” although the
contrast between code switching and code mixing was gone.
References
Aarons, A. C., Gordon, B. Y., & William, S. A. (Eds.) (1969). Linguistic-cultural differences and
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Reading
Clarifying the Multiple Dimensions of Monolingualism
Keeping Our Sights on Language Politics
Missy Watson and Rachael Shapiro
During the spring 2016 semester, Missy’s department at City College of New York, CUNY
embraced her request to propose a new course outcome for the first-year composition cur-
riculum that reflected current disciplinary theories for better attending to linguistic diversity.
Missy, excited at the opportunity and determined to craft an outcome that would endure,
sought the expertise of scholars participating in a Transnational Writing Group on Facebook.
She asked for feedback from the group and offered one option of an outcome to consider:
“Acknowledge your and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources, and draw on
those resources to develop rhetorical sensibility.”
While all responses from the group were helpful, one made her pause. Ligia Mihut shared
the following outcome that her department at Barry University includes in its first-year-writing
curriculum: “Students recognize the extent to which cultural standards, institutional practices,
and values oppress, marginalize, alienate, or create/enhance privilege and power.” Missy
was at once refreshed by the explicitness of this outcome and hesitant to move forward
with it, or some version of it, as the outcome she proposed at City College. Fully endorsing
the notions captured in the outcome and believing wholeheartedly that City College should
be an institution leading the pursuit to approach linguistic diversity with utmost care, Missy
pondered over her hesitance. She questioned whether her department and institution were
ready for such explicit stances on the oppressive nature of standardized English. And she
suspected her version of the outcome, which focused more on honoring diversity and honing
rhetorical sensibility, would be more welcome and still a worthy step in the right direction,
albeit modest and, admittedly, not fully capturing what the field has long known about the
oppressive role of standardized English.
We believe that this discrepancy—what Missy felt was truly needed and just given her
pedagogical position to explicitly combat standard language ideologies versus what she
believed was feasible given the dominance of English monolingualism that persists at City
College and across US higher education— is representative of the current state of composi-
tion studies when it comes to dealing with the politics of linguistic diversity. While we in com-
position studies may have grown more sensitive to and welcoming of cultural and linguistic
differences in the classroom, we remain far from united in pursuits to combat explicitly in our
pedagogies the politics of standardized English. We struggle to detach from the powers of
standard language ideology, so deeply engrained within our discipline and professional iden-
tities. While most writing teachers would readily agree that standardized English (hereafter
*SE)1 will “create/enhance privilege and power,” many may still be more reluctant to proclaim
and denounce how standard language ideology serves to “oppress, marginalize, alienate.”
We miss out on important opportunities to combat monolingualist ideology when we focus
only on cultivating in students a “rhetorical sensibility” and on fostering attitudes whereby stu-
dents see “linguistic differences as resources,” as did Missy’s initial version of a course out-
come. Inviting and celebrating language varieties is useful in confronting assumptions about
Tacit English-Only Policies (Horner and Trimbur) and in deconstructing the myth of linguistic
Multiple Dimensions of Monolingualism 357
homogeneity (Matsuda “Myth”). However, we hope to emphasize that inviting and including
language differences in the classroom and in writing, in and of itself, is far from sufficient. On
its own, over decades of use, inviting writing differences into composition classrooms might
begin to dismantle and quiet the harms caused by monolingualist ideologies. While a steady
pace toward adjusting centuries-long ideologies and rhetorical expectations is in order, if
we are to have any real hope of combating the harms of linguistic hierarchies, we must fur-
ther address students’ and our unchecked affinities for *SE, as well as our complicity with
the material harms caused by our profession’s perpetuation of standard language ideology.
Thus, to the extent that inviting language differences is the best vehicle in the field to unite
the front against monolingualism, a focus on language difference in our research and teach-
ing needs to be preceded by more explicit attention to how standardized languages have
historically suppressed linguistic varieties and oppressed their users.
Said simply, we believe we need to do more than acknowledge, invite, and honor the lin-
guistic diversity in our classrooms; we must do more than help students understand how lan-
guage works and how to negotiate their own interests and languages alongside standardized
varieties and conventions. We must also, together and at last, confront the field’s distancing
from, indeed resistance to, facing the material harms caused by the very monolingualist
ideologies so many of us, no matter our good intentions, uphold and perpetuate in our class-
rooms and institutions. To move toward linguistic justice, we call for unified intention and
action across our field to explicitly combat what we see as multiple facets of monolingualism.
One issue preventing unified approaches in contesting monolingualist ideologies, as we see
it, is that we do not forefront in our minds and our practices the material consequences of
monolingualist ideology, nor have we come to a holistic consensus on the concept of mono-
lingualism. With this article, we hope to clarify just what it is we’re rejecting when we combat
the monolingual paradigm, and, in so doing, be better prepared to combat more explicitly the
harms of linguistic hierarchies.
In what follows, we first synthesize decades’ worth of scholarship that illustrates the harms
caused by monolingualist ideology. Then, we parse out distinctions across four competing
definitions of English monolingualism, which helps us not only to highlight monolingualism’s
distinguishable strands but also to reveal that some uptakes of monolingualism may lead
us to stray too far from attending to its material consequences, which harm speakers and
writers and tarnish the ethical goals of our work as literacy and language professionals.
Indeed, as we show, the uses and meanings of monolingualism are multiple and have thus
not always been consistently or fully considered in composition scholarship. Following our
discussion of monolingualism and its multiple dimensions, we conclude with practical class-
room and administrative applications, including a proposed learning outcome that instructors
and WPAs might consider adopting in order to work more explicitly against the harmful con-
sequences of *SE in and beyond the composition classroom.
Students will recognize the role of language attitudes and standards in empowering,
oppressing, and hierarchizing languages and their users.
Again, there are a variety of pedagogical strategies we might propose or recall from past
scholarship that might address this outcome, too many to review here. For now, we wish
to highlight the need in our current historical moment for all writing teachers, tutors, and
administrators to consider how we might implement lessons, readings, discussions, and
assignments that interrogate *SE with students, offering critical reflection on how standard
language shapes and is shaped by social power. Adopting a learning outcome such as this
one, or like the one suggested by Ligia Mihut at the beginning of this essay, we believe may
help writing teachers explicitly work against all forms of monolingualism, whether they do so
out of a translingual framework or through other approaches. Guided by such an outcome,
our hope is that composition research, teaching, and administration will merge in a collective
pursuit against the many affective, embodied, and material consequences of monolingual-
ism. While this is but a modest step, we know well the importance of defining the culture of a
discipline, department, and classroom by way of settling on shared goals.8
We will be the first to acknowledge that none of the work we’ve covered, including our
own approaches and the outcome we suggest, will magically solve the problems we’ve high-
lighted with monolingualist ideologies and the incomplete treatment of them. However, mov-
ing forward, we believe we can work toward a set of shared ideals. We can make sure other
languages and Englishes are invited, supported, and valued; we can ensure that students
and teachers alike come to know the full politics of English; we can develop strategies to help
our institutions gain a fuller sense of what students’ language backgrounds and language
goals are; we can fight for a range of credit-bearing composition courses that fulfill degree
374 Missy Watson and Rachael Shapiro
requirements, and advocate for students’ agency in self-selecting courses that best meet
their linguistic needs and goals; we can better train and support service staff who work with
linguistically diverse students; we can advocate for smaller classrooms to provide the space
and time teachers need to work on languaging; we can develop programmatic assessments
that value labor and rhetorical sensibility rather than proficiency in academic discourse; we
ourselves can normalize and make visible the plentitude of language variety by continuing
to publish in our own dialects and languages; we can press our universities and the public at
large to understand the full politics of English and monolingualist ideologies; we can increase
efforts toward becoming a more multilingual nation; we can protest unethical media portray-
als through public critique; we can lobby for legislation and community programs that work
to support rather than discriminate against folks who don’t use English. We invite your ideas,
suggestions, and participation to extend this list of actions and to better unite against linguis-
tic injustice in our classrooms and in everyday moments.
Notes
1 We intentionally include the “-ized” suffix when referring to standardized English to recognize the
ongoing and emergent historical and social processes that shape what version of English is privi-
leged at a given place and time (see Laura Greenfield). We aim to further emphasize the myth of
so-called “standard English” by preceding our acronym with an asterix, in chorus with sociolinguist
Rosina Lippi-Green who explains her use of *SAE as follows: “syntacticians use an asterisk to mark
utterances which are judged grammatically inauthentic. I am adapting that practice here, and will use
*SAE to refer to that mythical beast, the idea of homogenous, standard American English” (62).
2 See Dingo’s treatment of women’s economic “fitness” in neoliberal policy in Networking Arguments.
3 This conversation has also come up in cultural rhetorics scholarship, especially by Geneva
Smitherman, Keith Gilyard, and Victor Villanueva; in alternative discourse conversations including
scholars like Patricia Bizzell and Tom Fox; more recently around code-meshing with scholars like
Vershawn Ashanti Young and Suresh Canagarajah; and throughout decades of basic writing and
second language writing research.
4 Especially important scholarship on language politics from beyond our field comes from, among many
others, aforementioned scholars Lippi-Green, James Milroy, Lesley Milroy, and Phillipson, but also
linguists Alastair Pennycook, Terrence G. Wiley, and Walt Wolfram, as well as TESOL and second
language writing scholars Elsa Roberts Auerbach, Ryuko Kubuta, and Angel Lin.
5 We can imagine readers questioning our reasoning that encouraging code-meshed texts does not
contest Monolingualism as Standard Language Ideology. While it’s true that inviting language differ-
ence may work to assign heightened value to other varieties and languages within academic settings,
unless we are actively and explicitly exposing and deconstructing the harmful standard language
ideologies undergirding our unchecked privileging of *SE (and that which make code-meshing a
purposeful and useful act of contestation in the first place), we fail to address the full politics of
monolingualism. In other words, we can invite language difference into our classrooms without stu-
dents ever challenging their and others’ belief systems deeming *SE as superior. Such a pedagogical
approach, we believe, would be an incomprehensive treatment of monolingualist ideologies.
6 Of course, translingualism isn’t the only entry point for discussing language politics. But here we invoke
scholarship on translingualism because of its situatedness in composition studies, its relevance to our
own projects, and, especially, its explicit and unapologetic commitment to combating monolingualism.
In this way, we understand translingualism to be an active strategy for working against monolin-
gualism and intervening in the harmful effects of *SE, particularly for the most vulnerable student
bodies in US higher education. Further, although here we ground our understanding for combating
monolingualism in translingual approaches to writing, we respect and reflect important critiques of
Multiple Dimensions of Monolingualism 375
translingualism’s potential to elide difference in language users in its attempts to unite all language
through the differences within and among language uses. In Horner et al.’s opinion piece, they define
translingualism as threefold: “(1) honoring the power of all language users to shape language to spe-
cific ends; (2) recognizing the linguistic heterogeneity of all users of language both within the United
States and globally; and (3) directly confronting English monolingualist expectations by researching
and teaching how writers can work with and against, not simply within, those expectations” (305). Of
interest to us here is how this definition aligns to the multifaceted nature of monolingualism that we
outline. Significantly, the third aspect of translingualism they name explicitly works with students to
combat monolingualism. That said, while “teaching how writers can work with and against” discursive
norms like those in *SE no doubt helps to combat monolingualism, such a pedagogical approach still
does not make clear the need for instructors to examine alongside students the oppressive nature of
said norms. This, we argue, is where our field can unite behind a shared outcome, like that we pro-
pose below, to make this work more explicit in our classrooms.
7 It’s worth acknowledging that the field was examining the myth of standard English before it was
examining tacit English-Only policies and before it was examining the myth of linguistic homogeneity.
Indeed, we may even respectively align influential texts that were significant to each of these three
notions, which also reveals chronology (SRTOL, 1974; Horner and Trimbur, 2002; Matsuda “Myth,”
2006). However, what we find particularly noteworthy is that the term translingualism was coined once
most monolingualisms had been introduced to the field (As Standard Language Ideology, as Tacit
English-Only Policies, and as the Myth of Linguistic Homogeneity), while the other monolingualism
we review here (As the Myth of Linguistic Uniformity, Stability, and Separateness) was (and is still
being) developed alongside, and as a response to, the translingual movement. While we do not have
the time and space to explore that further here, this may be relevant given recent arguments that
focusing on the Myth of Linguistic Uniformity, Stability, and Separateness without attending more to
Standard Language Ideology can lead to overlooking the politics of language.
8 Some folks may argue that outcomes constrain pedagogical possibilities in an effort to streamline
easily assessable deliverables and to satisfy neoliberal university impulses toward efficiency, scal-
ability, and replicability. We, rather, understand this kind of outcome to offer unity to teachers in a
department or discipline. Through shared outcomes, we project and enact a shared vision of best
practices and shared values; we tether our ideological commitments to pragmatic action. We imagine
the outcome we propose as one that an individual teacher may take up in her classroom, that a writing
program may adopt or adapt in their lower division courses, or that may even be used to amend the
current Council of Writing Program Administrators’ Outcomes Statement.
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When we bring multimodal composing into our writing classes, we can help students build a
broader definition of writing that includes the various contexts in which writing takes place in
their lives: in digital and analog spaces, in multimodal and text-based writing, both in and out of
school. With a clear and direct connection made between writing in various contexts, students
may see their out-of-school writing as more important, may see it as connected to classroom
practice, and may be able to learn from it in a way that they were not able to previously.
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Guiding Questions
• How can we help students expand their Composition practices and rhetorical toolkits by
integrating technology and multimodality into our writing classes?
• How can we help students realize and leverage “all available means of persuasion”
through greater attention to multimodal and technological affordances?
Introduction
Over the past four decades, technology and digital environments have dramatically changed
the genres, audiences, and purposes of our communications. The variety of communicative
modalities we now have to choose from, along with the speed, frequency, public nature, and
complex social dimensions involved, have also had a significant impact on writing and writing
instruction. Composition teachers are increasingly responsible for integrating technology into
their pedagogy, including incorporating computers, mobile devices, online applications, and
social media platforms, and for making space for a broader view of what constitutes “writing”
and “text.” For instructors new to the field, having to include digital and multimodal writing
in an already packed curriculum can seem overwhelming, or worse, an unnecessary distrac-
tion from the “real” work of teaching writing. As the discussion below illustrates, however,
facility with a variety of types of technologies, writing processes, modalities, and texts is criti-
cal for communicative success in the 21st century.
The purpose of this chapter is to offer an introduction to digital and multimodal writing
instruction and how these areas fit within the primary learning goals for teaching Composition.
Rather than viewing these responsibilities as yet more to cover, digital and multimodal writ-
ing actually offer a number of possibilities for assisting students in becoming more rhetorically
savvy communicators, helping them leverage what Aristotle famously called “all available
means of persuasion.” An increasing aspect of our job as contemporary instructors of writing
and rhetoric is to help students recognize and employ these practices in thoughtful, deliberate,
and productive ways.
380 Jennifer Sheppard
To be sure, the research-based argumentative essays traditionally taught in many
Composition courses are still a critical and important set of (largely academic) literacies and
the need for this type of writing isn’t going anyway anytime soon. In fact, the ability to
read and analyze critically, and to communicate in informed, credible, source-based ways is
perhaps more important than ever. However, developing proficiency with this genre and its
attendant writing processes is only one part of learning how to communicate effectively and
persuasively in an array of contemporary contexts. Authors also need to develop critical and
flexible composing practices so they can utilize whatever digital or multimodal resources are
most strategic for making meaning in a given rhetorical situation.
This chapter provides an overview of central theoretical and pedagogical issues in digital
and multimodal writing; major areas of focus in the teaching of Composition. I begin by
discussing terminology for issues of digital and multimodal writing and the ways in which
these concerns are in conversation with the larger field of writing studies. I then offer a brief
history of scholarship surrounding each of these concepts and the ways this evolving research
has informed classroom practice over the past four decades. Building on this historical con-
text, I then identify and discuss three key issues in contemporary theory and pedagogy for
digital and multimodal composition, providing prompts for discussion and ideas for classroom
integration along the way.
Discussion Question
What terms make the most sense to you in relation to the kinds of “writing” you do
with technology of various sorts? Why and in what ways do your terms change based
on context or audience? In what ways are these distinctions important?
As Claire Lauer (2009) argued, “Defining terms is an important and necessary practice
in any field, including Composition. . . . Defining terms is a situated activity that involves
determining the collective interests and values of the community for which the definition
matters” (225). In other words, terms, each with their own definitions and histories, are use-
ful for establishing common ground and shared understandings so that our “conversations”
are really centered on the same concerns. For the sake of time and because they are the terms
most commonly in use as of this writing, this chapter focuses on the concepts of “digital”
and “multimodal,” as defined below, but see Lauer’s 2009 article for an in-depth discussion
of differences in the concepts of “multimedia” and “multimodal” and her 2012 follow up on
definitions for “New/Multi/Modal/Digital/Media Texts.”
Issues in Digital and Multimodal Writing 381
What Is “Digital” Writing and Why Does It Matter to Composition?
When Composition scholars talk about “digital writing” or “digital rhetoric,” they are typi-
cally concerned with the relationship between writers and ever-evolving communication
technologies. They want to better understand the affordances and constraints these technolo-
gies offer writers, as well as the implications these hold for writing processes, genre conven-
tions, audience expectations, and the ability to communicate thoughtfully and persuasively
using a variety of digital tools and environments. As Sarah Arroyo (2013) argued,
digital rhetoric does not just mean that more people write with computers or that more
people are online. Rather, it entails larger cultural shifts in recognizing new patterns of
thinking, rethinking familiar conceptualizations about both the self and human interac-
tion, and re-envisioning attitudes and expectations toward reading, writing, and rhetoric,
regardless of the physical presence of machines.
(p. 114)
In other words, while scholarship has addressed the integration of different forms of technology
into writing instruction, a larger underlying focus has been on the ways in which those tech-
nologies have changed our conceptions of and expectations for writing and human interactions.
Although the work of teacher-scholars in the computers and composition subfield has
grown and diversified since early calls for inclusion of technology in the writing class, the
following list summarizes many of the key concepts, issues, and questions that have emerged.
1 Digital Pedagogies: How can the availability of various networked and stand-alone
technologies be used to teach writing in classrooms, programs, writing centers, and
online settings?
2 Technological Literacies: How can students develop practical facility with and critical
awareness of digital tools for communication and interaction expected for participation
in academic, professional, and cultural contexts?
3 Multimodality: How do the multiple modes for composing and meaning-making made
available through technology broaden what counts as “writing”?
4 Cultural and Systemic Changes in Communication: How do systemic changes to
our cultural communication landscape reshape our relationships with others?
5 Technological Access and Experience and the Digital Divide: How do issues of
technology access and prior experience impact the writing classroom and student learn-
ing outcomes?
6 Technological Identities: How can new communication technologies be used to
allow the construction of new kinds of identities for students, instructors, and audiences?
7 Writing in Online Environments: How can online social and instructional spaces
shape and reshape types of interactions and communication between participants?
8 Digital Privacy, Copyright, Ethics, and Intellectual Property: How do digital
affordances and online sources create a complex ethical intersection between “remixed”
compositions, fair use, plagiarism, and copyright?
9 Interdisciplinary Connections to and Implications for Digital Writing: How do
diverse fields, including art, literature, linguistics, graphic design, technical communica-
tion, geography, and media studies intersect with digital writing and pedagogy to allow
for better understanding of available communicative affordances?
Each of these themes call on Composition teacher-scholars to consider how various tech-
nologies, platforms, modalities, and online spaces can extend writing instruction in critical
382 Jennifer Sheppard
and relevant ways. A more complete discussion of the history of scholarship and pedagogy in
digital writing follows later in this chapter.
Discussion Questions
Reviewing the themes and questions listed above, which interest you most and why? If
you were to design a research study to investigate one or more, what would you want
to find out and how would it relate to the teaching of writing? What other areas for
inquiry are not included here that you think belong?
While all the modes have their own affordances, or things they do well individually (e.g. a
picture is worth a thousand words), it is the combination of modes that really gives them their
rhetorical strength (e.g. the way a written caption and an audio clip can help an audience
understand the meaning of an image in a deeper, more contextualized, more critical way).
In composing multimodally, writers have to think carefully about their rhetorical situation
(audience, purpose, and context) to choose the modes, media, and genres that will function
most persuasively for a given situation.
At first glance, it may seem that only the linguistic and maybe the visual are related to
what we typically think of as “writing.” However, as the kinds of texts we encounter on an
everyday basis continue to expand, so do the modalities upon which we rely to make mean-
ing. For example, even a word-based webpage, utilizing only the linguistic mode, is still
exploiting the spatial (e.g. in the alignment of words on screen, the breaks between sentences
or paragraphs, and the location and arrangement of navigation elements) and visual (e.g. in
the choices of font, color, and textual emphases such as bolding and italics) modes to make
and convey meaning.
As I will discuss below, a primary focus of the “multimodal turn” in composition is the way
in which writers can learn to leverage, both alone and in conjunction with one another, the
affordances of multiple modalities. You can think of the modes as a set of meaning-making
Issues in Digital and Multimodal Writing 383
resources from which writers can select, consciously, depending on their specific rhetorical
goals. The intention is not to try to use multiple modes for their own sake, but instead to
make intentional decisions about which modes might be most appropriate and effective for a
given subject, purpose, audience, and context.
Discussion Questions/Activities
Take 10 minutes to walk around your school, building, or home and make a list of
every kind of multimodal communication you encounter. Don’t worry about the con-
tent of the messages being conveyed or even if you are the intended audience, but
instead focus on how that text communicates. Consider, for example, the meaning of
different sounds in your environment, such as those from your phone, toaster, micro-
wave, and other electronics. Consider the arrangement of furniture and its texture, the
body language of others you encounter, the ways in which colors are coded for specific
messages, and any other element or text that is attempting to communicate something
to someone. Compare your list with a partner or small group, paying specific atten-
tion to modes of communication that don’t overlap between the lists. Finally, discuss
why, how, and in what ways you might want to incorporate attention to some of these
modalities in the writing classroom.
Discussion Questions/Activity
Take a few minutes to brainstorm ways you could bring attention to the rhetorical and
meaning-making opportunities available in specific examples of multiple modalities that
are not reliant, at least directly, on technology. What ways can you think of that could
help classmates or students to be more conscious of the affordances and constraints of
different modalities, either through observation and analysis of texts produced by others
or through creation of one’s own non-digital multimodal text?
Further, as Jody Shipka (2011) argued in her book Toward a Composition Made Whole, “to
label a text multimodal or monomodal based on its final appearance alone discounts, or worse
yet, renders invisible the contributions made by a much wider variety of resources, supports,
and tools” (p. 52). Discussing Shipka’s argument and her workshop-based classroom approach,
Claire Lutkewitte (2014) wrote that “This process-focused approach encourages students to
experiment with multiple modes and rhetorical appeals in a way that broadens their under-
standing of what effective communication entails” (p. 3). The work of Anderson, Shipka,
Lutkewitte, and other multimodal scholars reminds us as Composition teachers that we should
continue critical exploration of how digital tools AND multimodal resources, both alone and
in combination, can help students develop necessary 21st-century communication practices.
The WPA Outcomes Statement is often used by writing programs as the foundation for
establishing their own programmatic student learning outcomes (SLOs). The Statement’s
existence has helped to move the scholarly and pedagogical conversations about digital and
multimodal writing instruction into higher education classrooms across the country. Despite
these efforts, however, attention to these issues and their integration into writing pedagogy is
still a work in progress. A large-scale survey of writing faculty in 2006 found that only 24%
of respondents indicated that multimodality was an integral part of their writing program’s
overall curriculum (Anderson et al.).
Further, these researchers found that 84% of respondents reported that multimodal com-
position takes place within individual classrooms rather than on a larger programmatic level
(Anderson et al., 2006, p. 69), meaning that universal instructional attention in this area is
far from complete. What this means for writing teachers and writing programs is that there is
still much work to be done in educating and supporting faculty as they learn more about the
rhetorical possibilities of digital and multimodal composing and how that fits into the work
and responsibilities of Composition instruction.
Discussion Questions
Search your department’s website or ask your Writing Program Director or Department
Chair for a copy of the Student Learning Outcomes that guide the work of first-year
writing classes at your institution. In what ways do these outcomes sync up (or not)
with the WPA’s Outcomes Statement? In what ways, if any, do they reference or make
space for digital and/or multimodal writing?
386 Jennifer Sheppard
A caveat: A key assumption underlying most scholarship in digital and multimodal writing
is that pedagogical considerations, not technological ones, should drive the integration of technol-
ogy and/or multimodality in the teaching of writing. That is, this work does not advocate
the use of new technologies and text types for their own sake, but rather because they offer
a potential to address pedagogical needs and goals. For example, teacher-scholars working
from this perspective would not simply make use of a new social media platform because of
its cultural popularity or its technological bells and whistles. Instead, such a platform might be
adopted because it offers specific features or affordances that support student learning, such
as synchronous and asynchronous team communication capabilities, cloud storage and online
tools to facilitate collaborative writing in and out of class, and access to a large public audience
to share final texts and receive feedback from real-world users, giving students new avenues
and rhetorical considerations to employ in their own writing processes. Although teach-
ers and scholars from Composition are often on the bleeding edge of classroom technology
integration, they are also thinking continually about their pedagogy and what Kress (2005)
described as the “gains and losses” as “we move from representation primarily through writ-
ing to representation” through visual and multimodal means (p. 5).
Discussion Questions
Log onto your library’s database of scholarly journals and search for one or more of the
journals above. Review the titles from the last three years’ worth of issues. Make a list
of the top three or four themes that seem most interesting or relevant to your studies/
teaching. What is significant about these themes and why? Be prepared to share and
discuss your themes with classmates.
What follows in this section is a brief overview of the computers and composition field
and its focus on digital writing. This discussion offers only broad strokes of the discipline’s
history, unfortunately glossing over many interesting nuances and controversies. However,
Issues in Digital and Multimodal Writing 387
this selective review is intended to provide a backdrop for the contemporary issues I will
cover in more depth in the next section. If you are new to the field or would like to find out
more about this history, I have included suggestions for a number of detailed histories in the
selected readings section at the end of this chapter that will supplement the references cited.
Late 1980s through Early 1990s: Investigating Widening Access to Computers and
What It Meant for Writing Instruction
According to the Computers and Composition (C&C) website’s “History” page, early
writings in the emerging field of computers and writing featured “authors who focused on
innovative technologies (e.g., hypertext and electronic mail) and their attempts to situate
them within classroom contexts” (C&C, “History”). With the addition of Gail Hawisher as
Co-Editor in the late 1980s, “the journal began to feature special-edited issues that focused on
such diverse areas as writing centers, synchronous CMC [computer-mediated communica-
tion], computer programming, intellectual property rights and professional concerns such as
tenure and promotion” (C&C Blog, “History”). A review of the archives points to interests
in the potentials of word-processing software (e.g. Paul LeBlanc’s 1988 article “How to Get
the Words Just Right: A Reappraisal of Word Processing and Revision”), the ways in which
computers could support a process-based approach to writing (e.g. Timothy Weiss’s 1989
article “A Process of Composing with Computers”), and the pedagogical and administrative
logistics of creating computer-based learning spaces (e.g. Stephen A. Bernhardt’s 1989 article
“Designing a Microcomputer Classroom for Teaching Composition”).
Discussion Questions
Take a few minutes to brainstorm questions about the writing and digital literacy
dimensions of your favorite technology or social media platform. If you were to begin
an investigation into these practices, what kinds of issues might you explore and why?
Once you’ve finished brainstorming your ideas, share and discuss with classmates.
In other words, Kress and van Leeuwen suggested that to be fully literate in the digital era
required the ability to communicate the same meaning through different modalities depend-
ing upon what one is trying to convey for a particular audience or purpose. Although Kress
and van Leeuwen focused on theoretical arguments about how meaning is made across dif-
ferent modes of representation in contemporary culture, their work, as well as that of other
scholars in Semiotics, Linguistics, and Literacy Studies has been significant in shaping peda-
gogy, classroom practice, and research in Composition.
Issues in Digital and Multimodal Writing 391
Visual Rhetoric, Visual Communication
Interestingly, work on multimodality from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, initially focused
on the communicative potential of the visual mode. In his book, Digital Rhetoric: Theory,
Method, Practice, Douglas Eyman cited Roland Barthes’s 1977 article, “The Rhetoric of the
Image,” as a “touchstone for the turn to the visual in rhetorical studies” (p. 49). In this piece,
Barthes argued that images can be read rhetorically, rather than just aesthetically, by examining
their linguistic (written words), denotative (explicit), and connotative (implied) messages. This
contribution to rhetorical theory expanded the artifacts/modalities considered research-worthy
from an exclusive focus on written and spoken language and offered an initial analytical frame-
work for understanding how the visual mode functions to communicate and persuade.
John Berger’s 1977 Ways of Seeing is also seen as a significant scholarly and cultural influ-
ence on the necessity of incorporating serious, critical attention to the visual in education. As
Diana George (2002) suggested about Berger’s work, it was “radical” because of “his insist-
ence on breaking down the barriers that separated high culture (in this case art history) from
low (advertising)” (p. 23). This publication began to shift scholarly focus on visual analysis
away from the realm of modal experts and high-culture texts (e.g. fine art) and toward one
that sought to understand how everyday visual images/artifacts were read by ordinary, every-
day people. This shift also brought the kinds of texts available for (and in need of) study into
the domain of writing teachers where they would be responsible for helping students read and
write a range of persuasive messages utilizing textual and visual modes.
Following the work of Barthes, Berger, and others, Sonja Foss (2005) was influential in
defining a critical schema for analyzing how visuals convey meaning. She contended that
using existing rhetorical theory, developed for speech and writing, did not allow analysts to
attend to all communicative and persuasive features of visual artifacts. Instead, she argued
some features of visual images clearly require attention to different elements and a different
treatment of those elements from what discourse does (pp. 150–151). She maintained, that
“visual images provide access to a range of human experience not always available through
the study of discourse” and that it is therefore incumbent upon rhetoricians to be inclusive of
the visual mode and how it can be utilized for persuasion (p. 143).
Working from a Composition perspective, Diana George’s 2002 article, “From Analysis
to Design: Visual Communication in the Teaching of Writing,” argued for the necessity of
training students to be critical producers of visual texts, not just critical consumers. She wrote,
“For students who have grown up in a technology-saturated and image-rich culture, ques-
tions of communication and Composition absolutely will include the visual, not as attendant
to the verbal but as complex communication intricately related to the world around them”
(p. 32). George’s work echoed broader calls in rhetoric and Composition to shift from an
examination of how multimodal signs themselves convey meaning to how writers utilize those
meaning-making resources in their literate practices. She also made the important point that
we should not approach the visual as a kind of add-on, appended at the end of the composing
process, to somehow decorate or support the “primary” written text. Instead, her approach
suggested that students need to begin their composing processes by considering their specific
rhetorical situation. Only then, should they consider the visual and linguistic modalities at
their disposal to address that situation.
Making a similar argument from a rhetorical perspective, Eyman (2015) contended, “If
we see digital [and multimodal] rhetoric as a productive art, then nearly all digital texts can be
seen both as objects of study for analysis (using digital rhetoric methods) and as products of digi-
tal rhetorical practices” (p. 9, emphasis mine). He continued, “While many rhetorical theorists
focus primarily on the analytical capacity of rhetoric, it is the value for production that I see as
392 Jennifer Sheppard
a key resource for the formulation of digital rhetoric” (p. 17, emphasis mine). That is, Eyman
suggested, if we as teachers of writing and rhetoric are working to assist students in develop-
ing critical, kairotic, and persuasive understandings of digital communication, we fail in part
of our duty if we focus only on analysis of texts and not also on their composition. “Digital
rhetoricians,” Eyman contended, “must explore both the theory and the technology; critical
engagement alone is just as insufficient as a curricular approach as would be practical applica-
tion without the provision of tools for understanding how technologies work within social
and cultural contexts” (p. 113, emphasis in original).
A little more than twenty years ago we talked about “winds of change” (Hairston, cita-
tion in original); today the changes are those of tremors. These are structural changes—
global, educational, technological. Like seismic tremors, these signal a re-formation in
process, and because we exist on the borders of our own tectonic plates—rhetoric, com-
position and communication, process, activity, service and social justice—we are at the
very center of those tremors.
(p. 321)
Issues in Digital and Multimodal Writing 393
Yancey pointed to the ways in which digital possibilities and their global implications were
not simply re-shaping writing, but were calling into question the very processes, practices,
and foundations on which we base our teaching, learning, and interaction with the world.
Failing to acknowledge these communicative and cultural shifts, by holding stubbornly to
monomodal texts and traditional understandings of writing, for example, we leave our stu-
dents ill-equipped for the actual critical and communicative demands they will face.
A significant additional contribution to the conversation came in the National Council of
Teachers of English’s (NCTE) 2005 “NCTE Position Statement on Multimodal Literacies.”
It argued that, “[i]ntegration of multiple modes of communication and expression can
enhance or transform the meaning of the work beyond illustration or decoration” and that
“[t]he use of different modes of expression in student work should be integrated into the
overall literacy goals of the curriculum and appropriate for time and resources invested”
(NCTE, “Position”). This professional statement was, and continues to be, particularly note-
worthy because it is addressed to the broader field of English Studies at both the K-12 and
higher education levels, rather than just the post-secondary writing studies community more
specifically. This move worked to improve curricular alignment between different educa-
tional stages, expanded and standardized some aspects of contemporary literacy practices, and
offered students opportunities to develop critical multimodal literacy skills at a younger age.
Importantly, though the statement offers a rich and inclusive definition of multimodal
literacies, it also demonstrated awareness that communicative practices are still very much
in flux. By focusing on the practices needed to read and compose through multiple modes,
rather than on specific digital tools, genres, or modalities, the statement has remained an
important touchstone for educators.
Despite the well-established scholarly calls for more attention to multimodality in com-
position, implementation of that change in writing pedagogy has been slowed by a host of
constraints, such as faculty, administrators, and institutions wedded to traditionalist models
of writing, outdated learning outcomes, and lack of technology resources. Writing Studies
scholars Karla Kitalong and Rebecca Miner (2017) argued,
Nearly two decades later, we are, as a profession, still turning toward multimodality in
Composition teaching, research, and administration . . . . What we do seem to agree on
is that effective multimodal composing, like effective composing in a single—usually
written—mode, is more than simply accumulating bits of information one upon the
other, more than merely including multimodality within Composition (Alexander &
Rhodes, 2014, p. 4, cited in original). The goal with multimodal composition, as
with composition in any single mode, is for students to practice so that they
can synthesize modes, genres, ideas, and skills, and become ever more fluid
and flexible composers.
(pp. 39–40, emphasis mine)
To address what they saw as a stagnancy in moving from theory to classroom practice,
Kitalong and Miner proposed looking at multimodality for its potential to offer enhanced
opportunities for student writers to exercise increased agency. They offered three suggestions
for creating such classroom composing possibilities. First, prompts and assignments should
explicitly encourage students to exercise personal agency through selecting issues of inter-
est to them (p. 53). Second, as students begin incorporating multimodal elements into their
research and composing, Kitalong and Miner suggested,
a pause to reflect and consider alternative ways to express an argument before they resume
their textual production. . . opens up new avenues for argumentation. We believe that
394 Jennifer Sheppard
allowing this valuable time for reflection enables students to learn from their experiences
as well as from each other (e.g. in peer reviews or in conversation outside of class).
(p. 53)
Finally, they argued that while “encouraging free invention and fostering creative thinking”
may leave some instructors uncomfortable with a loss of classroom control, “the excitement
of being free to compose in multiple modalities generates students’ engagement in their own
learning, which leads them toward reflectiveness and self-awareness” (p. 53). Further, they
contended,
as college composition students experiment with multiple modalities, they learn (as do
professionals in complex work environments) that it is okay to struggle and beneficial
to make changes in response to critiques of their work. . . [U]ltimately, the work of
rhetorically analyzing and revising their projects generates more precise and potentially
more powerful messages that reveal elements of personal agency, especially evident in
their reflections.
(Ibid.)
Although all of the contributions highlighted in this section offer critical tools and frame-
works for understanding multimodal rhetoric and writing, each also reminded us that genres
and practices for using digital tools and environments to compose multimodally are still very
much evolving. These scholars and many more have worked to help us and our students see
how meaning is made in our ever-changing communicative landscape, by focusing not on
the newest social media platform or type of digital writing but on how to recognize and make
use of the persuasive and meaning-making potentials they might hold.
By default, many instructors might then see themselves as “digital immigrants,” struggling to
develop a fluency with technology later in life that appears to come so naturally to younger
students. While Prensky’s contention that today’s students are “born digital” and thus have an
innate ability to use and create digital and multimodal texts has found a hold in popular con-
versation, many scholars have taken issue with this supposition and its implications, including
danah boyd (2014).
As a technology and social media researcher who studies teens’ digital habits, boyd argued,
Teens may make their own media or share content online, but this does not mean that
they inherently have the knowledge or perspective to critically examine what they con-
sume. Being exposed to information or imagery through the internet and engaging with
social media do not make someone a savvy interpreter of the meaning behind these arti-
facts. Technology is constantly reworking social and information systems, but teens will
not become critical contributors to this ecosystem simply because they were born in an
age when these technologies were pervasive. . . . Becoming literate in a networked age
requires hard work, regardless of age.
(p. 177)
Echoing the concerns of a number of scholars, boyd’s work emphasized the fact that ubiq-
uitous exposure to technology does not necessarily equate to critical awareness of what
digital/multimodal texts say or how such communicative practices can be put to use for
students’ own rhetorical purposes. Instead, as Selfe (2004) suggested, it is the responsibility
of educators to help students understand “the implications of such cultural trends as well as
manag[e] their own communicative efforts in ways that are rhetorically effective, critically
aware, morally responsible, and personally satisfying” (642). Additionally, as boyd suggested,
developing digital literacies requires explicit commitment to learning functional and rhetori-
cal possibilities. As with any other form of professional development, digital fluency neces-
sitates that instructors put in the effort to learn and to consider the pedagogical applications
for such practices.
For some demographic groups—such as young adults, college graduates and those from
high-income households—internet usage is near ubiquitous. Even so, adoption gaps
remain based on factors such as age, income, education and community type. . . . As is
true of internet adoption more broadly, home broadband adoption varies across demo-
graphic groups. Racial minorities, older adults, rural residents, and those with lower
levels of education and income are less likely to have broadband service at home.
(Internet/Broadband)
What these findings mean in the context of the digital and multimodal writing classroom is that
instructors must be attentive to the wide continuum of digital experiences and literacies among
our students. Without regular access to technology in both school and home environments,
students may be unable to develop the comfort and fluency that results from instructional
and self-sponsored digital activities. If our goal as writing faculty is to help students develop
the critical abilities and literacies needed for informed, persuasive communication, we must
develop inclusive pedagogies that support the rhetorical and technological needs of all students.
Rather than framing the digital divide as simply one of access, however, researcher
Stephanie Vie (2008) questioned our assumptions about what exactly the digital divide is for
today’s students. She wrote,
The problem is not so much providing access for Generation M [millennial] students sur-
rounded by technology but rather to effectively integrate technological literacy instruc-
tion into the composition classroom in meaningful ways. Compositionists should focus
on incorporating into their pedagogy technologies that students are familiar with but do
not think critically about: online social networking sites, podcasts, audio mash-ups, blogs,
and wikis.
(p. 9)
In other words, Vie suggested that critical digital literacy should be the focus of our con-
versations about equity rather than just physical access or lack thereof to computers, mobile
devices, and technology. Further discussion of the need for critical digital literacy and ways
we can support these practices in our writing courses follows in the next section.
Moscow’s influence campaign [during the 2016 presidential election cycle] followed a
Russian messaging strategy that blends covert intelligence operations—with overt efforts
by Russian Government agencies, state-funded media, third-party intermediaries, and
paid social media users or “trolls.”
(p. ii)
Far from being a one-off, Daniel Coates, in his Director of National Intelligence’s 2018
Worldwide Threat Assessment, argued that such cyber-espionage efforts are the “new normal.”
The assessment warned,
The potential for surprise in the cyber realm will increase in the next year and beyond as
billions more digital devices are connected—with relatively little built-in security—and
both nation states and malign actors become more emboldened and better equipped in
the use of increasingly widespread cyber toolkits.
(p. 5)
While the political and technological power to block such efforts is far from the realm of
writing instruction, compositionist still have an important role to play in this arena and many
others in our digital environment. By helping students develop a set of critical tools for
questioning and assessing all media they encounter, writing faculty can provide a level of
protection against such efforts. Many of the traditional, digital, and multimodal practices we
teach, including identification and analysis of persuasive appeals, careful evaluation of source
credibility, and critical consideration of the messages conveyed through multimodal content
can support students in developing deliberative, informed consumption practices. Further, as
students hone these critical consumption practices, we also need to help them understand the
implications of their own contributions to the digital landscape.
Discussion Questions
Consider and discuss the following questions with a small group of classmates: What
are some potential consequences or implications for users’ contributions in a variety
of digital environments? Why might it be important to help users be critical of their
Issues in Digital and Multimodal Writing 399
individual or collaborative contributions to digital spaces? In what ways could we facili-
tate conscious awareness of these considerations among students?
Rodney Jones and Christoph Hafner (2012) offered one approach for teaching and supporting
these practices through their concept of critical or conscious stance-taking. Such a model posi-
tions readers and writers to “‘interrogate’ the ideologies and agendas promoted in the texts”
they “encounter via digital media and by digital media themselves” (p. 98). That is, critical
stance-taking helps learners to evaluate the agendas of the content they encounter, as well as that
of the technology, mode, or medium itself. Such work is important because both the content (the
“what” of a communication”) and the mode or technology (the “how” of a communication)
convey and shape meaning. “The problem with ideologies,” they argued, “is not that they are
necessarily bad, but that most people are unconscious of them, taking the particular ideology
they subscribe to as the ‘truth’ rather than simply as one of many possible ‘versions or reality’”
(p. 98). By developing strategies for identifying and questioning these embedded ideologies, we
can help students to exercise greater agency over what they know and how they communicate.
Discussion Questions
The affordances offered through multimodal means for stance-taking (posts, likes,
follows, images, videos, emojis, etc.) in the networked and social media world has
added immeasurable complexity to the possibilities for expressing one’s own views and
responding to those of others. “Thus, at a broader level, understanding acts of stance-
taking is crucial to understanding how identities are constructed in new online spaces”
(Barton & Lee, p. 31). In a small group, discuss the following questions in relation to
stance-taking, identities, and affordances:
•• What social media platforms do you use most often and why? In what ways does
your intended audience or purpose shape your choice of which one to use when?
•• What are the stance-taking affordances and constraints of your most-used social
media apps? That is, what affordances or means do they offer for expressing your
views through interactions such as your original contributions, shares/retweets,
likes, comments, emojis, and more?
•• What considerations do you have in mind as you think about your potential audi-
ence and the kinds of responses you want to elicit when posting or sharing your
own content? In what ways is this specific to a particular platform?
•• What considerations do you have in mind as you think about your interaction
with content produced by others (e.g. what are you trying to say when you “like”
a photo or write a comment or “follow” an account and who is your audience)?
•• In what ways do these questions relate to your identity or the parts of your identity
you want to construct for particular audiences and contexts?
By the early 1990s, however, utopian aspirations matured as Composition researchers took
a more critical approach. One of these scholars, Lester Faigley (1992), argued that while
teaching his first course in a networked classroom reproduced many of the same idealized
characteristics suggested by Eyman, “subsequent experiences . . . problematized the concept
of a student-centered classroom” and caused him to question more critically if, and in what
ways, computers and networked communication in the classroom was realigning potentials
for student agency and identity (p. 167).
Connecting back to the importance of critical thinking and stance-taking activities in
relation to issues of agency and identity, Selfe (2009), reminded us that digital and multi-
modal writing offers students important opportunities for self-expression and identity shap-
ing. Perhaps more significantly, though, she argued that “For students, the stakes are even
more significant. Young people need to know that their role as rhetorical agents is open”
(p. 643). Further, these stakes:
involve fundamental issues of rhetorical sovereignty: the rights and responsibilities that
students have to identify their own communicative needs and to represent their own
identities, to select the right tools for the communicative contexts in which they operate,
and to think critically and carefully about the meaning that they and others compose.
(p. 618)
Writing from a New Literacy Studies perspective, Jones and Hafner (2012) suggested that
while understanding the affordances and constraints of particular technologies is important,
developing digital literacies requires more than mastery over tools and technologies. “It also
means using those tools to do something in the social world and these things we do invariably
involve managing our social relationships and our social identities in all sorts of different and
sometimes unpredictable situations” (p. 13, emphasis in original). That is, the creation and
re-creation of our digital identities is highly mutable. These identities represent who we are,
who we want to be, and how we want others to see us in a variety of contexts. Each time we
construct these digital identities, they are based not just on our desires for self-representation,
but also on our rhetorical situations, digital tools, and social media platforms. This interaction
requires a complex negotiation of contexts, audiences, affordances, and constraints each time
we, as writers, engage with a digital environment.
Discussion Questions
Literacy scholars David Barton and Carmen Lee (2013) suggested the concept of “pres-
entational culture” as one lens for examining people’s digital and multimodal practices
in social media and other online spaces. They define presentational culture as the:
new opportunities for people to document and display their everyday lives in the
form of writing and other modes” that are often shared with varied audiences and
Issues in Digital and Multimodal Writing 401
through varied platforms and in which writers “constantly pay attention to how
they present themselves.
(68)
In small groups, discuss the ways in which the concept of presentational culture is
applicable to your use of two or more social media applications. What kinds of consid-
erations shape the identities you craft on different platforms and how do you express
such aspects of identity? In what ways does the identity you present or craft differ
between platforms based on considerations such as audience and multimodal affor-
dances? Finally, what ideas do you have for how you might incorporate attention to
presentational culture and online identity in a writing class?
As Eyman, Selfe, Jones and Hafner; Barton and Lee; and others have suggested, issues of
identity and rhetorical agency in the teaching of digital and multimodal writing are complex
and ever-changing. Exploring them in an explicit way in the writing classroom not only
influences relationships among students and between students and instructors, but also has
significant implications for writers beyond the classroom. Helping students to be conscious of
and intentional about the ways they construct identities and interact with others is critical to
their development and empowerment as writers in a digital era. As with many other aspects
of the field, technologies make possible a whole host of opportunities for exploring one’s
own identity and the multitude of ways it can be represented online, but these potentials are
realized most constructively with active attention to and reflection upon these possibilities.
These assessment strategies should make learning explicit to students. To move from
implicit practice to explicit understanding allows students to make conscious, purpose-
ful choices in their projects. It also provides space for self-assessment, allowing students
to consider what worked, what didn’t and how they might alter their approach in the
future. If one of our primary goals as teachers of writing and communication is to help
students be successful in any number of rhetorical environments beyond the classroom,
pushing them to be mindful of their own practices and the tools in their repertoire is an
important component of our work.
(Arola, Ball, & Sheppard, n.p.)
Beyond helping students understand our pedagogical goals, being explicit about our assessment
expectations models for students the importance of awareness of and control over authorial
choices and practices. Additionally, including a self-reflection component in course projects
encourages students to develop self-assessment practices to improve future performance.
Rather than beginning with a question of how to assess multimodal texts in a standardized
way, the Multimodal Assessment Project (MAP) group began their research with the ques-
tion, what would assessment of digital and multimodal writing “look like if the language of
assessment was closely aligned with the language used by the creators and readers of digital
compositions?” (Eidman-Aadahl, et al.). As a result of their 18-month project, funded by
the National Writing Project, the ten authors advocated for assessment that is inclusive of
“five domains—context, artifact, substance, process management and technique, and habits of
mind—that link the language of assessing multimodal writing with acts that drive the creation
and reception of digital texts” (Eidman-Aadahl, et al.).
Reviewing the MAP group’s recommendations, Sohee Park (2015) summarized the five
domains of multimodal assessment as follows:
As the MAP group discussed, these domains overlap with each providing a critical but neces-
sarily partial means for reading and assessing a digital or multimodal text. True assessment of
multimodal composing requires evaluation in all five domains. Further, the group argued,
considering these dimensions collectively rather than individually, “offer[s] multimodal
authors and those providing feedback and evaluating multimodal works with a framework for
discussing both a single piece and a writer’s development over time” (Eidman-Aadahl, et. al).
The digital/multimodal assessment approach advocated by the MAP group is very much in
line with best practices in the field of Composition more broadly. The CCCC’s Committee
on Assessment first established its “Writing Assessment: A Position Statement” in 2006 and
most recently reaffirmed it in 2014. Although its terminology focuses almost exclusively on
written texts, its guidelines nonetheless have application to digital and multimodal writing.
In part, this relevance is so apparent because of the statement’s emphasis on assessment as
a formative pedagogical instrument rather than just a summative evaluation tool. Among
the principle’s most applicable guidelines is the assumption that “Best assessment practice is
informed by pedagogy and curricular goals” and “is useful primarily as a means of improving
teaching and learning” (CCCC Committee on Assessment). What this means is that standard-
ized assessment for writing, any kind of writing, is often problematic because it fails to leave
space for local, rhetorical, and pedagogical needs. Instead, assessment of any kind of writing
should remain open to revision and negotiation so that it keeps pace with the unique autho-
rial demands of ever-evolving types of texts and writing.
encourage instructors to think of multiple possibilities for writing that challenge tradi-
tional and canonized beliefs about what writing should be and do. Using multiple modes
often results in a break from thesis-driven print culture, a culture which prevents us from
composing with all meanings and does not adequately prepare students for the kinds of
creating they will do outside of the academy.
(Lutkewitte, p. 14)
For Lutkewitte and many other teacher-scholars in Composition, the affordances of digital
and multimodal writing offer students opportunities to leverage all available means of persua-
sion and to explore what relevant and persuasive communication might look like for different
audiences and purposes and in a variety of settings, genres, and modalities. Further, as digital
communication and tools for composing become even more pervasive in the world beyond
404 Jennifer Sheppard
the classroom, neglecting to prepare students for more diverse approaches to writing has the
potential to limit their professional readiness.
Importantly, and even more broadly, Cynthia Selfe (2009) reminded us that failing to
prepare students for the diverse and ever-changing digital and multimodal world would hurt
them not just on an educational or professional level, but also on a sociopolitical level. Rather
than letting our own biases and limitations as teachers yoked to more traditional understand-
ings of writing foreclose students’ rhetorical agency, Selfe argued, we too must adapt. She
contended that students:
need a full quiver of semiotic modes from which to select, role models who can teach
them to think critically about a range of communication tools, and multiple ways of
reaching their audience. They do not need teachers who insist on one tool or one way.
Students, in sum, need opportunities to realize that different compositional modalities
carry with them different possibilities for representing multiple and shifting patterns of
identity, additional potential for expression and resistance, expanded ways of engaging
with a changing world.
(Selfe, p. 645)
Throughout this chapter, I have argued for expanded understandings of rhetoric, writing,
and literacy and the ways in which our instruction must work to be more inclusive of digital
and non-textual means of communication and persuasion. Such evolutions are grounded in
the research and theory of the field and encoded in the position statements and best practices
advocated by our professional organizations. These understandings are increasingly evident
in the classrooms, teaching, and pedagogies of our practitioners. And attention to these affor-
dances is increasingly expected by students in our curricula. Failing to adapt and broaden our
approaches to teaching writing to be more attentive to these digital and multimodal com-
posing possibilities is not only a missed opportunity for us as instructors, but also a disservice
to those we teach. Among the primary goals of writing instruction is an aspiration to help
students learn to be critical, engaged readers, writers, and participants in academic, profes-
sional, and social contexts. If such instruction is not attentive to the digital and multimodal
tools and composing practices now so widely available, our contribution is incomplete and
fails to help students realize and leverage all available means of persuasion at their disposal in
our contemporary world.
Option #3—Integrating Visuals and Using One of the Critical Rhetorical Methods
We Read About
If you are feeling a little apprehensive about jumping into a tech-centered project, you do
have the option to complete a more traditional essay. While I would still require inclusion,
at minimum, of several images within your text to help illustrate your ideas or examples, this
option would allow you to write a traditional essay using a different method of rhetorical
criticism than you did for paper #2. You would be welcome to use the same artifact or one
that is similar to what you worked with before, but you must select a different rhetorical lens
for investigation (ideological, genre, cluster, feminist, visual, etc.) and follow the same struc-
ture laid out by Foss for organizing your paper (an introduction and description of the artifact,
an explanation of the rhetorical/critical framework you are using, an analysis of
the artifact using the focus of your chosen method, and a conclusion that wraps
up the project and the significance of your analysis).
Other Details:
No matter which of these options you choose, your final project will have two components:
Suggested Readings
In addition to the references cited throughout this chapter, the sources below will provide
additional insight into the issues discussed in this chapter.
406 Jennifer Sheppard
Alexander, J., & Rhodes, J. (2014). On multimodality: New media in composition studies. Urbana, IL:
National Council of Teachers of English.
Alexander, A., & Rhodes, J. (Eds.). (2018). The Routledge handbook of digital writing and rhetoric. New
York: Routledge.
Arola, K. L. & Wysocki, A. F. (Eds.). (2012). Composing(media) = composing(embodiment): bodies, technolo-
gies, writing, the teaching of writing. Boulder, CO: University of Colorado Press.
Ball, C. E., Sheppard, J., & Arola, K. L. (2018). Writer/Designer: A guide to making multimodal projects
(2nd ed.). Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s.
Bowen, T. & Whithaus, W. (Eds.). (2013). Multiliteracies and emerging genres. Pittsburgh, PA: University
of Pittsburg Press.
Hawisher, G. & Selfe, C.L. (Eds.). (1999) Passions, pedagogies, and 21st century literacies. Logan, UT: Utah
State University Press.
McKee, H. & De Voss, D. N. (Eds.). (2007). Digital writing research: Technologies, methodologies, and ethical
issues. New York: Hampton Press.
Miller, S. M. & McVee, M. B. (2012). Multimodal composing in classrooms: Learning and teaching for the
digital age. New York: Routledge.
Palmeri, J. (2012). Remixing composition: A history of multimodal writing pedagogy. Carbondale, IL:
Southern Illinois University Press.
Selfe, C. L. (Ed.). (2007). Multimodal composition: Resources for teachers. New York: Hampton Press.
Selfe, C. L. (1999). Technology and literacy in the 21st century: The importance of paying attention. Carbondale,
IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
Sheridan, D. M., Ridolfo, J., & Michel, A. J. (2012). Available means of persuasion: Mapping a theory and
pedagogy of multimodal public rhetoric. Anderson, SC: Parlor Press.
References
Alexander, J., & Rhodes, J. (2014). On multimodality: New media in composition studies. Urbana, IL:
National Council of Teachers of English.
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Reading
The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning
Aurality and Multimodal Composing
Cynthia L. Selfe
Participation means being able to speak in one’s own voice, and thereby simultaneously to
construct and express one’s cultural identity through idiom and style.
—Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere”
ory dimension is. . . more than a simple changing of variables. It begins as a deliberate decen-
tering of a dominant tradition in order to discover what may be missing as a result of the tradi-
tional double reduction of vision as the main variable and metaphor.
—Don Ihde, Listening and Voice
Anyone who has spent time on a college or university campus over the past few decades
knows how fundamentally important students consider their sonic environments—the songs,
music, and podcasts they produce and listen to; the cell phone conversations in which they
immerse themselves; the headphones and Nanos that accompany them wherever they go;
the thumper cars they use to turn the streets into concert stages; the audio blogs, video
soundtracks, and mixes they compose and exchange with each other and share with anyone
else who will listen.
Indeed, students’ general penchant for listening to and producing sound can be elo-
quently ironic for English composition teachers faced with the deafening silence of a
class invited to engage in an oral discussion about a written text. This phenomenon,
however, may reveal as much about our profession’s attitudes toward aurality and
writing1—or the related history of these expressive modalities within our discipline—as it
does about students’ literacy values and practices. Sound, although it remains of central
importance both to students and to the population at large, is often undervalued as a
compositional mode.
My argument in this article is that the history of writing in U.S. composition instruction, as
well as its contemporary legacy, functions to limit our professional understanding of compos-
ing as a multimodal rhetorical activity and deprive students of valuable semiotic resources
for making meaning.2 As print assumed an increasingly privileged position in composition
classrooms during the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century, aurality
was both subsumed by, and defined in opposition to, writing (Russell, “Institutionalizing” and
Writing; Halbritter; B. McCorkle, “Harbingers”; Elbow, “What”), thus establishing and perpetu-
ating a false binary between the two modalities of expression (Biber, “Spoken” and Variation;
Tannen, “Oral” and Spoken), encouraging an overly narrow understanding of language and
literacy (Kress, “English”), and allowing collegiate teachers of English composition to lose
sight of the integrated nature of language arts. Further, I argue that a single-minded focus
The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning 411
on print in composition classrooms ignores the importance of aurality and other composing
modalities for making meaning and understanding the world. Finally, I suggest that the almost
exclusive dominance of print literacy works against the interests of individuals whose cul-
tures and communities have managed to maintain a value on multiple modalities of expres-
sion, multiple and hybrid ways of knowing, communicating, and establishing identity (Gilyard;
Dunn, Learning and Talking; Royster, Traces and “First Voice”; Hibbitts; Powell; Lyons).
My ultimate goal in exploring aurality as a case in point is not to make an either/or
argument—not to suggest that we pay attention to aurality rather than to writing. Instead, I
suggest we need to pay attention to both writing and aurality, and other composing modali-
ties, as well. I hope to encourage teachers to develop an increasingly thoughtful under-
standing of a whole range of modalities and semiotic resources in their assignments and
then to provide students the opportunities of developing expertise with all available means
of persuasion and expression, so that they can function as literate citizens in a world where
communications cross geopolitical, cultural, and linguistic borders and are enriched rather
than diminished by semiotic dimensionality.
What is at stake in this endeavor seems significant—both for teachers of English com-
position and for students. When teachers of composition limit the bandwidth of composing
modalities in our classrooms and assignments, when we privilege print as the only accept-
able way to make or exchange meaning, we not only ignore the history of rhetoric and its
intellectual inheritance, but we also limit, unnecessarily, our scholarly understanding of semi-
otic systems (Kress, “English”) and the effectiveness of our instruction for many students.
The stakes for students are no less significant—they involve fundamental issues of
rhetorical sovereignty3: the rights and responsibilities that students have to identify their
own communicative needs and to represent their own identities, to select the right tools
for the communicative contexts within which they operate, and to think critically and care-
fully about the meaning that they and others compose. When we insist on print as the
primary, and most formally acceptable, modality for composing knowledge, we usurp
these rights and responsibilities on several important intellectual and social dimensions,
and, unwittingly, limit students’ sense of rhetorical agency to the bandwidth of our own
interests and imaginations.4
By way of making this argument, I begin by recounting a very brief, and necessarily selec-
tive, history of aurality, focusing on the role it came to assume in college composition class-
rooms from the mid-nineteenth century onward. I then discuss some of the ways in which
aurality has persisted in English composition classrooms in the midst of a culture saturated
by the written word. Finally, I suggest how digital communication environments and digital
multimodal texts have encouraged some teachers of composition to rediscover aurality as a
valuable modality of expression.
The irony of making an argument about aurality in print is not lost on me, nor, I suspect,
will it be on most other readers of this article. Indeed, it is very much the point of what I try
to say in the following pages. Thus, throughout this article I have included references to four
sound essays composed by students at Michigan Tech, the University of Louisville, and The
Ohio State University. I consider these pieces a crucial part of my argument about valuing
aurality as a composing modality. Hence, I encourage readers to go to <http://people. cohums.
ohio-state.edu/selfe2/ccc/>, listen to these sound essays, and read what their authors have
said about composing them.
412 Cynthia L. Selfe
Aural Composing: Sample 1, Sonya Borton’s Legacy of Music
At this point, I ask readers to leave this printed text and go to <http://people.cohums.
ohio-state.edu/selfe2/ccc/>, where they can listen to Sonya Borton’s autobiographical
essay, Legacy of Music, in which she tells listeners about the musical talents of various
members of her Kentucky family. In relating her narrative, Borton weaves a richly textured
fabric of interviews, commentary, instrumental music, and song to support her thesis that
a love of music represents an important legacy passed down from parents to children
within her family.
question an over-emphasis on writing in a discipline whose raison d’etre is, like no other
discipline, for and about writing. That common-sense assumption, however, may be
what makes it so difficult for us in Composition to see word-based pedagogies in any
way other than supportive of learning.
(150)
Composition teachers, she concludes, have come to believe “writing is not simply one way of
knowing; it is the way” (15). Doxa, or common belief, however, always maintains its strong-
est hold in the absence of multiple historical and cultural perspectives. Although writing has
come to occupy a privileged position in composition classrooms—and in the minds of many
compositionists—historical accounts by such scholars as David Russell (“Institutionalizing”
and Writing), James Berlin, Nan Johnson, and Michael Halloran confirm this situation as both
relatively recent and contested.
In the first half of the eighteenth century, for example, collegiate education in America was
fundamentally shaped by Western classical traditions and was oral in its focus. As Michael
Halloran notes, within this curriculum students learned to read, speak, and write both clas-
sical language and English through recitation—the standard pedagogical approach for all
subjects—as well as through a wide range of oratorical performances, debates, orations,
and declamations, both inside formal classes and in extracurricular settings such as literary
societies. The goal of these activities was to build students’ general skill in public speaking,
rather than encouraging specialized inquiry as mediated by the written word.
This old model of oratorical education, David Russell notes (“Institutionalizing” and
Writing), was linked to the cultural values, power, and practices of privileged families in the
colonies who considered facility in oral, face-to-face encounters to be the hallmark of an edu-
cated class. The male children of these families were expected to help lead the nation in the
role of statesmen, enter the judicial and legal arena, or become ministers. For heirs of these
families, as Susan Miller has added, little instruction in writing was needed other than practice
in penmanship. Their lives were imbricated with oral communication practices—speeches,
The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning 413
debates, sermons—and such individuals had to be able to speak, as gentlemen, in contexts
of power. Universities were charged with preparing these future leaders to assume their roles
and responsibilities.
During the latter half of the nineteenth century, however, universities began to change in
response to the rapid rise of industrial manufacturing, the explosion of scientific discover-
ies, and the expansion of the new country’s international trade. These converging trends
accumulated with increasing tendential force and resulted in profound cultural transforma-
tions that placed an increasing value on specialization and professionalization, especially
within the emerging middle class. Such changes required both new approaches to edu-
cation and a new kind of secular university, one designed to meet the needs of individu-
als involved in science, commerce, and manufacturing. It was within this new collegiate
context that the first departments of English were able to form, primarily by forging identi-
ties for themselves as units that educated a range of citizens occupied with business and
professional affairs.5 In response to these cultural trends, Russell has observed, “the mod-
ern project of purification, the drive toward specialization, made old rhetoric impossible”
(“Institutionalizing” 40).6
Instead, departments of English focused on preparing professionals whose work, after
graduation, would increasingly rely on writing, as Russell explains—articles, reports,
memoranda and communications, “texts as objects to be silently studied, critiqued, com-
pared, appreciated, and evaluated” (Writing 4–5). Supporting this work were technological
innovations—improved printing presses, typewriters, and pens, among others—that com-
bined with innovations in business operations, efficient manufacturing techniques, and
science to lend added importance to writing as a cultural code, both within the new univer-
sity and outside it (Russell, “Institutionalizing”).
As they emerged in this context, departments of English sought increasingly modern
approaches to changing communication practices and values—hoping to distance them-
selves from the old-school education in oratory, which was considered increasingly less valu-
able as a preparation for the world of manufacturing, business, and science, and to link their
curricula to more pragmatic concerns of professionalism in the modern university. The new
departments of English taught their studies in the vernacular—rather than in Greek or Latin—
and separated themselves from a continued focus on oratory, religion, and the classics,
which became devalued as historical or narrowly defined studies. These newly emergent
departments of English focused primarily on their ability to provide instruction in written com-
position. During this brief period in the latter third of the nineteenth century, writing became
one of a very few subjects required for a university course of study (Berlin; Russell, Writing).7
Charles William Eliot, who became president of Harvard in 1869, noted that instruction in
writing—distinguished by a natural, uninflated style—was not only desirable for students at
the new university but also necessary for the success of a national culture based on eco-
nomic development, modern industrial processes, and trade (359).8
Scholars have described, in various ways, the historic shift that occurred during the last
half of the nineteenth century, from an older style of education based on declamation, ora-
tory, forensics, and delivery9 to a new style of education based primarily on the study and
analysis of written texts, both classical and contemporary10—and the production of such texts.
Perhaps the most succinct statement, however, and the one most directly to the point for this
history of aurality in college composition classrooms is Ronald Reid’s (1959) comment:
414 Cynthia L. Selfe
The most significant change was rhetoric’s abandonment of oratory. The advanced
courses, commonly known during this period as “themes and forensics,” consisted
almost exclusively of written work. . . . The beginning course, too, gave much practice in
writing, none in public speaking.
(253)
Although attention to aurality persisted in various ways into the twentieth century, it was
clearly on the wane in English studies.11 By 1913, one year before teachers of speech
seceded from the National Council of Teachers of English, John Clapp was moved to ask in
an article published by the English Journal;
Is there a place in College English classes for exercises in reading, or talking, or both?
The question has been raised now and then in the past, almost always to receive a
negative answer, particularly from English departments.
(21)
The general response of the profession to these questions, Clapp noted, was that “for the
purposes of the intellectual life, which college graduates are to lead, talking is of little impor-
tant, and writing of very great importance” (23).
This brief history of composition as a discipline can be productively viewed within a larger
historical frame as well—specifically that of the rise of science (and its progeny, technology) in
the West before, during, and immediately after the Enlightenment, from the seventeenth to the
nineteenth centuries. At the heart of science as a rational project was the belief that humans
could unlock the secrets of nature using systematic observations and precisely recorded
written measurements. In a world attuned to the systematic methodologies of science, the
recorded word, the visual trace of evidence, provided proof, and observations rendered in
the visual medium of print revealed truth—Newton’s notes on mathematical proofs, Franklin’s
written descriptions of experiments, Darwin’s Beagle diaries. If the scientific revolution rested
on the understanding that seeing was believing, it also depended on writing—and after the
mid-fifteenth century—on printing as a primary means of recording, storing, and retrieving
important information and discoveries. Later, with the application of scientific methods to a
wide range of legal, military, industrial, and manufacturing practices, the complex network of
cultural formations that reinforced the privileged role of visual and print information.
From the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, then, as the power of vision and print
gradually waxed in the context of a university education, the power of aurality gradually
waned, although this trend was, at different times and places, far from even or immediate in
its effects. U.S. colleges and universities, for instance, lagged slightly behind those in Europe
for a time in this regard, but education within the two cultures followed the same general tra-
jectory. As Hibbitts notes, it was during this period that “the social and intellectual status of
vision gradually undermined the position still occupied by the other forms of sensory experi-
ence in the Western tradition” (2.25).
In educational institutions and, later, departments of English and programs of English
composition, the effects of this shift were far-reaching. Writing and reading, for example,
became separated from speech in educational contexts and became largely silent practices
for students in classroom settings. Written literature, although including artifacts of earlier
aural forms (Platonic dialogues, Shakespearean monologues, and poetry, for instance), was
The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning 415
studied through silent reading and subjected to written analysis, consumed by the eye rather
than the ear.12 The disciplined practices of silent writing, reading, and observation that char-
acterized collegiate education became normalized and, importantly, linked to both class and
race. In educational contexts, Hibbitts observes, “[t]he most important meta-lesson became,
as it today remains, how to sit, write, and read in contented quiet” (2.25). It was through
such changes that writing became the focus of a specialized academic education delivered
primarily to, and by, privileged white males.
If print became increasingly important within the new U.S. universities in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, however, aurality retained some of its power and reach in
other locations, where individuals and groups were forced to acquire both written and aural
literacies by a range of informal means or through an educational system that retained a fun-
damental integration of the language arts. Many women during this period, for instance, were
discouraged from pursuing a university education or had less time and money for such a lux-
ury. Blacks, Hispanics and Latinos/as, and American Indians, in addition, were, for prolonged
periods, persecuted for learning to read and write (Gere; Royster, Traces; Richardson), edu-
cated outside the schools that males attended, and denied access to the white colleges and
universities.13 Although individuals from these groups learned—through various means and,
often, with great sacrifice—to deploy writing skillfully and in ways that resisted the violence
of oppression, many also managed to retain a deep and nuanced appreciation for aural tradi-
tions as well: in churches and sacred ceremonies, in storytelling and performance contexts,
in poetry and song.
The history of slavery in the United States, for example, shaped the educational opportu-
nities of black citizens, many of whom survived and resisted the violence and oppression in
their lives by developing literacy values and practices—often, but certainly not exclusively,
aural in nature—that remained invisible to whites and that were, often because of this fact,
highly effective. Although many of the legal prohibitions against teaching blacks to read and
write were lifted after the Civil War, de facto barriers of racism continued to function. Many
black citizens were denied access to schools with adequate resources and others had to
abandon their own formal education to help their families survive the economic hardships
that continued to characterize the lives of blacks in both the North and the South (Hibbitts).
And although black citizens, under adverse conditions, found their own routes for acquiring
written literacy—in historically black colleges and universities, in churches, literary socie-
ties, homes, segregated public schools—artifacts of this historical period persisted in black
communities in verbal games, music, vocal performance, storytelling, and other “vernacular
expressive arts” (Richardson 680). These aural traces identify communities of people who
have survived and thrived, not only by deploying but also by resisting the literacy practices
of a dominant culture that continued to link the printed word and silent reading, so closely to
formal education, racism, and the exercise power by whites (Banks; Smitherman, “CCCC”;
Richardson; Royster, “First Voice;” Mahiri). “[T]he written word,” notes Ashraf Rushdy, in
part “represents the processes used by racist white American institutions to proscribe and
prescribe African American subjectivity.”14
Hispanic/Latino communities, too, while valuing a wide range of literacy practices in
their cultural, familial, and intellectual lives (Guerra; Guerra and Farr; Kells, Balester, and
Villanueva; Gutierrez, Baquedano-Lopez, and Alvarez; Cintron; Villanueva; Trejo; Limon;
and Ruiz) also managed to retain, to varying extents and in a range of different ways, an
investment in collective storytelling, cuentos, corridos, and other aural practices developed
416 Cynthia L. Selfe
within a long—and continuing—history of linguistic, educational, economic, and cultural dis-
crimination. Contributing to the persistence of these traditions has been the history of U.S.
imperialism and discrimination in Texas, California, and other border states; the troubled his-
tory of bilingual education in this country; the devaluing of Latin American, Puerto Rican, and
Mexican Spanish speakers; and the persistence of the English-Only movements in public
education. Given this history of discrimination, as Hibbitts points out, Hispanic citizens often
find themselves “drawn and sometimes forced back into the soundscapes of their own ethnic
communities” (2.43), while simultaneously deploying a wide range of written discourses—
skillfully and, sometimes, in ways that productively resist mainstream discourses (Kells,
Balester, and Villanueva; Reyes and Halcon; Cintron).
Many American Indians, too, have managed to sustain a value on aurality—as well as
on writing and a range of other modalities of expression—as means of preserving their
heritage and identities: in public speaking, ceremonial contexts, shared stories, poetry,
and song (Clements; Blaeser; Keeling; Evers and Toelken), although as both Scott Lyons
and Malea Powell point out, the diversity of tribal histories and the “discursive intricacies”
and complexity of Native American’s literacy practices and values remain misunderstood,
under-examined in published scholarship, and prone to painful and simplistic stereotypes.
The aural literacy practices that many tribal members have valued and continue to value—
along with the skillful and critical use of other modalities—serve as complex cultural and
community-based responses to the imperialism of the “Euroamerican mainstream” (Powell
398). Such practices form part of the story of survival and resistance that American Indians
have composed for themselves during the occupation of their homeland and the continuing
denigration of their culture as their battles for sovereignty continue.
In sum, the increasingly limited role of aurality within U.S. English and composition pro-
grams during the last half of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries was intimately tied
to the emerging influence of writing as the primary mode of formal academic work, of com-
mercial exchange and recordkeeping, and of public and professional expression. This trend,
influenced by the rise of manufacturing and science, as well as the growing cultural value
on professionalism, was instantiated in various ways and to varying extents in courses and
universities around the country and enacted variously by groups and individuals according to
their different cultures, literacy values, and practices. The trend was, nevertheless, consist-
ent in its general direction and tendential force. In formal educational contexts, writing and
reading increasingly became separated from speech and were understood as activities to be
enacted, for the most part, in silence.
In this discussion, I take an important lesson from colleagues like Jacqueline Royster
(“First Voice”), Geneva Smitherman (Talkin’), Adam Banks, Scott Lyons, and Malea Powell,
who point out the serious risks, when discussing the oral traditions and practices of people
of color, to cede written English as “somehow the exclusive domain of Whites” (Banks 70).
The work of these scholars reminds us in persuasive and powerful terms that people of color
have historically deployed a wide range of written discourses in masterful and often power-
fully oppositional ways while retaining a value on traditional oral discourses and practices.
My goal in this article, then, is not to suggest that teachers focus on either writing or aurality,
but rather that they respect and encourage students to deploy multiple modalities in skillful
ways—written, aural, visual—and that they model a respect for and understanding of the
various roles each modality can play in human expression, the formation of individual and
group identity, and meaning making. In this work, the efforts of the scholars such as those
cited above as well as attention to historical and contemporary discursive practices of blacks,
The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning 417
Native Americans, Hispanics, and other peoples of color can help direct our thinking and lead
our profession forward in productive ways.
Artifacts of Aurality
Tracing how aurality became subsumed by print within composition classrooms in the United
States during the nineteenth century, however, provides us only one part of a complex his-
torical picture. Another, and perhaps as important, part of the picture involves investigating
how and why aurality has persisted in English composition classrooms, in the midst of a
culture saturated by print.
From one perspective, this process can be understood as a kind of cultural and intellectual
remediation.15 Within the specialized cultural location of the college classroom in the United
States, aural practices became gradually, but increasingly, subsumed by academic writing,
which was presented as the improved medium of formal communication characterizing new
U.S. universities. At the same time, academic writing often made its case for superiority by
referring backwards to characteristics of aurality, which was never entirely erased. By the end
of the nineteenth century, for instance, as scholars such as Ben McCorkle (“Harbingers”) has
noted, the academic focus on the production and delivery of aural texts was increasingly to be
mediated by written textbooks on delivery and elocution. English studies faculty still lectured
and students still engaged in some oral activities, but within the context of the new university,
instruction was increasingly mediated by writing and printed materials—published textbooks,
in written assignments, collected and printed lectures, written examinations for students.
Throughout the twentieth century, too, English composition faculty continued to talk about
oral language, but primarily in comparison with written language. They continued to make ref-
erence to the oral qualities of language, but often metaphorically and in the service of writing
instruction and in the study of written texts (the voice of the writer, the tone of an essay, and
the rhythm of sentences) (Yancey; Elbow, “What”). Similarly, although students continued
to have opportunities for oral performance, they were carefully circumscribed and limited to
conferences, presentations, and class discussions focused on writing.16 And although writing
assignments in the twentieth century sometimes focused on topics that touched on aurality
and oral performances—popular music, for example—students were expected to write their
analyses of songs, to focus on written lyrics, or to use music as a prompt for written composi-
tion. In scholarly arenas, scholars studied the history of rhetoric but considered orality and the
canon of delivery (McCorkle, “Harbingers”) to be of interest primarily as a historical artifact.
418 Cynthia L. Selfe
Even rhetoric scholars whose work was designed to focus attention on the discursive prac-
tices and “voices” of long-ignored groups—blacks, Latinos/as, Native Americans, women—
wrote about these oral practices.17 The majority of English composition scholars who spoke
about their work at professional conferences delivered written papers that they wrote first
and, only then, read. By the end of the twentieth century, the ideological privileging of writ-
ing was so firmly established that it had become almost fully naturalized. The program of the
1998 Watson Conference, for example, included Beverly Moss as a featured speaker. Moss,
who had fractured the elbow of her right arm, delivered a talk about oral language practices in
black churches. She introduced her presentation by mentioning her own struggle to prepare a
talk without being able to write her text first. Moss’s presentation and delivery were superb—
cogent and insightful—but her framing comments highlighted how difficult and unusual it was
for her, and many other scholars, to deliver an oral presentation without a written text.
Writing as Not-Speech
A brief examination of some aural artifacts in English composition classrooms during the
twentieth century can be instructive in helping readers understand the ways in which atten-
tion to orality has persisted in U.S. composition classrooms.
By the time the Conference on College Composition and Communication was formed in
1949, attention to students’ writing in English departments, with a few brief exceptions, had
almost completely eclipsed attention to aural composition. Although the professional focus
on speech was revived somewhat after scholars like Lev Vygotsky published his ground-
breaking work on the developmental relationship between speech and writing in 1962, many
composition scholars—concerned with staking out the territory of the new field and identify-
ing the intellectual and professional boundaries of the nascent discipline—chose to focus on
the differences between writing and speech, to define the work of composition classrooms
(i.e., writing and the teaching of writing) in opposition to talking, speech, and aurality.18 This
scholarly effort continued throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s, until informed by
the work of linguists like Douglas Biber (“Spoken” and Variation) and Deborah Tannen (“Oral”
and Spoken), many in the profession came to recognize that writing and speaking actually
shared many of the same characteristics and did not exist in the essentialized, dichotomous
relationship that had been constructed by scholars.
During the 1960s and 1970s, however, many compositionists defined writing primarily in
terms of how it differed from speech. Motivating some of this activity, at least in part, were
two converging trends. The first, well underway at this point, was the movement away from
current-traditional rhetoric (which posited knowledge as pre-existing language, as external,
as discoverable, and as verifiable) and toward a social-epistemic understanding of rhetoric
(which posited knowledge as socially constructed and created in, and through, the social
uses of language) (Berlin). During roughly the same period, teachers of composition were
also attempting to digest poststructuralist theories of language, which occasionally proved
less than directly accessible. In his 1976 work Of Grammatology, for example, Jacques
Derrida pointed out the fallacy of immediacy and questioned the notion of coherent, self-
presentation of meaning in spoken discourse, and he urged close attention to writing as
the ground for understanding the active play of difference in language and the shifting
nature of signification. Although Derrida’s aim was not to reverse the historical hierarchy
of speech over writing, but rather to call into question logocentricity itself, many composi-
tion scholars connected his focus to the field’s emerging understanding of writing as both
The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning 419
social and epistemic. Influenced not only by these scholarly streams of thought, but by the
overdetermined forces of specialization that continued to shape the field within the modern
university, compositionists turned their scholarly attention and pedagogical efforts, increas-
ingly, away from speech and toward writing, defining the figure of writing against the ground
of speech.19
In 1984, for instance, Sarah Liggett annotated fifty-one articles on “the relationship
between speaking and writing” (354) and suggested another nineteen pieces for “related
reading.” The majority of these works, not surprisingly, concluded that the aural language
practices of talking and speaking were related to writing in various ways and at various lev-
els, but also that they differed significantly from writing in terms of important features (Emig;
Barritt and Kroll; Connors, “Differences”; Farrell; Halpern; Hirsch). Further, in a number of
cases, scholars claimed that writing posed more intellectual challenges to students than
speech or oral composing, that writing was more sophisticated or complex than speech
(Sawyer). Many of these works associated speaking and talking with less reflective, more
“haphazard” communication (Snipes) and with popular culture, while writing was consid-
ered “inherently more self-reliant” (Emig 353), a “more deliberate mode of expression” and
“inherently more intellectual” (Newman and Horowitz 160). In their 1965 article in College
Composition and Communication, John Newman and Milton Horowitz concluded:
Writing and speaking clearly represent different strata of the person. Although both func-
tions funnel thought processes, speaking evidences more feeling, more emotive expres-
sion and more “first thoughts that come to mind.” While writing is more indicative of the
intellectualized, rational, and deliberative aspects of the person.
(164)
Other scholars (Dyson; Bereiter and Scardemalia; Carroll; Furner; Lopate; Snipes; Zoellner)
explored speech and talking as auxiliary activities that could help students during the pro-
cess of writing. The ultimate goal of these activities, however, was always a written compo-
sition or a literate writer. The profession’s bias against aural forms of expression was also
evident in the work of scholars who implied that students’ reliance on the conventions of
oral discourse resulted in the presence of problematic features in their written work (Cayer
and Sacks; Collins and Williamson; Robinson, 1982; Snipes; Shaughnessy). In 1973, for
example, Wilson Snipes investigated the hypothesis that “orientation to an oral culture has
helped cause a gradual decrease in student ability to handle written English in traditionally
acceptable ways” (156), citing “haphazard punctuation,” “loose rambling style,” and “diminu-
tive vocabulary” (159), writing that is “superficial, devoid of subtle distinctions,” and thought
that remains “fixed in a larval state” (160).
Despite the scholarly work of linguists (Biber, “Spoken” and Variation; Tannen, “Oral” and
Spoken) who identified a broad range of overlapping elements that writing and speaking
shared as composing modalities, the bias toward writing continued to grow in composition
studies throughout the twentieth century. By 1994, Peter Elbow sounded a wondering note
at the profession’s continued efforts to separate voice from writing:
What interests me is how . . . most of us are unconscious of how deeply our culture’s
version of literacy has involved as decision to keep voice out of writing, to maximize
the difference between speaking and writing—to prevent writers from even using those
few crude markers that could capture more of the subtle and not so subtle semiotics of
420 Cynthia L. Selfe
speech. Our version of literacy requires people to distance their writing behavior further
from their speaking behavior than the actual modalities require.
(“What” 8)
[W]e use the metaphor of voice to talk generally around issues in writing: about both
the act of writing and its agent, the writer, and even about the reader, and occasionally
about the presence in the text of the writer. . . .Sometimes we use voice to talk specifi-
cally about what and how a writer knows, about the capacity of a writer through “voice”
to reveal (and yet be dictated by) the epistemology of a specific culture. Sometimes we
use voice to talk in neo-Romantic terms about the writer discovering an authentic self
and then deploying it in text.
(vii)
the substitution of electronic experience [music, film, radio] in the classroom, for the
study of the printed page is open to question. It tends to reduce the amount of reading by
creating a thirst for the greater immediate excitement of sound and light. The classroom
is for criticism; the critical experience is valuable; and it cannot be wise to attenuate it by
the substitution of sensory experience which the age already supplies in excess.
(242–43)
Despite this common characterization, some pioneering teachers during the 1960s, 1970s,
and 1980s continued to experiment with more contemporary texts and assignments that
involved aural components. Lisa Ede and John Lofty, for instance, suggested incorporat-
ing oral histories into composition classrooms. Both authors, however, also considered the
goal and the final step of such assignments to be written essays that quoted from conversa-
tions with interview subjects. Although aurality was acknowledged and deployed as a way
of engaging students and even a way of investigating various phenomena, it was generally
ignored as a compositional modality.
The history of Western culture over the past 125 years suggests that the recent turn
toward the aural is largely a product of new aural technologies. In essence, cultural
aurality has tended to become more pronounced as aural technologies have multiplied
and spread. At every stage in this process, the existence of these technologies has radi-
cally extended the power and range of aurally communicated information. As technologi-
cally transmitted and amplified sound has become able to assume more of the cultural
burden, culture itself has turned towards sound for information.
(3.12)
In composition studies, then, it is not surprising that some of the impetus for a new turn
toward aurality has been contributed by technology scholars focusing on electronic, multime-
dia, and multimodal composing. This early thread of scholarship resisted, for the most part,
simplistic distinctions between orality and writing, and connected digital writing to aurality
in metaphorical terms. Such work became increasingly important throughout the last dec-
ade of the twentieth century as computer systems developed to accommodate new forms
of communicative exchanges: online conferences (Bruce, Peyton, and Bertram; Faigley,
Fragments); listservs (Cubbison; Selfe and Myer); MOOs and MUDs (Haefner; Haynes and
Holmevik), and email (Yancey and Spooner), for example.27
By the end of the decade and the century, low-cost and portable technologies of digi-
tal audio recording, such as minidisc recorders, and simplified open-source audio-editing
426 Cynthia L. Selfe
software, such as Audacity, put the material means of digital audio production into the hands
of both students and English composition teachers.28 Many of these teachers were already
experimenting with digital video, using Apple’s iMovie or Microsoft’s Movie Maker,29 both
which contained an audio track and limited audio-editing capabilities, but digital audio-editing
programs made it possible for teachers and students to compose with audio in ways that they
could not do previously: recording and layering environmental and artificial sounds to create
a textured sonic context and collection of detail, weaving vocal interview and commentary
sources together to provide multiple perspectives on a subject; adding music, silence, and
audio effects to ways of changing emphasis, tone, pace, delivery, and content.
Although new software environments expanded the opportunities for experimentation
with audio compositions in English classrooms, the intellectual basis of such work was also
fueled by the germinal scholarship of the New London Group, Gunther Kress and Theo Van
Leeuwen, and Cope and Kalantzis—who identified the aural as one modality among many
on which individuals should be able to call as a rhetorical and creative resource in composing
messages and making meaning. These scholars argued for an increasingly robust theory of
semiosis that acknowledged the practices of human sign makers who selected from a range
of modalities for expression (including sound, image, and animation, for example) depending
on rhetorical and material contexts within which the communication was being designed and
distributed. They also noted that no one expressive modality, including print, was capable of
carrying the full range of meaning in a text, and pointed out that the texts sign makers created
both shaped and were shaped by the universe of semiotic resources they accessed.
This expanded semiotic theory brought into sharp relief the hegemony of print as an
expressive mode in English composition classrooms—especially for scholars studying
emerging forms of communication in digital environments. Many of these scholars had
observed the profession’s love-hate relationship with these new forms of expression during
the last decade of the twentieth century—blogs,30 homemade digital videos,31 multimedia
sites like MySpace32 and Facebook,33 digital audio and podcasting.34 Although such texts had
begun to dominate digital environments and self-sponsored literacy venues, print continued
to prevail as “the way” of knowing (Dunn, Talking 15), the primary means of learning and
communicating in composition classrooms. Although email, websites, and multimedia texts
were accepted as objects for study, critique, and analysis—and while many students were
already engaging in the self-sponsored literacy practices of creating digital video and audio
texts—composition assignments, for the large part, continued to resemble those of the past
hundred years (Takayoshi and Selfe).
In a 1999 chapter, “English at the Crossroads,” in Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century
Technologies, for instance, Kress described the cultural changes he saw literacy practices
undergoing in an increasingly technological world and compared these to the continued privileg-
ing of print by teachers of English. The exclusive focus on print and written language, he noted,
The challenges and difficulties of such work cannot be underestimated. The time that stu-
dents spend in composition classrooms is altogether too short—especially during the first two
years of college. Indeed, many teachers will argue that they do not have enough instructional
time to teach students what they need to know about writing and rhetoric, let alone about
composing digital audio texts (or digital videos or photo essays, for instance). A variation
430 Cynthia L. Selfe
of this argument will be familiar to any compositionist who has offered a writing-across-the-
curriculum workshop to colleagues who understand their job as involving coverage of a set
amount of disciplinary material rather than the task of teaching students how to think through
problems using writing. Frequently, these colleagues—who design instruction around the
mastery of facts, procedures, or series of historical events—consider writing instruction to be
add-on content, material that detracts from the real focus of disciplinary mastery. Like most
writing-across-the-curriculum specialists, however, I would argue that the primary work of
any classroom is to help students use semiotic resources to think critically, to explore, and to
solve problems. In composition classes, this means helping students work through communi-
cative problems—analyzing a range of rhetorical tasks and contexts (online, in print contexts,
and face to face); deploying a range of assets (both digital and nondigital) effectively and
responsibly; and making meaning for a range of purposes, audiences, and information sets.
It is an understandable, if unfortunate, fact, as Patricia Dunn (“Talking” 150) argues, that our
profession has come to equate writing with intelligence. Even more important, she adds, we
have allowed ourselves to ignore the “back story” implications of this equation, the unspoken
belief that those who do not privilege writing above all other forms of expression—those indi-
viduals and groups who have “other ways of knowing,” learning, and expressing themselves—
may somehow lack intelligence. This unacknowledged and often unconscious episteme has
particular salience for contemporary literacy practices that are not focused solely on print or
alphabetic writing. As teachers of rhetoric and composition, our responsibility is to teach stu-
dents effective, rhetorically based strategies for taking advantage of all available means of
communicating effectively and productively as literate citizens.
And so back to what’s at stake. As faculty, when we limit our understanding of composing
and our teaching of composition to a single modality, when we focus on print alone as the
communicative venue for our assignments and for students responses to those assignments,
we ensure that instruction is less accessible to a wide range of learners, and we constrain
students’ ability to succeed by offering them an unnecessarily narrow choice of semiotic and
rhetorical resources. By broadening the choice of composing modalities, I argue, we expand
the field of play for students with different learning styles and differing ways of reflecting on
the world; we provide the opportunity for them to study, think critically about, and work with
new communicative modes. Such a move not only offers us a chance to make instruction
increasingly effective for those students from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds,
but it also provides an opportunity to make our work increasingly relevant to a changing set
of communicative needs in a globalized world. As Gunther Kress (“English”) has suggested,
it may also make us better scholars of semiotic systems by providing us with additional
chances to observe, systematically and at close quarters, how people make meaning in
contemporary communication environments when they have a full palette of rhetorical and
semiotic resources on which to draw, new opportunities to theorize about emerging repre-
sentational practices within such environments, and additional chances to study the com-
municative possibilities and potentials of various modes of expression. It gives us another
reason to pay attention to language and to learn.
For students, the stakes are even more significant. Young people need to know that their
role as rhetorical agents is open, not artificially foreclosed by the limits of their teachers’ imag-
inations. They need a full quiver of semiotic modes from which to select, role models who
can teach them to think critically about a range of communication tools, and multiple ways of
reaching their audience. They do not need teachers who insist on one tool or one way.
The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning 431
Students, in sum, need opportunities to realize that different compositional modalities
carry with them different possibilities for representing multiple and shifting patterns of iden-
tity, additional potential for expression and resistance, expanded ways of engaging with a
changing world—as the four audio essays I reference in this article indicate. As student Elisa
Norris put it, “If we can imagine using these types of projects in our writing studios, we can
open up that learning space so that all students have room to express themselves.”
Students need these things because they will join us as part of an increasingly challenging
and difficult world—one plagued by destructive wars and great ill will, marked by poverty and
disease, scarred by racism and ecological degradation. In this world, we face some wickedly
complex communicative tasks. To make our collective way with any hope for success, to cre-
ate a different set of global and local relations than currently exists, we will need all available
means of persuasion, all available dimensions, all available approaches, not simply those
limited to the two dimensional space of a printed page.
Acknowledgments
l am deeply grateful to Diana George whose work on the visual (CCC 54.1) inspired this
piece, as well as to all the generous friends and colleagues who helped me think about
aurality as I wrote this article: Dickie Selfe, Gail Hawisher, Randy Freisinger, Marilyn
Cooper, Erin Smith, Gary Bays, Michael Moore, Dennis Lynch, Scott DeWitt, Debra Journet,
Ben McCorkle, Michael Harker, Jason Palmeri, Beverly Moss, and Peter Elbow, among
others. I am also most grateful for the valuable revision suggestions provided by the CCC
reviewers. All of these individuals have contributed to making this a better, more insightful,
and more thoughtful text.
Notes
1 With the term aurality, I refer to a complexly related web of communicative practices that are received
or perceived by the ear, including speech, sound, and music. In exploring aurality, I focus on both the
reception and the production of aural communications. I also focus on the purposeful composition of
aural texts. One of my goals in exploring the role of aural communication in composition classrooms
is to suggest that the written word is not the only way of composing and communicating meaning
or understanding, nor should it be the sole focus of composition instruction in a world where people
make meaning and extend their understanding through the use of multiple semiotic modalities in
combination— sound, printed words, spoken words, still and moving images, graphical elements.
In using the term aurality, rather than the more common orality, I hope to resist models of an
oral/literate divide and simplistic characterizations of cultures or groups as either oral or literate in
their communicative practices. Humans make and communicate meaning through a combination of
modalities—sound, still and moving images, words, among them—and using a variety of media. And
they read and interpret texts that combine modalities as well.
2 The term multimodal is used by the New London Group to indicate the range of modalities—printed
words, still and moving images, sound, speech, and music, color—that authors combine as they
design texts.
3 I borrow the term rhetorical sovereignty from Scott Lyons (2000), but extend it, advisedly, and in ways
that I recognize might not remain faithful to his use of the term. Lyons uses the term to describe the
right of indigenous peoples to have “some say about the nature of their textual representations,” to
determine their own representational needs and identities, their own accounts of the past and pres-
ent. For Lyons, rhetorical sovereignty is intimately connected to the land; to the history, the present,
432 Cynthia L. Selfe
and the future of native peoples; to culture and community. I use rhetorical sovereignty to refer to
the rights of students to have “some say” about their own representational needs, identities, and
modalities of expression. In making this statement, however, I do not want to suggest that all college
students are subject to the same systems of domination and cultural violence as native peoples.
They are not. Nor do I want to diminish, in any way or to any degree, the importance, of Lyons’s
insights or our professional responsibility for supporting the sovereignty efforts that native peoples
have undertaken. I stand in solidarity and support of these efforts.
4 As I suggest throughout this article, aurality remains a relatively small but valued part of the com-
position classroom—only, however, in limited and constrained circumstances: in the occasional oral
presentation, in classroom discussions, or in one-on-one conferences, for example. In these situa-
tions, aurality is valued and even prized. In the vast majority of compositions classrooms, however,
the formal expression of knowledge is reserved for writing, and written papers are the product toward
which students are taught to work.
5 In 1873, Harvard formed its Department of English. The mission of this unit was to teach written
English within the new secular, specialized university. For extended and informative discussions
of how rhetorical education was conducted during this period, see Russell (“Institutionalizing”);
Halloran; Wright and Halloran; Johnson; Berlin; and Congleton.
6 Within this context, David Russell (Writing) notes, writing:
was now embedded in a whole array of complex and highly differentiated social practices car-
ried on without face-to-face communication. The new professions . . . increasingly wrote . . . for
specialized audiences of colleagues who were united not primarily by ties of class but by the
shared activities, the goals, . . . the unique conventions of a profession or discipline.
(4–5)
7 James A. Berlin notes that “Charles William Eliot, Harvard’s president from 1869 to 1909 . . . con-
sidered writing so central to the new elective curriculum he was shaping that in 1874 the Freshman
English course at Harvard was established, by 1894 was the only requirement except for a modern
language, and by 1897, was the only required course in the curriculum, consisting of a two-semes-
ter sequence” (20). Influenced variously by the belles lettristic tradition, the pressures of increasing
collegiate enrollments, the influential move toward graduate education on the German model,
and continued moves toward specialized study in the new university, however, writing gave way,
in fairly short order, to a focus on the reading and analysis of contemporary and classical literary
texts. And by the first part of the twentieth century, the efforts of most departments of English were
focused primarily on literary works. For an extended discussion of this trend, see Halloran; Berlin;
and Russell.
8 In the Atlantic Monthly of March 1869, Eliot wrote:
No men have greater need of the power of expressing their ideas with clearness, conciseness,
and vigor than those whose avocation require them to describe and discuss material resources,
industrial processes, public works, mining enterprises, and the complicated problems of trade
and finance. In such writings, embellishment may be dispensed with, but the chief merits of
style—precision, simplicity, perspicuity, and force are never more necessary.
(359)
9 See Ben McCorkle’s article “Harbingers of the Printed Page” for an extended explanation of how the
canon of delivery fared in nineteenth-century composition classes and how orality became sub-
sumed to, and remediated by, writing in composition classrooms.
10 Ronald Reid describes these changes in terms of the Boyleston Professorship at Harvard—and the
occupants of this position—as cases in point.
The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning 433
In 1806, rhetoric was concerned primarily with persuasive oratory and sunk its roots deeply in
the classical tradition. By the time of Hill’s retirement [in 1904], what was called “rhetoric” was
concerned not with oratory, but with written composition, expository and literary as well as per-
suasive and made little direct reference to classical authors. And not even these new concerns
were those of the Boyleston professorship, which abandoned rhetoric for literature, oratory for
poetry. Such a dramatic shift took place not only at Harvard, but in higher education generally.
(239)
The Boyleston Professorship of Rhetoric and Oratory, was held by the following individuals from 1806
to 1904: John Quincy Adams (statesman, 1806–1809), Joseph McKean (former minister, mathemati-
cian, 1809–1818), Edward T. Channing (attorney, editor of North American Review, 1819–1851),
Francis James Child (who studied at Gottingen University in Germany and applied many German
practices to the revision of U.S. curricula, 1851–1876), and Adams Sherman Hill (1876–1904). For
an extended discussion of this professorship and the changes it underwent at the end of the nine-
teenth century, see Ronald Reid s article “The Boyleston Professorship of Rhetoric and Oratory,
1806–1904.”
11 Although oral composition—both scripted and nonscripted—waned relatively rapidly in English com-
position classrooms during the last half of the nineteenth century, it persisted in other locations. One
of these was the extracurricular literary and debate societies that gained popularity in the eighteenth
century and persisted throughout the nineteenth century in various collegiate and noncollegiate
forms (Gere; Halloran; Royster, Traces; Berlin). In colleges, this movement was often initiated and
carried on by students, often with little help from faculty, to support practice in public speaking and
debating topics of interest. Many such clubs engaged in intercollegiate contests.
Attention to aurality was also sustained by the popular Elocutionary Movement, which began its
rise to prominence in the late eighteenth century and continued throughout the nineteenth century.
This movement, too, was built on the general interest in systematic and scientific knowledge, iden-
tifying elaborately prescriptive texts with “highly encoded notational systems to precisely regulate
vocal inflection, gestures of the arms, hands, and legs, and even facial countenances as a means of
directly manipulating different faculties in the minds of listeners.” (B. McCorkle, “Harbingers” 35). In
this movement, oral delivery figured centrally and prescriptively.
12 As Hibbitts (2.25) describes this shift,
Within the white community, public speech became more dependent on visual, written scripts;
old-fashioned oratory was increasingly dismissed as “mere rhetoric.” Storytelling survived, but it
was largely, if not altogether accurately, associated with children, members of less literate lower
classes, and inhabitants of backward rural areas. Most white American authors jettisoned the
more obvious aural mannerisms and formats that had characterized so much American litera-
ture in the antebellum era. At the same time, white Americans gradually embraced silence as
both a social norm and a primary means of social discipline. Increasingly used to sitting quietly
in front of texts, white American theater- and concert-goers who had formerly been inclined to
spontaneously talk to each other and interact with stage performers became more willing to sit
in silent (or at least suspended) judgment on the musicians and actors who appeared before
them. In the schoolroom where white American teachers had once taught their students to read
by recitation, the most important meta-lesson became, as it today remains, how to sit, write,
and read in contented quiet.
13 I write about the complexly articulated effects of race, class, and gender from my subject position
as a white female academic. As Marilyn Cooper reminds me, this position limits my work: I can write
about people of color, but never as a person of color. I also recognize the great danger, especially
in such a brief article, of glossing over the important differences, cultural complexities, and rich
434 Cynthia L. Selfe
histories of different groups, ignoring the specific ways in which individuals and communities have
figured in the history of the United States, the distinctive kinds of oppression and discrimination
they have experienced, the ways in which they have been treated within educational, judicial, and
legislative arenas. I encourage readers to refer to more extended works by the notable scholars
cited in this section who write as people of color, as well as about people of color.
14 For a rich and insightful discussion of how African Americans have both retained a value on histori-
cal oral forms and skillfully deployed written discourses in resistant ways, see Adam Banks’s Race,
Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground. In this book, Banks notes how black online
discourse and spaces such as Black Planet have served as nonmainstream sites for keeping “self-
determination, of resistance, of keeping oppositional identities and worldviews alive, refusing to
allow melting pot ideologies of language and identity” (70) to prevail.
15 Bolter and Gruisins term remediation—explored in their 1999 book of the same name—refers to
the processes by which new media and media forms (for instance, flat-screen television) take up
and transform prior media (conventional televisions)—promising to fulfill a particular unmet need or
improve on some performance standard. Bolter and Grusin note, however, that new media never
completely supplant or erase prior media because they must refer to these forms in making the
case for their own superiority (54). Their discussion of remediation extends far beyond the simple,
limited, and metaphorical use of the term I make in this article.
16 Technical, professional, and business communication courses offer an important exception to the
diminishing role of aurality. In these courses, the oral presentation has consistently retained its cur-
rency as an important part of the curriculum. In 1994, Heather A. Howard reported that every single
one of the authors of the ten leading textbooks in business and professional communication con-
sidered “oral communication and public speaking as worthwhile topics” for inclusion in their books,
and 70 percent of these authors specifically mentioned “informative and persuasive” speeches (5).
And, in 2003, Kelli Cargile Cook noted that oral presentations were the most frequently assigned
tasks in 197 technical communication courses identified in a random sampling of ATTW listserv
members (54). It is possible that this situation persists because such courses are so responsive to
the needs of employers. In 1995, for example, Karen K. Waner noted that “oral communication skills”
such as “using appropriate techniques in making oral presentations”; using “appropriate body action
in interpersonal and oral communication”; “analyzing the audience before, during, and after an oral
report”; and “objectively” presenting information in oral reports” were considered “important” or “very
important” by both business faculty and business professionals (55).
17 Contributing to these practices, of course, was the cultural value that the academy placed—and con-
tinues to place—on written scholarship published in print journals. This value has been instantiated
at numerous levels of university culture and through articulated systems of salaries, raises, hirings,
and promotion and tenure guidelines. These related formations have shaped the professional culture
of composition studies and continue to do so in fundamental ways.
18 One of the notable exceptions to this trend can be found in the work of Peter Elbow, who has, for
years, reminded readers that writing and speech, far from being absolutely distinct activities, are
complexly connected through a constellation of cognitive, linguistic, and social relationships. See
Elbows “The Shifting Relationships between Speech and Writing” and “What Do We Mean When We
Talk about Voice.”
9
1 I thank Debra Journet, of the University of Louisville, for this insight and for many others.
20 The books with “voice” in their title included: Frank O’Connor’s The Lonely Voice: A Study of the
Short Story; Donald Stewart’s The Authentic Voice: A Pre-Writing Approach to Student Writing; Otis
Winchester’s The Sound of Your Own Voice; Jill Wilson Cohn’s Writing: The Personal Voice; Martin
Medhurst’s Voice and Writing; Jim W. Corder’s Finding a Voice; Kathleen Yancey’s Voices on Voice;
Johnny Payne’s Voice and Style; Michael Huspek and Gary P. Radford’s Transgressing Discourses:
Communication and the Voice of the Other; and Albert Guerard, Maclin Guerard, John Hawkes, and
Claire Rosenfield’s The Personal Voice: A Contemporary Prose Reader.
The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning 435
21 In this article, and elsewhere, George and Trimbur argue persuasively against this conception, as
well as English studies’ adherence to the historical distinction between high and low culture.
22 For further explanation of this technique and a bibliography see Susan Sipple’s and Jeff Sommers’s
“A Heterotopic Space: Digitized Audio Commentary and Student Revisions.”
23 My thanks to Peter Elbow for pointing out the persistence of aurality and lecturing in both composi-
tion classroom settings and testing contexts for graduate students.
24 Increasingly throughout the 1960s to 1990s, lecturing in composition classrooms became sup-
planted by peer-group and project-based work and the one-on-one conferencing approaches that
characterized student-centered pedagogies. This process, however, was slow, often uneven, and
certainly never complete.
In a 1965 Conference on College Composition and Communication workshop session (“New
Approaches in Teaching Composition”) that was attended by James Moffett, for example, William
Holmes reported on using “televised lectures” developed by Ohio University as a “solution to teach-
ing ever more freshman with ever more graduate students” (207), W. Grayson Lappert described
lecture sessions at Balwin Wallace (208); and Eric Zale described using lectures used to teach
composition at Eastern Michigan University (208).
In 1972, James R. Sturdevant—defending lectures as one effective method for teaching large
groups of students, especially when such methods were combined with other approaches—
described a pilot program at Ohio Wesleyan University. This program was developed to teach large
groups of students effectively and efficiently: “Students were exposed to the study of composition
through assigned readings in a rhetoric text and an essay anthology, large group lectures, short
diagnostic exercises, small group meetings, and coordinating writing assignments” (420).
And even later, in 1997, Martha Sammons, providing readers advice on using PowerPoint, noted:
Electronic presentations tend to make you lecture more quickly than usual, so remember to
move slowly from slide to slide. To maintain suspense, you can use the feature of hiding bullets
until you are ready. Use traditional lecturing techniques to elaborate on key points. Most impor-
tant, don’t lose your normal teaching style.
Indeed lecturing has never entirely disappeared from college-level writing classrooms, although
it has certainly become less popular. In 2000, Donald Finkel wrote in his book Teaching with Your
Mouth Shut:
Most people have a set of ready-made assumptions about what a teacher does. A teacher
talks, tells, explains, lectures, instructs, professes. Teaching is something you do with your
mouth open, your voice intoning . . . . After hearing their stirring lectures, we left their class-
rooms inspired, moved. But did we learn anything? What was left of this experience five years
later? These questions usually don’t get asked.
(1)
25 Soundmark is R. Murray Schafer’s (1977) term, derived from the word landmarks, to refer to sounds
that characterize the life of a particular place, time, or group, sonic markers that “make the acoustic
life of a community unique” (10).
26 I do not mean to suggest that digital technologies are the only reason for a renewed interest in orality.
The cultural ecology of literacy is a complexly rendered landscape and comprises a large number of
related factors.
27 It is important to note that one of the very earliest online conferencing systems— ENFI (Electronic
Networks for Interaction)—was used as a communicative environment for deaf students. As my col-
league Brenda Brueggeman has reminded me, innovations in communicative technologies often
begin in communities of people who have different abilities and forms of making and exchanging
436 Cynthia L. Selfe
information, of composing meaning. For more about ENFI, see Bruce, Peyton, and Batson. For more
about technology and disability, see Brueggemann and Snyder; Brueggemann; and Garland-Thomson.
8 The minidisc recorder was developed by Sony in 1991–1992 (“Hardware and Software”), providing
2
consumers with a low-cost and highly portable digital audio recording device that is still used today.
Audacity, a widely used open-source audio editor, was invented in 1999 by Dominic Mazzoni. As the
Audacity manual describes the project’s development, Mazzoni was a:
graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA, USA. He was working on a
research project with his advisor, Professor Roger Dannenberg, and they needed a tool that
would let them visualize audio analysis algorithms. Over time, this program developed into a
general audio editor, and other people started helping out.
(Oetzmann)
This combination put digital audio recording, editing, and production within the reach of teachers and
students in English composition, much like the personal computer put word processing within the
reach of such classes in the early 1980s.
29 Apple’s iMovie was first released to consumers in 1999 (“Apple Computer”). Microsoft’s MovieMaker
was released on 14 September 2000 as part of the Windows Millennium Edition (“Windows ME”).
30 According to Technorati, by January of 2006, over 75,000 new blogs were being created each day, an
average of one newblog every second of every day. In addition, 13.7 million bloggers are still post-
ing three months after their blogs were created. At this point, Technorati tracked 1.2 million new blog
posts a day, about 50,000 per hour. For further statistics, see the Technorati website at <http://www.
technorati.com/>.
31 In August of 2006, YouTube.com reported more than 100 million video views every day with 65,000
new videos uploaded daily and approximately 20 million unique users per month (<http://www.you
tube.com/t/fact_sheet>). Grouper.com, another site that allows users to upload their homemade
videos, reported 8 million unique visitors (<http://www.grouper.com/about/press.aspx>).
32 Kevin Poulson reported in 2006 that MySpace has “gathered over 57 million registered users (count-
ing some duplicates and fake profiles). As of last November, it enjoyed a 752-percent growth in Web
traffic over one year, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.”
33 Facebook, the “second most-trafficked PHP site in the world,” reports “175 million active (users who
have returned to the site in the last 30 days).”
34 The Arbitron/Edison Media Research report, Internet and Multimedia 2006, notes that the ownership
of MP3 players increased from 14 percent to 22 percent among all age groups in the United States
and from 27 percent to 42 percent among 12- to 17-year-olds in 2005–2006 (32), and that more than
27 million people in the United States have listened to audio podcasts (Rose and Lenski 29).
35 See Daniel Anderson, Erin Branch, and Stephanie Morgans website, Casting about with Sound: A
Podcast Workshop, offered at the 2006 Computers and Writing conference <http://www.siteslab.org/
workshops/podcast/>.
36 See Daniel Anderson’s blog, I am Dan: A Writing Pusher in the Media Age at <http://www.thoughtpress.
org/daniel/> for innovative uses of sound in the composition classroom.
37 See Jeff Porter’s course “Radio Essays” at the University of Iowa at <http://isis5.uiowa.edu/isis/
courses/details.page?ddd=08N&ccc=145&sss=001&session=20063> and Jonah Willihnganz’s
course “The Art of the Audio Essay” at Stanford University at <http://www.stanford.edu/~jonahw/
PWR2-W06/Radio-Home.html>.
38 See Lisa Spiro’s course “The Documentary Across Media” at Rice University at <http://www.owlnet.
rice.edu/~hans320/syllabus.html>.
39 See Katherine Braun’s course “Documenting Community Culture” at Ohio State University at <http://
people.cohums.ohio-state.edu/Braun43/teaching/10901Au05/index.htm>.
40 See “Oral History Project” (24 March 2005) on the Community College English website at <http://
twoyearcomp.blogspot.com/2005/03/oral-history-project.html>.
The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning 437
41 See The Rhetoric and Composition Sound Archives (18 Feb. 2006) at Texas Christian University at
<http://www.rcsa.tcu.edu/collection.htm>.
42 See the “Oral History Archive” on the Writing Centers Research Project website at <http://coldfusion.
louisville.edu/webs/a-s/wcrp/oral.cfm>.
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Appendix 1
Effective Writing Assignments
Writing Assignments
Here is an important maxim for teaching a writing class: well-constructed, thoughtful writ-
ing assignments enhance the possibility for effective student writing, and poorly developed
assignments, to which an instructor has not given adequate thought, are likely to minimize
that possibility. This is probably one of the most important ideas for teachers to understand,
whether they are teaching a stand-alone writing class or a subject-matter class that includes
writing. I cannot stress enough how important it is for composition instructors (or any
instructors) to develop thoughtful assignments—to give yourself enough time to plan, revise,
confer with other instructors, even to try responding to the assignment yourself. This section
provides some suggestions for constructing and presenting effective assignments, focusing on
purpose, structure, audience, and sources of information.
Analyze the problem of gender in Hedda Gabler and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Remember to
consider other relevant factors such as race, social conditions, economic class and author’s
nationality. I expect clean, tightly written, interesting prose that is free of literary jargon.
If your thinking is sloppy, the paper will be sloppy, and I grade accordingly.
(p. 200)
In her discussion of this prompt, Harris noted that although emphasis was placed on “think-
ing,” “clean” writing, and “interesting prose,” it is unlikely that students would understand
what was expected.
Another type of problematic writing prompt is one that is so general that students have
difficulty knowing what is expected. John Bean, In Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to
Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom (2011) provides an
example of a traditional writing prompt, which is often presented as follows: “There will be a
term paper due at the end of the semester. The term paper can be on any aspect of the course
that interests you, but I have to approve your topic in advance” (p. 90). Bean maintained that
although some students, such as “skilled upper-division students who have already learned the
conventions of inquiry and argumentation in a discipline” (p. 91) may be able to respond to
this type of writing prompt and might, in fact, value the freedom it offers, most college writers
Appendix 1 447
are not yet comfortable with “academic writing or with the discourse conventions of a new
discipline” (Bean, 2011, p. 91). As a result, students will write essays that Beans refers to as
“all-about papers” (papers that present information but have no main point) or “quasi plagia-
rized data dumps with long quotations and thinly disguised paraphrases” (Bean, 2011, p. 91).
More effective assignments, according to Bean, are those that specify “rhetorical context—
purpose, audience, genre” (p. 93).
1 Introduce the topic for a writing assignment in class, using exploratory writ-
ing, discussion questions, response to a reading, or another classroom activity
that will help students understand the topic and engage with it.
Be sure to prepare students for the assignment. Explain it carefully. Do not simply hand out
an assignment in class, or, worse, scribble the assignment on the board at the end of class.
Exploration questions enable students to become aware of what they already know or believe
about the topic. They can respond to these questions either in class, at home, or online, using
discussion lists of course management programs such as WebCT or Moodle. It is helpful for
students to share their responses in groups or with the whole class.
Example exploration questions:
•• When you were growing up, what experiences did you have with this topic?
•• To what extent was the topic discussed in your home?
•• To what extent was the topic discussed in your high school?
•• Describe your feelings about this topic.
•• Do you think this topic is important for people to understand or explore? Why or why not?
•• Are there controversies concerning this topic? If so, has the topic always been controversial?
3 Assign an initial reading(s) concerned with the topic. Students can then sum-
marize the content of these readings and/or write a response.
To use readings as springboards for writing, you can begin with one reading, go over it carefully
in class (depending on the level of the students) and ask students to summarize the article and
448 Appendix 1
then write a letter or some form of response to the author, indicating points of agreement or
disagreement. You can also assign two articles on the topic, each presenting a different perspec-
tive. In preparation for class discussion, students should summarize and respond to these essays.
Indicate to students that this component of the assignment will count toward the final grade.
Example assignment using summary and response:
Read Professor X’s essay on the topic. In one or two paragraphs, summarize Professor
X’s perspective and indicate why you think that perspective is important to understand.
In a second paragraph, discuss the extent to which you agree with that perspective.
Read Professor Y’s essay on the topic. In one or two paragraphs, summarize Professor Y’s
perspective and indicate why you think that perspective is important to understand. In a
second paragraph, discuss the extent to which you agree with that perspective.
Locate __ additional articles on this topic from the (library, Internet, etc.). These articles
might support the positions of Professors X and Y, take a more moderate position, or present
a different position. Create an annotated bibliography in which you summarize the main
positions of these articles.
Here is an example you can use as a model. It includes the following sections: background,
writing task, requirements, schedule of activities and due dates.
Background:
The topic of __ has increasingly attracted public attention, generating considerable debate
among scholars. One perspective, presented in the essay by Professor X, maintains that __.
Presenting another perspective, however, Professor Y maintains that __. Moreover, other
scholars, presenting less extreme positions, have argued that __. (Elaboration depends on the
complexity of the topic.)
Writing task:
Consider the perspectives of both Professor X and Professor Y on the topic of __ and those
expressed in the additional articles you have obtained. Then, in a well-organized essay of __
pages, develop and support a position on the topic of __.
Requirements:
Keep in mind that this assignment requires you to develop and support a position—that is,
a thesis or main point that you support throughout the essay. You should not simply sum-
marize various perspectives on this topic although you should acknowledge the positions of
Professors X and Y as well as those of the additional articles you have located.
Bring a paragraph to class in which you summarize the position you plan to support in your
essay. (Depending on time constraints, students can hand these in to the instructor, or read
them aloud in small groups.)
First polished draft due __. (Depending on time constraints, the instructor can make
comments, but not assign a grade.)
Peer review comments due __.
Final draft due. (This is assigned a grade.)
In the film Avatar, what is being suggested about society? Do the aliens represent a particular group
in contemporary society? What image does the show provide of science and corporate development?
Of racial tendencies? Of moral leadership? Does the film have an ethical message? Is the message
consistent with the narrative?
Students may not understand that these questions are intended to generate thinking and that
they don’t have to answer every question in their essay.
For a discussion of approaching writing assignments from the perspective of genre, see Irene
Clark “A Genre Approach to Writing Assignments,” (Composition Forum 14.2, fall 2005).
http://compositionforum.com/issue/14.2.
Below is an example of a writing prompt that you can use as a model:
Appendix 1 451
Components of a Writing Assignment
Assignment #2 Changing the Law
Purpose: Goals of the assignment are
made explicit
•• To formulate a thesis concerning a law that you think should
be changed
•• To support that thesis with convincing reasons
•• To provide development and support for your ideas
•• To demonstrate your understanding of essay structure
Readings: Readings specified
At least three short readings that you find online. These may not
be from Wikipedia. We will have a library session to help
you locate appropriate sources.
Background: A context is set for the
assignment
This assignment requires you to choose a law that exists today
at the federal or local level that is currently enforced but
which you believe needs to be changed. Examples can
include seatbelt laws, helmet laws, drinking laws, voting
laws, drug laws, cigarette laws, speed limit laws—the list
is inexhaustible—but whatever you choose, it should be
something that interests you, something with which you have
some personal experience.
•• Have you had personal experience with this law? If so,
describe it
•• Why was this law passed in the first place?
•• When was it passed?
•• Who was in favor of its passage and who was against it?
•• Who is most affected by it?
•• Who benefits from it?
•• What purpose did it originally serve?
•• Is it outdated?/Why?
•• What is wrong with it as it stands now?
•• How would society benefit if it were changed?
Writing task: The writing task is specified,
isolated in a bolded
prompt. It is desirable to
have a short prompt
Once you have learned as much as you can about this law,
respond to the following question in a well-argued essay:
To what extent should this law be changed?
Further explanation: Students are reminded of
the type of essay this
assignment requires.
Audiences and grading
rubrics are specified
This essay will be constructed as an academic argument and
therefore should be well reasoned, supported with logic-
based evidence, and balanced through the inclusion of a
counter-argument. Preparation for this paper must include
brainstorming, a fact–idea list, and a points list. It should be
oriented toward a general, academic audience and will be
evaluated according to the grading rubric for this course.
Appendix 2
Developing a Syllabus
A syllabus is a very important document, serving as a contract between you and your students.
It describes as comprehensively as possible the focus and structure of the course, explains
course policies, and indicates responsibilities students will have to fulfill. Although many ele-
ments of syllabus will be dictated by the requirements of a particular program or department,
your syllabus will reflect your personality as a teacher and orientation toward the teaching of
writing. It is, therefore, important to reflect on what sort of persona you want to project and
the philosophy of writing and writing pedagogy you want to endorse. Whether the syllabus is
in electronic or paper form, be sure to go over it carefully so that students can ask questions.
Do not assume that students will read it carefully on their own.
Necessary components of a syllabus are listed here:
Course Description
English XXXX is a course in expository writing designed for freshman and transfer students.
Its emphasis is on helping you gain experience with academic writing—that is, the text gen-
res you will be using in your college courses. You will practice exploring ideas, conveying
information, thinking critically about ideas in published works, and adopting a thoughtful
position about complex and substantive topics. You will also develop skills in organizing
an essay, using logical reasoning in support of a thesis, and expressing ideas clearly through
appropriate language choices. Beyond these fundamental concerns, the course will encour-
age you to develop a degree of grace and style which will make your writing interesting
and readable.
Essentially, this course is designed to improve your writing and prepare you for the
variety of writing tasks that you will meet throughout your college careers and probably in
your life beyond college. Thus, we will spend much time on learning strategies to approach
a given writing task and to carry it through to its conclusion. In short, we will attempt to
improve your individual writing process. While some writers have difficulty getting started,
others have problems developing their ideas as they write, or experience varying degrees of
writing anxiety. Still others have problems revising their writing; however, no two writers
have the exact same problems. Your writing process is as unique and complex as you are
as a person. For this reason, we will attempt to individualize as much as possible through
teacher–student conferences, peer reviews, and by exercising any other necessary measures
to foster success.
Course Objectives
• To reinforce the theory and practice of composition as a recursive process—this entails
exercises in invention, drafting, revision and editing.
• To encourage an understanding of the various contexts for writing, including timed and
extemporaneous expository writing, and the utilization of effective strategies for writ-
ing in a variety of forms appropriate for a writer’s multiple purposes. These include an
awareness of purpose, audience, and genre (the rhetorical situation); the use of effective
rhetorical appeals; and the use of the rhetorical methods of development.
• To develop fluency and style by practicing sentence variety, increasing vocabulary, and
using the conventions of Edited American English.
• To increase proficiency in research and documentation techniques required by various
disciplines, i.e., MLA, APA, annotated bibliographies, etc.
• To become acquainted with culturally diverse texts and encourage practice in the written
analysis of rhetorical strategies, the potential effects of biased language on both writers
454 Appendix 2
and readers, and the interdependence between critical thinking and college-level reading
and writing.
• To promote writing as a means of participation in democracy and social change.
Assignments
Major Essays (40% of final grade)
You are required to compose (4) substantive, thesis-driven essays four to six pages in length
which you will post to Canvas (or another course-management system). These are depart-
ment requirements; failure to meet any of these requirements will result in a lowered grade.
You will develop your work through multiple drafts, revisions, course readings and other
various assignments. During the semester, you will be introduced to a variety of helpful revi-
sion strategies that include tips on style, structure, focus, grammar/punctuation, and more to
help you through this part of the process.
Draft and Revision Requirements—Drafts and revisions are requirements for each major
essay; therefore, drafts submitted with your essays must demonstrate significant develop-
ment from copy to copy. They may not be carbon copies of each other with only slight
cosmetic changes. Please compose drafts that are distinguished from one another; those
that demonstrate the beginning and evolution of each of your essays into a finished
product. This requirement helps me to examine your personal process and transitions
through them.
Submission Requirements and Essay Format—Please see individual instructions listed on the
essay prompts you are given for each assignment. These will inform you of the specific tasks
being asked of you for your writing, i.e., genre, style, document layout, submission proce-
dures, etc., and will include a specialized grading rubric so that you may gauge your work as
you write.
All English XXXX students are required to submit a final portfolio that consists of their best
writing from the semester. For this reason, do not delete any of your writing and save copies of
each essay draft. Your portfolio should contain the following items:
• A two-to-three page reflective essay discussing the contents of your portfolio and the
knowledge you have absorbed as a student in English XXXX.
• One in-class timed essay with the assignment sheet attached.
Appendix 2 455
• Two individually stapled essay packets which will include: the assignment sheet; at least
one polished draft; and one final draft of your essay that has been revised beyond its final
submission stage.
Keep in mind that the appearance and quality of your work are a reflection of you and your
commitment to excellence.
The participation grade consists of how well you demonstrate engagement with the course. It
includes contributions to class or group discussions as well as your score on quizzes that may
be given in class at random points during the semester.
Here is a helpful tip—Stay on top of your readings, remain attentive in class, and take good
notes—if you do, you will succeed. I do not allow make-ups for quizzes unless severe and
verifiable circumstances prevent you from taking them on the day administered. These quiz-
zes help me to gauge your grasp of the material and other concepts while preliminarily indi-
cating potential weaknesses you may have.
In-Class Essay Exams—One timed essay composed during class will be assigned. An assign-
ment sheet will be given with the essay prompt instructing you to develop and discuss a topic
based upon certain issues/ideas. You will then address issues/ideas in-depth, thus creating
coherent essays. This helps to develop your ability to write on command and helps me to
determine where you need improvement.
Small homework assignments will be given occasionally, and shall encompass a random
variety of topics: questions regarding the readings; rhetorical techniques/writing strategies;
research methods, etc. Homework is a great way to stay actively engaged in learning outside
of the classroom.
Late Policy
Late assignments are not acceptable at any time unless severe and verifiable circumstances are
the cause. All work is due at the start of class, on the due date specified. If you are knowingly going
456 Appendix 2
to miss class I must receive the assignment(s) before class begins. Failure to submit work in a
timely manner will result in a full letter grade reduction for the assignment.
Attendance
You are permitted to miss up to two class meetings during the semester for whatever reason
you choose; no excuses are necessary for these. I will excuse additional absences due to uni-
versity business and severe personal emergencies, but only with verifiable documentation. In
addition, you are solely responsible for finding out the assignments that will be due for the
following class. Please contact a classmate to obtain this information.
Classroom Etiquette
Always arrive to class on time and treat the instructor and classmates with the same respect
that you would want to receive in return. In addition, anything that beeps, buzzes, rings,
sings, chimes or vibrates—anything at all along those lines—must be turned off before entering
class. No exceptions! Also, you must refrain from chit-chatting while class is in progress. If
you have questions during class, i.e. what did he say? What page? Where are we? Rather than
ask your neighbor, please ask me instead.
Plagiarism
According to the university catalog, plagiarism is “intentionally or knowingly representing the
words, ideas or work of another as one’s own in any academic exercise.” Specific forms of plagiarism
include the following:
• Turning in material that was written for any other class (high school included).
• Offering a restructured, reworded, version of someone else’s text as your original work.
• Downloading essays from the internet, or paper mills, and offering them as your own
work.
• Practicing any variation of not turning in original work for grades.
Special Accommodations
Any student requiring special accommodations for specific learning needs should speak with
me early in the semester. I am extremely sensitive to these requests and will put forth my
greatest efforts to assure your needs are met in order to achieve success in the course.
Adjustments to Syllabus
As the course instructor, I reserve the right to modify any and/or all parts of this syllabus
including policies, procedures, timelines, work schedules, etc., as necessary in order to best
serve the collective needs of the class.
Appendix 2 457
Tentative Work Schedule for Spring XXXX
*Please read selections below in the order that they are listed prior to the due date, and be
prepared to discuss in class for the date scheduled
Week 1:
January 22 Introduction to course, review of syllabus, and discussion of chapter 1 on why
writing is important and how it is learned.
January 24 Discussion of rhetorical genre theory, and the rhetorical situation. Begin rhetorical
exercise.
Week 2:
January 29 Complete rhetorical exercise and begin discussing elements of applied rhetoric.
Discussion of chapter 3 (pp. 72–98) on the genre of writing profiles.
January 31 Continue discussion of chapter 3 (pp. 100–124) and chapter 20 on planning class
exercise.
Week 3:
February 5 Continue discussion of chapter 3 (pp. 125–133) and chapter 25 (pp. 808–823) on
document designs for writing.
February 7 DRAFT DUE: Essay (1), peer critique training, peer critique workshop.
Week 4:
February 12 ESSAY (1) DUE, discussion of chapter 13 on cueing a reader.
February 14 Discussion of chapter 16 on defining, class exercise.
Week 5:
February 19 Discussion of chapter 4 (pp. 134–163) on explaining a concept.
February 21 Continue discussion of chapter 4 (pp. 164–165), class exercise.
Week 6:
February 26 Continue discussion of chapter 4 (pp. 166–190), and read chapter 21 (pp. 702–737)
on conducting library and Internet research.
February 28 DRAFT DUE: Essay (2), peer critique workshop, discussion of chapter 22
(pp. 738–779) on using and acknowledging sources.
Week 7:
March 4 ESSAY (2) DUE, discussion of chapter 19 (pp. 670–685) on arguing.
March 6 Wings TBD, class exercise.
Week 8:
March 11 Discussion of chapter 6 (pp. 272–293) on arguing a position.
March 13 Continue discussion of chapter 6 (pp. 294–295).
Holiday:
March 18 SPRING BREAK: NO CLASSES
March 20 SPRING BREAK: NO CLASSES
Week 9:
March 25 Continue discussion of chapter 6 (pp. 296–318).
March 27 DRAFT DUE: Essay (3), peer critique workshop, continue chapter 6 (pp.
319–341).
Week 10:
April 1 ESSAY (3) DUE, discussion of chapter 7 (pp. 326–359) on proposing a solution.
April 3 CLASS CANCELED FOR 4 C’S CONFERENCE
Week 11:
April 8 Continue discussion of chapter 7 (pp. 360–392), class exercise.
April 10 Discussion of chapter 9 (pp. 457–481) on speculating about causes.
(continued)
458 Appendix 2
(continued)
Week 12:
April 15 Continue discussion of chapter 9 (pp. 482–507), class exercise.
April 17 DRAFT DUE: Essay (4), peer critique workshop, continue chapter 9
(pp. 509–513).
Week 13:
April 22 ESSAY (4) DUE, discussion of chapter 23 on essay examination and timed writing.
April 24 Practice with essay examinations.
Week 14:
April 29 In-class writing
May 1 DRAFT DUE: Reflective Essay, peer critique workshop, review of chapter 23.
Week 15:
May 6 ESSAY DUE: Reflective Essay, portfolio assembly process.,
May 8 Final Class—Fully assembled portfolios due at the start of class.
Grading Scale
*Please consult this document before submitting writing assignments*
Scoring Rubric
(A) Papers: Represent a superior, well-polished, level of writing that satisfies all assignment
requirements
• Thesis is thoughtful, considerably clear, and skillfully supported.
• Sentences are free of grammatical errors, careless mistakes, and exhibit noticeable
variety.
• Paragraphs are extremely well developed, organized effectively with a strong focus,
and represent clear, connected units of thought.
• Essay is rich in detail with exemplary rhetorical control, stylistic fluency, and a wealth
of critical thinking.
(B) Papers: Represent a commendable level of writing that satisfies all assignment requirements
• Thesis is thoughtful, clear, and well supported.
• Sentences are free of major grammatical errors, careless mistakes, and exhibit suffi-
cient variety.
• Paragraphs are well developed, organized effectively, clearly focused, and represent
complete, connected units of thought.
• Essay contains noticeable detail, sufficient rhetorical control, and substantial evidence
of critical thinking.
(C) Papers: Represent an adequate level of writing that satisfies basic assignment require-
ments only
• Thesis is present, but possibly inadequate and/or ill-conceived.
• Sentences demonstrate lapses in proofreading/editing with enough careless mistakes
to significantly catch a reader’s attention in a negative manner, and exhibit little or
no variety. Grammatical and structural errors may affect readability.
Appendix 2 459
• Paragraphs are adequately organized, but contain only modest levels of focus and
support necessary to effectively illustrate assertions, or represent clear, connected
units of thought.
• Essay contains a minimally acceptable level of detail, rhetorical control, and critical
thinking.
(D) Papers: Represent an inadequate level of writing that ineffectively and/or inappropriately
satisfies basic assignment requirements
• Thesis is poorly conceived, ineffective, or absent.
• Sentences demonstrate significant lapses in proofreading/editing, insufficient vari-
ety, and several grammatical and/or structural errors that significantly diminish
readability.
• Paragraphs are inadequately organized, and lack sufficient coherence, support, and
focus necessary to appropriately illustrate assertions, or represent clear, connected
units of thought.
• Essay contains insufficient levels of detail, rhetorical control, and little or no evidence
of critical thinking.
(F) Papers: Represent an unacceptable level of writing that fails to satisfy core assignment
requirements
• Thesis is absent, erroneous, or completely unacceptable.
• Sentences demonstrate severe lapses in proofreading/editing, lack variety or appro-
priateness, and contain an abundance of grammatical and/or structural errors that
significantly diminish readability.
• Paragraphs are not organized, and lack any coherence, support, and focus necessary
to appropriately illustrate assertions, and represent clear, connected units of thought.
• Essay contains little or no detail, and exhibits a complete absence of rhetorical con-
trol and critical thinking.
Planning a syllabus for a writing course requires considerable planning because you have to
allow time for you to read each draft and then additional time for students to revise. New
instructors may not consider this element of assigning drafts and therefore find themselves
pressured to provide adequate feedback, especially if they teach several classes. If you find
that you haven’t allowed enough time between drafts or to begin a new essay topic, it is
perfectly alright to provide a revised version of your syllabus. Explain to your students at
the beginning of the course that you wish to tailor assignments to students’ needs (this is,
of course, absolutely true) and that in order to do so, you may have to revise due dates or
reading requirements. Be sure to post the revised version on whatever course-management
system you are using (Moodle, Canvas, a website) and remind students to keep checking fot
the most current version.
Online Syllabi
Increasingly, writing instructors are posting their syllabi online, sometimes through a course-
management system such as Moodle, Canvas, or on a website. In some instances, the online
syllabus is in exactly the same form as the paper version; students download the syllabus, print
it out, and bring it to class. In other instances, the format of the syllabus may be quite dif-
ferent, reflecting the map-like configuration of visual texts. Whichever type of syllabus you
decide to post, the same precepts pertain as those discussed above: be as specific as possible
about all components of your course and go over the syllabus with your students in class
through whatever means you use to communicate with your students.
460 Appendix 2
An online syllabus can include a number of frames and attachments, but however you
decide to structure it, it is important to construct a “welcome page” or some form of entrance
to the syllabus so that students will be able to find it easily. An online syllabus, like a paper
syllabus, constitutes a contract between students and instructors, defining requirements and
expected responsibilities, including due dates. One element that can be particularly confusing
for students if you are teaching in an online format is the definition of “participation.” Does
it mean sending messages to a discussion board, participating in real time, or simply logging
on and doing the assigned reading and writing? Clarify as much as you can, so students will
know what is expected of them.
Because of the increased importance of new media and new models of coursework, online
syllabi have become more prevalent. However, like all syllabi, an online syllabus should reflect
your philosophy of teaching writing and provide necessary information for your students
about the requirements of your course. It should be easy to navigate and clearly structured.
But it doesn’t have to be a work of art. Some instructors like to include pictures, videos, and
various elements that can make the syllabus visually attractive. Keep in mind, though, that a
syllabus does not have to be beautiful. It just has to fulfill its function.
References
Bean, J. C. (2011). Engaging ideas: The professor’s guide to integrating writing, critical thinking and active learn-
ing in the classroom (2nd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Harris, M. (2010). Assignments from hell: The view from the writing center. In P. Sullivan, H. Tinberg,
& S. Blau (Eds). What is college level writing? Vol.2 (pp. 183–206). Urbana, IL: NCTE.
Index
academic genres/discourse 49, 164–165; and genre basic writers 12, 97, 101, 149, 368
170–172, 180; imitating 214; L2 students 281, Bawarshi, Anis 63, 163–164, 181
290, 294 Bazerman, Charles 14, 20, 161, 163, 208, 209
access 280, 396–397 Berger, John 391
activity theory 175 bilingualism 339; see also multilingual writers
Adler-Kassner, Linda 21, 177–178 blogs 125, 136, 179
affect 85, 208; see also emotions; expressivism; voice Booth, Wayne 54, 125, 212
African American Language(s) 339 Borton, Sonya 412
African American women 423 brainstorming 69
agency, student 374, 393–394, 399–401 Bridwell, Lillian 32–33, 34, 91
ambiguity, (in)tolerance for 40, 66, 80, 287 Britton, James 11–12, 110, 148, 155
American Indians/Native Americans 416, 424 Bruner, Jerome 2, 5, 10
analysis, writer’s block 76–86 Burke, Kenneth 72–73, 162
antigenre 49, 50 Butler, Paul 213–214
anxiety see writer’s block
Arabic-speaking writers 289–290 Carillo, Ellen 208, 211, 212
argumentative writing/discourse 60, 98–99, 164–165 Chinese rhetorical patterns 288, 291
Aristotle 8, 54, 57–58, 88, 160 Chomsky, Noam 149–150, 321, 325–326
assessment 238–265; CCCC on 403; in the citizenship 358–359
classroom 246–248; digital/multimodal writing class/group discussion 68–69
401–403; direct 240–242; indirect 239–240; classical rhetoric 4–5, 54, 55–59, 88, 170, 213–214
internal and external 244–245; multi-authored closure, need for 41
papers 256–258; outcomes 245; portfolios clustering 69
242–243; programmatic 245; scoring 243–244; code-meshing 369, 371
and social justice 246, 258–259; summative cognitive psychology 10–12, 146–147, 175–176
and formative 245, 247–248, 251–252; see also collaboration 15–17, 125, 386, 387–388, 395
evaluation; feedback College Composition and Communication (CCC) 387,
audience 11, 119–140; awareness/unawareness 392, 420
140–147; and consciousness-raising 134; colonization 165, 358, 424
cues 135–136; digital/multimodal writing Common Core Standards (CCSS) 133
386; discourse communities and shared/new community 14–15, 55, 58–59
knowledge 132–133; feedback 82, 136; fictional composing: behaviors 32–46; developmental
and real characters as 123–124, 127–130, 134; models of 11–12; early research on 9–13; stage-
new media, multiple concepts of 130–131; model theory of 8, 9
perspectives on 120–124; and revision 101, Computers and Composition: An International Journal
115–116, 134–135; and rhetoric 73; self as, (C&C) 386–387
suppressing 153; stance and engagement conceptual conflict 84
193–194; student perspectives on 127–128; Conference on College Composition and
teacher as 120, 127–128, 155; see also language Communication (CCCC) 330, 362–363, 392, 403
audio recording 422, 425–426 conferences: one-to-one 95–96, 423; online 425;
aurality: history 412–420; and multimodal secondary school 102
composing 410–437; and pedagogy 421–423; context 135–136, 162–163, 322; see also transfer
and popular culture 420–421 conventions, knowledge of 385
creative nonfiction 180
Barthes, Roland 110–111, 391 creativity: digital/multimodal writing 403; and
Bartholomae, David 35, 170, 207, 214 genre 171–173
462 Index